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Sermon for the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost – October 19, 2025
Luke 18:1-8
Dear friends, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
We live in a cultural moment which is filled with doom and gloom. I’m not talking about Halloween displays, though why people “decorate” their yard with all of that ugly, hideous gore this time of year is something I will never understand. What I’m talking about is the angry, fearful, despairing, doom and gloom attitude I see so often in people. I see it in people from all walks of life, and from all points on the political spectrum. There are different concerns driving this doom and gloom, but the spiritual malady underneath it all is the same: It is a lack of hope.
In our gospel reading for today Jesus gives us both practical advice and a powerful promise for cultivating hope amidst the doom and gloom. He teaches us how we can endure in hope when dark days and hard times come.
In the verses leading up to today’s gospel reading, Jesus himself lays some doom and gloom on the disciples. He tells them that there will be dark days ahead. He tells them that days are coming when they will “long to see the days of the Son of Man,” and they will not see it. He says there will be days like the days of Noah, when there was widespread immorality and lawlessness and rejection of God. He says there will be days like the days of Sodom, when Lot and his wife fled the violence-plagued city as fire and sulfur rained down. The disciples were understandably shaken by what Jesus was saying, and so they asked him: “Where, Lord?” And Jesus replied cryptically and ominously: “Where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather.” Talk about doom and gloom!
I imagine the disciples sitting there, pale and sweaty, ready to buy a bunch of canned goods and head for the hills. But then Jesus goes on – and that’s where our reading picks up for today: “Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.”
In this parable there is a judge. In the Hebrew Bible, our Old Testament, there are special mandates for the judges of Israel to give special attention and care to widows. But this judge, Jesus tells us, neither feared God nor had any respect for people. And so, when a widow kept coming to his court, asking for justice, he ignored her. But this widow kept coming back again and again and again. She knew what the scriptures said about how judges are supposed to treat widows. She was persistent. She didn’t give up. She knew what the judge was supposed to do, and she held him to what the scriptures demanded of him. Finally, the judge relented. He said to himself, “Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice so that she will not wear me out by continually coming!”
Some parables Jesus tells are allegorical, with God usually being represented by the powerful figure in the story. Other parables, however, employ a teaching method used by Jewish rabbis to make a point differently by employing contrast, moving from a lesser example to illustrate something greater. An example of this method is found when Jesus taught that just as fallen human parents know how to give good things to their children, how much more will God give good things to those who ask.
This same teaching method is being used with this parable. God is not represented by the unjust judge, as might happen in an allegory. Instead, the unjust judge is there to provide a contrast to the qualities and character of God. Unlike the unjust judge, God cares deeply for widows and others who are vulnerable or needy. Jesus is saying that if even a godless, heartless judge will relent at the persistence of this widow, how much more will a good and loving God respond to you! “Will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry out to him day and night?” Jesus asks, rhetorically. “Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them.”
With this parable, Jesus gives both practical advice and a powerful promise for the inevitable difficult days the disciples will face. He recognizes the doom and gloom that will fall over them, but he doesn’t leave them mired in it. Instead, he tells them this parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. He encourages them by assuring them that God will respond to their prayers, God will hear their cries and respond quickly, God will be there to help.
Like the disciples, we too experience dark days and hard times. Like the disciples, there are times when we long to see the Son of Man, but we have a hard time seeing him. Like Jesus said, there are days when we seem to be surrounded by immorality and lawlessness and violence. It does seem at times as though wickedness and confusion and godlessness are as rampant today as they were in the days of Noah. Dark days and hard times come on a smaller scale too. There are the many personal apocalypses people face that come with a scary diagnosis, or a lost job, or a broken relationship, or the death of a loved one – those times when life gets completely upended and the future is frightening and foreboding.
How do we respond to dark days and hard times? Jesus calls us to “pray always and not lose heart.” But what does this mean? What does it mean to “pray always”? Does it mean we should all become monks or nuns and head off to a remote monastery somewhere where we can cloister ourselves off from the world and literally pray all day long? It sounds tempting, I know! But this isn’t what it means to “pray always.”
Does praying always mean closing our eyes and folding our hands twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week? That’s not a bad prayer posture. It is how I teach our preschoolers to pray. It can help us focus. But we can’t hold that posture all day long, right? So what does it mean to “pray always?”
To pray always is to constantly keep a God-centered perspective on things. To pray always is to constantly entrust ourselves to God even when everything around us seems to be falling apart. To pray always is to constantly take all our concerns to God in prayer, trusting that God will hear us and help us. To pray always isn’t just to fold our hands, it is to open them up to God, ready to receive the future God promises he has in store for us.
The practical advice given to us in this parable is to be persistent in prayer, cultivating hope by immersing ourselves in the reality of God’s promises, day by day, minute by minute. But there aren’t just instructions for us to heed here. There is also a promise. Jesus promises us that God is not an unjust judge, unwilling to give us a hearing. Instead, God is standing by, even now, to hear our plea, to listen to our cry, and to respond. While worldly justice is a perpetual struggle, God quickly grants justice to his chosen ones. God justifies us by his grace. God makes things right with us by giving us his mercy, his love, and the promise of his coming kingdom. And so our posture towards the future cannot be one of doom and gloom. We have a God who hears us, and a promise that gives us hope.
And so, my dear friends in Christ, pray always! In a time when prayer is sometimes dismissed or ridiculed as a response to horrible events, Jesus lifts up prayer as the most important thing you can do! To pray always is to call upon the God who has promised so hear us, and the means by which we hang on to hope.
So pray always and do not lose heart. Remember that God is in control, that God will always be there to hear and to help us. There might be dark days, but God’s kingdom will come. In fact, in the death and resurrection of Jesus, the glorious kingdom of God has already begun. Sin, death, and the devil, though they seem to rule the day, have already ultimately been conquered by Christ Jesus.
And so as we look to the future, we pray, trusting that God will come to make things right once and for all, to complete what he’s begun. As we look to the future, we do not lose heart, for even now he comes to us, speaking to us through his word, feeding us at his table, giving us a foretaste of the feast to come, when his goodness and grace will restore all things.
In the meantime, as Jesus’ disciples today, we don’t stay stuck in the doom and gloom our algorithms and news channels are constantly feeding us. Instead, we pray, and we do not lose heart.
Dark days and hard times will come, but we don’t run to the hills when they do. We don’t close ourselves off or retreat to our enclaves in fear.
Instead, we go out into the world to share the promise. We go out into the world to share the truth of God’s Word. We go out into the world to share hope that is in us with a world that desperately needs it.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev. Jeffrey R. Spencer
Oak Harbor Lutheran Church