HOMILY: "A Delightful Burden"

A Meditation on the Parable of the Persisting Widow (Luke 18:1-8)

Sunday, March 23, 2025

A Poem: "Because of Us" (Em Berry)

This morning I learned
the English word gauze

(finely woven medical cloth)
comes from the Arabic word […] Ghazza
because Gazans have been skilled weavers for centuries

I wondered then
how many of our wounds
have been dressed
because of them

and how many of theirs
have been left open
because of us

1.

So Luke tells us--even before a word's out of Jesus' mouth--that this particular parable's about "the necessity of praying always and not losing heart."  As if that's any help at all.  As if any of us have the slightest clue as to what "praying always" could possibly mean.  And then, and then, instead of a story about a great mystic or a devout believer or a cloistered master, Jesus tells this one about a relentless widow who wears out, who flat-out wears out an unjust judge. And, as always, we’re left to wrestle with what prayer really means in our lives, in our communities, in our particular moment. What kind of persistence, what kind of relentlessness is Jesus talking about here? Is it simply a story about personal prayer and piety? Or is it also, somehow, a story about discipleship, public life and resistance?

I have a hunch that Jesus’ point is that it’s all one and the same. While prayer certainly is personal—it has to be personal—it’s not insulated from the suffering of our neighbors or the injustice so many face every day. Prayer isn’t the passive practice of a docile people; and God isn’t a disinterested if benevolent force who has everything figured out long before we get around to caring. God insists instead on partnership, engagement, a deeply personal and sometimes even contentious relationship. Sometimes we have to get up in God’s face. As God gets up in ours.  Prayer is all of that.

But that’s hard for us. We’ve grown up with stories and images that resist confrontation, defy disbelief and aim for spiritual simplicity. For example, we preachers are prone to pithy reassurances, like: “God knows what you really need before you even ask.” Or, “God always wants what’s best for you.” Or, “God is closer to you than your very breathing.” Sweet and comforting, perhaps. But how do you square these comforting one-liners with a parable which seems to suggest that there are occasions when God needs to be pressured to move on something important; there are issues where God needs to be cajoled for justice’s sake; there are seasons in our lives in which we must go back to God, over and over and over again, to insist on our passion for the protection of the vulnerable and the healing of the planet? It’s a little unsettling, this story. And I think that’s just as Jesus would have it.

I think that Jesus imagines prayer as partnership, restless and creative and loving, no doubt fashioned in grace—but less interested in pithy reassurances than God’s own disarming passion for justice and renewal. Such a life will lead us in strange and unsteadying directions. Crooked lines.

2.

Years ago, in a Palestinian refugee camp, I met a woman who (that night and ever since) has reminded me of the relentless widow in Jesus’ parable. And her unyielding faithfulness. I was traveling in Palestine that spring with a delegation of Quaker activists, visiting Palestinian and Israeli peacemakers, hearing first-hand their stories of displacement and exile, hope and heartbreak.

And that night, in the Dheisheh camp, just outside of Bethlehem, we were to visit with a Palestinian couple who had grown up, and then married, and then raised their own family in that camp. I never did catch their names; and she was more than an hour late to supper and our appointed time together. And this meant that our delegation had eaten our hosts’ marvelous homecooked meal—shawarma, falafel, the works—while waiting for her and worrying about her whereabouts.

When she did finally arrive and collapsed into a chair at our table, she explained (over a cold plate of food) that she’d been stopped at a military checkpoint outside the city. Stopped, questioned and harassed by 20-year-old Israeli soldiers, wielding (she noted angrily) US-made weapons, who pressed her for information she didn’t have about terrorists she didn’t know. She noted that this happened at least two or three times a week, as she returned home from work. Hassled by soldiers with automatic weapons. Laughing as they poked around in her handbag and mocked her for her frustration.

