SPEAKER_01: Life within all living.
SPEAKER_01: We praise you, salve for every soreness, mender of every brokenness, midwife of a better future.
SPEAKER_01: We praise you, ground of all being, judge of all nations, conscience of the universe.
SPEAKER_01: We praise you, creator, redeemer, companion, friend, breath of life, God beyond all names.
SPEAKER_01: We praise you.
SPEAKER_01: We gather in God's name.
SPEAKER_01: We claim Christ's promised presence.
SPEAKER_01: Let's pray together.
SPEAKER_01: Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.
SPEAKER_01: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee and worthily magnify thy holy name through Christ our Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: The Lord is, was, and will be with you.
SPEAKER_01: Let us pray.
SPEAKER_01: Let your continual mercy, O Lord, cleanse and defend your church.
SPEAKER_01: And because it cannot continue in safety without your help, protect and governeth always by your goodness, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: My brothers and sisters, not out of dread or fear, but believing that God is faithful to forgive, let us rid ourselves of what we need to carry no longer.
SPEAKER_01: O God, you are always true to us in love, and we are left wanting to say sorry for our faithlessness to you and one another, for our forgetting the poor and broken, for our failure to cherish creation.
SPEAKER_01: Give us life, God, to change and enable us to change that we may live.
SPEAKER_01: Holy and mighty, holy immortal, have mercy on us.
SPEAKER_02: Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be worked with.
SPEAKER_01: Our hearts and minds are open.
SPEAKER_03: Naomi said, Look, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods.
SPEAKER_03: Go back after your sister-in-law.
SPEAKER_03: Both Ruth said, Do not press me to forsake you, or to turn back from following you.
SPEAKER_03: Where you go, I will go.
SPEAKER_03: Where you abide, I will abide.
SPEAKER_03: Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God.
SPEAKER_03: Where you die, I will die, and there will I be buried.
SPEAKER_03: May the Holy One of God to thus, and more to me, and even death departs me from you.
SPEAKER_03: And when Naomi saw that Ruth had strengthened herself to go with her, she ceased speaking to her.
SPEAKER_03: So the two of them travelled until coming to Betland.
SPEAKER_03: And when they came to Betland, the whole town was buzzing over them.
SPEAKER_03: And the women said, Is this Naomi?
SPEAKER_03: And Naomi said to the women, Call me not Naomi, the pleasant one.
SPEAKER_03: Call me Mara, a bitter eye.
SPEAKER_03: For Shadow Shaddai, the breasted one has greatly embittered me.
SPEAKER_03: I went away full, but the Holy One of Sinai brought me back empty.
SPEAKER_03: The Holy One has spoken against me, and Shaddai, or the breasted one, has brought evil upon me.
SPEAKER_03: So Naomi returned with Ruth, and the old I woman, her daughter-in-law with her, and she was the one who came back from the country of Moia.
SPEAKER_03: They came to Bethlehem at the beginning of the barley harvest.
SPEAKER_03: From the word of God in Scripture, the Word of God among us, or the Word of God within us.
SPEAKER_03: We will read responsibly by the half verse.
SPEAKER_03: God with your ears have we heard, our mothers and fathers have told us.
SPEAKER_03: You with your own hand displaced nations and you planted them.
SPEAKER_03: For not by thy own sword did they inherit the land, nor did their own arm save them.
SPEAKER_03: You are my sovereign and my God.
SPEAKER_03: In God we glory all the day.
SPEAKER_03: And this has come upon us.
SPEAKER_03: Rouse yourself.
SPEAKER_03: Why do you sleep, my ruler?
SPEAKER_03: Why do you hide your face?
SPEAKER_03: Raise yourself as our helper.
SPEAKER_00: And the twelve called together the multitude of the disciples and said, It is not right that we should forsake the word of God in order to minister upon tables.
SPEAKER_00: Appoint then, kindred, seven of whom there is good testimony from among yourselves, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we may task to this need.
SPEAKER_00: But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to ministering the word.
