The Parable of the Persistent Widow
A sermon delivered at the Unitarian Church of Baton Rouge on July 9, 2023
Invocation:
“Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely.”
~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Reading: Prayer and the Parable of the Persistent Widow
Then Jesus told them a parable1 to show them they should always pray and not lose heart. He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected people. There was also a widow in that city who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Give me justice against my adversary.’ For a while he refused, but later on he said to himself, ‘Though I neither fear God nor have regard for people, yet because this widow keeps on bothering me, I will give her justice, or in the end she will wear me out by her unending pleas.’”
And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unrighteous judge says! Won’t God give justice to his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he delay long to help them? I tell you, he will give them justice speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”
Part I: A Sermon in St. James Parish
When Reverend Nathan, our senior minister, announced he would conduct a sermon writing class, I asked to join and thankfully became a member of what has been dubbed “The Preacher Pack.” In our first class, Rev. Nathan asked each of us to choose a story or Bible passage that troubled us, and I immediately thought of the Parable of the Persistent Widow.
I first heard this parable in the fall of 2019 at Mount Calvary Baptist Church in St. James Parish. The Poor People’s Campaign was holding a mass meeting at the church as part of their We Must Do More tour. If you aren’t familiar with the Poor People’s Campaign, I strongly encourage you to learn more about it. The original campaign was started by Martin Luther King, Jr. in December of 1967, just a few months before he was assassinated. King brought together poor people from every race—black, white, Native American, Mexican American, Puerto Rican. They came together to demand jobs, housing, health care, education—dignity. After King’s assassination, the Campaign continued, but it produced few policy changes and ended in the Summer of 1968.
In 2016, this effort was renewed by the Reverend William Barber III and Reverend Liz Theoharis. You may know Reverend Barber for organizing Moral Mondays civil rights protests in North Carolina. For the resurrected Poor People’s Campaign, he and Rev. Theoharis, his co-chair, have organized rallies and protests in a multitude of states. They’ve marched on Washington. They’ve made it possible for poor and low-income people to testify before Congress. They along with hundreds of other supporters have been arrested protesting for Medicaid expansion, union rights, voting rights, higher wages. I admire their work.
In 2019 they came to Louisiana to participate in a march in partnership with the Coalition Against Death Alley, an alliance of grassroots organizations fighting for environmental justice, specifically opposing the proliferation of petrochemical plants in the River Parishes, more often than not in historically black communities.
I couldn’t make the march, but I was determined to attend the mass meeting held at Mount Calvary Baptist, so I drove down I-10, took the Sunshine Bridge across the Mississippi and found the church where it fronted the levee.
Mt. Calvary is a small church. I was able to get a pretty good picture of Rev. Barber in the pulpit, Sharon Lavigne, the leader of Rise St. James, standing beside him. I didn’t take a picture of Rev. Theoharis, but it is her sermon about the Parable of the Persistent Widow that has stayed with me.
It is not surprising that Rev. Theoharis draws upon this parable, and it’s not surprising that it spoke to me. On the face of it, the widow is relentless in her fight for justice and because she is relentless, the judge grants her request. Success!
As someone who’d been involved in advocacy work for nearly a decade, I wholeheartedly understood the need to persist in the fight for justice. So the call to persist spoke to me. But I also appreciated the acknowledgement that the judge was not righteous or fair, that he did not care about God—a Divine power, or other people. It was validating to me. How many times had I been frustrated and impatient with people—good people fighting in their own way for justice—because they could not fathom that a powerful person was immoral, lacked regard for God or other people, so they’d negotiate and compromise with them in good faith in their fight for justice. And then the good people would be bewildered when the powerful person or persons betrayed them or dispirited when it was clear nothing would really change.
In her sermon, Reverend Theoharis spoke about the need for persistence and the judge’s disregard for God and other people, and then she went on to address another aspect which really intrigued me. She discussed various translations of one key word or phrase in the passage.
In the version that was read to you today the judge says, “[B]ecause this widow keeps on bothering me, I will give her justice, or in the end she will wear me out by her unending pleas.”
In the King James version, it reads “lest by her continued coming she weary me.”
In the Common English Bible, the Judge says he grants the widow justice because “[o]therwise there will be no end to her coming here and embarrassing me.”
The English Standard Version: “so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.”
In the New International Version, “so that she will not attack me.”
Reverend Theoharis explained that the translation of the original Greek is “so that she won’t punch me in the eye.”
