Do It Anyway

Sermon for 21st Sunday after Pentecost 2007
Mt. Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church

2 Timothy 3:14-4:5

But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.

In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I solemnly urge you: proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching. For the time is coming when people will not put up with the sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths. As for you, always be sober, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, carry out your ministry fully.

Luke 18:1-8

Then Jesus told them a parable about the need to pray always and not to lose heart. He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent’. For a while, he refused; but later 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 may not wear me out by continually coming’.” And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them.

And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on Earth?”


The last class of my old professor’s life took place once a week in his home, by a window, where he could watch a small hibiscus plant shed its pink leaves. The class met on Tuesdays. The subject was the meaning of life. A funeral was held in lieu of graduation. The last class of my old professor’s life had only one student. I was the student.

The story is not mine. It belongs to Mitch Albom. The story, Tuesdays with Morrie, was told about his old professor, Morrie Schwartz, who had contracted ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, a brutal, unforgiving illness of the neurological system with no known cure.

Now what do Morrie Schwartz and the widow in the parable have in common?

Morrie Schwartz had sparkling blue-green eyes, thinning hair, graying eyebrows, big ears, a triangular nose, crooked teeth. In his graduation robes, he looks like a cross between a Biblical prophet and a Christmas elf.

His death sentence came in the summer of 1994. In the fall of that year, Morrie hobbled onto the Brandeis campus to teach his final college course. He could have skipped this course. The university would have understood. Why suffer in front of so many? Stay at home. Get your affairs in order. But the idea of quitting never occurred to Morrie.

Instead, Mitch’s old professor made a profound decision.

“Do I wither up and disappear, or do I make the best of my time left? He would not wither or be ashamed of dying. Instead he would make death his final project. Everyone was going to die, he said. Watch me. Learn with me. Morrie chose to walk the final bridge between life and death and he would narrate the trip.

He refused to be depressed.

Instead, he jotted down bite-sized philosophies about living. At one count, he had fifty of these “aphorisms” or proverbs.

Seek the answers to eternal questions about life and death, but be prepared not to find them. Enjoy the search anyway.
Be hopeful, but not foolishly hopeful.
Accept your doubts about your ability to achieve any change. But keep trying.
You might be surprised.

Despite his grave diagnosis, Morrie trudged on.

His trudging took a lot of energy …

“There are mornings when I cry and cry and mourn for myself,” he told Mitch. “I’m a big believer in the power of complaining! Some mornings I’m so angry and bitter. What did I do to deserve this? But I don’t let it last long. I cry my cry, then I get up and say, ‘I want to live …’. So far, I’ve been able to do it. Will I be able to continue? I don’t know. But I’m betting on myself that I will.”

Today’s text is seen by Biblical scholars as describing Jesus’ coming again at the end of the world. The parable centers on a widow, a woman of low status and few rights. She, if anyone, would be justified in thinking there was no hope for a person of her low status to expect someone in the position of a judge (who neither fears God nor has respect for man) to give her what she asks for. But, after some delay, he reluctantly relents and yields to the widow’s complaint.

The judge doesn’t “find religion”. He remains unjust. But the widow, in spite of his indifference, endures and perseveres. She asks again and again … anyway.

So what do Morrie and the widow have in common?

A conviction. A conviction of the heart.
… that Pastor Johnson spoke of 2 weeks back.

The texts from the last three weeks all complement one another. Morrie and the widow – they’re us! – frustrated at not having their prayers answered. But what is their response? They trudge on anyway. And they trudge on even though justice and a cure continue to elude them.

The text is clear about the delay between the widow’s request and the judge’s yield … the widow receives her request only after some delay! And in that delay, because we’re human, it is easy to give up hope & quit.

One of Morrie’s proverbs was

“You have to be strong enough to say ‘If the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it, make your own.’”

Our world is all about impatience and expectation. We whine because our culture is one of instant gratification. We want it yesterday. Remember Jesus surrounded by whining disciples?

But, like Morrie, the widow believes with conviction anyway. She asks again anyway, repeatedly.

Through the story of the widow, God reminds us: we need patience to be persistent, we need trust to persevere.

The world will continue to send the water downstream against us, but God says “Swim upstream anyway”. Like the widow before the judge, we may feel insignificant before God, but God wants us to plead our case anyway because he’s NOT LIKE the judge!!!

He wants us to have faith …that belief in things unseen. The belief that, in due time, He will deliver the goods.

But one of the tough lessons in all of this is that in God’s playbook, time is measured differently. A big block of ice needs a long time exposed to heat to melt. Sometimes we need to hold things before the Lord for a long time before we see any tangible evidence of change. Luke was a physician. Perhaps more than most, he understood that healing takes time and constant care. In the Science of God, Gerald Schroeder explains that the theory of relativity tells us the faster you travel, the more your time frame is compressed. Under the conditions of the Big Bang, the age of the universe (roughly 16 billion years) collapses to nearly 6 24 hour days. What may be 6 days in Genesis to God can seem “like” 16 billion years to us!

God can act outside of the laws of nature, but often it appears He chooses not to.

Even when that delay seems like an eternity, God wants us to trudge on anyway. And just like the whining disciples, we are asked to continue on even when an answer to our prayer seems out of reach.

It is said that Mother Theresa handwrote a prayer that hung on her bedroom wall in Calcutta.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Be kind anyway.
If you are honest and sincere people may deceive you. Be honest and sincere anyway.
What you spend years creating, others could destroy overnight. Create anyway.
The good you do today, will often be forgotten. Do good anyway.
Give the best you have, and it will never be enough. Give your best anyway.

