Last week the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a man in China who has spent the
last two years in prison. He is serving out and 11 year sentence for his
connection to a 2008 manifesto for political reform in China.
Liu Xiabo, a former professor at Beijing Normal University, University of Oslo,
and Columbia University in NY, is serving 11 years in jail on subversion charges
for demanding democratic transformation of China's one-party state, and his wife
Liu Xia has sent out messages she is under house arrest in Beijing, according to
news reports and overseas human rights groups.
He was arrested June 23, 2009 and charged with “inciting subversion of state
power” for co-authoring Charter 08, a declaration calling for political reform,
greater human rights, and an end to one-party rule in China that has been signed
by hundreds of individuals from all walks of life throughout the country.
The U.S. Embassy urged China to lift any restrictions Liu Xia and earlier
President Barack Obama called for Liu Xiaobo's release. Diplomats from the
European Union as well as Australia and Switzerland unsuccessfully tried to
visit Liu's wife, Liu Xia, in her apartment in western Beijing on Monday but
were blocked.
The reaction of the Chinese government to this award was quick and angry.
"Giving the Nobel Peace Prize to a criminal serving a prison sentence shows a
lack of respect for China's judicial system," Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma
Zhaoxu told a regular news briefing in Beijing.
"If some people try to change China's political system in this way, and try to
stop the Chinese people from moving forward, that is obviously making a
mistake," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu. "This is not only
disrespect for China's judicial system, but also puts a big question mark on
their true intentions."
Now I might have some respect for China’s judicial system if they have people a
fairer trial than he got. Liu Xiaobo was tried by the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate
People's Court on December 23, 2009, and pleaded not guilty to the charge of
"inciting subversion of state power."
The trial lasted less than three hours, and the defense was not permitted to
present evidence. Two days later, on December 25, he was sentenced to 11 years
in prison and two years' deprivation of political rights. The Beijing High Court
rejected his appeal on February 11, 2010.
From the perspective of people who enjoy many more rights and a much fairer
court system most of the time, we can’t even imagine such a thing. But I want
you to try and put yourself in Liu’s place and ask yourself what you would do if
you were imprisoned and given boiled vegetables every day for 11 years?
How could you reconcile doing something that you thought was so right, something
that simply upholds human dignity and makes the government more accountable to
the people it rules, with an eleven year sentence in a Chinese jail?
One of the things you’d want most, besides the chance to be released, is an
opportunity to face your accusers, defend yourself, and show them you are not
the criminal they’ve made you out to be.
Another fair question for a person of faith is, “How is God working in this
situation? If God is a God of justice, and the Bible says God is, what is God
going to do about it? Do people of faith see any hope in this situation?
Does God care about people like this guy and millions of others around the world
who have been imprisoned simply for saying that people should be treated with
dignity by their government?
That’s one question raised by the passage we’re looking at for this morning.
It’s a parable Jesus tells his disciples about why they should pray without
giving up. Sounds good, right?
He tells them a story about a widow who has suffered some kind of fraud from
some other party. We don’t know what kind of fraud it was or how she had
suffered. Odds are that it had something to do with losing her house or her
home’s equity after her husband had died. But she clearly has been defrauded and
deserves a judgment in her favor.
The problem she has is that the judge assigned to her case is corrupt. He had no
respect for the people he was appointed to serve. Often in that time judges were
appointed not because of qualifications or merits, but because the judge knew
the right person or even paid the right person for the job.
Jesus doesn’t say why this guy was so unconcerned. He just says that the judge
had consistently ignored this woman’s lawsuit. But she was very persistent. You
can just imagine her coming in every week or so and saying, “Well your honor, is
today the day you’re going to take my case seriously?”
For a while it was easier for him to just say, “Sorry. Your petition is denied.
Next case please.” He didn’t have to bother himself with her case. She had no
recourse, and he knew it. It’s not like she could appeal or hire a high powered
lawyer.
The only weapon she had was her persistence. And she used it. After a while the
judge decided to give in. He said to himself, “This woman is going to nag me to
death.” He uses a word that they used to use when two people were boxing and one
boxer gave the other one a black eye. It was like her nagging was a right hook
or something. And you thought your spouse was a nag?
