Persistently Seeking Justice: A Homily For the Nineteenth Sunday After Pentecost

 Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, 19 October, 2025.  Readings for Proper 29(C):  Jeremiah 31:27-34; Psalm 119:97-104; 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5; Luke 18:1-

“And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?" (Lk 18.8)

You may have a morning routine where you like to stretch your brain muscles before starting the day.  In our house, we have to finish some of the New York Times puzzle games - Wordle and Connections - before we get going.  It feels like a useful exercise, a little mental calisthentics to keep the brain sharp, ad there’s always a feeling of reward if I can solve the puzzle quickly.

I don’t know about you, but whenever I hear that the gospel is going to be one of Jesus’ parables, I think it’s a puzzle that needs to be solved.    That might seem like an odd reaction, because we’re taught in Sunday school that parables are simple stories using everyday images for ordinary folk, and offering homespun wisdom.   But in fact many parables are cryptic and leave us wondering, what is Jesus trying to say?  How exactly is heaven like a mustard seed?  (and so on).

Today’s gospel is different because Jesus gives us the Coles Notes summary at the start - “[he] told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart” (Lk. 18.1).    So right off the bat Jesus is telling us what the parable is about - it’s an encouragement to pray often, persistently, and hopefully.   

Jesus also helps us avoid an interpretive error.  Sometimes with these sorts of parables we are tempted to say that the most powerful person in the story somehow represents God, but Jesus helpfully tells us that if even the corrupt and wicked judge in the story can be swayed by a pesky widow, how much more will a loving God quickly hear and answer the prayers of his people?  

If there’s a character in the parable that we want to identify with, surely it’s the widow.  It’s not just that she is persistent, though Jesus does say that we should “pray always”.   But if we were to simply say that the moral of the parable is that “the squeaky wheel gets the grease”, then I think we would be missing out on a more important truth.  The important point of the parable I think is that the woman wants justice.

In Jesus’ time, a widow asking for justice would have tied in to definite ideas about the kind of society God wants, where even the most helpless have protections and dignity.   We see this for example in one of the psalms.

“O Lord, you will hear the desire of the meek, you will strengthen their heart, you will incline your ear to do justice for the meek and for the orphan and the oppressed, so that those from earth may strike terror no more.” (Ps 10:17-18).

Jesus’ parable thus takes up a call for justice for the poor and powerless that runs throughout the Hebrew scriptures.  Verse 7 of the gospel reading should be read in this context as a powerful promise that God’s will bring justice to the world:  “And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them?” (Lk 18:7).   So that promise is reassuring, and yet the Gospel ends on a question that seems almost foreboding: “And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

What does Jesus mean by faith on earth?   Does he mean faith as a set of abstract beliefs that we have to hold in our heads?  I would say no, that’s not a helpfulw way to understand either faith in general or this parable in particular.  Faith is more than a set of abstract ideas.  Faith is beliefs in action.    And here in the parable the action is about the widow’s persistent prayer for justiuce.

And if the parable is about justice, we could say that faith is the extent to which we believe in and strive for God’s justice, in our actions where possible, and in prayer often.  In this context, “faith” is understood to include “faith/belief in God’s justice”.

Caring about justice doesn’t necessarily mean that we as Christians and as Canadian Anglicans need to align ourselves with any one political party or cause, though it does mean I think that we care about what happens in the political realm.   I think we have pretty good instincts when it comes to looking around us and recognizing injustice.  Injustice is simply that which isn’t right. 

As a case in point, people going homeless isn’t rigght.  Our wonderful deacon, Rev. Lorna, was in the city yesterday at the church of St Stephen in the Fields.    You many have heard that this church has been the site of a homeless encampment for the past year or more.  In fact, the priest there. the Rev. Maggie Hellwig, recentlty published a book called Encampment, a theological and social reflection on what homelessness is and how we should respond to it.

