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One of the most important lessons our Father has and is still teaching me is to keep speaking up until someone somewhere hears your pleas for help and listens and cares enough to share with you the help you need to survive. God has made us a global family and wants us to be the loving, caring family He created us to be.

Yes, there are, sadly, many people that will actually feel better about their own life the more they see you suffer without having the help that you need to survive being disabled or whatever challenges you may face. However, you can take comfort in knowing that those people do not love our Father anymore then they are loving you. God lets us know that if they can't love you when they can see and touch you then they cannot love God that they can not see with their human eyes and touch with their human hands. And God is aware of their lack of compassion for your situation and will and is now dealing with them accordingly. Especially if those people who know of your need are choosing to ignore your situation while claiming at the same time to be His Children. God has taught us that the "greatest is love" along with the truth that when everything else passes away the only remaining substance is love.

Father, thank You for the lessons in love that You teach us every day. In Jesus' name, Amen.

Sadly, it is also more and more the god of most churches in this world of ours to the point that it pushes everything else including our Father into second place at best. And as for widows and orphans we are barely on the radar screen as a faint, distant blip of sorts. As a disabled widow I am learning this very painful lesson. People who discover that there is no money they can bleed off from me are soon gone never to be heard from again. Leaving me isolated and broken hearted. I guess what causes the most pain is many of those people who have vanished told me that they were my Brothers and Sisters in Christ, my family. If it causes me this much pain and suffering I can only imagine how it must hurt our Father who only wants us to place Him first and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. How needlessly sad it all is. It would be so easy for us to be the FAMILY our Father has called us to be. We would first have to be willing to place God our Father above all material wealth along with the false god of money that we seem to seek after and worship far more than we ever do our true God, our loving Father.

We are hearing today the story of three widows. Widows have a prominent place in our Christian scripture. In ancient society, in a time when there was no social safety net, widows were among the most vulnerable of all citizens. And because the Bible over and again says God sides with the least of these - the poor, the sick, the estranged, the despised and rejected - it should not surprise us to hear we are responsible before God to care for widows and orphans.

The Mosaic law says, "You shall not abuse any widow or orphan. If you do abuse them, when they cry out to me, I will surely heed their cry; my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children orphans" (Ex 22:22-24).

And in the New Testament James declares: "Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world" (1:27).

The prophets over and again declare God's judgment against the nation for economic policies which abuse the helpless. Isaiah, for instance, says - Ah, you who make iniquitous decrees, who write oppressive statutes, to turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right, that widows may be your spoil, and that you may make the orphans your prey! What will you do on the day of punishment, in the calamity that will come from far away? To whom will you flee for help, and where will you leave your wealth, so as not to crouch among the prisoners or fall among the slain? For all this (God's) anger has not turned away; (God's) hand is stretched out still. (Isa 10:1-4)

But the Bible goes even further in telling stories of widows, abandoned and forgotten by the powers, who played a major role in the work of God that mattered. In the days of Elijah, what finally mattered was not the political decisions and wars of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, but the widow of Zarephath, a pagan foreigner who took care of God's prophet (I Kings 17:8-24). When Jesus was born, King Herod tried to have the rumored infant Messiah killed, but the widow Anna affirmed "the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem" (Luke 2:37). These lowly widows appeared to be minor players on the world scene, but God used them in a powerful way.

As Paul says it, "God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God." (1 Cor 1:27-29).

We want to set ourselves up to be challenged by the widow we read about in the eighteenth chapter of the Gospel of Luke. Being open to being challenged means that we make ourselves think, "Maybe what she is saying is right. Maybe I need to question what I think." That is all we need to be open-minded, and that is the mindset we want to have as we approach this widow.

We need to understand the story found in Luke 18:1-8 against the background of Luke 11, where Jesus teaches his disciples to pray and follows it up with a declaration that if we ask, we will receive: if we who are not always so good find it impossible to say no to our children, much less will God say no to us if we ask. "Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you" (11:9).