So he finally gives in and renders a verdict in her favor. He doesn’t do so
because he cares about the cause of justice. He does so because he doesn’t want
to put up with this woman anymore.
I remember years ago when we were trying to get the city to allow us to move the
Nelson House residents into our parsonage, we had a problem with zoning. Somehow
we had become zoned as a business, without our knowledge or permission of
course.
So the city planner told us we couldn’t have a home like that (they call it a
CBRF) on our property. I remember Kathy contacting the city planner and
repeatedly asking if there were any kind of zoning change we could apply for. He
told her “no” over and over.
We decided to go over his head and ask the city plan commission to ignore his
recommendation and zone our parsonage as residential. They would have done it
for us even though it was not policy to have more than one zoning on a single
property.
But a couple of days before that meeting, after we had already put in the
application, I went up to his office and nagged him some more. I asked him,
“Isn’t there some other kind of zoning we could apply for so that the whole
property could be zoned together and we could be allowed to house these people?”
I can’t tell you why this happened, but all of a sudden he decided to inform me
that if we applied for zoning as an institution, both the church and the Nelson
House would be zoned that way. I thought to myself, “Well why couldn’t you have
said that two months ago instead of turning Kathy down?”
Fortunately Kathy does not carry a firearm, and the city planner went to the
meeting and recommended us for institutional zoning. But it wouldn’t have
happened unless we kept bugging him.
That’s the kind of persistence Jesus talks about in this parable. Jesus compares
God to this unjust judge and says, “Hey, if this widow can nag a completely
uninterested judge into giving her justice, certainly those of you who ask God
to vindicate you will also receive help from God much quicker.”
I remember when I was younger and just out of seminary I wrote a sermon on this
passage and I basically understood Jesus to be saying that if you needed
something, you should just keep praying for it, and God would eventually give it
to you. And I spent a lot of my earlier years in ministry praying for things
that I thought I needed for the churches I served.
Funny thing, though: I didn’t get a lot of them. I got other things that I
didn’t realize I needed. I got some other things that I really worked hard for.
But my own experience showed me that you can’t just keep asking for something,
even if it’s entirely legitimate, and expect that God will eventually give it to
you.
Life just doesn’t work that way. If it did, we’d never have financial struggles
in the church. I’d be doing a lot less funerals. We’d clear out the prayer board
by praying people’s problems away. But that isn’t the way God works. And that
isn’t the context of this parable.
To understand what Jesus is getting at, you have to keep in mind that this
parable comes right after Jesus tells his disciples that he would be rejected by
his own people, put on trial, and executed. But later on he would return from
heaven to claim his followers.
There is a time period though between the moment when he is executed and the
moment he returns. During that period his followers will be persecuted for
following him. Jesus tells them to try and escape the persecution, though not
everyone will.
Also keep in mind that Luke is writing during a time where those very events are
taking place. Jesus is gone, he promised to return, and his followers are being
persecuted for following him. Some are certainly being falsely accused of trying
to oppose the Roman Emperor by following Jesus as their Lord, and some are being
incarcerated.
But what they hope for is that Jesus will return quickly and vindicate their
belief that Jesus is Lord even over the emperor, and that they were right to
follow Jesus, even if the emperor demanded that they proclaim him as Lord.
Since that’s the context in which Jesus tells this parable, we have to hear it
as Luke reminding a group of persecuted Christians that someday Jesus would
return and back up all the things they said and believed about him.
Those persecuted Christians were like the widow, nagging God to vindicate them
from their accusers. And it was taking longer than they expected. In fact, this
parable seems to have been included in Luke’s gospel because some people were
starting to doubt whether or not God was really going to act. They wondered
whether or not Jesus was going to return after all.
To be honest with you, our own context is very different. We’re not being
persecuted for our faith. No one is being put in jail for being a Christian in
our country. We would see that as a great injustice, and we wouldn’t’ stand for
it.
