What we pretend to be — Pentecost XIX

We continue our reading in Luke's Gospel as we enter a time in the Church's annual year that looks to the end of time, the thin place/time between the equinox and the solstice, the quieting-down of the natural world in the northern hemisphere, and the mystery and beauty of our mortality held-in-God. The feast of All Saints is the focus, and is on November 1. (We will engage in some "Hallowse'eve'n" engagement with this in our courtyard as we build a shrine with our neighbors to remember all those “…whom we love but see no longer,” though they are all around us.) We will observe it on the Sunday following: 6 November, and will remember our baptism into Christ and his living-and-dying-and-being-resurrected in the power of God.

The readings get progressively more end-timey over November -- look out! In doing so, they bleed over into the themes of Advent (which, itself, used to last longer...).

This week, though, Jesus just tells his disciples a parable about persistence in prayer, persistence in growing-in-faith. We tend to be impatient creatures, bounded by and in our comprehension of Time. Step outside of time, Jesus urges, by stepping into God, who is (among other things) a Reality unbounded by Time. Begin to live in this Life-That-Is-Eternal (eternity) now, while you live bounded in time and mortal bodiliness.

What does 'persistence' have to do with this? He tells a parable about a widow (a marginalized, vulnerable person standing in for all the vulnerable creatures, people, places...) who keeps petitioning a corrupt, unjust judge, looking for justice. She just keeps at it, and eventually this unjust judge just gets tired of her habitual petitioning and gives her justice.

This parable is often used in social-justice-flavored Christianity to encourage us to keep going (‘nevertheless, she persisted’) in seeking justice in this world for the vulnerable. And, amen to that.

But, Jesus tells this story to illustrate that 'God' is not an unjust judge, and that we project our human experiences of injustice and corrupt, patriarchal systems onto God. 'How much more than the unjust judge will God give to you what you need in your life of faith, your mortal seeking of that life that is eternal now?'

Learn through persistence that 'God' (as a character in a story) is not an unjust judge who needs to be badgered into self-offering in grace, or persuaded into inviting us into participating in God's very Life-of-the-Real. God is not an unjust judge. This life-of-God is always present, and available, and realer than real (our quotidian perception).

God is Mercy. Constantly. God is Love. Always.

Be persistent, yes, but be persistent for our own sake-and-transformation, not to 'convince' God.

I hear in this invitation the awareness that repeated ('persistent'!) practices form us over time. Kurt Vonnegut (and others before him) said, 'We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.'

We become over time what we pretend to be.

Let us 'pretend', then. Use repetitive language in your own prayer life (your inner life of self-opening to the divine presence and reality) that orients you toward the reality of God who is love, mercy, and justice. Use repetitive language of the tradition to enter more fully into the mysteries toward which they point us, like repeated encounters with signposts along a pilgrimage. 'Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again' is both poetical metaphor, storytelling from the tradition, and mapping of eternally fluid reality. 'As it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever,' is similar. Saying every day upon waking in the morning (early or late!), "Lord, open my lips and my mouth shall declare your praise,' briefly orients you to/ward ultimate reality, even if your first task or engagement is then unquestionably ...quotidian.

Language matters. Repeated, repetitive language-use forms us. It changes our hearts, and our encountering with the ultimate reality of God, daily, bit by bit. “God is not an unjust judge.” Say it with me…

And, speaking words of divine justice regularly, each in our own way, does wear down the unjust judge of our world in time. That moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Remind it so, daily, with your own use of the signposts of language, repeated, to indicate the way of Life. Daily.

Our human bounded-in-time-ness (our beautiful, common mortality) is the 'unjust judge' we think we deal with.

Divine reality - the One who makes all things new - is, Jesus tells us, not like an unjust judge. Being persistent in following signs of repeated language will build our faith, our hope, our love, our justice, all over time, and in time, and outside of time.