Sermon — October 16, 2022
The Rev. Greg Johnston
When I was in college, I spent a semester’s-worth of Saturday mornings learning how to use an old-school, hand-operated printing press. This is the sort of thing I love: learning how to hand-set lead type in a little wooden frame; applying just the right amount of ink; the moment you realize where the phrases “upper case” and “lower case” come from, because you’re pulling a whole case of type out of a drawer.
But this was the easy stuff. The guy who taught our informal class was working on woodcuts. Those are something else. Printing a woodcut is closer to carving a statue than to drawing a picture, because when you roll ink over something, it coats only the highest, raised part of the surface. It’s like rolling ink over a mountain range: you only coat the peaks and the ridges, not the valleys. That means that to make a woodcut of a rose, you’re working completely in negative space. You can’t just carve a drawing of a rose into a block of wood, which would be hard enough for most of us. Instead, you have to carve away everything that’s not the rose, revealing the form of your design from within the wood like a sculptor revealing the human form hidden within a block of marble. It’s a gradual process of carefully, slowly carving away layer after layer, because if you go too deep or your hand slips, there’s no gluing the wood back on. You have to start again.
And all I did was print some stationery.
Our readings this morning touch on three of the central practices of Christian life: the reading of Scripture; persistent, devoted prayer; and incredible frustration with how slowly things are getting done. (But mostly the Bible and prayer.) And each of these readings is difficult in its own way.
Jeremiah’s prophecy combines destruction and restoration, accountability and judgment, and he promises the people a “new covenant.” “I will put my law within them,” God says, “and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” (Jer. 31:33) This “writing” is an interesting metaphor. “Law” here is Torah; not just “law” in the abstract, but “The Law,” the first five books of the Bible. So it’s a fascinating promise: What is now captured in a scroll or in a book, God will write within our hearts. There will be no more sermons or Sunday Schools; we will not need to teach one another about God, we “shall all” simply “know” God, because God’s Law will be written on our hearts. But of course, it’s clear that this promise has not yet been fulfilled.
Paul, for his part, introduces a phrase that’s been used as a kind of proof-text for one view Biblical authority in more years: “All scripture is inspired by God.” (2 Tim. 3:16) In the long-running debates over the exact nature of the relationship between the Bible and truth, Scripture and science, some have held tight to a particular understanding of these words. “All scripture is inspired by God,” they say, meaning every word and every sentence of the Bible is factually true, in some sense dictated by God. Creation in seven days? A literal Adam and Eve? As the bumper sticker goes: “The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it.” And if you don’t believe it, that’s just your “itching ears,” seeking “teachers to suit your own desires.” (2 Tim. 4:3) (Or maybe not.)
And then in the Gospel of Luke we get this inspiring and yet troubling image of prayer. There’s a judge who despises both God and humankind, who can’t be bothered to look out for anyone but himself. And there’s a woman, a widow, who comes to him, begging for justice, again and again. And for a while he refuses, but she persists, and eventually she’s so annoying that he just gives in—Fine! You win the lawsuit! It’s yours! Just get out of my face. And this is, Jesus tells us, a parable about “the need to pray always and not to lose heart.” (Luke 18:1) Because God, the takeaway seems to be, is at least marginally less terrible than that judge.
Three readings, each stranger than the last. But in a way it’s actually this third reading, this strange parable in the Gospel of Luke, in which we spend most of our lives. Our spiritual lives are not a one-time act of conversion, or commitment. They’re a process, a continual turning and returning to God. Spiritual life is less like passing the driver’s license test, and more like learning to drive.
Again and again and again, Sunday after Sunday, night after night, we bring ourselves before God in prayer, wondering whether God will answer our pleas. Year after year after year, for centuries and millennia, we read the same stories and sing the same songs. And that’s not because we have “itchy ears” or insufficient faith. It’s not because we need to be, as Jeremiah says, broken down and overthrown and destroyed. It’s because God is slowly writing on our hearts. And the human heart is a precious thing, more fragile than any woodcut, and carving away at it takes time and care.
If you look back at 2 Timothy, you’ll see that Paul doesn’t actually see mean that the Bible as a repository of simple facts, something we can consult to give us easy answer, because “the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.” “From childhood,” Timothy has “known the sacred writings,” and they are still instructing him. (2 Tim. 3:15) The scriptures are “inspired by God,” they are, Paul literally writes, “God-breathed,” in the sense that God breathes through them. They are “useful” for us, and when we use them “for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness,” (2 Tim. 3:16) we are engaging in exactly the same kind of gradual process as the widow slowly wearing down the judge. Over time, as we read again and again what has been written, God is writing in our hearts.
In our worship and in our prayer, in our singing and our sermonizing, God is gently carving away everything that obscures God’s image in us. When we come before God in prayer, wondering whether God is out there listening, God is in here, working. The story is not yet finished. The new covenant is not yet complete. The judge who lives in our hearts has not yet broken down. But day by day and year by year, as we “persevere with steadfast faith,” God is carving away within us and among us, refining an image whose beauty will one day be revealed.