All Scriptures quoted are from The New Revised Standard Version unless otherwise quoted.

If someone were to ask you how your prayer life is today and you were to answer truthfully, what would you say? Some might say that their prayer life has never been more meaningful. Others might say that, for some reason, prayer never has been much of a part of their spiritual journey. Apart from saying grace when asked or prayers cried out during times of distress, as a rule, they live from day to day saying that they trust God but rarely praying. Others might say that they once prayed but what they prayed for and what life turned out to be never squared up. Which of those three describes each of us most accurately?

Jesus has just laid some heavy stuff on his disciples, as recorded in Luke 17, the chapter previous to the one in which gospel reading is found this morning. At least in part to what Jesus has said, the disciples responded with these words, “‘Increase our faith (Luke 17:5)!’” Do you think that is a prayer that God is interested in answering? If you don’t know anything else to pray or you’ve grown discouraged and all you can say to God in the face of life’s inequities is, “Increase my faith,” do you believe that God will answer that prayer? Let’s find out.

Following all of this, Jesus tells the parable we’ve read this morning. Luke records that the reason Jesus told the parable was so that his followers would remember “their need to pray always and not to lose heart.”

It’s a parable cast in the form of one of the greatest contrasts of power in Jesus’ day and time. On the one hand, we have a widow who has someone challenging her in a way we’re not told. It doesn’t matter what the challenge was for the widow. At least for the sake of the parable, it allows all of us to find our place in the story by recalling those times we felt unfairly treated. When Jesus said “‘widow,’” he could have easily said “one who had no power.” Aside from the diminished role and value of women in Jesus’ day, a widow was worse off than virtually anyone else.

Women were not allowed to own property or to have power in their culture. When a woman’s husband died in Jesus’ day, she was totally dependent for her basic life needs, like food and shelter, either on her family or on the welfare of those who might show her mercy or, worse, on those who might take advantage of her situation. There was no such thing as Social Security or any form of government assistance for the impoverished. When a woman’s husband died, she basically lost all of her remaining resources and power, whatever they may have been. That’s the reason there is such a great emphasis in the New Testament on the church taking care of widows. If the church didn’t, many women would have been left to very unscrupulous ways of making a living. Even women who wanted to follow Jesus might find their morality compromised in order to survive. Have you ever found yourself in such a situation, where you felt you had to compromise your Christian principles in order to survive?

On the other hand, there is a judge. Much like today, in Jesus’ day and time very few people had power to affect the day to day life of people more than a judge in just about any court. In this case, however, this is a judge who, by his own admission, has “no fear of God and no respect for anyone.” If you don’t have love or respect for God or your fellowman, what is your moral compass? Can you imagine pleading your legal cause before such a judge?

Jesus could not have set up a more powerful contrast than this. On the one hand, a helpless widow. On the other hand, a judge with no respect for his fellowman and no concern for ultimate morality before God.

The woman has come before the judge more than once to plead her cause to no avail. But, whatever she lacked in resources, she made up for in tenacity. She just kept coming and coming, probably because she had no other choice. Which, by the way, is when we tend to do most of our praying, when we feel that we have no alternatives. Whatever this opponent of hers was trying to take away from her, her only recourse was to hope that the judge would change his mind and grant her a just ruling against her opponent. Which he finally did. But, not because his character changed. Again, by his own admission, he finally gave the widow what she wanted“so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.” She got the justice she sought simply because, true to his character, the judge just wanted to get rid of her.

Parables are stories but they are more. They are human stories that convey a divine meaning. They may or may not be based in real human situations but they are all meant to tell us something about God that is connected to our real life human experience. Again, Jesus doesn’t tell us the nature of the widow’s dilemma and thereby allows room for all of us to find a place for ourselves in the story by thinking of how life’s inequities affect us and our perception of God’s response to them. In this particular case, Jesus tells us something about the character of God, not by comparing the unjust judge to God, but, by contrasting them.

After he finishes the parable Jesus drives home the point with, essentially, two questions. Is God not just? Do we have faith? In other words, when life doesn’t square with what we’ve been praying, God is not the one who answers to us. It’s the other way around. Our prayers are never a test of God’s character, Jesus is saying. Our prayers are a test of our character.

So, back to the original question. How’s your prayer life and what does that say about you more than what it says about God? Has life been unfair to you? Have you taken your cause before God? Has God answered your prayers or has God answered your prayers in the way you insisted? Are you disappointed with how life has turned out compared to what you prayed? Or, are you still waiting, beginning to wonder if God has even heard you when you prayed?

A friend called one day to tell me that he had found a T-shirt he was considering purchasing. He had been through some very difficult times. The T-shirt appealed to him because it had this inscription written on it, “This is not the life I ordered.” I hear that the T-shirt comes in all sizes, in case it would be of interest to you as well.