Let me be clear: Reverend Theoharis did not suggest that people needed to threaten those in positions of power with violence in order to get justice. She and Rev. Barber are unequivocally committed to non-violent civil disobedience—sit-ins and marches, occupying buildings and filling roadways.
And I think it’s important to note that the widow does not threaten the judge with violence in any version. Only that the judge fears she will become violent. That’s a subtle but significant distinction.
That resonates with me, too, because the only time we’ve seen signs of progress in this country is when violence is erupting all around or the threat of violence looms.
Does non-violent action only get us closer to justice when the unjust judges of the world fear violence?
I expected to wrestle with the question about non-violent action and the fear of violence for this sermon. And then I read the actual parable as I prepared to write, and I was instead pulled towards another part of the passage. Initially I tried to ignore these lines because I couldn’t make sense of them. They appeared to contradict what I valued in this parable: take action and persist in your demands for justice, know that people in power aren’t necessarily just.
But then there were these lines:
And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unrighteous judge says! Won’t God give justice to his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he delay long to help them? I tell you, he will give them justice speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?
What did this mean? Was Jesus saying: Just call out to God, don’t bother with taking action, fall to your knees and pray and justice will be yours?
That doesn’t sit well with me. It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t reflect my own experience. It doesn’t reflect history. And more importantly, it doesn’t reflect the life of Jesus Christ.
Jesus lived his life fighting for justice and doing good works. He calls on us to follow his example. I find it difficult to believe that Jesus would turn around and say, sit down and just pray and justice will be yours.
What then did these lines mean?
Hymn: #1045: There is a Balm in Gilead
Part II: Grandparents’ Story
I never knew my maternal grandfather. He died when I was just under a year old. According to my mother, he had a 5th grade level education. This wasn’t uncommon for poor Southern white people of my grandparents’ generation. My grandmother had an 8th grade education. Many people today are unaware that compulsory education for children—even white children—wasn’t guaranteed across the nation until 1918. Mississippi, the state where my grandparents were born and lived most of their lives, was the last state to adopt a compulsory education law. It wasn’t enforced and it was riddled with loopholes. The counties weren’t required to build schools or make sure children could get to school, so if a child didn’t live near a school, they weren’t required to attend. And the Fair Labor Act, which prohibited child labor, wasn’t enacted until 1938. If a child was needed to work to help support the family, then the child wasn’t expected to go to school.
My grandfather was only able to attend school intermittently until he was 14. That was the cut-off age for compulsory education back then. At 14 with a 5th grade level education, he was expected to work, which is what he did.
After he met and married my grandmother, he found work in the shipyards in Pascagoula, Mississippi. It allowed him to provide for his family, but it wasn’t especially lucrative. For much of my mother’s childhood, they didn’t have indoor plumbing. One house had a pump. Another only a well. She was in middle school when they finally moved to a house with running water.
The shipyards clearly didn’t make my grandfather rich. They did expose him to asbestos. He died of emphysema when he was 59. My mother once spoke about how painful it was to just hear him struggle to breathe.
My grandmother received a settlement from the asbestos suit. She was not like the persistent widow in the parable wearying a judge. She was simply one of many beneficiaries of a class action lawsuit, one of many who were harmed.
That there was a class action lawsuit and the judge ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor tells me that the owners and executives of the asbestos companies or the shipyards or both knew they were exposing their workers to a deadly substance.
Those owners and executives had no regard for God. They had no regard for people. They cared more for profit.
They didn’t care that my grandfather was a man with a wife and seven children.
They didn’t care that he was a Christian.
They didn’t care that he was white.
They knew he was poor and vulnerable. And he was poor and vulnerable because they and all the other unjust judges of the world made sure he was poor and vulnerable so they didn’t have to worry about exposing him to a deadly substance so they could profit.
My grandmother was 54 when my grandfather died. Younger than I am now. My mother and most of her siblings were out of the house, but my grandmother still had one son at home.
I am sure the settlement helped keep a roof over their heads and food on the table, but I’ll be damned if I call that justice.
What would justice look like?
It would start with a society that didn’t revere those who care more about profit than they do people.
We would not hold in esteem those who help design and maintain systems that keep whole swaths of people poor and vulnerable so they can be exploited for profit.
A system that then praises those with the wealth and power for how much money they make—Look at how much wealth they’ve accumulated for themselves, their companies, their shareholders! Pay no attention to the poor and suffering behind the curtain and spreadsheets.
And if you’re not wealthy and powerful, pay no attention to the way in which you must subvert your own moral compass to survive in this system. Turn a blind eye. Harden your heart. Believe the myth of the meritocracy.
