You know those people. Those ones. Them.
The ones who don’t know when to quit, when to go away, who are stubborn and tenacious in wanting to see the right thing done.
As Bruce Springsteen sings “no retreat baby, no surrender.”
While the rest of us kind of like things as they are, or see no point in trying to change things, we lose heart, there are those ones, them, who never settle.
God is like that. God is one of them.
Flannery O’Connor said it is like Jesus haunts us, lurking behind every tree, she describes it as being Christ haunted, the more we deny and give up, the more Jesus lurks in our denial.
Prayer is like that.
Prayer is that kiss where God’s kingdom breaks into the world and rubs the wrong way.
Prayer is the God itch showing us a different blueprint of the world, of how things can and should be, never settle, no retreat, no surrender, never lose heart.
Christians have always been those who mess with the world, starting schools, hospitals, soup kitchens, you name it with a vision and a cry for justice, making things better for everyone.
Don’t let the heart fire grow cold, don’t close the eyes and go to sleep, always be on that cross beam of what is and what is arriving, the intrusion of God upon what we know.
Jacob wrestles with God refusing to let go without a blessing. The widow threatens the judge with her passionate insistence on justice.
Prayer is that persistent and insistent reaching out and responding, the communication that is communion, the intimate embrace of a broken world with a holy kingdom.
Jesus tells us to never grow weary of this act and work of faith, of prayer bringing the impossible into our failed possibilities.
Jacob limps away marking the place with the name of the face of God.
The judge gives in and the widow’s cry and dream of justice comes true.
Don’t lose heart.
Keep the faith.
God’s will be done, God’s kingdom come.
Prayer is more than the pious folding of hands. Prayer is the hand changing the world, rebuilding, serving, feeding and healing.
Prayer cannot be separated from action. It isn’t so much that prayer and action go hand in hand as it is that they are the same thing, the point of intrusion, where the kingdom starts to arrive.
Don’t lose heart or grow weary with the long frustration of justice in our broken world.
God’s heart, God’s fire, God’s stubborn, haunting insistence won’t abandon us, won’t let us settle, won’t let us fall asleep.
Jesus is that God itch, always insisting.
Jesus is the prayer of God, the blessing that never lets go.
No retreat baby, no surrender.