Rethinking God

Our gospel readings for the past few weeks have all been about prayer – faith, gratitude, and today persistence. Luke is very clear about Jesus’ intention in telling the parable of the unjust judge and the persistent widow. He headlines it “a parable about the disciples’ need to pray always and not to lose heart.”

Which is a good thing.

Because we might get confused and think it’s a parable telling us about the nature of God.

It was the job of the judge to protect the vulnerable – the widows, orphans and foreigners – but either he couldn’t be bothered, or he had other ambitions which consumed him. One widow needed him to make a judgment on her behalf. We don’t know what exactly but probably it was to do with her deceased husband’s estate. And so she kept on at him. She kept demanding that he do his job and finally he did, just to get rid of her.

If this is a parable about prayer, does it mean that God needs us to keep reminding him of our needs before he gets round to doing anything?

Now remember that the parable is about the “need to pray always and not to lose heart.” And Jesus specifically says, “will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them.”

So there’s a problem.

If God will quickly grant justice to his chosen ones, what about the times we pray and God does not seem to respond, period? It’s not just that we don’t get an answer quickly, we don’t get an answer at all, or at least not the one we want. Does that mean that we are not God’s chosen ones, or that God isn’t paying attention? Or that we didn’t pray persistently enough or use the right words? Or maybe we weren’t sufficiently grateful or simply didn’t have enough faith. And what about situations of blatant injustice? Does God not care?

I suspect that we need a paradigm shift in our understanding of God and the way God works. And that’s not easy. We are used to thinking of God as being someone, like the judge. who listens to our prayers and then decides whether or not to answer them. And if we think about God like that, then we hit some unanswerable questions.

For example, when the Twin Towers came down on 9/11 2,700 people were killed. Yet on a typical day 50,000 people worked there, and around 17,000 people were in the towers at the time of the attack. What made the difference? Did God not care as much about those who died as about those who gave thanks that they survived?

In the last century there have been many new ideas about the way the universe works. Quantum physics has developed to show how the tiniest particles of matter work; chaos theory offers new insight into complex systems; string theory suggests that all of creation is based on vibration, and at the other end of the spectrum, cosmologists now think that the universe is expanding because of so-called ‘dark energy’. Scientists suggest that the cosmos is made of about 4.9% ordinary matter, like you me and this building, 26.8 % dark matter and 68.3% dark energy. And I really have no idea what they are talking about.

But if we have all this new information and all these new theories about the universe, isn’t it time that we revise our pictures of God?

What if God is not omnipotent in the way that my questions about the Twin Towers assume? What if God does not directly intervene in the life of the cosmos but rather participates?

That would mean that God is not directing the events of our lives, but is accompanying us and creating with us. Scripture tells us that God is love. If God is love then Love is what sustains us and pulls us forwards; Love is what always bring the highest possible outcome from every situation.

So when we pray, we are praying for Love to be manifest. We are not begging an omnipotent but distracted God to pay attention to our situation, rather we are adding our love to God’s love – we are co-creating the best possible outcomes together with the God who is participating in our lives and is participating in the continuing work of Creation.

From this perspective, persistent prayer makes sense because every situation is always in flux. Things are always changing. Prayer brings our love and the love of the Creator into that state of change. And that is powerful. And persistent prayer brings love persistently.

When we look at it like this, persistent prayer is not begging a bored judge to pay attention but more like keeping our foot on the accelerator. Steady and even. Though that metaphor also breaks down because the foot on the accelerator provides control and prayer is not a form of remote control.

Prayer brings our positive and loving energy into the state of flux which is our reality and God’s reality. Our love joins with God’s love and as we participate together in loving creativity so something new becomes possible. We don’t know the best possible outcome of any situation because there are so many variables which we don’t know about, and which are outside our control.

A simple example is that a couple of weeks ago I was on call for jury duty. After calling in twice, I was meant to call after 5 on Tuesday. I woke up in the middle of the night and realized I had forgotten to call. So early Wednesday morning I went to call in, but could not find the card with my jury number on it. We turned the house upside down looking for it. I kept praying for help to find the card. We didn’t find it. There was no-one in the jury office until 8:30 and when I got through, a nice woman called Jasmine told me that I should already have arrived and reported for duty. And then she helped me think of a truthful and legitimate reason that she could excuse me. By the time I came off the phone I was excused from jury duty for 12 months and excused from spending the whole day in jury selection.

As far as I knew, the best solution was to find the jury card and that is what I was praying for. If I had been in control, it would have turned up. But then I would have spent the day at the courthouse. But I was not in control and God was not sitting in the clouds deciding whether or not to help me find the card, God was participating in my life and in the unfolding of the universe for the highest good of all beings.

After talking with the disciples about faith, and demonstrating the importance of gratitude, in this week’s gospel Jesus encourages us to be persistent in prayer and not give up hope. There are many reasons why we may be tempted to give up hope. We live at a time when the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, where uncertainty and insecurity lurk at every corner, and our courts are under threat.

But our prayer helps to bring Love, love with a capital L into every situation. Our prayer joins with God’s activity and helps bring about outcomes we cannot even imagine.

So my friends, let us pray always and not lose heart.

the Rev. Dr. Caroline Hall