What would justice look like?
I’m not entirely sure, but I know this ain’t it.
Hymn: #170: We Are a Gentle, Angry People
Reading: Frederick Douglass, “No Progress Without Struggle” [excerpt]
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its mighty waters.
The struggle may be a moral one or it may be a physical one, or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
~ Frederick Douglass
Part III: Lessons from History
I’ve been involved in advocacy work for more than ten years and from the beginning that work has been grounded in research. One of the most dispiriting lessons I eventually learned was that very often what appeared to be a significant leap forward in the march towards justice continued the injustice or contained the seeds for a new insidious injustice to take root. It seems our sense of progress is often an illusion.
There are many examples of this. One of the best known and most straightforward ones is the 13th Amendment which ostensibly abolished slavery. By now most of us are aware that the 13th Amendment contains the exception clause which allows slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime. That means, as Bryan Stevenson, the author of Just Mercy, puts it, “Slavery didn’t end. It just evolved.”
Another example is that of the federal public housing program begun as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s. That program was created to provide housing to working- and middle-class families who couldn’t find housing near urban centers and manufacturing hubs due to a national shortage. Initially the program was intended to primarily benefit white families, but under the leadership of Harold Ickes, a liberal spokesman dedicated to racial equality, the program also benefited African Americans. Thanks to Ickes African Americans occupied one-third of the units created under this program. It was one of the first government programs to address the housing needs of African Americans. But Ickes didn’t require the developments to be integrated, so it also became a means of entrenching racial segregation in areas already segregated and expanding segregation to areas that were not. According to Richard Rothstein, the author of The Color of Law, the program not only expanded and entrenched segregation, it increased the population density in African American neighborhoods turning those neighborhoods into slums.
Maybe President Lincoln and his allies didn’t recognize how the exception clause would be used to continue slavery. Or maybe they believed it was necessary to compromise with slaveholders in order to get the 13th Amendment ratified and its ratification would get us one step closer to justice.
Maybe Ickes believed it was better to compromise with segregationists and allow public housing to be segregated in order to procure some benefits for African Americans. Maybe he believed that segregated government housing as opposed to no government housing was one step closer to justice.
Such compromises are often defended as necessary to propel us on an incremental march towards justice. “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” so the saying goes. But what if such compromises are not incremental steps towards justice but obstacles. Do they not reveal a tragic loss of faith in our ability to bring about real justice? Divine justice?
Does the persistent widow compromise with the unjust judge in her fight for justice?
No.
Why would she ask someone who does not fear God or care about people to tell her what justice is?
From the parable we learn that the unjust judges, the tyrants, those who have no regard for people will never grant justice on their own accord. They will only do so if they are afraid or ashamed. And from history we learn that if they are willing to compromise, the compromise is likely to ensure the injustice will continue if not make matters worse.
The persistent widow has faith in her concept of justice and she demands the unrighteous judge give her that justice. Her persistence is in her relentless fight and in her faith in what justice is.
She does not compromise with someone who does not value justice. Should we?
For me, this is at the heart of this parable and at the heart of those final lines that trouble me. Faith.
In those lines Jesus declares that God will grant justice speedily to those who cry out to him. His final question implies we should have faith in that.
Do I have that faith? Even if I rephrase it to ask whether I have faith that justice will be granted to those who fight for it, I cannot say that I unequivocally do.
I do have faith that the fight for justice has meaning in and of itself. And that was enough for me until I wrestled with this parable and decided I wanted to know:
How do we cultivate as strong a faith in our sense of justice as that of the persistent widow? A faith so strong in what we’re fighting for that there is no temptation to compromise with the unjust judges of the world?
As I wrestled with this question I thought about the Serenity Prayers—the original and the popular version. Most of you are probably familiar with this version:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.
The courage to change the things I can.
And the wisdom to know the difference.
That’s not the original version. The original version was written in the 1940s by Reinhold Neibuhr, an American theologian. It reads:
God give us grace, to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.
Did you hear the difference in the second line? Not “the courage to change the things I can,” but “courage to change the things that should be changed.”
That’s a profound difference. What should be changed is real justice, divine justice. If we only focus on what can be changed, then we are more susceptible to compromising with the unjust judges and tyrants who have no regard for other people and no interest in real justice, and any outcome is more likely to inadvertently continue the injustice.
We need to focus on what should be changed.
How do we know what should be changed? According to the Serenity Poem, we need wisdom.
How do you cultivate wisdom? You may be familiar with the Wise Mind venn diagram. There is a circle with the reasonable mind. Another circle with the emotional mind. And the overlap of the two is the wise mind.
