Pray always and don't lose heart

Sermon by Carrie Eikler
Luke 18:1-8
October 17, 2010

I don’t know much about stem cells.

There are probably a good number of you in here that know more than I do about stem cells.

After all, I am a practical theologian, not a scientist.
So when the flyers came in the mail when I was pregnant with Sebastian saying that once he was born, we could preserve the blood from his umbilical cord

--preserve the stem cells--I knew there had to be some catch.

Another way for us to drop thousands of dollars on the baby industry.

“Fearing” us into buying something that may, someday, be needed.

They said it could help him in the future if he developed a condition that stem cells could somehow treat.

*Really, I don’t know how it works. They just said it.

Torin and I thought, we’d take our chances and pray our child would forgive us if that unfortunate event ever did occur, and we had not stored his umbilical cord blood for a mere $100 a month fee.

And when the company providing this service followed up the flyers with a phone call, I was ready to give them a polite no thank you please don’t call again.
But I got more information from them as they talked.

They told me that if the child had an immediate relative with a disease that stem cells could possibly be used in treating,

that there was a charitable arm of the company that would store the cells at no cost for that relative.

No $100 a month handling fee. No charges. They would just do it.

*My mom had been recently diagnosed with leukemia.

Stem cells have been known to be effective in treating leukemia.

If things got really bad with her disease, Sebastian’s umbilical cord stem cells could be a potential option in his grandmother’s treatment.

So somewhere, in some freezer, there is a vile of blood that may, be used to help treat her disease.

Like a gift from grandson to grandmother.

Like a vile of prayers. Frozen. Ready to be thawed if… need be.

Hoping it will never need to be.

*Unlike most salespeople, I’m glad they kept knocking.

This is another thing I know about stem cells.

We all have them all over our body.

Most of us hear the loaded term “embryonic stem cells” when
the politicians start debating over the use of these cells in research, but really they’re everywhere in our body. And stem cells do two things: the regenerate and they differentiate,

meaning, they make more of themselves, and they become lots of different things.

*And these stem cells do amazing things.

Scientists have even taken a heart from the cadaver of a rat, wash out the dead cells, inject it with stem cells, and after great lengths, it started beating.
They brought a heart back to life.

*I know it can sound a bit like Frankenstein, just in time for the Halloween season, right?

But when Jesus talks about this widow as an example of always praying and never losing heart,

I know he is not talking about a real one, a real heart.

I know another translation for “never lose heart” is also “never give up” “keep being persistent.”

Pray always. Don’t lose heart.

*I don’t know why I can’t get stem cells out of my mind as I think about this scripture.

I even asked Torin, “Do you see any relationship between the widow and the judge and heart stem cells?”

*You can image the look he gave me.

*Because really, what we’re talking about here is prayer.
About constantly going to God in prayer,

banging on the door, demanding justice,
coming with viles of prayer ready to thaw and lay them on the door step.

Willing them to live. To beat. To cure and heal.

It’s no surprise that how we understand prayer reflects a lot about how we understand God.

Theologian Marjorie Suchocki reflects on some major ways we think of God by how we think of prayer.

I wonder if any of these sound familiar to you?

Sometimes we imagine God as the great genie in Aladdin’s bottle,
with prayer being the magic rubbing that draws the genie forth to do our bidding.

Or at times we approach God as our divine secretary,
ready to give God our memo for the day, which are our requests and prayers.

In seeing God as genie and God as secretary, we believe that God has the power to do the requests,
but the control rests in the one doing the asking.
We have the control.

Then there is God as the divine egoist.
This is when we think about prayer in terms of “God likes to be asked”
God could do all we want, if we stroke God’s ego enough.

Or similarly, we treat God like a king holding audience, who might grant a petitioner a boon.
This king knows what the petitioner wants, but is just waiting to act until properly asked.

Of course, these are extremes—caricatures.

But who among us has not wondered how prayer works? If it works? How God works with prayers? We often see ourselves in the scripture as the widow banging on God’s door demanding justice,
or healing, or fortunate blessings.

But God is not being likened to this judge in the scripture

but rather reflected on as the opposite of the judge.

