Advocacy

Rebecca Sheridan
Sunday, October 19, 2025
Luke 18:1-8

    In college, I worked as a part-time youth director at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church.  One Sunday, as I was leaving worship, Cathy, who was a retired missionary in Cameroon, grabbed me and led me to some tables where there were some people writing, along with blank pieces of lined paper with envelopes addressed to our state senators and congresswoman.  “It’s letter-writing Sunday!” she reminded me excitedly.  “Your voice matters!”  St. Mark’s was a member church of Bread for the World, a Christian anti-hunger advocacy organization, and they had a long-standing tradition of writing letters to their elected officials at least once a year to support policies that would fight domestic and global world hunger.  I had done plenty of service projects as a youth and with St. Mark’s youth group, but to be honest, it had never really occurred to me that the calling of a Christian would include not just service but also advocacy.  Through this experience, I ended up becoming involved in Bread for the World as a member myself, and I am proud to say that I have been a member now for over twenty years.
    We’ve been looking at different discipleship practices this fall, and today, our scripture readings remind us of our baptismal promise to “strive for justice and peace in all the earth.”  Last week, we focused on gratitude and giving thanks.  I noted that “gratitude” is pretty trendy right now.  Justice and advocacy? Not so much.  It’s a messy thing to talk about advocacy in the church right now!  It’s incredibly easy of course these days to get caught up in the culture wars of our country and quickly get partisan about the issues we feel strongly about.  I like to say that Christianity is political, but not partisan.  The Christian church should not align itself fully with any political party.  Christianity is a global movement, and it is Christ-centered.  There’s no Republican or Democratic party in the Bible.  I feel like unfortunately these days we have to say this very loudly because of how the American media represents Christians.  However, we are called to seek justice for our neighbors, especially for those who are most on the margins of society, like the widow in Jesus’ parable for today.  Like Cathy told me, your voice matters!  The discipleship practice of advocacy is definitely a challenging one.  Yet sometimes, advocacy and striving for justice and peace can start as simply as writing a letter (or these days, an email or a phone call), knowing who your local representatives ARE, and voting!  These are all ways we live out our faith and strive for justice and peace in all the earth.
    Today, Jesus tells a parable about a widow who does not give up in pursuing justice.  As you may have known already, widows had very little power in society at the time – women generally could not own property, and very few job options or social security nets were available to them.  The widow uses what she has – her faith, and her voice, to basically persistently badger the unjust judge into granting her justice.  We might ask today, what injustice can bring to God like the widow brings to the judge?  There’s a Mennonite saying that we “pray with our feet” when it comes to matters of justice and peace.  This means, what are we doing to partner with God along with our prayers, like the widow doing what she can to seek justice?  How can we also use our voices to speak up when we witness injustice, especially when it comes to speaking up for those who are most vulnerable? We can also ask, “Who are the widows in our community today?” not necessarily literally widows, but those who are struggling to make ends meet, who tend to be overlooked and taken advantage of by the politicians of our day.  That’s a place to start in striving for justice and peace in all the earth.
    What I appreciated about St. Mark’s focus on letter-writing to support hunger relief efforts is that ending hunger is not a partisan issue – it doesn’t matter who’s in the White House or in our local state Congress, we fight for the hungry because that is what Christians are called to do.  A few years ago, I read a book called The Hole in Our Gospel written by Richard Stearns, one of the CEOs of World Vision, probably the largest pan-Christian global organization in the world.   Stearns suggests that individualism in our American culture can convince us that we only need to worry about ourselves and our personal salvation.  In focusing on ourselves and our own personal spiritual improvement, we leave out a huge portion of scripture.  Certainly, today in these culture wars we’re living in we tend to hyperfocus on what God has to say about sexuality and sexual morality, for example.  The Bible, both Old and New Testament, mentions sexual sins fewer than ten times.  The Bible urges the faithful over 2000 times to care for the widow, the orphan, the stranger, and the poor.  This is where Richard Stearns got his title, The Hole in our Gospel.  When we focus soley on personal morality in Christian living and discipleship, we miss a big part of what God teaches us in the scriptures about loving and serving our neighbors. Where is our cry for justice for issues the Bible clearly and consistently lifts up over and over again?  Talking about loving and caring for the poor is not trendy, it doesn’t show up in the news cycle much, but it is definitely Christian.  It is a good first step to donate food and clothing to our pantry, but we also need to ask why we have these food pantries to begin with.  We need a ”God-sized goal” as World Vision likes to put it, of ending the need for food pantries in the first place.  This is where advocacy comes in.
It’s important to note that Jesus offers this parable of an unjust judge in contrast to God.  Jesus is saying that if a guy who only thinks about himself and acts without fear of any consequence from God or anyone else can grant a persistent widow justice, how much more is God ready to listen to us and help us in our quest for justice?  We seek God’s justice not our own.  And why does Jesus tell this parable?  To encourage us to pray and NOT LOSE HEART.  Sometimes justice seems long in coming, but God does hear us and works with us for justice and peace in all the earth.  One of my favorite quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. is, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” God’s justice is coming!  Our prayers and our voices matter, Jesus assures us.
When we look at the world, we might be tempted to throw our hands up and give up.  Violence, poverty, discrimination and other social ills are as old as sin itself.  Yet Jesus consistently calls us as his disciples to live differently, to love our neighbors as ourselves, and to not lose heart.  God listens to the prayers of our heart and the prayers of our feet.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.