It was a warm summer evening, and better than that it was a warm summer evening on vacation.  I was eight years old.  My parents and I were traveling with my aunt and uncle in one of those trailer homes.  In an oh-so-cool to an eight year old fashion the kitchen table folded down to make a bed where my parents slept and the cupboard section above that folded down to form a bed where I slept.  The cupboard doors were latched shut so they did not swing down and clobber the sleepers below.  As we were settling in to sleep, something popped into my eight year old mind that I had to share with my mother.  I called out to her and leaned over.  As my mother raised her head up my leaning down released the cupboard door latch and the door came swinging down,whacking my mother in the head and giving her a black eye. The rest of the vacation was dominated by my uncle giggling and taking multiple pictures of my mother and her shiner.  Somewhere there is a theme photo album; my mother's black eye at Williamsburg; my mother's black eye at Gettysburg, my mother's black eye at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Other than an amusing and perhaps insightful anecdote about my family, why am I sharing this story with you this morning?  As I was studying the parable of the widow and the unjust judge, I was fascinated by a line from the text when the judge relents and gives in to the widow.  The NRSV translates it, "so that she may not wear me out by continually coming."  In the Greek it says so that she may not strike me in the eye, bruising me.  The unjust judge gives in, fearing a black eye from a widow, one of the most powerless members of society in ancient Palestine.

Now of course the message of this parable is certainly not that God is an unjust judge, or that God responds to us
out of some fear of being bullied.  But I am always struck by the notion of how our actions affect the divine.  I love the story of Abraham bargaining with God over the fate of the city of Sodom, convincing God to spare the city if fifty righteous ones are found, forty-five, forty, thirty, twenty, ten, the city will be spared if ten righteous people live there.  Or when Jesus debates with the Syrophoenician woman about who his ministry is for Jews exclusively or everyone, and she convinces him that his mission is to all people regardless of tribe.

Unfortunately our contact with God is not quite as immediate and interactive.  Most of us will not have a direct out loud conversation with the divine, let alone engaging in such a conversation that alters God's actions in visible concrete ways.  We have to go on faith that our prayers are heard when planes fall out of the sky and our mouths are filled with the metallic taste of fear and anger. We have to go on faith that our prayers are heard when a grandson is born premature and frail.  We have to go on faith that our prayers are heard in those dark pre-dawn hours when we toss and turn seeking to shrug off the doubts and worries of this world.
 
 It is hard to keep that faith up day after day, prayer after prayer.  Jesus promises us that God will respond quickly to our prayers, granting justice.  Well I am not sure how Jesus defines quickly but quite often we miss any immediate response to our petitions and pleas of the divine.  We have to keep going back to the well of the divine and lowering our buckets and pulling up the rope and seeking God's response out of the depths of our imploring cries.  Fred Craddock quotes an elderly African-American pastor who says that this text tells us "Until you have stood for years knocking at a locked door, your knuckles bleeding, you do not really know what prayer is."

But our bare hands and urgent pleas do not bang against a locked and lifeless door.  They bang against our God.  Our God is bruised by our pleas for justice.  As surely as God chose to take human form and carry the weight of our human frailty all the way to death on the cross, God carries the pain we possess.  Just as my mother leaned toward me, our God leans toward the sound of our impassioned voices when we cry out.  But unlike my mother, God knows what the cost of such action will be every time.
 
When the cry goes up for innocents killed our God is bruised. When the forgotten poor are remembered in prayer our God is bruised.  When the plea is offered for children suffering from fear and bigotry our God is bruised.  Some philosophers suggest that the divine is the prime mover of the universe, the entity that set all in motion and thus can not be pushed into motion by any action of the universe.  They are wrong in their notion of an immutable God.  Our God is moved by the dilemmas of this mortal life, and the fulcrum that moves the prime principal, the creator of the universe, is our prayers.
 
When we stand with the widows of this world, when we stand with the powerless and the weak, when we reveal our own weakness and come before God continually seeking justice, God is changed, and we are changed.  It is God's choice to be bruised by the pains of this world, to accept the pains of mortality as God's own.  And it is our choice whether we too will accept the pain of others as our own.  It is our choice whether we stand in the midst of the pain of this world; trusting in God's never-failing presence;
lifting our voices in both praise and intercession; knowing that God's love exceeds our brokenness at every turn;  recognizing that our love needs to be extended to the broken places in our midst.

It is our choice how we respond to the pain of this world, with anger, fear, and resignation, or with powerful and plaintiff pleas to our God.Do we sit numb and paralyzed by our collective human plight, or do we raise our voices to the Lord, coaxing, cajoling, convincing God of humanity's need for wholeness?  Do we rise up with words of passion that draw God and ourselves into the midst of suffering as agents of healing?  Do we lean toward God and call out, letting the door between humanity and the divine swing open in ways beyond our imagination? Do we pray?