\nI recently heard a story,
\nit was the story of the person who told it to me, but it struck me
\nthat it was also \u00a0many peoples’ story. \u00a0There was much to celebrate
\nin the story, and also a lot to be frustrated by. \u00a0The person who
\ntold me the story was someone who lacks access to sufficient
\nfinancial resources. \u00a0That is, in the colloquial \u2013 he is poor \u2013
\nalthough I think poverty is more complicated than that! \u00a0The man is a
\nfather, and his daughter got into a VERY good college, despite the
\nchallenges the family faced and the challenges their school district
\nfaced. \u00a0As you might hope, the very good college offered this young
\nwoman a financial aid package to make it possible for her to attend
\nthe school. \u00a0However, when the young woman got the financial aid
\npackage and read it over carefully, she realized that the loans she
\nwas being offered were predatory loans that would be verging on
\nimpossible to ever be able to pay back! \u00a0She contacted the school.
\nThey ignored her. \u00a0She kept pestering. \u00a0They kept ignoring her. \u00a0Her
\nfather started calling, and he started calling up the chain of
\ncommand. \u00a0He was told to stop calling. \u00a0When I heard the story,
\nthat’s where it ended \u2013 they were unsure if the young woman would
\nattend the very good college because she was WAY too smart to do so
\nat risk to her financial future.<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
\nShe sounds like the
\npersistent widow. \u00a0I’ve been told that the persistent widow is a very
\nstrange character with which to start a sermon series on subversive
\nwomen \u2013 and not just because the Bible presents her as fictional.
\nThe bigger issue is that her subversiveness isn’t very obvious. \u00a0To
\nthe naked eye, she just looks like an annoying nag! \u00a0Actually, even
\nthat may be projection. \u00a0This is a SHORT story, there isn’t that much
\nto it! \u00a0\n<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
\nIn our study of the text
\nthough, we found a lot to discuss about this short-storied,
\nfictional, persistent widow. \u00a0It is helpful to remember that the
\nTorah, the laws of community life that the Jewish people understood
\nto have come from God, were very clear about the care for widows,
\norphans, and foreigners. \u00a0That would be, people who did not have the
\nprotection of an adult male who was a member of society and were thus
\nvulnerable. \u00a0The system was designed so that even the vulnerable
\ncould find ways to survive. \u00a0The Torah was also very clear about the
\nthreat to society created by an unjust justice system, and
\narticulated frequently, in no uncertain terms, the need to have
\njudges who made rulings based on JUSTICE and not on who had more
\nmoney or influence. \u00a0\n<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
\nThat is, the persistent
\nwidow is stuck in a situation she shouldn’t be in. \u00a0She should be
\ncared for. \u00a0She isn’t! \u00a0It is likely that her \u201copponent\u201d is the
\nperson who should have been taking care of her and providing for her
\nlivelihood, and wasn’t! \u00a0The justice system was supposed to help her
\nfind a way to justice. \u00a0It didn’t. \u00a0 She was stuck in a situation
\nwhich was untenable for her survival without a means of recourse
\nbecause of the immorality of the judge. \u00a0There was no other means by
\nwhich she could get justice. \u00a0The system was closed to her, and the
\nonly option left to her was to agitate the system.<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
\nThe judge is presented
\nvery simplistically. \u00a0He doesn’t care about justice, people, or
\nGod… and it sounds like he just does what he wants to do. \u00a0He is a
\nnegative caricature of a person abusing power or authority, someone
\nwho isn’t easy to move toward justice.<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
\nThe persistent widow won
\nthough! \u00a0I suspect that she could have taught the courses I took this
\nspring on non-violent direct action! \u00a0Jesus says that the judge
\nthought to himself,
\n\u201cbecause this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice,
\nso that she may not wear me out by continually coming.\u201d (v. 5) The
\npersistent widow didn’t have much power to use in the world, and she
\ndidn’t have ANY power that could be used without being annoying. \u00a0So
\nshe used what she had. \u00a0She was annoying. \u00a0She didn’t give up. \u00a0And
\nshe annoyed him into doing what was right! \u00a0\n<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
\nThat’s
\nwhat I think is so subversive about the persistent widow. \u00a0She can’t
\nhave been the only widow in that city who was impoverished by a lack
\nof justice, she likely wasn’t even the only one to bring it to the
\njudge’s attention. \u00a0MANY of the widows might have been in similar
\nsituations. \u00a0However, in cases like that, most people give up.
