Luke 18:1-8

Jesus told his disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, `Grant me justice against my opponent.’ For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, `Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’“ And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

I’m told that as a ten year old I was very, very annoying when a tune or a song found its way into my head and lodged itself there. It did not matter how much my brother and sisters begged me to stop, it did not matter how many times my parents threatened me, I could not, I would not, I did not stop humming or whistling the tune. I could not, I would not, I did not stop singing the song.

And, of course, as is often the case with a quirk such as this in a young person, I behaved the very same way when it came to ideas or questions or desires that became lodged in my consciousness. No matter how many times I was told to go away and stop talking about the idea, no matter how many times I was begged to stop asking the question, no matter how many times I was told “no” to the thing I wanted to do or have, I would not, I could not, I did not stop talking about, asking about or pursuing the thing I wanted.

In my family, we had a name for this tendency. Though we were not a musical family, it was called “singing a one-note song.” And it was clearly not a good thing to be doing in that it annoyed others to the point of distraction and exasperation. But to those of us who were masters of it, it was the way we got what we wanted…that is, if we didn’t get killed in the process!

Our gospel for today is about this, isn’t it? In it Jesus is talking to the disciples about someone who is singing a one-note song of sorts, but note (no pun intended) the positive way he describes this.

The context is this: Jesus is talking to the disciples about the “need to pray and not to lose heart.” To make his point he tells them a story—it’s the story of a judge who doesn’t care either about God or people and it’s the story of a widow (one of the least of all in ancient society) who has come to him seeking justice. As Jesus tells the story, the judge, who has no reason to grant the widow justice, does, indeed, end up granting her the justice she seeks for one reason only—because of her dogged ability to sing a one-note song about the justice she is due, and his own desire not to hear it, not to be worn out by it.

From this story the messages seem clear—those who are persistent in prayer, those who ask, seek, knock, or sing their song no matter how wearying it may be to them to do this and no matter how annoying it may be to others, those who do this, will find something, will receive something out of the asking. And more specifically, perhaps, those who seek justice in particular, though it my seem to take too long in coming, those who seek justice, if they keep seeking it, will one day see and taste the justice they seek.

Yes, the messages seem clear here in Jesus’ story, a story only found in the Gospel of Luke, for in a sense what we are hearing once again are Luke’s particular one-note songs, a song about the importance of prayer and another song about a God who hears and responds to the cries of her children, especially those without direction, without hope, without a voice, without a buffer between themselves and the street. Yes, the messages do seem clear.

But, what is unclear or better said, what is hard about this is how to muster the energy to do this: to ask, to seek, to knock to sing our song over and over again in the face of nothing seeming to happen, no progress seeming to be made, no clear path magically appearing before us. How do we keep asking, knocking, seeking, singing? And what are we to expect out of doing this?

What are you having a hard time continuing to ask about, a hard time continuing to seek an answer to or a direction through? Where have you been tempted to lose heart? Put another way, where has your heart been running scared for fear of failure or disappointment, away from the thing you suspect, you believe you were put here to pursue?

What Luke’s Jesus seems to be commending to the disciples and to us is something I’d like to call holy persistence—a kind of unwillingness to let go of something no matter how wearisome it may be for us to pursue it or how inconvenient and annoying it may be for others for us to do so. As Luke says, this is about not losing heart, refusing to shut down possibilities for the future based on what today looks like.

For me, holy persistence shows itself through the prayers we say with our lips and in the silence of our hearts, and through the way we direct our life’s energy into other actions. It’s like a song sung to God and to others, a song we sing with bodies, with our whole being, a song we keep singing though we’re not always sure if anyone is listening or if anything will come of it.

Luke’s Jesus tells his disciples and us that this song of our hearts and our bodies, will go someplace, will find its way to a God who ever listens and watches for her children, who in the end can be trusted to hear and respond to our persistent cries for justice, for wholeness. for a path to our god-given future.

And so we are to keep asking, keep seeking, keep yearning, keep singing the song that God has given us to carry, and then we are to wait and to watch for what emerges as we do this.

Later this morning we’ll share a meal downstairs in our parish hall and engage in conversation about and activities related to the idea of “Singing to the Lord a New Song.” This is the theme of our annual campaign this year—and I really love it. For it gets us thinking about what’s both more familiar and new about the song this parish is singing these days. Is there a kind of melody that has been in this parish’s song for a long, long, time and is there also something new and fresh in the song we are singing together? As I said, I love thinking about both our individual and our lives as a parish this way.

Since coming to St. Paul’s over five years ago I feel like I’ve been singing the same tune over and over again—but as I’ve said, I’ve been that way for as long as I can remember. It’s a tune you taught me—but one that resonated with the deepest parts of me the first time I had a conversation with some of you about it. That tune is this: Anglo-Catholic liturgy and spirituality with its love of reverence, beauty, mystery, its hungering after justice AND how to connect this way of being Christian to more people—people who have been searching for it, people who need it. Five years later, we are now still an Anglo-Catholic parish and we are over twice the size we were when I first came here. You might say that you and I together have worn out God (and perhaps others) with our singing!

As you’ll hear downstairs, our song together for the last six years will come up against some important challenges next year. We, in fact, will need an additional $30,000 in income to hold even on the costs related to an increasing diocesan assessment, our three Sunday liturgies and many of the programs we’ve enjoyed over this last year. I pray that you and I will not lose heart, but will pray for and give ourselves to what is before us.

Five years ago when we put together our then newly renovated website, I just had to have a slide show be a part of it. Barb Levy warned me that it might make the homepage take to long to load, but I just had to have a slide show—one with pictures and phrases on it that spoke to our identity.

We knew as a part of this we wanted to have a photo of the choir with some sort of phrase about how our sung prayer is central to our lives here at St. Paul’s. We tried on a lot of phrases, all of which fell short. Finally, we hit upon the title of a chapter written by Don Saliers in a book entitled Practicing our Faith that was all about core Christian practices that when practiced in church, lead to new ways of being... The title of that chapter and the phrase we ended up using was “singing our lives.”

Don’t lose heart. Pray the desire for yourself and for the world that God has given you to carry and to express. Sing out. Sing the ancient song of justice and wholeness and hope that is made new in every generation. For God is listening to the songs of her children. God is still listening. God is still listening.

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