Ordinarily interpretations of this passage on the widow highlight exclusively the need we have to be insistent, to be importune, to be willing to bother others. This is what we women have done throughout the ages, why we have been killed - because we are insistent, especially when the demand has to do with our children.

Today what we women need is to be sure of ourselves, to trust ourselves. Today when we insist on our rights, on our views, on our understandings of who God is and what God is like, we are usually met with derision. Our understanding of God, the ways we image God, come under scrutiny and are considered deficient, not good, even heretical, because they are ours, they are based on our woman-experience, on our woman-knowledge.

So, today we look at the woman in this story, we look at the text and try to understand her, what she thought about herself, about her rights, about her own point of view. Today, given our situation, we want to look at this text and emphasize not only the widow's insistence but also her character. What kind of woman was she? What kind of woman does it take to insist about justice for oneself, yes, justice for ourselves? This is about what the widow did to get justice for herself, to have her understanding prevail.

First, let us look at the position of the woman in this story.

1. Remember this is a parable, a fictional story Jesus weaves together to make a point. So every detail introduced in the story has a point. This woman is a widow. Widows in the Bible are objects of pity, recipients of favors. Living in a patriarchal society without a male to protect them and to be their point of reference, widows were victims of injustice. They were outsiders, no provisions were made by society for them; they were helpless and defenseless. Widows were overlooked in the Israelites' system of inheritance. They could remarry. The law of levirate marriage protected only widows who were daughters of priests by obliging the brothers of the defunct husband to marry the widow. But when there were no brothers, the widow was without recourse.

2. The fact that the widow in this story approaches the judge herself indicates that most probably she had no male relatives since, if she did, they would have been the ones to advocate for her.

In our world today there are many women who resemble the situation in which the widow found herself. Today women continue to live longer than men so there are many more widows than widowers. Then there is the fact that today many more women choose to be single than women have in the past.

Like the widow in this parable these women have to speak for themselves, fight for themselves, face the patriarchal world in which we live by themselves, face our patriarchal churches by themselves - and all of this we do unprotected by any man. Yes, that is what we do, and we do it so often that we forget how much more work it is to be a woman in a patriarchal church, in a patriarchal society.

The second thing we notice in this story created by Jesus is that this woman, this widow, was a knowledgeable woman, a woman who knew that the law was on her side. Her appeal was legal. This is what the words of the judge mean: "Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone..." (Luke 18: 46). He was ignoring either God's law or human law; or maybe he was ignoring both of them.

And looking at this text we have to say that we need to become knowledgeable about economics, we need to understand the economy of this country and how it intersects with and influences the economies of other countries. It is not beyond us, it is not something we cannot learn. Just as the widow could learn and understand the law so as to stand up against an unfair judge, so too can we learn about and understand economics in order to denounce injustice.

Third, this woman in Jesus' story knows her adversary well. He does not respect the law, therefore, she does not try to reason with him but instead wears him down. No, women are not pests, women are not obnoxious. The problem is that faced with lack of integrity, faced with lack of respect for the law, faced with lack of willingness or ability to correct injustice, faced with such a situation, women have discovered that the best strategy is to pressure by being assertive, by being persistent, by repeatedly setting forth our demands.

Fourth, there had to be a moment when the widow said to herself: "I'm not going to accept the way things are. I'm not going to put up with it. I will risk being ridiculed, I will risk being called obnoxious. But I will do something about it." She knew that, given the situation she was in, to be right was not enough, to know the law was not enough. She realized that once she knew what was right she had to act on what she knew. This widow realized that to achieve what she wanted she had to do; she was concerned with justice through action.

Unfortunately many times we think that it is enough to know, that it is enough to pray, that it is enough to be concerned. But the widow shows us that we have to do. That is the true kernel of this story. And to do we have to know, we have to have courage, we have to decide, and then act. This widow acts out of moral strength and finds moral strength in acting.

