Pray Like a Menace

Good morning, friends. My name is Daniel. I'm part of our preaching team here at the table, and we're in our third week of a series called Dangerous Imaginations, the parables of Jesus and Afrofuturism. So over the last couple of weeks, Pastor Tonetta, who is on vacation today, getting a lot of rest, we hope, has explored this connection between the parables of Jesus, these stories where I'm meant to surprise the audience, and Afrofuturism, the works of authors like Octavia Butler and many others, written to give people hope in times of despair and dystopia. These are stories that are meant to engage our imagination. Both the parables and Afrofuturism have twists and turns to them. They leave the reader thinking long after the story is done, and they challenge dominant systems.

So last week, Pastor Tonetta gave us kind of a simple definition of Afrofuturism. The best way to learn about Afrofuturism is to just read Octavia Butler and other authors that we'll talk about. So, but as a sort of straightforward definition, Pastor Tonetta described it as fiction that insists on writing Black people, along with all marginalized people, into the future, insisting that marginalized people are the active creators of the future. And in last week's sermon on the parable of the seeds and the soil from Mark, she left us with these words. Here is the good news buried in the dirt of the parable. Soil is not destiny. Soil can change.

Encouraging us to imagine a world where change is possible. But, truthfully, I have a complicated relationship with imagination.

When I hear people like Robin D. G. Kelley, who's the author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, say things like this, Love and imagination might be the most revolutionary impulses available to us. We have failed to understand their political importance and respect them as powerful social forces. And as I've thought about this sermon series, there's a song that's been stuck in my head.

It's called The Rich Man's House. It was written by families as part of the Poor People's Campaign in the 1990s. I'm not going to sing it, because you don't want to hear me sing, but it goes like this.

I went down to the rich man's house, and I took back what he stole from me. I took back my dignity. I took back my humanity.

And now he's under my feet. I ain't going to let this system walk all over me. And this chorus repeats itself with the rich man's house being swapped out for a number of other things.

The courthouse, the landlord's house, the white house, and more. It's a song where imagination is powerful, where the tables get turned, and the rich find themselves under the feet of the poor. And yet, so many of my experiences point towards a different reality, where imagination feels like a naive approach to the injustices of this world.

Lama Mansour, who is a Palestinian Christian from Nazareth, not unlike another person from Nazareth, wrote an article, Imagination and the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where she explores how can you speak of God, of love, and imagination, in light of the horrific violence inflicted on the people of Gaza over the last several decades, but especially since 2023. And so, as much as I want to speak about the power of imagination as a social force, it does feel absurd to me sometimes.

I've seen plenty of people go down to the rich man's house to take back their humanity and be turned away empty-handed. I felt this perhaps the most in Minnesota in 2022, where I had the honor to stand alongside Indigenous peoples who were organized against a pipeline being built across Native land. In the freezing cold, it does get very cold in Minnesota, if you've been there before, and in the heat of summer, it also gets really hot there, seems unfair.

We acted out of love, imagination, and prayer to protect water. For me, one of the most powerful experiences was shortly after Lent, when I joined a group that set up a prayer lodge to block the pipeline's construction. We prayed, we sang songs, we told stories for hours, until the police finally arrested everyone there.

It was transformational. It was imaginative. And yet, several months later, the pipeline was finished, and hundreds of people, myself included, faced criminal charges for their bravery and their imagination.

I felt the power of love and imagination, and also its absurdity, when the system seemingly walked all over us. I think about this, too, in my personal life. Like, I'm not a very hopeful person.

My idea of a good time is a gloomy day with a lot of rain and very sad music. I went on a road trip with a friend a few years back, and around 2 a.m., I lost DJ privileges because of how sad my playlist was. My friend was like, if I have to listen to another sad song about heartbreak and suffering at 2 a.m., I'm going to crash this car.

So I lost those privileges. But I do want a life that is full of joy, full of healthy relationships, where I can grow into a more loving, compassionate, joyful person. But after many years of therapy and inner work, there are still old patterns of avoidance and hopelessness that seem to pop up.

Parables of Jesus were written to an audience where empire felt like it had total control, one where oppression, calamity, and difficulty were everyday occurrences.

And both the parables of Jesus and the writings of Afrofuturism describe imagination as dangerous, as powerful. So we're going to take a look at Luke 18, 1-8, which is one of Jesus' parables, to see how Jesus describes the power, the danger of imagination. So Luke 18, 1-8, is sometimes called the parable of the persistent widow.

So then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them they should always pray and not give up. He said, In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared what people thought. And there's a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, grant me justice against my adversary.

For some time, the judge refused. But finally, he said to himself, Even though I don't fear God or care what people think, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won't eventually come and attack me.