SPEAKER_00: For what they said pleased the whole multitude of disciples, and they chose Stephen, full of faith and the Holy Spirit, together with Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Armenas, and Nicolaus, the convert to Judaism from Antioch.
SPEAKER_00: They had them stand before the apostles, who prayed and laid their hands on them.
SPEAKER_00: For the word is of God in Scripture, the Word of God among us, or the Word of God within us.
SPEAKER_01: Invite you to join me in your blue hymnal for Hymn four hundred and ninety four hundred and ninety.
SPEAKER_02: I want to follow Jesus.
SPEAKER_02: God sent the stars to give my two storms.
SPEAKER_01: Glory to you, Lord Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus told the disciples a parable about the need to pray continually and not be discouraged.
SPEAKER_01: He said, There was a judge in a certain city who neither feared God nor respected people.
SPEAKER_01: There was a widow in that city, and she came to him continually and saying, Grant me justice against my accuser.
SPEAKER_01: And he was not willing for some time, but later he said to himself, Though I do not fear God, nor respect anyone else, yet because this widow persists in troubling me, I will grant her justice, so she may not ultimately come to violence against me.
SPEAKER_01: And the Messiah said, Listen to what the unjust judge says, and will not God grant justice to the elect of God who cry to God day and night?
SPEAKER_01: Will God forbear in helping them?
SPEAKER_01: I tell you all, God will quickly grant justice to them, and yet when the Son of Woman comes will he find faith on the earth?
SPEAKER_01: The gospel of the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Praise to you, Lord Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Please be seated.
SPEAKER_01: This is lectionary year B, which means we're reading through the Gospel of Mark.
SPEAKER_01: So you might be wondering how it is that Luke slipped in all of a sudden.
SPEAKER_01: The reason being Mark is the shortest gospel, right?
SPEAKER_01: It's only 16 chapters, and we will actually through this year read the entirety of Mark's Gospel.
SPEAKER_01: So we've got a little bit of extra time.
SPEAKER_01: And we're giving one of these parables at an interesting time, and perhaps you're familiar with this, just to unwind a little bit of it.
SPEAKER_01: A judge is somebody of high esteem.
SPEAKER_01: Judgments were not held in courts, they didn't have courtrooms, they happened at the city gate, which is where people go and come from the town.
SPEAKER_01: Reminder, most people don't live in the city walls, they live in the fields, so they come into the market to buy and sell, and they also come through the gate to have their cases adjudicated.
SPEAKER_01: Judges were not exactly elected, they tended to be elders, they tended to have means, and they tended to have also, therefore, education.
SPEAKER_01: It's an interesting description that the judge neither fears God nor regards anybody.
SPEAKER_01: You may say, like, oh, justice is blind, and here's that person, but actually you're hearing that this is like the worst kind of judge.
SPEAKER_01: Potentially highly corrupt without morals.
SPEAKER_01: And this is the kind of person who's adjudicating the case.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe, you know, judges like that.
SPEAKER_01: And the woman comes and she's a widow, which means she's the lowest in social standing.
SPEAKER_01: She can't inherit property because she's a woman.
SPEAKER_01: What case she's arguing, we don't know, and curiously enough, we don't even know if she's in the right.
SPEAKER_01: Her case could be fraudulent.
SPEAKER_01: We really don't know.
SPEAKER_01: And of course, when we hear the story, we hear her dogged persistence that she comes day after day after day and finally wears the judge down, so much so that he's not just concerned about his reputation.
SPEAKER_01: He's concerned she's gonna hit him.
SPEAKER_01: Bring violence against her.
SPEAKER_01: I've also heard this translated that she will give me a black eye.
SPEAKER_01: Now, again, that could be literal.
SPEAKER_01: It could also be, though, it could be figurative, that if she continues to come, people are gonna say, What's with this judge not even hearing the case?
SPEAKER_01: And in so doing, right, he might lose his esteem among the people.
SPEAKER_01: I have often heard this parable explained as how we should continually beseech God with our prayers for the outcomes we want.
