Sermon: On Not Losing Heart

On Not Losing Heart

Luke 18 1-8

This sermon begins with a sorry tale.

On Friday evening I was enjoying a happy dinner party with friends and colleagues and looking forward very much to my day off on Saturday.  As we relaxed over coffee one of the clergy present asked if others had prepared their sermons for Sunday.  It seemed that only I had done so.  I had the floor and offered a summary of what I was planning to say.  My précis was followed by an uncanny and worrying silence - the meal had not been marked by silence up until that point, indeed it had been a very jolly evening.  But now the silence was thick. It was broken by a calm, worried and curious assertion from one who spoke for all the clergy in the room.  ‘But Stephen, your sermon is not based in the right readings! The gospel is the Unjust Judge.' The others nodded in sage agreement. 

My sermon preparation had been flawed.  I had misread the lectionary to say that today's gospel was Luke 18.1-18 not 1-8 and I had chosen to preach on the second half of that passage, which you have not just heard, rather than the first, which you have.  And so what I offer you this morning is not a nice, slow cooked, deeply baked meditation on the gospel but something prepared more hastily. You might like to think of it as a sermon cooked not on the bottom shelf of the oven but in a microwave.

Jesus tells the parable of the ‘Unjust Judge' or ‘Importunate Widow' in order to help people appreciate their need to pray and to not lose heart. The widow simply keeps going on and on at the judge, pressing for justice, or perhaps vengeance, against her opponent until the judge accedes to her request. 

To be honest with you, I am not convinced that the story that Jesus tells is actually as helpful as it might be.  Which is an odd conclusion for me to come to because on the whole I find Jesus' stories are far deeper than the points that they are alleged to make by his followers - ancient or modern.

At one level the story is  little more than an advertisement for what some have called the ‘broken record' method of assertiveness.  But the other word that springs to mind is ‘nagging'.  That nagging widow is a problem for me.  I feel sorry for the judge! The whole thing suggests that justice might come as a result of inappropriate pressure or manipulation or even threat.  ‘Unless you do what I want I will make your life a misery'. Surely this is not what Jesus was trying to communicate about the importance and power of prayer.

Persistence, it seems to me, whether in prayer or anything else, is not necessarily a good thing.  Sometimes we just have to accept ‘no' for an answer because, to put it bluntly, ‘no' is the answer. Or to put it with more subtlety, we are not yet asking the right question.

And yet the word ‘persistence' like the word ‘determination' is very important in both our spiritual and ethical lives.  Why?  Because losing heart is not a good enough reason for giving up. ‘Being persistent' means, in this context, not giving up simply because we have lost heart.  

It might be that we decide that a particular course of action, a project or a cause that we once held dear is something we can no longer pursue. But ‘persistence' means that we must make those decisions for positive and not negative reasons. There is not gospel mandate for ‘quitters'.

As it happens I heard a good story of persistence in the course of my day off yesterday. It was of a man who felt called to be ordained but was told he was too young and he should do something else.  He joined the army. Many years later he still felt called and offered himself again. ‘You've been too long in the army', they said.  But he did not give up. He persisted. He was ordained. And, surprise, surprise, became an army chaplain.

We are often tempted to give up when we are disappointed, when things do not go according to plan.  I have on two recent occasions taken ideas to groups only to have them kicked straight into touch.   I have not gone home happy but dispirited. But for some reason I have not given up and I have found that taking the idea to the same group on a second occasion has led to it being heard in a different light and accepted or acted upon.   One of these was a suggestion that some senior people in the diocese take a day out to learn more together about other faiths by visiting people of different faiths.  First time round it was as if I had suggested robbing the bank. Second time round I persuaded a colleague to raise it and it was accepted as a brilliant idea! 

The other example comes from work I am doing with a group of parishes.  In this case they initially agreed with my suggestion but failed to act on it. This led to a very acrimonious meeting with high emotions and one person walking out in tears.  So we agreed on plan B.  We did plan B. Then we came back to the original idea. They agreed again but this time they actually did the agreed work between the meetings. We all met again last week and it was very happy and positive occasion as we all could see that things were at last moving forwards. I am glad that I did not give up in either case. But I admit that I was very tempted to do so in both.

But if disappointment can make us lose heart, so too can making mistakes.  When we foul up we feel bad - guilty, ashamed, regretful, annoyed, low self esteem - all that sort of stuff.  We want to give up and go home. I have made a few mistakes recently. But I have not made the mistake of thinking that making is mistake is a dreadful thing.  So I have also made a few apologies recently and, with the gracious forgiveness of others as part of the process,  we have moved on together.

I saw a postcard the other day which says this ‘I have learnt so much from my mistakes that I am going to make another one'.  Well yes. But not just one more mistake, lots more!  Indeed I am wondering whether I should think of a good week as one in which I make several mistakes and then apologise, make up and move on constructively.  There are worse things than mistakes.  If you are not making mistakes you are perhaps not stretching yourself fully.  Of course you can't plan your mistakes.  But you can't plan on the basis that you or someone else won't make mistakes either. You will and they will. That's life. 

I am coming to the view that this business of persistence is very connected with wisdom.  But how do we grow in wisdom?  Partly by making mistakes.  A poem puts it like this:

The road to wisdom? - Well, its plain

And simple to express;

Err

And err

And err again

But less

And less

And less.

(The Road to Wisdom by Piet Hein)

The paradox is that we both make more and more errors and less and less errors.  The paradox is resolved once you realise that this is based on the idea that you are for ever making new mistakes.  Repeating the old ones is persistence gone wrong.

But we can only learn from our mistakes if we take responsibility for them. One of the many problems with ‘blame culture', with pointing the finger, is that you learn nothing through the experience of making mistakes.  You can never grow in wisdom. 

I have been reading a book about failure recently. It is called ‘Failing Forward'.  Its whole thesis is that the road to success is paved with, yes, failure. The point is that the difference between successful people and the others lies not so much in natural ability but in the way in which they respond to failure.  It is a convincing argument because we all fail, we all mess up, we all make mistakes and yes, we all lose heart.  But some persist. Some know that, as a saying goes, it does not matter how much milk you spill as long as you keep your cow.

Jesus told people a story to encourage them to keep praying and not lose heart.  It was not perhaps his best story.  It can be read in unhelpful ways.  But as we think about it we can perhaps realise that there is, as I put it before, no gospel mandate for quitting.  When we are in a difficult situation, when we are disappointed or realise that we have made a mistake - put our foot in it again we have two choices.  Two and not three.  The first choice is the option to persist.  To do what we can to stay on track.  To upright the capsized boat and carry on. The second choice is to learn from the experience and realise that we should really be aiming at something else.  And the third option?  This is the one Jesus and I both want to talk you out of. It is of losing heart because you have run out of energy or courage or because you are just fed up with it not working out as you hope.  That's not an option. That's losing heart. That's quitting. And it is not worthy of us.

In the Christian life there are really only two worthy courses of action: persistence or repentance, carrying on in the same direction or turning around and heading off in another direction.  But both are good.

Stephen Cherry