But there are other places where that does happen, where people are unjustly
accused of trying to cause a revolution simply by working for God’s justice and
spreading the message of Jesus. And like the widow in this story, they need to
be vindicated.
A few years ago I saw the film, Hotel Rwanda, the difficult story of what
happened in Rwanda in 1994, when that African nation descended into madness,
with the powerful Hutu majority beginning a systematic slaughter of the Tutsi
minority.
One writer would later call that massacre "the fastest and most efficient
killing spree of the 20th century;" in one hundred days, the Hutus killed
800,000 Tutsis. The film tells the story of that horror through the person of
Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel manager in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, a Hutu who
made a promise to protect his Tutsi wife and the family he loved and ended up
finding the courage to shelter and save over 1,200 people by hiding them in the
luxury hotel he managed.
As the horror built, Paul initially protested that there was nothing he could
do, but his reticence was challenged by the steady beating of truth upon his
door. What was it Alan Culpepper said? "To those who have it in their power to
relieve ... distress ... but do not, the call to pray day and night is a command
to let the priorities of God's compassion reorder the priorities of their
lives."
Paul began to see the horror and experience the shame. It was a truth he didn't
want to admit; but in the end, his conscience prevailed and he acted to save as
many lives as he could.
But Paul was not the only one to hear the beating on the door and to experience
the need to reorder his priorities; it happened also to many viewers of the
film. And I think it happened especially in one telling moment.
About midway through the story, as the slaughter of the Tutsi people escalated
in Kigali, Western reporters began to capture scenes of the genocide on tape.
Paul was heartened a bit, because he assumed the broadcast of such images would
prompt immediate Western intervention.
When a skeptical Western reporter expressed doubt, Paul was dumbfounded. "How
can they see that and not intervene?" he asked. But the reporter had seen it all
before.
"More likely," he responded, "people will see the footage, say 'Isn't that
horrible?' and then go right on with their dinners." It was for me a
particularly disturbing moment in a deeply disturbing film, for I knew he was
right. Who could see and hear that exchange and not feel shame?
The point is that persistent focus on the problem of people being unfairly
persecuted, which is the issue in Luke, eventually has the effect of bringing
shame upon the people who persecute the innocent, often causing them to stop
persecuting.
If we are not persistent and not only asking God to intervene, but especially to
speaking out against it, then bad things can go on for a long time. In other
words, this passage cannot only be about praying persistently.
If the only lesson we learn from this parable is that we need to keep praying
for God to help those who are falsely accused and persecuted, then we have a
problem, because sometimes, many times, God does not vindicate them, even in
their own lifetimes, if ever. And that’s despite the fact that people are
praying all over the world about this twenty four hours a day.
That’s the problem with hearing the parable as only being about prayer. Another
way to understand it is to remember that whatever Jesus is doing, we should also
be about doing. And if Jesus talks about standing up for those who are unfairly
persecuted, then we should be doing that too.
If the Bible talks about God wanting to vindicate the innocent, then Christians
should work toward the same thing. We have not always done that. Nelson Mandela
shouldn’t have been imprisoned for 27 years. The world should never have stood
for it. Christians should never have stood for it.
In our own country Dr. King was thrown into a Birmingham Alabama jail. But when
he writes about his experience, his main focus is not the racist city that
arrested him and put him there. Instead, he writes a letter to white pastors who
talk about fairness but don’t want to get involved in making it happen.
He says, “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's
great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's
Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to
"order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of
tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly
says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your
methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the
timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and
who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season."
Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute
misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more
bewildering than outright rejection.
From the beginning of scripture to the end, there are good times and bad times
for God's people -- there are utterly joyous times and bone crushing horrid
times. The long haul outcome, however, is never in doubt to the eyes of faith.
If the unjust judge finally gives justice to the persistent woman Jesus says,
how much more will the Lord answer the cry of God's people for justice? So don't
lose heart. Pray -- especially in the tough times. Pray hardest when it's
hardest to pray!
"Yet," Jesus says, ”When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?"
The question translates to you and me in a direct way. It is as though Jesus is
asking, "Will you be waiting for and expecting the triumph of good? Will you
keep the faith?"