Mass readings for the 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time:
Exodus 17.8-13 Psalm 121.1-8 2 Timothy 3.14-4.2 Luke 18.1-8
Today we have two illustrations of the place and power of prayer; but I daresay, also the problem of prayer; and the issue of prayer at both the level of the individual and of the community.
We see in our first reading Moses, by prayer, supporting the efforts of his people to stave off destruction at the hands of desert marauders. In Jesus’ parable we hear him teaching with great sympathy about the challenges of prayer in discouraging times. In both instances the message is that we shouldn’t look upon prayer as easy, or as simply transactional. Prayer isn’t the saying of words with head bowed or raised to heaven; and it’s not a matter of we pray and God acts; prayer is a matter of relationship with the divine, a demonstration of our faith and trust in the Lord; it’s not a request line to heaven. Nor is it about our sincerity. People who pray, or try to pray, aren’t being disingenuous. I think people who participate in liturgy, even with poor understanding of what is going on, do so with a good measure of authenticity – and that often accounts for discomfort or confusion at mass as they can’t figure out if what they’re doing they are doing correctly, or if they think they’re doing it basically right, why it feels awkward.
To think about prayer in these ways is to set ourselves up for constant disappointment. And I hear this complaint, and to be clear, I hear it with sympathy: I prayed to God and he didn’t answer; I am suffering, I am in the depths of despair, and I cry out, and there is nothing. The conclusions that people draw from these experiences are disturbing to me: that there is simply no God, yet even worse, there is a God but he doesn’t care about me; and most distressing, I hear some people coming to believe that God is actively punishing them by his apparent withdrawal from their lives.
Now, I wish I had an hour or more to get into this. There are dimensions to this, such as the problem of human suffering, that will need to be unpacked. And really, the homily is not the time and place for a theology lecture, a deep dive into what our tradition knows as theodicy – the problem of evil and the goodness of God.
What I can focus on, as someone who is going to assume that I’m addressing believers, people of faith, is the difficulty of prayer – that real prayer is hard, it demands something of us that I believe a good many of us are not always prepared to give. And I accuse myself of this. I’m not always willing to rely on God, and put the whole of my faith in Him; I get in the way of that and fail to make the effort to shove myself aside.
I have had occasion to say this from the ambo, or when speaking on the matter of prayer to a group engaged in study, whether elementary school students or adult learners, if you come to mass and worship, pray and offer praise, you should at end of it feel that you’ve worked, expended energy, made an effort. This is not a time for passivity. We together are trying to reach God, or more accurately, let ourselves receive God who surely has come down to reach us. And that is such a profound act of surrender that it is not so casually done.
I must confess, that for me the motivation that gets me to do the work of prayer, that really gets me to where I can let go and allow God in, to speak and guide me, it’s in times of crisis, of distress, of confusion, when I don’t know what to do, or when I do know, but I am terrified of doing it! Suffice to say, my prayer is best when I recognize my need of God. It’s at its worst when everything is great, and life is easy.
What we hear from Exodus today in the first reading comes from the point in the story where the Hebrew slaves have successfully escaped Egypt, crossed the Reed Sea, but now some time has passed. While still recent, the memory of deliverance from Pharoah’s chariots faded fast as the pressing problems of food and water have led to dissension and complaining. They’ve only lately found water – we have the famous story of Moses striking the rock with his staff and water miraculously springing forth. Yet that miracle is remembered in tradition with bitterness for it did not come of faith but of quarreling and complaint with Moses rebuking the people for their lack of faith just as he then produced abundant water for them.
Moses is getting tired, he’s being worn out by the people – how shall we put it? He’s at the end of his rope. And then, we have the assault of the Amalekites.
The Amalekites were a nomadic people of the Sinai Peninsula in ancient times, the area through which Israel must pass to get to the Promised Land. We shouldn’t really think of them as a nation, but more a loose alliance of desert tribes who occasionally cooperated for common gain. And they’ve come together to attack the poor, bedraggled Israelites. They’ve no sympathy for them, no compassion for these former slaves, they don’t find in their story, what they may know of it, inspiration for their own lives of desperate struggle to survive in the wastelands. They are opportunists who have been launching scattered attacks at God’s people, picking off stragglers, raiding the camp at night and carrying off food, treasure, and yes, women and children, killing the men as the opportunity presented itself. And all this as the great mass of the nation of Israel moves slowly through the desert in what must have felt to the Israelites like a death march. And so, Moses rightly directs Joshua and the other military leaders – this cannot continue, we must draw these Amalekites into a proper battle, have them show themselves in all their strength, as frightening as that might prove to be, and Israel must form up her army, and then have it out in an open battle.
And as we see in the story, it’s only insofar as Moses can pray on behalf of the Israelites they succeed, as his prayer falters, so too does the army. But happily, with the support of Aaron and Hur, Moses renews his prayer, they hold up his arms, they lean him up against a rock, and I would think, his body in that stance of prayer familiar to us (the pose of the priest standing with arms open offering the sacrifice of the Mass) and Israel emerges victorious, albeit at some cost in lives.
It is difficult for the Church to imagine herself apart from the western civilization to which she gave birth, but this child appears to be a changeling, or perhaps we can see that recurring divide between Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau. I suppose we should really regard our current cultural situation as being like the journey of Exodus – what we find around us is no longer that rich and resplendent Christian culture but the desert of secularism whose culture honestly assessed is not just degenerate, but even where it was once a temptation, it is now just ugly. Through this we move as a people. And all through this journey, we are attacked, and some of us are picked off, others carried off into captivity, to become slaves of peoples, communities who have no greater goal than to exist and to attack those of us who live in the hope of achieving something better, of making a true civilization. These marauders are all around us today: and their weapons are media, educational institutions, the levers of power that are government and business. They capture these and turn their power against us, corrupting minds and hearts, punishing those who resist, but also rewarding those who acquiesce and even join them in the work of destruction, a destruction that will ultimately claim them too.
The Church then has an important part to play. We have the place of Moses because we also stand spiritually in a place where we can survey the battlefield, we have the perspective that shows so clearly what danger we are in as a people, and so we must pray, and continue to do in the desperate hours, until we see the army of virtue and of God’s right win; and we know that is more than a single battle but a war whose conclusion we may not see in this life, but a victory we will nonetheless be a part of in the absolute end.
And our fights might be matter of individual combat, such as Jesus describes in his parable of the unjust judge. That’s a fight done in anonymity, not something many will take notice of, but it is part of the same great spiritual war. So, don’t give up. I’ll tell you as someone forced to his knees on a number of occasions – yes, forced into that posture of humility by the weight of the world that I tried hold up and resist in my stubborn pride – it will be then that the battle will turn, when we come to recognize that the power to save is not in our possession, but that it’s nonetheless always available to us, the power of God. Our help is from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.
Amen.