The CBC described Helwig as “an outspoken social justice activist [who] has spent the last three years getting to know the residents and fighting tooth and nail to allow them to stay, battling various authorities that want to clear the yard and prefer to keep the results of the housing crisis out of sight and out of mind”.

https://www.cbc.ca/books/encampment-by-maggie-helwig-1.7458187

This Thursday, less than 24 hours after Hellwig received the Toronto Book Award, the Toronto Fire Marshall had the encampment cleared on the grounds of safety, and the residents were offered space in the city’s shelter system.   As Hellwig noted, many of the encampment residents see shelters as more dangerous than sleeping in tents, and so the problem of urban homelessness will continue.  All that people like Rev Hellwig, Deacon Lorna, and their supporters can do is to bear witness to this seemingly insoluble problem and call for justice.

 https://torontolife.com/city/a-churchyard-homeless-encampment-was-cleared-less-than-24-hours-after-the-priest-received-the-toronto-book-award-for-writing-about-it/

Even persistent, applied faith can seem to be in vain.   Despite the efforts of Revs Lorna and Maggie and others, the encampment was cleared.   Their efforts, like our other good causes, may seem like a drop in the ocean compared to the injustice in the world. 

However, prayer reminds us of God’s purpose and plan to rescue and redeem the world, to return it to the way he created it.  Iy briefy point us ahead a month to the season of Advent and Christmas beyond it, I’m reminded of another widow in Luke’s gospel, the one who is mentioned in the nativity stories, the prophet Anna, who lives long enough to see the Saviour born.  Luke tells us that:

“She was of a great age, having lived with her husband for seven years after her marriage, ³⁷then as a widow to the age of eighty-four. She never left the temple but worshipped there with fasting and prayer night and day. ³⁸At that moment she came, and began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.  Luke 2:36-38)”

Anna reminds us that prayer is heard and answered, that God does care for the world enough to send us his son, and that as Christians, are prayers are part of God’s ongoing work in Christ to save and rescue the world. 

Until this happens, our job is “to pray always and not to lose heart”.

Authentic Gratitude: A Homily for Harvest Thanksgiving

 Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, and St Luke’s, Creemore, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 28C).  Readings: Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7; Psalm 66:1-11; 2 Timothy 2:8-15; Luke 17:11-19

Thanksgiving, the time when we take stock of our blessings, traditionally thought of as blessings of the earth, and when, ideally, we think of others as ourselves.   Thanksgiving can be thought of as an attitude that is sometimes expressed in prayers and hymns.   I want to suggest today that thanksgiving is best thought of as the church’s posture, as a spiritual default position.

The Christian write Anne Lamott has written that the best prayers she knows are ‘help me, help me, help me” and “thank you, thank you, thank you”.     It’s a wise observation, because surely our most heartelt personal prayers fall into the two categories of “please” and “thank you”.

In their everyday use, both prayers are born out of urgency.   We might pray “please help me” when we are racing to the hospital after receiving terrible news, or when we want the pain to stop.   We might pray “thank you” when we receive a clean bill of health, or when we get to the hospital and find that our loved one is ok.    I can’t prove it, but I think that we are more likely to pray “please help” than we are to pray “thank you”, because I think that fear is a stronger motivator than is gratitude.

In our gospel lesson, Jesus meets ten people who are pretty good at the “please” part of praying, but not so good at the “thank you” part.   By healing them, Jesus does them an enormous favour.  Before they met Jesus they were practically in exile, banished from their homes and communities because they were ritually unclean.    Now they are healed, they can come home.     But the only one who actually comes to Jesus turns out to be a Samaritan, an outsider and, as Jesus calls him, a “foreigner”.  And yet the point of the story is surely that this the Samaritan leper, even through a foreigner, understood grace, in the same way that another Samaritan practiced grace when he stopped to help an injured traveller.   The Samaritan who has been given new life surely understands what authentic gratitude is.

Why do the other nine never return to thank Jesus?   We find their ingratitude shocking, and indeed, it clearly offends Jesus.   Perhaps like someone who receives a windfall, they just think “well, this is my lucky day” without taking the trouble to feel grateful.   But the Samaritan who returns to thank and praise Jesus connects the blessing with who Jesus is.   He realizes somehiow that Jesus is God, with the power to rescue, to heal, to resurrect, for leprosy was a kind of living death.    He understands who Jesus truly is and he is grateful - authentically grateful.