Please, do not let anyone refer to this woman as the nagging widow. She is a woman of courage, a woman of action, and all of that because she knows. The burden of knowing. It is a burden to know because once you know you have to act. If not, you will betray yourself, your integrity will be eaten away, you will no longer be a moral person. The burden of knowing is a burden that calls for revolutionary integrity, it calls for consistent renewal of our commitment to follow the message of justice we find in the gospel. The revolutionary integrity to which knowing calls us is precisely that, a daily being converted to the core of the gospel message: to justice, to doing justice.

The widow Jesus tells us about in Luke 18 is a woman of integrity. She knows what is right and goes after it.

The fifth point I want to make about this widow is the fact that she takes on someone in authority. You know how that is! You know how much we have been taught to follow those in authority, to go with what they say. People in authority have to be held accountable; that is what the widow did. She said to the judge: "It is your job to see that justice is done, vindicate me against my adversaries."

How do we deal with people in authority? To hold them accountable is not a matter of ignoring them, disobeying them, or arguing with them. To hold those in authority accountable we have to be willing to engage them, to enter into dialogue with them. Any person in a position of authority who is not willing to dialogue should not have that position. But we also have to be open to the dialogue. Both, those in authority and those of us who do not hold such a position, have to listen intensively to each other. We have to listen until our ears ache and our heads are about to explode; we have to listen, attempting first of all to find a point of contact with the other.

The first step in this process of establishing dialogue with people in authority with whom we do not agree is to find in what the other person is saying something we understand, not agree with but understand. Can I at least understand why she thinks that way?

The second step in this process is to find something we can agree with, even if it is not integral to what you are discussing but yet has some bearing on it. We all have done that. Many times in discussions or confrontations we have started by agreeing only on the fact that, "We need to have this resolved by five this afternoon." For example, in the negotiations to bring peace to El Salvador after ten years of civil war, the only initial point of agreement between the warring factions was that both sides recognized that neither side could win the war.

In the first step basic respect for each other is established. In the second step you begin to see the possibility of a fruitful dialogue because you taste a bit of the satisfaction of agreeing. Now, when dialogue is not embraced, it is either because one of the parties is like the judge in the parable-who seemingly knew the widow was right but either because he was lazy or because he had no respect for her, he did not want to rule in her favor - or dialogue is not embraced because one of the parties knows their arguments are weak, reasons are not well-founded and this causes fear and insecurity. Notice in the parable that the widow is willing to talk to the judge. The text says, "[She] kept coming to him and saying..." (18:3b). She kept the conversation going. In his case, however, apparently he just said no to her and then simply started talking to himself!

The widow that Jesus carefully draws for us in this parable is indeed an audacious woman, a woman with the courage to do justice, not just to ask for justice to be done by others.

And here, to finish, I want to go back to the passage from Luke 11 to which I referred at the beginning. Notice that the passage starts with, "Ask and it will be given to you" (verse 9). But it does not stop there, it is not only a matter of asking. It is also a matter of doing: of seeking, of knocking. If we do that then we, like this widow, will be women of moral strength, of courage, of justice. We will not only ask for justice but we will be about doing justice. We will do justice because we have responsibly shouldered the burden of knowing, because we are women of integrity. Only then, only then, can we claim the widow of this parable as our sister.

Psalm 10:14
(helper of the fatherless)
Psalm 68:5
(defender of widows)

Exodus 22:21-24
Commands to the people of God to:
Not mistreat or oppress strangers.
Not take advantage of a widow or an orphan.

Leviticus 19:34 & 25:35
Treat the stranger as you would the 'local'.
Help the 'locals' as you would a stranger.

Deuteronomy 10:18
God defends the cause of the fatherless, widow and orphan. We are to love the strangers and fear the Lord.

Deuteronomy 14:28-29
Strangers, fatherless, widows and Levites are grouped together so that they all may glean. When THEY glean, we are blessed. The Levites had no allotment or inheritance of their own.

Deuteronomy 15:7-11
"Do not be hard-hearted or tightfisted. Do not harbor this wicked thought.
God listens carefully to these people: "he may appeal to the Lord?
There will always be poor in the land, THEREFORE?. I command you to be OPENHANDED.