We can find this in our UU principles. Respect for the inherent dignity of all people. Compassion in human relations. A free and responsible search for truth and meaning.
Wisdom.
I have no doubts about the compassion of the people in this church. And I know we are blessed to have so many members who are talented and knowledgeable, and more significantly, there’s a general recognition that decisions should be based on logical reasoning and credible information.
Relevant, credible information is critical because, “The world you see depends upon the news you get.”
But it can be difficult to get good information, and sometimes it seems especially difficult in Louisiana. Take, for example, that mass meeting with the Poor People’s Campaign that I attended back in 2019.
I think I only heard about the mass meeting and the march because I subscribe to the listserv for the Poor People’s Campaign. I don’t recall seeing any coverage of those events in our local media. The only article I saw about any of the PPC’s work in Louisiana was in The Guardian, a British publication.
The PPC came to Louisiana to protest Death Alley. You may know it as Cancer Alley. It has its own Wikipedia page, and we live in it. It stretches along the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. An ungodly number of petrochemical plants are located in these River Parishes. For the people who live near these petrochemical plants—primarily poor, primarily African American, cancer rates are higher. Rare cancers are more common.
Over 50 years ago my grandfather and many others died because they were exposed to a deadly substance by an industry that valued profit more than people.
That injustice didn’t end because my grandmother and other widows received a settlement. That injustice was allowed to continue and it is still going on.
People in Louisiana often say corruption is in the air or water. That’s not really a metaphor. The petrochemical industry is allowed to release toxins in the air we breathe and the water we drink.
There are supposed to be limits on the amount of toxins the plants can emit but there’s minimal monitoring and no meaningful oversight. The plants are allowed to “self-report.”
And what is our response?
We grant them tax abatements.
Through a program that’s been in place since 1936, we allow them to forego paying a portion of the taxes owed to the people of Louisiana. We essentially reimburse them for the privilege of being exposed to their toxins.
Louisiana is not the only state to grant such tax abatements to petrochemical companies and other businesses, but it is the only state to subject its public schools to those tax abatements.
Here in East Baton Rouge parish that has a profound impact, because we have several petrochemical plants in this parish which are eligible for tax abatements. Consider just one: the Exxon refinery which has been here since around 1910. That refinery is one of the largest not just in the country but in the world.
In 2021—two years ago—Exxon requested and was granted a tax abatement from our public schools in the amount of $23 million dollars over 10 years.
That may sound like a lot of money to most of us, and make no mistake that amount of money would be meaningful to our schools and the children in our schools. Seventy-six percent of the children in East Baton Rouge parish public schools live in poverty. We as a community have never fulfilled our responsibility to provide a quality education to all children regardless of race or socioeconomic background. So that money is meaningful to our ability to fulfill our responsibility to our schools and the children in this parish.
But to Exxon?
In 2022, Exxon made $56 billion in profit. That was for just one year. $2.3 million—one year of that 10-year tax abatement—is .004% of that profit.
So that tax abatement which is meaningful to our schools and the children in this parish is an insignificant share of one year of Exxon’s overall profit.
So why doesn’t Exxon pay it?
I think about my grandfather who was denied access to a quality education.
And I know there is more than one way to keep people poor and vulnerable so an industry that values profit more than people doesn’t have to worry about exposing them to deadly toxins.
Do I have faith that if the people of Louisiana demanded that this tax abatement program end or at the very least that our public schools not be subjected to it, then we could end this injustice?
Absolutely.
Unequivocally.
No compromises.
Turns out you can cultivate faith. Go figure.
Hymn: #121: We’ll Build a Land
Reading: Mark Morrison-Reed, “The Task of the Religious Community”
“The central task of the religious community is to unveil the bonds that bind each to all. There is a connectedness, a relationship discovered amid the particulars of our own lives and the lives of others. Once felt, it inspires us to act for Justice.
It is the church that assures us that we are not struggling for justice on our own, but as members of a larger community. The religious community is essential, for alone our vision is too narrow to see all that must be seen, and our strength too limited to do all that must be done. Together, our vision widens and our strength is renewed.”
~ Mark Morrison-Reed
Part IV: Look to the Divine
There is no shortage of injustices in Louisiana. Our convict leasing program is essentially modern-day slavery. We have one of the highest incarceration rates per capita in the world. Women are denied a citizen’s right to bodily autonomy. The LGBQT community is often demonized and targeted with pernicious legislation. Our libraries are being harangued to ban books. It can be overwhelming. Justice can seem far out of reach.
