The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 24C)
Genesis 32:22-31
Luke 18:1-8
Episcopal Student Center, Austin, Tex.

In this summer’s movie Three Thousand Years of Longing, Tilda Swinton plays a quiet, confident scholar of mythology named Alithea who finds herself in a situation she knows everything about and never believed she would have to deal with. On a trip to Turkey, she buys a strange, pretty bottle in the marketplace, and takes it back to her hotel room only to learn that it holds a djinn, played by Idris Elba, who has been trapped there for decades. Where there is a djinn and a bottle, there are of course three wishes, and after Alithea accepts that she is not having a mental breakdown, she resolves to make the whole situation go away as tidily as possible. “What does one do with three wishes?” Alithea asks. She is, of course, too smart for this. She has heard this story before and studied it from every angle, and she knows that stories like this are cautionary tales: “Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.” People in stories like this (she patiently explains) always end up wishing for selfish things that hurt others, or for the right thing for the wrong reason or in the wrong way and someone has to deal with the unintended consequences of the wishing. Even in the best case scenario, the hero’s wishing leaves them with new longings that can’t be satisfied, not least because the wishes are gone. Alithea knows she may not have everything she wants, but she certainly has everything she needs. She has a modest, successful career, a comfortable life, and a reasonable understanding of who she is. Why not be satisfied with good enough? Still, there is the djinn and there are the wishes and rules are rules, so she plays along and tries to fritter them away by wishing for more of the delicious breakfast that is already in front of her. Here the djinn insists that this will not do, for he can only grant wishes if they are the heart’s desire. And as they talk it begins to become clear that it has been a long time since Alithea considered her own truest desires, if she ever did at all. As the djinn tells his side of the story about how he came to be trapped in the bottle in the first place, Alithea begins to understand just what it looks like to wish for her heart’s desire, which goes much deeper than wishing for simple conveniences or cheap delights. 

Today Jesus shares a story about a woman who has no problem making her wishes known. She has been wronged and brings the matter before someone who can help her, and she will not leave him alone until he does. She badgers him until he finally gives in, not because he cares but because he wants to get on with his day. Jesus reminds us to put our faith in the fact that if justice comes about for absurd, small, human reasons like this, surely God will grant us what we ask simply for the sake of love. The meaning of the parable is not difficult, and Luke helpfully gives us a clue before Jesus opens his mouth: pray continually and don’t be discouraged. Okay, fine. And yet: easier said than done. 

I often hear the question, “Does it do any good to pray? Isn’t that a sort of old-fashioned idea? Just a kind of wishing dressed up for Jesus?” These are perfectly good questions. I ask them myself from time to time. Does Jesus really expect us to believe that, if only we can be annoying enough, God stands ready, willing, and eager to act? Do I really expect you to believe that making wishes in the name of Jesus will fix your problems or anyone else’s? In fairness this is probably the way most of us were taught to pray as children. “God bless my family and let me get a good grade on my test tomorrow.” As children these sorts of things probably did pass for our hearts’ desire as best we were able to discern it. As we grow older and as our faith matures we will find that these sorts of surface level problems are not what is really holding us and the world back from everything God longs to give us. Prayer invites us to consider bigger and deeper matters like our natural sense of injustice, which motivates the widow to act. 

When we look around it does not seem like God is in any particular hurry to establish justice or any of the other virtues that go with it, whether for his chosen people or for anyone else. The rich are getting richer, so the poor are getting poorer–and some of us know that our studies here will determine which side of that equation we end up on. We’re more anxious, overworked, and prone to despair than ever. War rages in far-flung places and rumors of war rage in our neighborhoods and in our hearts. The widow’s problem is our own, in every place and in every generation: we are faced with real, existential, world-defining problems that are bigger than we are. “Give us justice!” we cry. “Save us!” Now we might be getting somewhere. Prayer, it seems, is more than sending off wishes heavenward, although to be sure God is able to answer those prayers and sometimes they do. But if we are asking ourselves if prayer is worth it at all, we would probably do well to get down underneath those wishes to see what’s really going on so we can let God see what’s going on. 

More than anything, prayer is an invitation to let ourselves and our hearts’ desires be known to God and to let God reveal something of themselves to us in return. All those years ago on the bank of the river, Jacob spent a night alone in “great fear and distress,” terrified that his estranged brother Esau was on his way to kill him. When we find him today he has sent his family and everything he owns away so that they might survive. He is left with only himself. Just as he feared, a stranger shows up in the dead of night. It could be Esau but Jacob doesn’t know and there isn’t time to figure it out and suddenly Jacob is fighting for his life. Neither can completely subdue the other, and so they grapple and sweat and strain with one another, a tangle of limbs and wills as the night drags on. But somewhere in the midst of this, Jacob notices something feels familiar about this man. He remembers the last time he was alone in the wilderness, four chapters ago, with a vision of angels going to and from heaven on a ladder and a promise of protection from God. And it is here, tonight, in this moment of great vulnerability that God shows up to make good on the promise and in his anxiety Jacob has attacked the source of his blessing. It is when Jacob is no longer able to struggle, no longer able to keep his guard up, no longer able to shield his shame, that he finally clings to and receives what God has promised: I will not let you go. The story puts these words in Jacob’s mouth, but if we look closer we can see that it was God’s idea first. I will not let you go. As Jacob and God encounter one another, intimately entangled, their relationship takes on a new dimension. Jacob comes away with a new understanding of himself, but more importantly he comes to a better understanding of God than if he had kept God at arms length, kept thinking about God as someone somewhere out there who may or may not be listening. We do not serve a God who is far away, who is unwilling to get involved in human affairs. We serve a God who has chosen to dive straight to the heart of the matter, a God who longs to know us and our heart’s desires, a God who is always inviting us further up and further into the mystery of love, if only we will allow ourselves to journey there.

Back in the hotel room with Alithea and her djinn, Alithea learns that her heart’s desire has to do with true love. It’s a fairy tale; of course it has to do with true love. What she wants more than anything is to be loved, fully and truly, and to find within herself the courage and expansiveness to love someone else in return. So it is with us. We want to be loved. We naturally move toward whatever it is that promises us we will be seen and known and celebrated, and many have noted that this fundamentally human longing can never be fully sated on our own. Some 300 years after Jesus, Saint Augustine famously wrote, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” There is something in us that naturally makes us gravitate toward God, the source of love and the source of our hearts’ desire. We can try to soothe or numb ourselves with any number of things: money, success, pleasure, the approval of other people, our own pride in our accomplishments. But prayer–real, deep, honest, vulnerable engagement with God, in thought, word, and deed–this kind of prayer is the only thing that can bring us to our true home in the presence of the one who loved us into being and constantly calls us homeward. When we do, we will find ourselves embraced by the one who desired us first, and we will find that God does come quickly to give us what we ask: more deeply, more fully, more wondrously than we can ask or imagine.