July 27, 2025
Hosea 1:2-10
Luke 11:1-13
Is persistence a virtue?
Sometimes it seems like the virtue that remains when all other virtues have been suppressed. When people face active resistance in their quest to do what is good, and right, and true, persistence in trying to do well may be all you can do. It’s the noble but doomed attempt to scatter the clouds of evil when those clouds are just beyond our reach.
On the other hand, persistence can be a real problem. “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again,” goes the old maxim. Which is fine in some cases, but what if you’re trying to do something you shouldn’t? What if you’re trying to go through red lights? What if you’re trying to steal? What if you’re trying to walk on water?
Jesus managed that last one and so, briefly, did Simon Peter, but if I were to “try, try again” the most likely thing I’d achieve is two lungs full of water. Which I’d rather not achieve.
I’m often in favor of a revised version of the old proverb: “If at first you don’t succeed, try something different.” Experimentation means that failure teaches you something and opens up other possibilities, rather than putting you in a dreary cycle of repeated failure.
Which is fine if you’re trying to do something new, but doesn’t work if you’re trying to maintain your priorities, ethics, values, and commitment to God. Yes, all of those change and grow, but there sometimes comes a point where we go back to that virtue of persistence. Say what you want, people of power. I will do what is right.
In mid-19th century America, it was persistence of that kind that rescued enslaved people from the plantations. In 16th century Europe, it was persistence of that kind that sustained the Protestant movements and offered new possibilities for faithful living. In first century Jerusalem, it was that kind of persistence on God’s part that refused to accept the rejection of Jesus’ crucifixion and transformed it into God’s open door of Jesus’ resurrection.
I’m quite grateful for that kind of persistence.
Jesus raised persistence in the context of prayer. One of his followers asked him to teach them to pray. As D. Mark Davis writes at LeftBehindAndLovingIt, “This request – and the practice of John the Baptizer that he references in the request – presupposes that there is an actual, teachable skill to praying, as well as a disposition that is appropriate to the person pray-er and a disposition that the pray-er ought to suppose about God.” Jesus responded with an outline for prayer that we have generally memorized and pray as the “Lord’s Prayer.” We tend to use the version from Matthew’s Gospel, which is somewhat longer. Both follow the similar outline of praising God’s goodness first, then asking for God’s realm to be established on earth. We ask then for the basic necessities of bread and of God’s forgiveness before closing with the request that we be protected from at least some of the world’s suffering.
If you pray the Lord’s Prayer and extend it with the particulars of your situation, I think you’ll be doing what Jesus taught his followers to do.
But there’s a potential problem. As Debie Thomas writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “Read the wrong way, the lection renders prayer transactional, inviting us to believe that God is a cosmic gumball machine into which we can insert our prayers like so many shiny quarters.” Worse, it makes it sound like God has to be cajoled and badgered into responding to our prayers. If you read the sleeping neighbor as representing God in Jesus’ story, and read the persistence of his needy friend as representing our appropriate approach to prayer, well. It makes God sound both unresponsive and uncaring.
This is a God one worships because one is establishing credit with the Divine. “Look, I’ve worshiped you for years,” I can say. “Now I’ve got trouble, and it’s your turn to deliver.”
Here’s my shiny quarter. Cough up the gumball, God.
But Jesus didn’t say that.
Often when Jesus began a parable, he’d use a phrase like, “To what should I compare the kingdom of God?” That was an invitation to consider the actions of the characters in the parable, and see whether one of them might be more… God-like… than the others. But Jesus didn’t begin this story that way. He just launched into it. When it was done, he went on to point out that people know how to do better than the characters in the story. Rather than having to be irritated into responding, parents know how to give their children things that are good for them rather than harmful.
If people can do that, so can God. In fact, God can do it better. Better than kind and loving parents. Much better than sleepy grumpy neighbors.
God doesn’t need to be prodded into response, said Jesus. God is right there even as we pray.
Brian Peterson writes at Working Preacher, “It will not do to think that prayer works either because we continue to hound God about something or because we are so shameless in our asking. We are not the key that makes prayer ‘work.’ If we keep asking, seeking, and knocking, it is only because God has done so first, and continues to do so. We need to hear this parable in concert with verses 9-13, which make clear that God is good, and that God is eager to give not simply the good things that we might ask for.”
Eager indeed. But why, then, did Jesus raise persistence? And repeat it with a similar story later about a widow and an unjust judge?
Elisabeth Johnson writes at Working Preacher, “God is all-powerful, yet God is not the only power in the world. There are other powers at work, the powers of Satan and his demons, the powers of evil and death, often manifested in human sin. Although God has won the ultimate victory over these powers through the death and resurrection of Jesus, the battle still rages on. Consequently, God’s will can be — and often is — thwarted.
“Why bother to pray, then, if God’s will can be thwarted? Again we affirm what Scripture tells us, and particularly what Jesus tells us in this passage: that we are invited into relationship with a loving God who wants to give us life, and who continues to work tirelessly for our redemption and that of all creation.”
You know, it would be simpler to deal with a gumball machine God, one who responds predictably to a shiny prayer with something sweet. A predictable God; a predictable world. If we know anything about God, though, it’s that predictability isn’t one of God’s primary attributes. After all, we believe we’re made in the image of God. Are you predictable? Are the members of your ‘ohana? Your friends?
I mean, I’m fairly predictable here in a pulpit on Sunday, but that’s the nature of the role, not the person. I surprise myself from time to time.
If I can surprise you, then God can surprise you and even more so.
Debie Thomas observes that the only promise Jesus made in this Scripture was that God’s Holy Spirit would be, will be, is given to those who ask. “So here’s the question for us,” she writes. “Do we consider the ‘yes’ of God’s Spirit a sufficient response to our prayers? If God’s guaranteed answer to our petitions is God’s own self, can we live with that?
“I’ll be honest: sometimes I can, and sometimes I can’t. It’s not easy to let go of my transactional, gumball God — idol though he is… I want God to sweep in and fix everything much more than I want God’s Spirit to fill and accompany me so that I can do my part to heal the world. Resting in God’s yes requires vulnerability, patience, courage, discipline and trust — traits I can only cultivate in prayer.”
That’s why persistence with God is so important. It’s not about God’s response to us – that’s coming to us. God loves us. God cares for us. God wants the best for us before we ever say a word in prayer.
We, however, have to make an effort to open ourselves up, to look and recognize the Holy Spirit’s presence, to accept the strength, reassurance, and grace that the Holy Spirit brings. God is not a magic talisman to be invoked and suddenly the world is changed. God is someone to be embraced and suddenly our soul is changed.
Some time ago, Momi Lyman gave me a magic wand for Christmas. It sits on my desk waiting for me to use it. Unfortunately, I still haven’t found the instruction manual, and the world goes on as it will.
I have, however, listened to Jesus’ teaching about how to pray. Prayer isn’t magic. It doesn’t change the world to my liking. It took some practice to become not proficient, but persistent, in prayer.
And I’ve been changed.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric departs from the prepared text from time to time. Sometimes he means to.
The image is An etching by Jan Luyken illustrating Luke 11:5-8 in the Bowyer Bible, Bolton, England (1795). Bowyer Bible photos contributed to Wikimedia Commons by Phillip Medhurst – Photo by Harry Kossuth, FAL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7550704.