Jesus is trying to remind us that we are not the ones who order life. God is the one who ordered this world and who, when it is out of order will, in time, bring it back to its just order. When Jesus refers to that time he describes as “‘When the Son of Man comes . . .,’” if nothing else, he is referring to that time when ultimate justice will be served. In the meantime, Jesus says, we should pray always and not lose heart.

Human prayer, answered or unanswered, is never a test of God’s character. Prayer is a test of our character, and, specifically, a test of our tenacity to continue pursuing a just and loving God.

God is a just God and God will eventually see that true justice is done. We should, however, be prepared for the fact that a God who would let his only son die on a cross for the sins of others probably won’t demonstrate a justice that looks much like what we would call justice. Thanks be to God! God promises a justice in which he “‘will forgive (our) iniquity, and remember (our) sin no more’” (Jeremiah 31:34).

All of which begs one of the greatest questions about prayer. What do we do when God is silent, especially in the face of injustice? When we’ve prayed our hearts out and nothing happened that we could see or perceive, what do we do then? The silence of God is certainly one of the greatest of all mysteries as well as one of the greatest tests of faith. Someone sent me a quote just this week from Oswald Chambers’ classic daily devotional book, My Utmost for His Highest, that speaks to this issue. Chambers’ was reflecting on Jesus’ decision to delay rushing to be with Mary and Martha when Lazarus was ill. Jesus waited two days to respond to their request to rush to Lazarus’ side. It must have seemed like silent indifference to Mary and Martha and others. Let’s listen to Chambers’ words, the better part of a century old.

“Has God trusted you with His silence - a silence that has great meaning?  God's silences are actually His answers.  Just think of those days of absolute silence in the home at Bethany!  Is there anything comparable to those days in your life?  Can God trust you like that, or are you still asking Him for a visible answer?  His silence is the sign that He is bringing you into an even more wonderful understanding of Himself.  Are you mourning before God because you have not had an audible response?  When you cannot hear God, you will find that He has trusted you in the most intimate way possible - with absolute silence, not a silence of despair, but one of pleasure, because He saw that you could withstand an even bigger revelation.  If God has given you silence, then praise Him - He is bringing you into the mainstream of His purposes.  The actual evidence of the answer in time is simply a matter of God's sovereignty.  Time is nothing to God.”/

Have you ever driven across the great plains of West Texas or New Mexico during the night and just stopped your car, turned it off and gotten out? If you have then you know what a magnificent sight it can be. If there are no other cars coming for miles and no other sources of artificial light, the sky is bright, like a piece of black velvet needle-punched a million times, letting the light of stars billions of light years away pour through. You also know what a magnificent sound it can be, the sound of utter silence. Is there a more powerful sound than the sound of absolutely nothing? It would seem that anyone who has had this experience knows that it is impossible to stand staring at the night sky full of little Christmas-like lights from immeasurable distances and believe that, even though it is dead silent, there is not a living God hard at work, creating and recreating the world he ordered. Sometimes God’s most magnificent work in our lives is done in moments where we can’t hear a thing, when he is trusting us to trust him with the silence.

Or, what about the times you just need someone to thank and no human being is enough? What we do then is truly the test of our character, never God’s. G.K. Chesterson once wrote that, “‘The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has no one to thank’” (Philip Yancey, Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church, Doubleday, 2001, p. 48). If, like the unjust judge, we trade a life of prayer for a life built only on human rationale, what do we do with the night sky, or the light in a baby’s eyes, or the sparkle in the eyes of those who love us, or the power of a hug to change a heart, or an act of kindness that defies human reason? If we have no one to thank, that’s not because there is no one to thank. It is because, God forbid, we have become thankless.

Even if we have no other reason to pray, we should always stop and draw near to God in gratitude. Gratitude is the first requirement of good stewards of all of life’s gifts. Just as we cannot get too close to radioactivity without it damaging us or even killing us from the inside out, we cannot draw close to a generous and loving God in prayer without generous, loving and just character of God eventually transforming us from the inside out. Indeed, “says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people . . . for they shall all know me’”, (Jeremiah 31:33-34).

Jesus told this parable for one reason. Prayer, or our perception of God’s response to our prayers, is never a test of God’s character. It is a test of ours. God’s will will be done, in your life and in mine. God’s world, disordered by sin, will be re-ordered by justice. God is just and, in his own time and in his own way, God’s justice will prevail.

Do you believe that? Your prayer life is the real proof. If don’t know anything else to pray, here is a good place to start. Take a look around at the world and your place in it and then, no matter what you see or hear, simply say to God, eyes closed or not, “Lord, increase my faith!” Then, pray it again the next day and the next. All the while, wait in silence and see what happens next.