And Jesus said to his disciples, Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off?

I tell you, he will see that they get justice and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth? So, like all of Jesus' parables, this is a bit of an odd story.

It's supposed to be about prayer, but we don't see anything in here that we would normally see when talking about prayer. There's no temple. There's no offering.

There's no priest. There's actually no prayer that happens in the parable at all. And the characters are contrasting.

You have a widow, someone who had very little power in society, who's being marginalized, who's being attacked by an oppressor, probably a family member who's trying to take her land, and an unjust judge, someone with a lot of power, who doesn't really care what anyone thinks about him. And the twist in the story, the shocking ending, is that the widow, the powerless one, wins justice through her persistence.

The parable begins to get filled in a bit more for us when we see why Jesus is telling his disciples a parable about prayer. So in Luke 17, right before this, which I'm not going to read, but just to briefly summarize, Jesus tells his disciples that a time of suffering is coming. He compares it to the destruction that occurred in the time of Noah with the flood.

He paints a cataclysmic picture of suffering to come. Death, destruction, and loss are on their way. The disciples are overwhelmed and they say, when will this happen?

Where will this happen? They want to know more about it, how they can be prepared for this tragedy. And in response, Jesus tells them a story about a widow.

The widow in this parable embodies dangerous imagination.

She is not a polite old lady. She is not asking nicely for the judge to give her justice. She is feisty, she is indignant, and she does not stop asking for justice until she gets it.

The authors of the New Testament in Color, which is a great commentary written by people of multiple different backgrounds, describes it this way. Using the only weapon she possesses, that of persistence, the widow brings her petition repeatedly until the judge relents. A piece of humorous detail is lost in the English translation.

The RSV, which is just a translation of the Bible in English, states that the judge is willing to grant her justice so that she does not wear him out. The Greek verb, hypopiazo, literally means to give someone a black eye. It's a boxing term.

The image of a haughty judge being beat up by a feisty widow is rather comical. So in the parable when the judge says, I'll see that she gets justice so that she won't eventually come and attack me. This is the judge saying, this widow is going to beat me up.

She's going to literally come into my house and give me a black eye if I don't give her justice. The widow is dangerous to the judge. June Jordan is a black poet who wrote a lot in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

She has a poem that really captures, I think, the tone of this parable. The poem is called I Must Become a Menace. And it starts off with her saying, I will no longer lightly walk behind you.

Be afraid. I plan to give you reasons for your jumpy fits and facial tics. I will not walk politely on the pavements anymore.

I must become a menace. The widow was a menace. I can imagine the judge looking at his docket for the day, seeing the widow's name and thinking, not her, not again.

When she leaves after he said, no, I'm not giving you justice, I'm sure the judge thought to himself, this has got to be the last time I see her. She's not going to come back tomorrow. But as he lies in bed, drifting off to sleep, I would guess his thoughts start to go back to the widow, hoping that she won't be there the next morning.

And then when he walks in and sees her name on the docket, he's exasperated yet again. So the widow does not just get over it. Which is perhaps an accusation that has been lobbed at some of you, told, just get over it.

The widow does not just let it go. She doesn't care that she's supposed to give up. She persists until she gets justice.

And persistence is the foundation and the starting point of a dangerous imagination.

So there's this one silly that comes to mind for me here. I've used this before and I will continue to use this image. The horrors persist, but so do I.

I imagine this is what the widow looked like on her way to the judge's house. And her pink convertible, she's poor, she did not have a pink convertible, she walked. But the horrors persist, but so do I.

That was the determination, the mindset that the widow had. So when I think of imagination, I think of imagination as being future facing. I think about what could be in the days to come.

And while that's true, the widow teaches us that imagination is refusal. Imagination is an adamant and loud no to the way that things are. So Luke 18 describes how the judge refuses to give the widow justice.

And the widow in turn refuses to accept his verdict. It's kind of like Uno reverse. If you've played Uno, someone puts down a plus four card, you pull out your reverse, put it on the top of the deck, and it goes back to them.

See, the judge also has a vision of the future. He wants everything to stay exactly the same. He doesn't care what God thinks.

He doesn't care what people think. He wants everything to be as it is every single day. for the judge, change is his greatest enemy.

But the widow dares to imagine a world outside of the judge's unchanging rule. And her refusal challenges his ability to not change, and she ultimately forces him to give her justice. A dangerous imagination says no to the way that things are, and holds fast to a vision of a more just world.

A dangerous imagination refuses to accept that things will always be the way that they are today, and refuses to believe that change is not possible. Every time the judge made his ruling, saying there will be no justice here, the widow said back, no, there will be justice, I'll be back tomorrow. But refusal alone is not enough to make imagination dangerous.