SPEAKER_01: So, we tend to imagine when we hear a story like this that God must be the one with power, and we, like widows, compared to God, are the ones with no power.
SPEAKER_01: So the trick here is, you see, continue to supplicate to God until you embarrass God and God gives you what you want.
SPEAKER_01: Like a small child saying, How about now, how about now, how about now?
SPEAKER_01: But please hear the parable fights that interpretation itself.
SPEAKER_01: It says, God is not like that.
SPEAKER_01: So God is God fearing, and God also regards people.
SPEAKER_01: So if you find yourself thinking, I need to continue to pray to God for this thing I want until I get it, please hear Jesus saying that it's not necessary.
SPEAKER_01: But it's very different from how we practice prayer.
SPEAKER_01: But please hear Jesus saying that isn't how it works.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's the literal interpretation Jesus gives.
SPEAKER_01: God isn't like that.
SPEAKER_01: We don't have to badger God until we get what we want.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, one might say very plainly, since God knows everything, God already knows what it is you want.
SPEAKER_01: And the things that are virtuous that you want, well, God also wants as well.
SPEAKER_01: And the things that are not virtuous that you want, God probably isn't that interested in.
SPEAKER_01: Now, I would do a lot of good if I won the lottery, let me tell you, I would give at least 10% of what I earned.
SPEAKER_01: That seems really good.
SPEAKER_01: What would I do with the rest?
SPEAKER_01: God's not interested in that.
SPEAKER_01: I hope you hear that.
SPEAKER_01: God is not in the game of rigging lottery numbers so that I can give 10% to St.
SPEAKER_01: Thomas.
SPEAKER_01: If God played that game, we'd already hit it.
SPEAKER_01: So we have to remind ourselves that sometimes the outcomes we so earnestly want for, well, actually, aren't that appealing to God?
SPEAKER_01: Even the ones that are like, God, I just want my brother to become a Christian like me.
SPEAKER_01: I have prayed that prayer for years.
SPEAKER_01: Somehow God's not interested in my brother being as miserable as I am.
SPEAKER_01: Isn't that interesting?
SPEAKER_01: Just a good reminder here that the things we want that we're so sure God wants, God may not be that interested in.
SPEAKER_01: Further reminder, when we see injustice in the world, let's not pretend that God doesn't see that too.
SPEAKER_01: And I would actually remind us to consider that sometimes we probably get the roles reversed.
SPEAKER_01: We tend to think of God being the supreme judge, and we are the weak petitioners, but I would remind us that Jesus was not born in royalty, nor was he, nor did he ascend the imperial throne.
SPEAKER_01: He came in a manger to a peasant family and eked out a peasant existence.
SPEAKER_01: Probably most of his life he was called the B-word, which of course we know is really an insult against his mother, not him.
SPEAKER_01: Not a lot of majesty there.
SPEAKER_01: So, to be honest, as we consider the incarnation, it is more likely that we are the judge.
SPEAKER_01: And we often neither fear God nor regard one another as we should.
SPEAKER_01: And God comes to us persistently, meekly, quietly, not with a threat of violence, not with a threat of violence, but more often than not, God comes so often to me that I finally just give in so God will leave me alone.
SPEAKER_01: Not because I'm deeply as in love with God as I'd like to pretend, or because I love justice as much as I self-promote.
SPEAKER_01: God comes again and again.
SPEAKER_01: And quite honestly, in the story of my life, I do find it to be the case that God's way of interacting with me is gentle pressure, relentlessly applied.
SPEAKER_01: Gentle pressure, relentlessly applied.
SPEAKER_01: Not violence, not even an intervention, the kind that you used to see on like TLC in the early 2000s.
SPEAKER_01: I'd hope you didn't really watch that show too much.
SPEAKER_01: It's not healthy, it turns out.
SPEAKER_01: God doesn't really do that.
SPEAKER_01: God doesn't have come to Jesus meetings with me that are dramatic.