I wonder how we can go beyond this gospel story and feel authentic gratitude even when the blessings aren’t flowing our way. It can be especially challenging to feel gratitude to a God who might not give us ironclad guarantees of security, who might not answer every “please help” prayer with the prosperity that we might wish.  T

GThere is one place in the old Prayer Book service For the Blessings of a Harvest which I find helpful in this regard.  The authors of that service wisely included a prayer to be used if and “when the harvest has been defective”:

 Almighty God and everliving Father, who hast in wisdom seen fit to withhold from us at this time thine accustomed bounty: we most humbly praise thee for still bestowing upon us far more than we deserve.  Make us truly thankful for our many blessings; increase in us more and more a lively faith and love, and a humble submission to thy blessed will; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.  (BCP pp. 619-620)

This prayer is remarkable in that it says “thank you” when it really still wants to say “help”.   The harvest has not been good.   All is not safely gathered in.  Meals may be plain and infrequent this winter.   Even so, it says “thank you” for our real gifts:  faith, love, life, and even for God’s claims on our freedom to just look after our own interests and not share with others.  In times of scarcity, after a bad harvest, it would be all the more important to look after one’s neighbours, and all the more tempting to ignore them and hoard the little one has.

This prayer brings us back to gratitude and the difference between authentic and false gratitude.   Maybe the greatest difference between “help me” and “thank you” is that while the former is often simply primal, just pure raw need, “thank you” can sometimes be calculated in favour of our own interests and advantages.  Like the Pharisee (Lk 18.9-14), it can be tempting to say “thank you that I am not like” … like this person who has less than I do, like people who live in this war zone in this crappy country, like people who I see as being less important.   Idols and golden calves can seduce us into this kind of false gratitude.

Authentic gratitude is challenging because it makes us vulnerable – it exposes us to the needs of others and it does not meet every one of our perceived needs.  Authentic gratitude takes us away from ourselves and towards God, which is why in our prayer books we combine our thanks AND our praise.  Authentic gratitude means that we are grateful for the things that we hold in common with all humanity – the ability to love and be loved as creatures who all bear the image of God and who thus deserve equal dignity– and thus share what we have.

 

This Thanksgiving, may our gratitude be properly placed, with thanks and praise, in the living God who rescues us from sin and death, things that no god of our own making can do.    May our prayers of  “help me” be answered as we need and not as we deserve, and may our prayers of “thank you” be born of authentic gratitude which sees the love of God for all his creation and which compels us to love and share with our neighbours.

 

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The Ruined Cities In Our Hearts: A Homily for the 17th Sunday After Pentecost

 A Homily for the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 27C], Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, Anglican Diocese of Toronto.  Readings for this Sunday: Lamentations 1:1-6;  Psalm 137; 2 Timothy 1:1-14; Luke 17:5-10

“How lonely sits the city that once was full of people! How like a widow she has become, she that was great among the nations” (Lamentations 1.1)

You may have noticed if you’ve been driving around this part of Collingwood that there’s been a lot of construction this summer.   It’s been annoying, espoecially if you want to drive down Ontario Street, so recently I  to scripture to see if there was any advice on how to manage my impatience during construction season, and I didn’t really find anything helpful.   

There was the Tower of Babel, but that was a construction zone that never got finished. Imagine having paid for a penthouse suite in that!  And then there were all the Israelites who got lured to Egypt with the promise of high paying construction jobs, and it turned out to be a pyramid scheme.  

Unfortunately, scenes of destruction and desolation are far more common in scripture than are scenes of construction.  Our first lesson begins with the spectacle of Jerusalem lying in ruins, silent and desolate. The armies of Babylon have torn down the walls, the sacred Temple has been looted and ruined , the kings descended from David and their people have been taken into slavery.   It’s a scene that we would today call post-apocalyptic.

In the theology of ancient Israel, bad things happening was seen as a punishment.    So the book of Lamentations explains that Jerusalem has been destroyed because “the Lord has made her suffer for the multitude of her transgressions”.   The larger story here is that Israel’s leaders have followed foreign gods, they have abused and exploited the most helpless of their people, and so because Israel has broken its contract or covenant with God, God has brought the Babylonians to punish Israel.

So this idea that bad things happen to bad people is fairly old fashioned theology, but I don’t think it’s terribly interesting or helpful.   It’s certainly rejected by Jesus (John 9).    But I think the idea of a book called Lamentations is worth thinking about because we do live in a world where much is, well, lamentable.  To lament is to express profound sorrow and grief for something terrible that has happened, without necessarily having any answers.   For example, in a month we will be observing Remembrance Day Sunday, and the bagpipes, playing an ancient tune like Flowers of the Forest, and the sad of skirl of the pipes can’t explain why all those innocents died, it can only express sorrow for all the waste and destruction.

