Proper 24

She was an elderly woman. About 50 years old. Moderately well-preserved, although a bit dried out. Not likely to attract much attention.

Granted, 50 is not so old – unless you’re living 3,000 years ago in ancient Egypt. This 50-year-old woman was found in a burial chamber in the Egyptian necropolis at Thebes-West. For someone who’d been buried for three millennia, she looked remarkably well-preserved.

Yet even to archaeologists, she was not likely to attract attention because she appeared to be an average, everyday, garden-variety mummy … until someone noticed the odd-looking big toe on her right foot. It was totally artificial. It consisted of three pieces of carved wood fitted onto her foot with leather straps, making it the world’s oldest known prosthesis. The wooden toe still looked ready for use, still lashed to the patient’s mummified toe by a textile lace.

For paleo-pathologists around the world, this big toe was big news. X-rays revealed that the Egyptian woman’s actual toe had been surgically removed, perhaps because artery disease had cut off circulation to the toe. Soft tissue and skin had overgrown the site where the toe had been taken off, and then the prosthetic toe had been added.

She must’ve been a persistent woman to go to all the trouble! Evidence shows that the device must’ve worked. Scuff marks on the toe’s underside indicate that the artificial toe had assisted the woman for some time while she was alive. Without it, she would have had a very difficult time walking like an Egyptian.

Two millennia ago, there was another persistent woman of record, who evidently didn’t have trouble getting around like mummy lady did. She was a pain. A pest. And Jesus uses her for an instructive lesson. Like a terrier at your cuff, she sunk in her teeth, snarling to the judge handling her case: “Grant me justice against my opponent” (18:3).

Finally, the judge couldn’t stand it any longer. “I have no fear of God,” he admitted to himself. He even confessed that he didn’t care for people. “Yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice” (vv. 4-5). He simply wanted to get her out of his hair, because she was wearing him out with her continual griping.

The widow’s pleas were like a big wooden toe, one that kept jabbing and jabbing and jabbing away.

“Enough!” shouted the judge. ‘I get the point!” And, in a sense, so does God. “Will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night?” asks Jesus. “Will he delay long in helping them?” Of course not! “I tell you,” Jesus insists, “he will quickly grant justice to them” (vv. 7-8). Jesus is saying that if a corrupt and uncaring judge responds to persistent pleas, then certainly a holy and loving Lord will do the same.

Yet Jesus adds a nuance here that can be easily overlooked. Whereas the earthly judge delays, God will act quickly. God does not need to be browbeaten into submission before he hears our prayers. Ask and it shall be given. Seek and you shall find. Knock and the door will be opened to you.

That’s why prayer is not a prosthesis, a kind of crutch for people to lean on as they try to keep their faith from falling over. Prayer might be the big toe of faith, but there’s nothing artificial about it, and we don’t need to use it to be kicking God in the shins trying to get his attention.

Prayer is, rather, the thing that keeps our faith upright, that keeps us in the game, that positions us to receive from God what he wants us to have.
Prayer is a practice that connects us to a power that is much greater than ourselves, a power that can fill us and change us and strengthen us and guide us. Prayer is a practice that is perfected by persistence – by disciplined determination to be in an ongoing, life-long conversation with God.

John Marks Templeton was the creator of a number of well-known mutual funds, including the Templeton Growth Fund. And he always started his annual shareholders’ meetings with a prayer. “I pray to be in tune with God’s purposes,” he explained. “Humans are not wise enough to know what is best, and so you pray that what you do and think and say is in tune with God.”

Templeton came to the conclusion that we are all a tiny part of God in some way – kind of like a wave is a tiny part of the ocean. “A wave is not the ocean,” he noted, “but neither is the wave separate from the ocean. The wave is not eternal and long-lasting the way the ocean is, but the wave and the ocean are related to each other. The God I pray to in those shareholders’ meetings is vastly greater than we as humans have conceived as of yet.”

So our praying can be a bit like the movement of a small wave, a wave that should be in harmony with God, who can be likened to the great ocean that supports us and sustains us.

Kevin Burke, a social worker in California, was not a religious person, and he was discouraged from discussing religion in the hospital where he worked. But at San Francisco General Hospital, he saw several patients who seemed to fare better because of their spirituality.

Burke decided to study the effects of religion and spirituality on mental health and found a distinctive result: Those who say they feel “closeness to God,” which Burke defines as spirituality, fare much better according to a standard research tool, the Rand Medical Outcome Survey. Burke traces his research to his days in San Francisco. He remembers one patient, an undocumented worker from Central America, who was suffering from spinal cancer. Because Burke could speak Spanish, the man went to him for help. Burke brought the man a prayer card.

“He thanked me profusely,” Burke recalls. “He just started talking about how important it was to pray. All I did was listen.” Before the man died, his pain lessened. He required less medication. Doctors asked Burke what he had done. Burke became known as the prayer-card counselor.

The people he interviewed for his doctoral study were in similarly poor health. “All of these people had a number of chronic conditions. Physically, they were very sick people,” Burke says. “Persons who were close to God tended to have very high mental health scores, independent of how bad they were physically. They tended to cope much better.”

There’s no question that the person who walks with God, the big toe of faith functioning as it should, is in a stronger position to endure the calamities of life than one of little faith. But don’t wait until you’re sick to pray.

Instead, get serious now. The faith walk of the Christian is strenuous and demanding. We need strong legs and healthy feet for the journey. We need a muscular faith that has been well-conditioned.

Jesus had great respect for the feisty woman of today’s Gospel. She knew how to walk the talk and talk the walk. Her persistence was rewarded. She was a wave that kept lapping up on God’s great ocean. She had what she needed.

May her tribe increase! Even Jesus wondered whether “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” (v. 8).

It’s a good question. Will he find, in each of us, the Big Toe of Faith?