And Jesus' choice of characters in this story show that imagination is dangerous as it centers the margins. The characters in the parable contrast in their positions of power. Jesus uses a widow, one of the most marginalized people in society, as the centerpiece of the parable.

She can't rely on other people to protect her. Her family isn't there for her. The justice system itself is set against her.

And when faced with the end of their world, Jesus tells the disciples to look towards a widow. A widow confronting a powerful system that does not care about her well-being. And the judge, who's supposed to be powerful and unmovable, can seize defeat.

The widow, who's supposed to be powerless and weak, emerges victorious. Jesus consistently describes weakness and smallness as strength. The mustard seed becomes a tree.

The yeast works its way through the dough. The widow defeats a judge. So most underdog stories have a pivotal moment where there's like a heroic training montage.

Think like Rocky running through the streets of Philadelphia at 5 a.m. And the hero becomes powerful enough to defeat their enemy. But that doesn't happen with the widow.

She stays a widow for the whole parable. There's no heroic training montage. And it's precisely because of her smallness that she defeats the judge.

so I want to be clear about that is not a glamorization of suffering or of oppression. bell hooks in her essay Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness puts it this way. Marginality is more than deprivation.

It is also the site of radical possibility, a space of resistance. It offers to one the possibility of radical perspectives from which to see and to create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds. And the parable of the widow invites us to consider the possibilities, the alternatives, the new worlds that come from the margins.

Jesus centered the margins because the margins are the only place where a just future can be envisioned. So when Jesus ends this parable, he ends it with a statement and with a question. The statement basically goes like this.

If the judge, who is unjust, gives justice to the widow, how much more will God, who is not an unjust judge, give justice to his disciples. And that is good news, especially to those who have just been told they're going to go through a time of tragedy. But from there, Jesus quickly turns to a question.

Will he find faith when he returns? It's easy for me to read that question with a judgmental tone to it. It feels kind of like when I was a kid during the summer, my parents would leave for the day.

They might say something like, no, when we get back, you'll have done all of your chores, right? It's a question with both of us knowing full well I would do my chores when I heard the car turn into the driveway and then sprint to do whatever it was they had asked me to do.

But this is not a skeptical or judgmental question from Jesus to the disciples. It is not a doubt of their faith. The question is an invitation.

an invitation to pray. It's an invitation for the disciples to approach prayer, to approach God, like the widow approached the unjust judge, with their hearts open to the possibility of change, of alternatives, and of new worlds.

It's an invitation for them to stay persistent in their pursuit of justice, knowing that God is not like the unjust judge. It's an invitation to the margins, to smallness, to weakness, to ride out the waves of disaster with the determination and the feistiness of a widow who will not take no for

an answer. So we see this invitation to possibilities, alternatives, and new worlds, and Afrofuturist writings as well. So Walidah and adrienne maree brown have a book called Octavia's Brood, science fiction stories from social justice movements.

It's a collection of short stories written by activists, organizers, healers, people of many different backgrounds. And in that book they talk about the power of what they call visionary fiction. Reflecting on the legacy of Octavia Butler and on other Afrofuturist authors, they describe visionary fiction saying, we believe it is our right and our responsibility to write ourselves into the

future. Afrofuturism refuses to accept that change is impossible. It centers the margins by insisting that those who are marginalized have a place in the future, are creators of the future.

And Brown and Imarisha position themselves here saying, as two black women, we think of our ancestors in chains, dreaming about a day when their children's children's children would be free. They had no reason to believe this was likely, but together they dreamed of freedom, and they brought us into being.

Afrofuturism recognizes and honors the persistent dreaming that the generations prior have held onto in their search for justice. And Afrofuturism encourages its readers to carry that legacy of dreaming and imagination forward. Jesus ends his parable with a question.

Will there be faith when I return? And Brown and Imarisha ask a similar question of their readers as well. Are we brave enough to imagine beyond the boundaries of the real people and then do the hard work of sculpting reality from our dreams?

Are we brave enough to have faith, to have persistence, to be a menace like the widow? And when Jesus' disciples were faced with a disaster, Jesus told them a story using visionary fiction, that's what parables are, to teach them about prayer.

The parable of the widow is sometimes described as how we fight against injustice, we persist, and that's true. But it is first and foremost a parable about praying. And praying can be many things.

Prayer can be connecting with God, with each other, with nature. Prayer can be grief and lament. Prayer can be praise and worship.

prayer can be action, turning our faith into deeds. And when Jesus tells his disciples to pray, using the widow as an example, he's inviting them to see prayer as an act of imagination. We have that same invitation.