Some feel asking God for something more than once shows a lack of faith, but the text today tells us something quite different. Jesus reassures us that asking over and over with conviction is a sign of faith!

Someone once said that Jesus didn’t want his disciples to impress others. Rather, He wanted them to surprise others … with their belief.

Morrie’s prayers weren’t always answered as I imagine he would have liked. Some would have thought him foolish, but in Morrie’s culture, he chose to:

Be hopeful, but not foolishly hopeful.
Accept your doubts about your ability to achieve any change. But keep trying.
You might be surprised.

I think Jesus understood that the element of surprise that disciples engender in others CAN change lives … I can somehow see Jesus meeting Morrie in his wheelchair and getting a huge smile on his face, approaching Morrie and saying “I can use someone like you on my team. Surprise them, Morrie, with your trudging on, despite the diagnosis, and (and this is key) despite the fact that you were going to die anyway, the disease will eventually win the battle.

But Jesus died for us all and won the war …

While Morrie may seem foolish to some, his is the faith Jesus speaks of powerfully in the final line.

If Jesus were to come in that back door right now, would he find pews full of Morrie Schwartz’s? … ready to surprise the world with their persistence, even when the world will not provide them with what they ask for?

Jesus was & is the BEST example. He prayed and sweat blood in Gethsemane. And yet even He was not spared by His own Father. But, in HIS final walk on Calvary was a lesson still celebrated world-wide to this day.

We will celebrate it here today.

What do the widow and Morrie Schwartz and, yes, Eric Clapton have in common? They had to get up every day and shake the demons of disease, addiction, and injustice off their backs again – every day – and for the rest of their lives. With conviction, they went on anyway!

What Morrie and Eric and the widow have learned, as Pastor Johnson said, is – that THIS is not our best life. Our best life is yet to come. Where God will – finally – in his time - take away the disease, the addiction, the injustice.

The good news is … It’s not between us and the judge, us and the addiction, us and the bottle – it’s between us and God!

God is SO different from the judge.

Pastor Johnson let us in on a little secret two weeks ago. We ALL suffer. Some suffer openly like Morrie Schwartz. But others suffer quietly. Their suffering often goes unnoticed. And His message to the rest of us is:

Even though you don’t know what to say, be present anyway – even though you may feel helpless.

Tell the widower he’s not alone. God walks with him.
Tell that 8th grader that they DO fit in … where it matters.
Visit your old dying professor and let him know what he meant to you.

Every Morrie needs a Mitch.

Even if you don’t know what to say, go anyway.

Morrie got up every day and penned his proverbs. A fellow Brandeis professor was so taken by them, he took them to a reporter at the Boston Globe who published them where they were read by a producer for NightLine in Washington, DC. The next week, Ted Koppel’s limousine was in Morrie’s driveway. Mitch Albom saw the Nightline episode. A sudden & timely strike the Detroit Free Press, left him available to visit Morrie for the next fourteen Tuesdays and tell his story, transforming Mitch’s life in the process.

Every Mitch needs a Morrie.

None of us is weaker than the widow. Few of us are facing longer odds than Morrie.

Jesus wants to know, “When I return, will I find faith on Earth?”

This is the voice of a teacher … leaving the class … for some unspecified delay. And “when I return, is there any chance you will be doing what it is I taught you?”

Now I’m a teacher. I know the odds that upon my return they would have “gotten religion”. In fact, I tell my students every year that if I leave the room and, upon returning, they’ve managed to “learn the lesson”, I have an envelope in my pocket for them to open and read. Eight years and counting … and the envelope remains unopened. At graduation every year, someone asks, “What’s in the envelope?” But I won’t tell them.
But I’ll tell you. It says “Dial 9-1-1. I will have fainted!”

So I know the odds … they’re not stellar. But I’m a teacher … I hope anyway. I’m hopeful, but perhaps not foolishly hopeful. You see … the teacher WANTS their students to trust the message, to have faith in the message.

As the text in Timothy tells us, there will be others who seek teachers of their own desires to tell them myths … what they want to hear.

But Jesus IS the ultimate teacher! He wants to come back to the room and find everybody’s got it.

Now forgive my Hollywood moment here. I love these kinds of endings.

When the teacher comes back in this room ……

Wouldn’t it just be wonderful if there were Morrie Schwartz’s everywhere.

What if everywhere Jesus looked, he saw people living Mother Theresa’s prayer?

What if he walked down the block, into another church and found disciples, like the widow, praying anyway, asking anyway, again, and again ……

What if he left that church, walked into a Walgreens, then back out in the street and EVERYWHERE he went he saw people

Trudging on anyway … believing anyway .. praying anyway

If this is what the teacher finds when they come back in the room ….Wouldn’t that teacher just be … …

... ... surprised?

And I’ll let you in on a little secret, something you won’t see if the teacher’s shirt sleeves are down. They will get the biggest goose bumps this side of heaven.

And a smile will be tattooed on their face.

The last class of my old professor’s life took place once a week in his home, by a window, where he could watch a small hibiscus plant shed its pink leaves. The class met on Tuesdays. The subject was the meaning of life. It was taught from experience.

The teaching … goes on …

Whaddya say when we leave here today, let’s all go surprise that teacher …

… and make them smile.

Amen.