I remember that Palestinian woman as I think of the widow in the parable because she was angry and relentless. Once she finished her cold plate of food, she didn’t let her husband get a word in edgewise. She fumed at the expanding system of checkpoints that made traveling to and from work maddeningly complicated. She raged in recalling a pregnant neighbor who died at one of those checkpoints, as she pleaded with soldiers to let her get through to the hospital she needed for a complicated delivery. And she insisted that as long as she had breath in her body, she would organize protests and boycotts and anything else that offered any hope at all—to bring that system of apartheid and fear down, and offer her children a future of freedom. All the while, her husband nodded knowingly at her side. As if to say she wasn’t kidding around.

My Palestinian friends tell me that they have a word in Arabic for this kind of faithfulness, this kind of relentlessness. And it’s ‘SUMUD.’ ‘Sumud’ is the steadfastness of the widow in Jesus’ story, determined to make her case, unphased by the judge’s disinterest in her condition. ‘Sumud’ is the steadfastness of that refugee in the camp—mocked day after day by teenagers, unwavering in her commitment to a better world for her children. ‘Sumud’ is courage reinforced by friendship and faith; and sometimes it sounds like anger (as it did that night in Dheisheh). But always it manifests in prayer and perseverance.  For a world redeemed.

There’s a picture you can find online—I believe I saw it first in the New York Times—of a single table stretching for half a mile, through mounds of rubble in southern Gaza, earlier this month. A long, long table brightly covered in red cloth.  And seated on both sides, block after block after devastated block, are Gazans of all ages, gathered to break their fast on the first day of Ramadan. Organizers set up loudspeakers and played traditional music; they hung lights and flags between busted concrete pilings. And there, in the rubble, they had their feast. Though they grieve unimaginable losses, though justice seems a distant dream, though mad men rule the world of weapons and checkpoints: they had their feast. And that’s ‘sumud.’ It’s easy to imagine the widow in Jesus’ parable sitting at that table, telling a story to a friend, dipping a piece of pita into a bowl. Planning her next move.

3.

When I arrive in the West Bank in early May, I’ll have the extraordinary privilege of spending six weeks in the company of two men, two friends—whose friendship has become something of a delightful burden in my life. And I know that’s a strange way to describe any relationship; so I want to tell you just what I mean. By a delightful burden. You’ve met these two friends over the past few years—Ghassan Manasra (a Palestinian Muslim) has visited us here in Durham twice and Zoughbi Zoughbi (a Palestinian Christian) preached two months ago, on Zoom, from his family’s home in Bethlehem. Each is a leader in his own community; each is a generous practitioner of nonviolence and peace; and each has suffered physical violence and years of injustice alongside his people.

Because our United Church of Christ is so profoundly committed to the human rights of all Palestinian and all Israeli people, and because that commitment requires partnership with particular people in particular places, I’ve been blessed over many years to spend time with Ghassan and his family, and Zoughbi and his, in their cities and among their faith communities. In many ways these two men have shaped not only my faith, but the human being I am today.  In their company, religion isn't mere speculation; it's the air that I breathe.

On six different visits I’ve stayed in their homes and broken bread with their closest friends. I’ve prayed with them and wept with them and studied scripture with them. And I’ve listened to their stories: how Ghassan’s teenage son was beaten nearly to death by an angry mob in Jerusalem; how Zoughbi’s center is occasionally shot at by Jewish settlers; how friends are humiliated at checkpoints; and how their own families have lost beloved farms and orchards to Americans bent on ethnic cleansing.

So what I mean by the delightful burden of these friendships is just this. That their yearning for freedom encumbers my life; it matters to me. That their people’s ‘sumud’ encumbers my spirit; it matters to me. And not as an idea, not simply as an ideal—but as something very much like faith, something very much like brotherhood, something very much like love. Jesus used the Greek word ‘agape.’ That kind of love. The kind that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  When I pick up the paper tomorrow morning and read about another Israeli raid in another West Bank town, I will pray for Zoughbi and his colleagues, for their spirits and their beloveds and their safety. I’ll carry that prayer throughout my day. And when I look again at that picture of thousands breaking the Ramadan fast in Gaza, I will pray for Ghassan and his dear wife Laila—who has lost 17 family members in Gaza, 17 in her own extended family, over the past two years. In a war, by the way, that my government and my taxes have (in many ways) paid for.