I understand why some focus on just what can be changed in the hope that it puts us one step closer in an incremental march towards justice.
But when I am told I should work to change just the things that can be changed instead of the things that should be changed, that is when I feel hopeless. And I’m not alone in that. There’s a powerful quote from Vaclav Havel. He was a poet and dissident, the last president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of the Czech Republic, and this is what he says about hope:
“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out.”
To have hope we need to know that what we’re doing is worth doing. That we’re working for what should be changed. Many people see no point to fight only for what can be changed if what can be changed doesn’t remedy the fundamental injustice. Why waste one’s time?
I think this explains why many people just give up, and we here in Louisiana, unfortunately, prove the point made by Frederick Douglass: Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.
For Unitarian Universalists, giving up is not an option. Our faith, our UU principles, call us to work for justice and if you are involved in this church, you share that impulse—the hope to make this a better world—and by just being here, you are already working for justice.
We are each called to engage in this work differently. And how we are called is bound to evolve over time.
For some of us, the fight for justice may be to simply keep a roof over our heads and food on our tables. That is a primal fight for justice, especially in Louisiana, a state that is designed to keep whole swaths of us poor and vulnerable.
For those of us who have a roof and food, we are called to do more but again, how we are called to do that work is different for each of us. Some of us may choose to spend a portion of our lives or all our lives wearying those unjust judges. Some of us may be called to volunteer to help those who suffer as a result of systemic injustices. Some of us may be called to tend to this church and tending to this church may be the most fundamental in the fight for justice. This church is a safe space and that is critically important.
Over the years when I would be involved in one advocacy effort or another, occasionally a person would come up to me after a meeting or mention in passing that they agreed with what I was working on but they couldn’t get involved. They were afraid they might lose their job or their clients or alienate their colleagues and neighbors, their friends and family. Many people in this state are afraid to fight for justice. They fear not only losing the ability to keep a roof over their head and food on the table. They fear being ostracized. And those fears aren’t groundless.
That’s why this church is so important. When I go out and weary the unjust judges of the world, when I am like that persistent, annoying widow, I know I can come back here and be treated with kindness and compassion. I know that even when I disagree with any number of you, that we will disagree respectfully and that we will still be kind to one another, because we embrace the same principles. We respect the inherent dignity of all people. And we recognize the need for justice, equity and compassion in human relations. I find community here, and as the reading from Morrison-Reed explains, community is what inspires us to work for justice and allows us to know what needs to be done and to have the strength to do it.
So this church is fundamental in our ability to fight for justice. It is base camp, not just for me but for anyone, everyone who supports that effort. By just being here, by just being a part of this community, you are taking part in the fight for justice. Recognize the role you play, whichever it is. Embrace it. We are strengthened when we understand how vital we each are in this worthy endeavor.
So let us be intentional. Let us channel the persistent widow, proudly declare our commitment to work for justice, use our collective wisdom to determine what should be done, and cultivate a faith so strong in our sense of justice that we will not be tempted to compromise with the unjust judges.
Let us be a beacon of hope to all who yearn for justice.
Let us lift our lamp beside this golden door.
Amen. So be it.
Hymn: #118: This Little Light of Mine
Benediction:
May the light around us guide our footsteps,
And hold us fast to the best and most righteous that we seek.
May the darkness around us nurture our dreams,
And give us rest so that we may give ourselves to the work of our world.
Let us seek to remember the wholeness of our lives,
The weaving of light and shadow in this great and astonishing dance in which we move.
~ Kathleen McTigue
Luke 18:1-8 New English Translation
Powerful and strong! And yes, we must fight for justice. Relentlessly. We deserve so much better than we have.
I wonder if Havel was intentionally playing on Hebrews 11:1: “Faith means being sure of the things we hope for and knowing that something is real even if we do not see it. My favorite version is from the King James: "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.“
The sentence structure is similar although the meaning is not.
“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out.” I appreciate Havel's quote, which is new to me. The older I get, the more I wrestle with my ability to effect change, which seemed so much easier when I was young. When I feel like I cannot effect change, hopelessness overcomes me. Hopelessness is not a place I choose to stay, but getting out of that place is work.
I probably pray the Serenity Prayer 20 times a day; it is a meditation that I breathe and speak as I imagine the words trickling across my heart. It often lulls me to sleep at night, so I am really intrigued by the earlier version, also new to me.
Thank you for the insights, Tania. I'm simply letting you know how your sermon resonated with me.
I still of you as 34, by the way!