When we pray, we become open to possibilities, alternatives, narratives and new worlds. We say no to the way that things are. We refuse to accept that the world always has to be this way.

Prayer is an imagination-making space, one where our hearts and minds can be set free to dream again. When we pray, we gain confidence that just like the judge's verdict wasn't final, just like the widow refused to accept that the judge had a final say. We too can say that the systems of death all around us don't get to have the final say either.

When we pray, we do so believing that there is more to the story yet to be written. I believe it was the prophet Natasha Bedingfield who wrote, the rest is still unwritten. Think about the Lord's prayer, the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples to pray as repeated by people across time and cultures.

When we pray your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, we are saying a prayer of refusal, a prayer where we say no to the things of this world that are not part of God's kingdom. We're saying a prayer of imagination where we envision a future where people find love, comfort, and belonging.

When we pray, give us our daily bread, lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil, we're saying a prayer of persistence, a prayer that knows that every day is a new day, that change is always possible. When we pray for yours, creator God, liberating God, is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, we're saying that the systems of this world do not get the final

say, that the story of liberation and freedom, the story of Jesus, the story of his people will continue. Prayer is a way for us to become brave enough to go beyond the boundaries, the systems that seem so powerful, to sculpt reality from our dreams, or as we say in the Lord's prayer, to imagine, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

So I want to end with a story about something that happened recently, where I saw people brave enough to imagine beyond boundaries and sculpt reality from dreams. So last week was July 4th, if you've forgotten and blocked that from your memory like I have, it actually was just last week, which is wild, and the 250th anniversary of America.

And many of the commemorations for the 250th told a particular version of events in America, a certain history that left out the many catastrophes and horrors that have been inflicted on people over those 250-plus years. And those commemorations also had a future-facing angle to them, 250 more years of American greatness.

They're both a look back and a look forward. And in the midst of this American imagination, a small group of people, not part of really any organization, decided to engage in their own act of dangerous imagination. mission.

This group was predominantly black and decided that their act of refusal would take place at George Washington's Mount Vernon estate in Alexandria. They put together bouquets with cotton and $100 bills to symbolize the stolen economic labor that made 250 years-plus possible. They wrote on a flag the words of Frederick Douglass, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July.

They rewrote the Star-Spangled Banner into a new song called The Blood Spattered Banner. They sang, they marched, they chanted, and they made their way to the memorial of the enslaved at the Mount Vernon estate, which is where a number of people, we don't know exactly how many, who were enslaved by George Washington are buried.

And there, they read the names of those that we know. They held space for the names that we don't know. They sang songs, they left bouquets, and recommitted themselves to carrying forward the legacy of freedom.

One of the grounding elements for this group and this ritual was their insistence that July 4th, 2026, was not the commemoration of 250 years. July 4th was day one. It was day one of a new history, of a new future.

It was day one of a future where widows outlast judges. They went down to the rich man's house, and they took back dignity. They took back humanity.

We have a short video clip that we're going to show of that act of dangerous imagination. down to the forest, and I took back what they stole from me. Took it back.

Took back my dignity. Took it back. Took back my humanity.

Now he's under my feet, under my feet, under my feet, under my feet. They're going to let us open up to a band where they stole from me. Took it back.

Took it back. Took it back. Took it back.

Took it back. Took it back. Took it back.

Took it back. My friends, where is it that you're going down to?

And what is it that you are taking back? When I went down to that prayer lodge in Minnesota, I left a transformed person. I took back humanity and dignity in such a way that four years later, it is still changing me.

And when I think about where in my life right now, I need a dangerous imagination. My prayer life is what comes to mind. For a long time, I've allowed cynicism to rob me of the joy of connecting with God and others through prayer.

I've allowed numbness to rob me of the deep grief and lament that comes when we pray. I've allowed hopelessness to rob me of the visions and imagination, the new worlds that can be imagined when I pray. So my invitation for you this week is to turn that song, I went down to the rich man's house, into your own prayer, into a work of visionary fiction in your

life. I encourage you to swap out the rich man's house and replace it with something else. Replace it with something that makes you feel like imagination is absurd, something that brings up grief and loss for you.

And I invite you to swap out the words humanity and dignity and replace those with something else, the specific things that you want to take back. For some, this might be a prayer of lament and grief at all that you've had stolen from you. For others, this might be a feisty prayer as you stomp on whatever it is that's under your feet.

But wherever you find yourself this week, I pray that you see yourself in the widow of Luke 18, that you become a menace, that you practice persistence, that you say no as many times as you need to, to the things of this world that are not of love and justice, that you find possibilities, alternatives, and new worlds open to you through prayer.