When these two friends invite me to their cities, and into their homes; when they ask me to take seriously their pain and their worry—I sense this delightful burden, if you will, this call to faith and friendship, and I’m moved to go. Not to be too weird about; but it’s kind of a Jesus-thing for me. In their company, I have drawn as close as I ever imagined I could to the love of Jesus, and the ethic of Jesus, and the grace that reveals the truth of my own life. The gospel is no longer an abstraction—or even an aspiration—but a way of persevering in love and honoring friends in hard times.

Now given all that, I want to assure you—as I have my dear and for the most part patient family—that I am going to Bethlehem in May and June not to put myself at risk, and certainly not to inconvenience my hosts or cause them unnecessary worry. I’m going to listen and learn; I’m going to help both friends with writing projects of their own; I’m going to pray with their friends and break bread at their tables and offer whatever support I can in a moment of heartbreaking uncertainty among their people. Both have promised to let me know if anything changes—on the ground—that might cause them to have second thoughts about my coming. And I trust them deeply. I will follow their advice.

4.

Friends, I think today's parable suggests that we can do hard things together, even against the odds, though every deck seems stacked against peace, against justice, against us. We can—by faith and love and persevering grace—resist injustice and celebrate human decency and love God with all our hearts, minds and souls. Undoubtedly there are forces in play, systems even, that would try to demoralize us and convince us otherwise. But we would do well to take Jesus and his parable to heart. It's been passed down through generations: for such a time as this.

Whatever the circumstances of the widow’s petition—and that remains vague—there’s no doubt at all that her options would seem to be not only limited but dismissed as wildly irrational among her peers. Things just don’t work this way. Wrongs just aren’t righted this way. To expect that a woman in her position could influence a judge in his—even through unwavering faith; to expect that she could reverse injustice in this way is foolishness, pure and simple.

Except in this parable, foolishness, her foolishness wins the day.

This is a story for all of us who face corruption and cruelty—and are tempted to bemoan our powerlessness in the face of it all. While the privileged and zealous project durability and invincibility—in other words, that they will not and cannot be moved—Jesus challenges that very premise. And let’s be honest: it’s a very contemporary premise too. That their might is mighty; and our faith, flimsy. But Jesus tells a story about a powerful woman—grieving the violence of war, fearing for her family’s future—and how it is that she keeps coming back, how she continues to press her case, how she wins this particular judge over.

I have to imagine that the third time, or the fourth, or the fifth time she comes back—she doesn’t come alone. I have to imagine she’s building a movement out there: she’s talking to other widows, she’s collecting a hundred stories, she’s moving door to door with petitions, and she’s inviting other brave souls to make the trip downtown together. She persists. She’s building a movement. And the kind of power she has is easily and generously shared. And harnessed for the common good.

What moves me so—in my years of collaboration with Ghassan and Zoughbi and others in Palestine—is their gratitude for our friendship and their unqualified insistence that it matters. Like the widow in the parable, they are sometimes wearied by violence—but never defeated by it.  They too are building a movement.  They too are determined to go back to the judge, back to the powers-that-be, over and over and over again, until all God's children (of all tongues and races) can dream and dance together in peace. 

Their ‘sumud’—their steadfastness—touches something like the spirit of God in my heart and stirs me to do whatever little things I can to bring generations of injustice to an end and new possibilities into focus. And in that way, their ‘sumud’ becomes my own, and emboldens my ministry here and shakes me loose from complacency and fills my soul with hope. It’s a lot to ask from a single sabbatical, I grant you. But a man can dream.

Again, I want to thank you all for your kindness and support, and for your encouragement as I anticipate this very special sabbatical journey. What a gift we have here in Durham, a gift we have together, as a church. ‘Sumud’ (after all) isn’t a purely private thing, and it’s hardly a personal achievement either. ‘Sumud’ is the faith gifted to us from on high, the steadfast spirit we exercise in friendship and prayer together. It’s the gospel of grace that refuses to give up on us, as we refuse to give up on one another.

And for all that, I thank God.

Amen and Ashe!