Deuteronomy 24:17-18
Do not deprive the alien (stranger), or the fatherless of justice.
Do not take the cloak of the widow as a pledge.
Remember: You were once in this situation!!! That is why God COMMANDS this!

Deuteronomy 26:12
The 'set-aside' was for the Levite, the alien, the fatherless and the widow so that they may eat.

Deuteronomy 27:19
There is a curse upon the person who WITHHOLDS justice from the alien, fatherless or widows.

Proverbs 15:25
The Lord tears down the proud man's house but he keeps the widow's boundaries intact.

Date: Jun 5, 2008 11:42 AM

Dearest Pastor (DELETED),

Just wanted to share with you.

During my devotions I came across the following that gave me a better understanding of how our Father simply wants us to make our family strong through applying His love in our everyday lives. It is not our Father that has us living with unmet needs but our inability to share His love with one another and thus bring the healing and abundance that He wants for ALL OF US as His children. We are too comfortable seeing the "least of these, my brethren" living with the distress of less then what we want for our own person and the people we love and care about. It is no wonder we are reaping the pain we allow the "least of these, my brethren" to endure? Why do we believe that God will not give to US ALL what we are willing to provide to the "least of these, my brethren"? The more we are willing to love and care for all members of the family the stronger we will ALL become. God, as OUR Father will provide all of us with an even playing field. What we feel is good enough for those that we consider less then what we deserve is exactly what God will package up and give back to us. I have seen how our Father has packaged up the care I have received since the death of my husband in January of 2003 and has given this "gift" back to those that He has made aware of my distress. This is how, in part, He is allowing me to daily experience the love He has for me.

The person shared the following:

Matt. 25:31-46

Inasmuch as Ye Have Done It unto One of the Least of These


I'd like to share with you a recent insight that seems rather plain and obvious, but one I hadn't taken literally enough before. It's a powerful way of knowing Jesus Christ and of looking at others that can improve all our actions. In Matthew 25:31-46 Jesus speaks of the day when He returns and will separate the people of the earth as a shepherd divides the sheep from the goats. The sheep on His right hand are those who have served others while the goats on His left are the selfish who took only thought for themselves.

He tells the sheep (v34-40) "Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: For I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me."

"Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungered, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?"

"And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."

That last verse is the one that I'd like to point out -- "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." Contrast that with what he tells the goats who did not serve others, "Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me." Why is that? Is that simply rhetoric? Does it just mean, when you help others, you're helping God do His work and that when you do not serve others; you're not doing His work? I think it's even more literal than that.

I believe that how we treat others is literally how we're treating our Savior. The prophet Isaiah predicted of Christ: "He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed" (Isaiah 53:3-5 3).

Jesus Christ in a literal way paid for our sins, carried our sorrows, and experienced our grief through his infinite and eternal atonement that is not bound by the finite limits of mortal time constraints. What we do or do not do today -- our sins of commission or sins of omission -- retroactively must be paid for by Jesus Christ. What we do today affects Him in Gethsemane and Calvary.

When we lift the burdens of another, we lift a burden from Christ because that is one less burden He bears. When we treat another mercifully, we treat Him mercifully, for that is one less hardship He must experience. When we heal and comfort another, we heal and comfort Him. When we obey one of His commandments that is one less stripe He must endure on our behalf.

The eternal law of justice demands that a price be paid for every sin. And thus, through His infinite and merciful atonement Jesus Christ not only paid for every time we turn away the needy, but He also experienced what it was like for that downtrodden person to be spurned. Not only does His atonement pay for our rude and callous remarks, but also He experienced the pain of the person we've wounded. Is it any wonder that He pleaded, "If ye love me, keep my commandments" (John 14:15) and to "judge not lest we be judged" (Matthew 7:1). If we truly love Him, not only will we not wish to cause Him another ounce of pain, but also we will lift each other's burdens for in doing so, we lift His.

I think if we could always remember Him -- truly remember Him and how our actions and inaction impact Him - we would see each other through His eyes. We'd be more forgiving, more compassionate and giving. We'd reach out to others, lift, build and bless, for in doing so, we know we're alleviating His suffering in a literal way.