Perhaps the place of the lament in Christian theology is simply in the act of bearing witness to sin, to remembering tragedy and calling on God for justice.   At one point later on in Lamentations 1, shortly after the passage form our first lesson, Jerusalem herself speaks:  “Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, which is done unto me” (Lam 1.12).   This is one of those passages that is read on Good Friday, as if to capture the suffering of Jesus on the cross, which is greeted with a shrug by the indifferent crowds.  But the verse also speaks to us.

“Is it nothing to you, all you that pass by?”  How is it that we have become so adept at ignoring the suffering of others, so insulated from things that should shock us?  Whether it’s the random bits of violence that get circulated on video, or the relentless bombing that pulverizes cities and sends millions fleeing, images of hungry children in Gaza, or just the sickening drumbeat of environmental catastrophe and extinction, how have we become so good at tuning it out?  Perhaps we look the other way simply to preserve our sanity, and most folks out there, I suspect, just can’t be bothered to care.

There’s a social media feed I follow from the Auschwitz Museum n Poland.  Several times a day it shows the photos and names of people who died there.  Sometimes you see them in their nice civilian clothes, blissfully unaware of what history has in store for them.   Sometimes you see them with shaved heads in their striped prisoners’ uniforms as the ones selected for labour are processed, and you can see the shock on their faces.   I don’t enjoy looking at these images, but somehow I feel that I have to.  Lamentations reminds us that some things are worth mourining, so that even if all we can do is bear witness and remember, then that is something worth doing.   In bearning witness and remembering, we stand alongside God and share God’s sorrow and compassion.  We see the things that most people look away from, but which God sees.

A theology of Lamentation I think has to also acknowledge human complicity in the things that we lament.    Citiies are bombed and innocents die because something goes fearfully wrong in the human heart.   If you want an example of what I mean, think about the last verse of the psalm we read this morning.  After expressing the sadness of the Israelite captives who are now slaves in Babylon, the psalm gives way to a shocking desire for revenge:

O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy the one who pays you back for what you have done to us!

Happy shall he be who takes your little ones, and dashes them against the rock!  (Ps 137:8-9).

It’s a terribly shocking verse, and it makes me cringe when I read it and hear it in church, but I think it’s necessary that we hear it.

If we’re honest, the psalm is speaking truth about our human condition.  It is not calling for the death of infants, but it is clear-eyed about how humans can fall into thinking and doing such things.   As an expression of revenge, the psalm allows us to understand what has happened between Israelis and Palestinians for the last two years and beyond, and it speaks to any conflict in human history where people have thirsted for revenge.  The psalm states that ruin and desolation don’t just happen to cities.  Ruin and desolation can happen within the human heart.

There’s a famous line from the late director David Lynch who said that we must fix our hearts or die.  Who can we turn to fix our hearts?   I would finish simply by pointing to our gospel reading, and the disciples’ very natural cry to Jesus to increase their faith.  Don’t we want the same?  Don’t we want to believe more strongly and to feel that our faith is robust enough to get us through the challenges that we face in a sometimes awful world?

Jesus’ answer, about having faith the size of a mustard seed, can be a little misleading.   I don’t think Jesus is talking about what we can do with our faith, but rather, who we put our faith in.   I say this because in the words that follow, Jesus seems to link faith with the idea of following and obeying Jesus.  

We may find the gospel’s imagery of being slaves difficult to take, but if we can set that distaste aside long enough, we can remind ourselves that our job as disciples is to hear what Jesus tells us to do and to do it as best we can.    That’s obedience, and we serve Jesu, not because he’s a slaveholder, but  because we choose to.  We know that he loves us enough to serve us and die for us.  As Jesus tells the disciples at the Last Supper,  “For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one at the table? But I am among you as one who serves” (Lk 22:27).

So yes, we are called to lament.  If lament means that we see the evil around us, that we care and grieve and act as best we can, then we are being obedient disciples.   And as obedient disciples, even if our faith is as small as a tiny seed, we give it to the Prince of Peace and Lord of Lords, trusting that he can cure those things which are lamentable.  And we remember in the final book of the bible, in Revelation, we have a vision, not of a ruined city, but of a beautifully constructed city, the New Jerusalem.     And maybe, at the end of the day, faith is opening ourselves so that God can build God’s city on the ruin and devastation that lie within our hearts.