CAMINANDO WITH JESUS: Persistent Prayer, Resilient Faith

Pentecost 19, Proper 24 | October 20, 2019

By the Rev. Daniel Robayo

CAMINANDO WITH JESUS is a series of reflections on the Sunday Gospel by clergy and laity from across the Diocese. 

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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?"

- Luke 18:1-8

 
Azucena Villaflor de De Vicenti. Mirta Acuña de Baravalle. Raquel Arcushin. Ada Feingenmüller de Senar. Delicia González. They were mothers needing answers. Their children, young adults by then, had been taken by the Argentinian government for opposing the military dictatorship and never returned. They had met in waiting rooms at military barracks and police stations, slowly discovering they were not alone in their suffering. They told each other their stories. The government denied any knowledge and tried to shoo them away.

They began to gather in growing numbers on Thursdays at the Plaza de Mayo in front of the presidential palace, la Casa Rosada. Because gatherings of three or more were prohibited, they marched silently in pairs, arm in arm, as if simply on a stroll around the plaza. They wore white head scarves to symbolize the diapers of their lost children, embroidering them with the names and dates of birth of their children. Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, held the government accountable for its human rights violations. They persevered in their demands for justice. Though a number of the founders were imprisoned, tortured and even killed, the mothers did not give up. From 1977 through 2006, the mothers and grandmothers marched around the plaza. They never gave up. They created a movement that achieved some measure of justice in a world that thought they’d never receive any justice at all.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus lifts up a woman whose persistent demand for justice from a corrupt judge epitomizes the spirit of prayer that he wants all of us to have. Praying without ceasing, as Jesus calls it, keeps us connected to God who is the source of goodness, love and justice in the face of evil, hatred and injustice. God’s Dream of a reconciled humanity in harmony with one another, with all creation and with God fuels our prayers. We persist because we trust God’s promises of a new heaven and a new earth, of that city that “already in the mind of God…riseth fair,” as Walter Russell Bowie wrote in his wonderful hymn (#583 in The Hymnal 1982).

Persistent prayer, therefore, is not a passive posture but the source and sign of a faith that is active, at work in the world. Beware of activism devoid of prayer as well as inactive prayerfulness! Prayer without action is meaningless; activism without prayer is unsustainable. God despises praying with our lips but not with our lives, as the prophets remind us time and again. At the same time, activism disconnected from persistent prayer will get us exhausted, burned out and will extinguish our faith. Prayer and action go together.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu has said that prayer is a very dangerous thing. He is right! Because after we’ve poured out our heart in prayer, when we have said all that we can say and we have heard all that we can hear—when we have been present to God—then we have to get off our knees. And do something. Something that approximates the ache and love in the heart of God. Something that participates in making God’s Dream a present reality. And then we return to more prayer. And again, we dust off our knees and get to work some more. Repeat again. That is persistent prayer.

Persistent prayer makes for resilient faith. Resilient faith is capable of believing in God’s Dream, though we don’t see it happening yet and even when the evidence seems to point in the opposite direction. “Will the Son of Man find faith on the earth?” The question says to us that we are indeed at risk of desisting, of not praying and acting any more with the passion and persistence that the Madres displayed week after week and year after year. Jesus urges us to keep praying. When the forces that oppose God and would harm God’s creatures double down in their efforts to make us give in, will we persevere in prayer and keep the faith?

May God grace us today with persistent prayer and resilient faith.

The Rev. Daniel Robayo is the missioner for Latino/Hispanic ministries for the Diocese of North Carolina.