First Friends Meeting
Luke 18:1-8
‘Shameless Women’
Doug Gwyn

Mother’s Day is one of the special days of the whole year. That’s not just my opinion. It’s confirmed by our most trusted register of reality – retail sales. Apparently, sales of cards, flowers, candy, gifts, meals out, etc. total in the billions, making Mother’s Day one of the major commercial boosts of the year. So by being generous to Mom, we’re helping the economy. Mother’s Day works for everybody that way.

But seriously, we do owe our mothers a great debt of gratitude. The unconditional love, encouragement, spiritual nurture and moral teaching we receive from our mothers sustains us not only through our formative years. It can create a reservoir of inner peace and self-esteem to last a lifetime. Most of all, mothers (and fathers) offer our first experience of God’s unconditional love and mercy to us. We are created in God’s image. Our parents are the first to see it in us. The love we receive from them helps us begin to recognize ‘that of God’ in ourselves. And finding that of God in ourselves, we learn to recognize and honor God’s image in one another.

But ‘that of God in everyone’ is not only unconditional love and human dignity. It’s also empowerment to do God’s work in the world. When I was growing up, when my brother and I left the house for school, our mother would call out to us as we walked down the driveway, “Work hard!” We’ve laughed about that as we remembered that in retrospect. It might sound like a rather grim command. But that exhortation was undergirded by so much unconditional love that we enjoyed in our family. It wasn’t work hard to deserve love. It was you are loved, so get out there are do something good with all that well-being.

Unfortunately, mothers traditionally were relegated to the private world of hearth and home, while fathers went out there and grappled with the unjust and unsavory world of the marketplace. So, many have grown up hearing two versions of reality. Mothers emphasized moral purity, good hygiene and Church life. Meanwhile, fathers often stood somewhat apart, and emphasized coping with the rough-and-tumble world. Children were left to decide, which world is the ‘real’ world? In many cases, sons followed their fathers path into the rough-and-tumble world, but put their mothers up on a pedestal. A saint to be venerated, but not necessarily emulated. This week, I was thinking of that old country & western classic by Merle Haggard, ‘Mama Tried’. One line goes, “She tried to raise me right, but I refused.” Now he’s “turning 21 serving life without parole.” He can only conclude, “there’s only me to blame, ‘cause Mama tried.” The song was a hit because it told a common truth in our culture. Mothers try, but sometimes end up feeling like martyrs in a lost cause for decency and spirituality. It gives rise to that joke, how many mothers does it take to screw in light-bulb? No, it’s alright, I’ll just sit here in the dark.

More recently, the women’s movement has advanced women’s entry into the marketplace and fuller participation in society. As with all social change, there’s real progress here, mixed with new challenges. Women now get to grapple in new ways with the rough-and-tumble of the workplace, while still trying to nurture their children. Men are challenged to balance themselves better, to become better nurturers of their children, models of spiritual maturity and religious life.

Of course, Jesus lived and taught in a traditional culture. Traditional roles were unquestioned and women’s place was circumscribed. Yet Jesus clearly related to women with an openness and inclusiveness. It made women bold to say and do things they wouldn’t normally have dared. Luke in particular notes the number of women who gathered around Jesus and followed him in his ministry from Galilee to Jerusalem. And his encounters with women outside Galilee and Judea are even more provocative.

Mark tells us (Mark 7:24ff) one remarkable story. When Jesus was exhausted from the crowds in Galilee, he withdrew to the north, to the region of Tyre, where no one would know him. But a woman there asked him to heal her daughter. In his fatigue, Jesus snapped at her, saying that he had come to feed the children of Israel, not the dogs. She might have slinked away, utterly humiliated. But this mother saw an opportunity for her daughter to be healed and have a better life. She shamelessly answered back, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Jesus was moved by her reply – perhaps even ashamed of his initial remark. He responded, “For saying that, you may go – the demon has left your daughter.” Her shameless hope in Jesus, and faithfulness to her daughter, released the healing power of God.

Perhaps conversations like that were behind the parable that Anne has read for us. It begins with a certain judge who neither fears God nor respects people. It’s a shame, but he’s a judge, a powerful man in the city. He can face down people’s disgust at his shamelessness. But in this story, his shamelessness is trumped by the greater shamelessness of a poor widow. In a traditional patriarchal culture, a widow was especially vulnerable, if no male relative was present or willing to see to her needs. Jesus doesn’t elaborate on her case, or her legal opponent. But she kept coming at this judge, saying, “Grant me justice against my opponent.” Now these confrontations would not have been private. They would have been in front of people. But he kept refusing, kept brushing her off. Think how shaming, how humiliating it was for her to be treated that way in front of people. But she kept coming back and coming back, until the judge finally decided, “I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming [here].” Jesus draws this conclusion – if an unjust and uncaring judge finally gives in to this stubborn, shameless widow, then certainly God, who is just and compassionate, will respond to our persistent prayers.

But, he adds, do we find that kind of faith on earth? Do we pray like that shameless widow? Or do we change our theology and decide that God doesn’t care, or cares about bigger things and more important people? Do we adopt a sense of shame that we are undeserving, unworthy? Do we begin to adopt that response, “No, it’s alright, I’ll just sit here in the dark..” What makes that punchline so good is that, behind the feigned humility, there’s a little barb. We’re invited to feel ashamed of ourselves for not changing that lightbulb for Mom. Shame easily spreads through families, whole communities. It’s often dressed up ilike humility and spiritual maturity. But according to Jesus, shame is really the opposite of faith. Shame denies God’s unconditional love and purpose in our lives. Look at Jesus. It was his passionate love for all kinds of people, and his faith in God, not shame, that led him to the cross. As Hebrews (12:2) testifies, we look to “Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.”

As I thought about this passage this week, I wondered, where do we see that shameless widow’s faith in our world? Perhaps the most spectacular parallel to this parable in my lifetime took place in the 1980s in Argentina. For many years, an unjust and oppressive regime in Argentina had silenced its critics by arresting them and making them ‘disappear’. “Los Desaparicidos,” they were called. Tens of thousands of men and women who had been ‘disappeared’ by the government. Arrested, tortured, killed, dumped in remote places. Finally, in the early 1980s, the widows and mothers of these disappeared students, lawyers, and many ordinary people began to act. They met every day in a public square, in front of the offices of Argentina’s central government, demanding answers about their husbands, sons, and daughters, and demanding justice.

At first just a few, then hundreds, then thousands of these women gathered, for what turned in to weeks, months, and years. They were not ashamed to bare their tears, their grief and their outrage in public, and before a government that neither feared God nor respected people. For a long time it seemed utterly useless. The government could face them down. But slowly, it tapped the grief and outrage of the entire nation. And they caught the attention of other nations, who began to pressure the government to change. Once that national shame was out in the open, it wouldn’t go away. Finally, the Falklands war against Britain brought the government down. But it wouldn’t have, if those thousands of shameless widows and mothers hadn’t started something – out of their powerlessness and their stubborn grief.

It’s one of those tales from what’s sometimes called “the underside of history.” It’s the underside in three senses. It’s women’s history, not the kind of history usually made or written by men. It’s also the history of nonviolent struggle, which gets a lot more done and often brings more fundamental change than wars. Finally, it’s the history of faith, of millions of women and men, who have not been ashamed to trust in God, or to confess Jesus, or to take up their cross and follow him.

In our culture, we often gather to honor famous men. But let us gather today to honor mothers, daughters, sisters, wives and friends – famous or not. Women who have not been ashamed of their faith, who have not been ashamed to love us.