SPEAKER_01: God comes relentlessly and gently.
SPEAKER_01: Usually when I get it, it feels really dramatic.
SPEAKER_01: Although when I look back, that was just one of many, many, many instances in which God relentlessly exerted gentle pressure so that I would grant God's petition of justice, of grace, of acceptance.
SPEAKER_01: And so it makes me wonder if sometimes maybe we have so limited what prayer is that we forget that most of what we do really ought to be a prayer.
SPEAKER_01: So over and over again, we hear the disciples saying things like, Jesus, fix this problem.
SPEAKER_01: Look, there's all these hungry people.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus, what are you gonna give them to eat?
SPEAKER_01: Reminder, Jesus usually says, Why don't you feed them?
SPEAKER_01: Well, we don't have any stuff.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus says, You got plenty.
SPEAKER_01: Give them what you have, and then what do you know?
SPEAKER_01: 5,000 people get fed.
SPEAKER_01: We usually want God to fix our problems, and Jesus overwhelmingly says, Why don't you fix those problems?
SPEAKER_01: So sometimes instead of praying, asking God, why don't you take care of hunger, it might be a more authentic prayer for us to feed somebody who's hungry.
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes, when we find ourselves thinking, God, why doesn't that person forgive me?
SPEAKER_01: A more authentic prayer might be going to that person ourselves and getting reconciled instead of asking God to do it.
SPEAKER_01: When we find ourselves wondering about the partisan nature of American politics, and won't God fix that, I wonder if God isn't inviting us toward gentle pressure relentlessly applied until we are part of the solution.
SPEAKER_01: Now, I've told this story before, and I just want to share that much of what I've heard about prayer in the church that raised man, it doesn't matter whether that's the Baptist or Methodist or the Episcopal Church, many of the ways we pray have to do with asking for stuff.
SPEAKER_01: Those are called prayers of petition.
SPEAKER_01: And I've also heard about prayers of thanksgiving in which we thank God, and there's prayers of adoration, and there's prayers of there's these different categories.
SPEAKER_01: But I would Like to tell you, this is really more of a modern definition.
SPEAKER_01: When you read the mystics, when you read people in the Middle Ages, when you read our Jewish, early Jewish authors, to be honest, what they tend to say is that prayer is simply an awareness of God in the moment.
SPEAKER_01: Whether we have anything to say to God or not.
SPEAKER_01: Prayer is simply being aware that God is in the room with you.
SPEAKER_01: And so sometimes we pray by doing.
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes we pray by reimagining our neighbor.
SPEAKER_01: Why are they being so difficult?
SPEAKER_01: Well, with God in the room, we start to imagine compassionately, there could be reasons they're being so difficult.
SPEAKER_01: It doesn't even mean we're right.
SPEAKER_01: I just would suggest to you that at the end of a prayer, if we find ourselves with less compassion than when we started, we prayed to the wrong God.
SPEAKER_01: And if we find ourselves dumping our problems on God instead of assuming responsibility with God for the problems we see, I would like to suggest to you we've prayed to the wrong God.
SPEAKER_01: This is why I think we get the Acts passage in which the disciples notice there's a social problem.
SPEAKER_01: There's widows who are not getting fed because they're Greek.
SPEAKER_01: See, even the early church struggled with xenophobia.
SPEAKER_01: So what did they do?
SPEAKER_01: They appointed a new holy order called deacons.
SPEAKER_01: And the job of the deacon is to make sure Greek widows get fed alongside Hebrew widows.
SPEAKER_01: Because even though we're predisposed to favor people who look and dress and talk and believe like us, God is not so predisposed.
SPEAKER_01: Hence we have an ecclesiastical order called deacons to make sure we treat people the way God wants to treat them.
SPEAKER_01: The job of the deacon is to recognize people the church tends to forget, whether they're immigrants or migrants or incarcerated, or widows, or have what we like to call diagnosable mental illnesses.
SPEAKER_01: The job of the deacon is to treat people, regardless of their social status, the way God loves them.