\nThat’s what people are counting on, and that’s part of why injustices
\nsometimes win out.<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
\nI
\nthink about that young college bound woman, and how carefully she
\nread the details of her financial aid package to determine that the
\noffer wasn’t fair. \u00a0How many other people in the same situation come
\nwith some trust that the college they want to go to won’t do them
\nharm, don’t read the package, or don’t yet have the math skills to
\ninterpret the implications? \u00a0How many people would decide to take the
\npackage and hope for the best? \u00a0How many people would try to call and
\nask if there was another loan, but give up easily? \u00a0I don’t know how
\nmany people would get as far as the young woman I heard about, and
\nconsider giving up their dream school, but I do know that her
\npersistence is NOT what the predatory loan company is counting on.<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
\nThe
\npredatory loan company is expecting people not to pay attention, to
\ntrust, to take a leap of faith, not to run the numbers, and to sign
\non the dotted line \u2013 no matter how high the interest rate turns out
\nto be. \u00a0The predatory loan company is able to get away with their
\nloans because few people are as persistent as that young woman. The
\ncollege, as well, choose to work with that predatory loan company,
\nand in doing so to keep this young woman and those in similar
\nsituations IN poverty, while pretending to help them out of it. \u00a0It
\nmakes me wonder what they might be getting out of it.<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
\nKeeping
\nour eyes open to see
\nthe injustices of the wold and REFUSING to be quiet about them once
\nwe do is wildly subversive. \u00a0I’m claiming the persistent widow was
\nsubversive because she was a nag, and she didn’t stop nagging until
\njustice was found. \u00a0It isn’t the wildest story in the Bible by any
\nmeans, but it may represent the most frequently successful mechanism
\nof accessing justice: refusing to give up!<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
\nOne
\nof the challenges of acting like the persistent widow, though, is
\nthat there are a lot of injustices in the world and none of us can
\ngive attentiveness to all of them. \u00a0That level of nagging can’t be
\nmulti-tasked! \u00a0This is one of the reasons I am so grateful for the
\nimage of the Body of Christ. \u00a0I come back to it time and time again,
\nreminded that if I do my part faithfully, and trust the rest of the
\nBody to do their part (and God to do God’s part), the whole world
\ngets better. \u00a0Most often justice comes through collective action
\n(think Montgomery Bus Boycott, Women’s Suffrage, blocking the
\nKeystone XL pipeline), but sometimes they’re smaller or individual as
\nwell. \u00a0On occasion we can successfully seek justice alone, but no one
\nof us can seek ALL justice. \u00a0If any of us try to
\nall the work of the Body of Christ, nothing gets done
\nat all! \u00a0\n<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
\nMy
\ncollege thesis was on John Conway’s \u201cGame of Life,\u201d which is a
\nset of rules governing a grid. \u00a0On the grid, at any given moment,
\neach cell is \u201calive\u201d or \u201cdead\u201d and then, from there, things
\nchange. \u00a0The status \u201calive\u201d or \u201cdead\u201d is represented visually
\nby two different colors, and those statuses are able to change with
\ntime, based on the relationships they have with other cells who are
\nalso \u201calive\u201d or \u201cdead.\u201d \u00a0\n<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
\nOne
\nnight, deep in the trenches of trying to write up my thesis and
\nstruggling with a decision about where to go to seminary, I went down
\nto the river to pray. \u00a0I sat on a dock and watched the water flow by.
\n As might make sense if you’d spent as many hours and months staring
\nat colored boxes on a graph as I had, I started imagining the river
\nas the graph \u2013 and imagining the graph spreading out to cover all
\nthe water of the world. \u00a0I’d stared at colored boxes for a LONG time,
\nand I was tired \ud83d\ude09 \u00a0Then, as I continued to pray, ponder, and be
\noverwhelmed, I started imagining one of those boxes as representing
\nMY life. \u00a0To my horror, the box that represented my life was
\nblinking! \u00a0I took this to mean that sometimes my life was
\ncontributing to the well-being of others, but sometimes it WASN’T! \u00a0I
\nfound myself sitting on that dock on the Connecticut River, aware
\nthat sometimes I wasn’t benefiting the kin-dom of God and wishing
\nwith all that I was that I could ALWAYS be good.<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
\nIt
\nwas at that point that another thought entered my mind, one that was
\noutside of the particular ways my thoughts tend to cycle around.
\nThat process has been one I’ve associated with the Divine, and I have
\nsince thought of that prayer time by the river as a vision of sorts
\n-but I’m also giving you the details to consider it so that you can
\nassess how you’d like to think about it. \u00a0The thought that entered my
\nmind, seemingly from beyond me, was that if I could manage to be a
\nblessing that contributed to the well-being of the kindom 51% of the
\ntime, that was ENOUGH for God to be able to expand the goodness out
\ninto the world and to be a net gain to the kin-dom. \u00a0\n<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
\nIt
\nwas certainly a new thought to me then, I’d leaned more towards
\nperfectionism than toward an idea that offering more good than bad
\nwas a net gain! \u00a0It is a thought I’ve gone back to in the years
\nsince, particularly when I’ve found myself being extra rough on
\nmyself. \u00a0It helps me to consider that God is able to make things work
\nwith what we’re able to offer.<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
\nIf
\nwe do our best, and especially if we are able to offer a bit more
\ngood into the world than harm, then God can use what we offer in
\ncombination with the rest of the Body of Christ. \u00a0The world becomes a
\nsafer, fuller, more just place. \u00a0The kin-dom becomes. \u00a0We don’t have
\nto do all the work! \u00a0We can’t! \u00a0We’d burn out. \u00a0That means that
\nsometimes we have to work through the process of figuring out which
\nthings are ours to do and which things we leave for the rest of the
\nBody of Christ. \u00a0Together, each of us offering the love, compassion,
\nand persistence that are our gifts from God, we can follow the
\nwidow’s course and create the world that the Torah dreams and God
\nwants \u2013 the kin-dom of God! \u00a0And it doesn’t even require perfection
\n\ud83d\ude09 \u00a0Just persistence. \u00a0Thanks be to God. \u00a0Amen\n<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Rev. Sara E. Baron<\/p>\n
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady<\/p>\n
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305<\/p>\n
Pronouns: she\/her\/hershttp:\/\/fumcschenectady.org\/<\/a><\/p>\n