If this man who neglects his duty as judge,
to care for widows and orphans, to listen and deal wisely…

if even this man answers, even after a long while, then don’t you think God will answer your prayers, and more quickly?

Well, don’t you?

I think we want to say “yes.”

I think we might move a notch up the honesty scale if we sigh “I hope so.”

And we will join the majority of the faithful if we collapse in the doorway
with our knuckles bruised from knocking so much, crying out “I just don’t know.”

*I like what George Hermanson shares about this scripture in a sermon of his:
He says “I can't answer for Jesus, but it has been true in my own limited experience of prayer that justice does not come quickly.
It has also been true that I am not very good at always praying and never giving up.
And it is also true that occasionally the process of praying has changed me,
changed what I have been praying for as I have seen how my prayers
were as self-centred as the unjust judge…”
He says, “The moral of the story is NOT about the judge finally responding.
The moral is about the widow's persistence for justice during the long period of the judge not responding and giving no indication that he ever would.”
(http://www.holytextures.com/2010/10/luke-18-1-8-year-c-pentecost-october-16-october-22-proper-24-ordinary-time-29-sermon.html)

*I started this week off by witnessing the death of our brother, Doug Porter.
Doug had a heart attack, and after his family had all arrived, they took him off the ventilator sustaining his life.
He went quickly, surrounded by love.

His heart was tired. It needed to rest.

His wife Lou and his family prayed that Doug would gain strength and remain with them.

It sounds like something we would all pray, doesn’t it?

But the prayer didn’t stop there.

They also prayed that if it Doug couldn’t stay in this life,
they asked God to strengthen them and their hearts to continue on without him.

*And I guess here is that strange connection for me, how prayers like this, hearken me back to stem cells.

Prayers regenerate and differentiate,
they make more of themselves
and they become many different things.

Similarly, Hermanson reflects on two aspects of prayer
• First, “Prayer is a relationship with God, and with a community of prayer,
which sustains us through the dark times of justice not being granted.”

Prayer regenerates, it makes more of itself
by holding our lives in the movement of God,
a movement that beckons us to meet God in prayer.

• And secondly he says, “Prayer is a relationship with God, and with a community of prayer,
which guides and corrects the content of our prayers to closer alignment with God's desire for justice, with love for our neighbours, and with love for our enemies”

Prayer differentiates, it becomes many different things
by weaving us into the tapestry of this world.

*In this way prayer doesn’t deny the desires of our hearts
but rather opens us up to the larger sweep of God’s justice.

Urging us to keep praying, allowing it to change us,
And our relationship to the injustice and pain of the world.

*But I have to say, what clenched this seemingly bizarre connection with prayer and stem cells

was when I walked through this week of mine,

witnessing death, illness, buckwheat batter, meals for the homeless…

and then I heard an interview with Dr. Doris Taylor, a pioneer in the study of stem cells and regeneration

who also works with the connection of spirituality and the healing of the body.

And as I listened, I had to wonder,

“am I hearing her talk about her work with stem cells,
or am I hearing her whisper to me something about prayer?”

Here are her words,
“… the most profound moment for me was…the first time I saw heart cells beating in a dish, just in a dish. [And I realized] we're able to put together these tools that nature's created

and they [know], in ways we'll never understand… how to become greater than the sum of the parts.

“We still haven't created a cell.” Taylor confesses.

“ I've said for 20 years that if we really wanted to understand a cell, we should just take a big white wall, draw a circle on it, and everyone who walks by should write down what they know.

And at some point maybe we'd get to the point that we understand even what a cell is.

We don't really know how it works.

“And the beautiful, beautiful, beautiful part is we don't have to.

*“We could spend the next 20, 30, 40 years trying to understand how this works,
or we can watch it work and understand it well enough…[and] maybe actually change somebody's life.

And that's what we really want to do.”

*Here is where Dr. Taylor laughs: “…[t]here's actually this great road sign from New Zealand, I believe, that somebody sent me from the Internet.
And it's a road sign, and you're coming into a town and it says: "Drive carefully.

We have two cemeteries and no hospital."

"And that's really how we have to approach this field. Drive carefully..
And yet we've got to keep driving because it matters. It matters.” (www.onbeing.org)

Keep driving…keep praying…never lose heart. Because it matters. It matters.