SPEAKER_01: That's called prayer.
SPEAKER_01: Quick story.
SPEAKER_01: I used to do this thing called petitionary prayer during my morning walk with my dogs, and I had my list, and I would go through my list, people, time after time after time.
SPEAKER_01: One of my people, this happened probably about 16 years ago, was this truly lovely former teacher.
SPEAKER_01: She really was a beautiful human being in every aspect, gracious.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, and she presented herself as a lady.
SPEAKER_01: She got so sick with stage four ovarian cancer, she declined me visiting her because she would see, I would see that her house wasn't swept because she was in bed, and that would have been embarrassed.
SPEAKER_01: So every time I called her and said, Can I visit?
SPEAKER_01: She'd say, No, I finally just had to show up because she was too southern to turn me away.
SPEAKER_01: Gracious, esteemed stage four ovarian cancer, which, if you know anything about cancer, that's the kiss of death.
SPEAKER_01: She decided she was gonna fight it.
SPEAKER_01: And I mean fight it hard.
SPEAKER_01: The reason she wanted to fight it was because she had grandchildren who didn't go to church unless she took them.
SPEAKER_01: So her kids were not raising her grandkids in church.
SPEAKER_01: So she wanted to live so she could raise her grandkids in her faith.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I just want to be honest, that's pretty lovely.
SPEAKER_01: But I've been in and out of cancer wards, and I have seen more often than not chemotherapy kill people instead of cancer.
SPEAKER_01: And it is rough from my point of view.
SPEAKER_01: So I found myself praying for this woman one day as I was walking along, and my prayer for her was that she would just accept the cancer and die.
SPEAKER_01: I petitioned God that she would just gracefully die without all of this pain.
SPEAKER_01: I was really well intentioned.
SPEAKER_01: Gentle pressure relentlessly applied.
SPEAKER_01: This was the one day in ten years of praying for what I thought was best that this voice inside me clearly said to me, could have been my head, could have been something I ate the night before.
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
SPEAKER_01: I choose to think it was God, said to me, Why do you get to decide what's best for her?
SPEAKER_01: I answered, because I've been in cancer wards and I've seen people not only lose their hair, but lose their guts and lose their ability to just even lay in the bed without quaking with pain.
SPEAKER_01: I'm a strong arguer.
SPEAKER_01: And once again, whether it was something I ate or God, I choose to think it was God, gentle pressure relentlessly applied, said, but why do you get to decide what's best for her?
SPEAKER_01: I probably even happened three times before I was like, shoot.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe I don't get to decide what's best for her.
SPEAKER_01: So I found myself thinking, how do I petition God for this woman if she wants something different than I do?
SPEAKER_01: And the best I could come up with, and this is still true today, God help her to know, help her to know where this is going, accurately what she's facing, and give her peace about where she chooses to put her will.
SPEAKER_01: Now you may say, that is not asking God for very much.
SPEAKER_01: I think it's actually asking God for the best of things.
SPEAKER_01: Because every mystic that I've read says, we don't pray to God to change God.
SPEAKER_01: We pray so that we can be changed.
SPEAKER_01: And if I knew her will was to do this course so that she could do this goal, whether it would have been mine or not, then I could come alongside her and support her instead of criticizing her from afar.
SPEAKER_01: In that particular moment, the prayer was not what do I want, the prayer was, Mike, how do you respect what she wants?
SPEAKER_01: And it became this conversation.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe I had it with myself, maybe I had it with God.
SPEAKER_01: Either way, it was a conversation in God's presence about where I ended and she began.
SPEAKER_01: And that conversation utterly changed the way I viewed her and visited her and supported her.
SPEAKER_01: And I'd like to invite you to consider that God does relentlessly apply gentle pressure so that we can be changed, and so that we, like God, can go forward with our own relentless gentle pressure of love, of grace, of justice, until there are no more black eyes to be had.
SPEAKER_01: We believe in God above us, maker and sustainer of.