Anyone here ever do a vision board? Do we all know what a vision board is? I have never done a vision board. Not that I’m not against having a vision for my life. I guess I’ve just never spent a leisurely afternoon making collages from magazines while sipping mimosas with friends as we share our hopes and ideas. At least, this is my vision of what it means to create a vision board. I don’t actually know, but it doesn’t sound horrible.

So, I’m wondering about having a vision board because of the woman in our gospel today. This insistent widow unrelentingly demanded justice and got it due to her persistence. This was a woman who knew what was right and what she wanted. She was clear, consistent, and persistent. Back in ancient times, I can confidently say this woman didn’t have a vision board, but she did have a vision of what outcome she was working for. She had a vision about how life should have been. And because she had a vision, she was also crystal clear that her current reality didn’t match that vision and she went about making a change.

Her clarity and determination made her impossible to deny forever, even for a powerful person who had no other reason to do the right thing other than to make her go away. How much more do God and the good people in your life want to help make our positive and good visions become reality? This is particularly true when we share our vision so that others can get on board, whether it’s for us personally, for our community, or for our world.

Truth be told, I don’t hear much about positive and great visions for us in the world today. It seems we spend a lot of time talking about what is wrong, who is wrong, and all about our feelings of outrage about what is wrong. We may also spend a lot of time thinking about what is wrong in our families, our lives, our bodies, our homes, or our neighborhoods. And yet with all this time spent being consumed talking about what is wrong (which is an important part of this story), we don’t tend to spend much time creating and sharing visions of positive futures. Neither do most of us make it a common practice to ask for God’s inspiration of what a positive vision for our lives and our world might be. That’s not a normal part of my prayer practice, anyway.

The young ones among us kind of live their lives this way, though, looking to the future and wondering about who they are to become. Adults ask them all the time, “What are you going to do when you grow up?” Their parents and others close to them might ask, “What kind of person do you want to be? What values do you want to embody?”  

It seems to me we slow way down on asking these sorts of questions as adults. Companies, advertisers, and influencers talk to us all the time about what kind of life we should want. They paint pictures for about how wonderful our lives will be if only we buy their products. Our politicians tell us what kind of world we should want to live in, with differences offered across the political spectrum, of course. All we have to do is vote for them and they’ll take it from here. Yet these promises are mostly slippery. Of course, no one actually expects politicians or advertisers to tell us the truth. I guess that makes me wonder about the quality of visions they are setting before us.

So, who is casting a trustworthy and positive vision for you? For us?

One of the great surprises for me as I grew beyond my young 20s, through my still young 30s, into my less young 40s, was to realize that we’re actually the adults. I know that sounds funny, but as some point I realized that we, the people who don’t really having a total handle on life and all its complexities, are the adults. I somehow thought, when I was younger, that the adults in the world really had a better handle on life. They were less fraught with dark emotions, saw reality with clearer eyes, and knew how to navigate complexity with wisdom. Adorable, I know.

Well, than I “grew up” or at least got older and learned what’s it’s like to be an adult from the inside out. I learned that life is still hard, though it does get better than being a teenage or young adult. That is true. The ground underneath our feet does indeed stabilize, but it never really stops moving. I’ll just speak for myself so y’all here have some plausible deniability when you get home. So, I’ll say for me, I don’t always know what to do. I don’t always know who or what to believe. I mess up. I get confused and tired and cranky. Sometimes I just need a snack and nap, like any toddler in the world. Everyone else is like this, too, except for you perhaps!

We, the adults, are kind of a mess at times and yet we’re the ones raising kids, running businesses, holding public office, managing massive hydroelectric dams, and all the rest. We are the adults and yet we are also the same goofballs we’ve always been. So, if we are indeed the adults in this world (among billions more), we are responsible for the positive vision for our lives, right?

So, I wonder about this woman, the amoral judge who just wants her to go away, and her clarity of vision, clarity of what justice meant for her in concrete and real terms. She knew what to ask for and she got it. And I wonder about Jacob, wrestling with God at the ford of Jabbok. Now, Jacob was returning to his home where his brother Esau was. He ran years before to save himself after he betrayed his brother. In this story, he was returning a wealthy man with wives and children and herds, but he was still afraid of crossing the river himself to face his brother.

Wealth, status, and being an adult did not save Jacob from his fear. And in that night before he could bring himself to cross in humility before his brother, he wrestled with God. Before he had the courage to cross or maybe in order to have the courage to cross, he wrestled with God and demanded a blessing that he did not need to steal from anyone. Perhaps that blessing, that was rightly his this time, gave him the courage to face the one he had wronged. Perhaps this blessing gave him the clarity that he could show his face to his brother, ask for forgiveness, and actually receive it in order to live freely as they moved into the future as a newly mended family.

In between the woman and her justice, there was a struggle. In between Jacob and his fraught reunion with his brother, there was a struggle. This does seem like life, does it not, that between us and our hoped for future, there is struggle. But I wonder how much struggle we are willing to suffer without having a clear sense of our call as God’s people, a clear vision for what our lives should be, and for what our shared and collective lives should be. I wonder if we have given up in some ways, in the absence of a clear, compelling, and positive vision for ourselves and the world.

Earlier this week at the Bishop’s Convocation, we heard a speaker from St. Olaf College tell us a story about teaching his undergraduate students about poverty in America and he was surprised that their response to be so tepid, so defeated around the fact that we live in a country where approximately 17% of children under three live in homes where there may not be enough to eat. That’s almost 1 in 5 in America. They sort of shrugged their shoulders. We sort of shrug our shoulders. What are you gonna do?

Well, I don’t know exactly what we’re gonna do. However, I’m pretty sure the solution doesn’t come from tepid responses and shrugging shoulders. And yet this is one problem in a sea of problems. Not only that, this is one problem on a large scale, while we all have our personal trials and worries.

Thankfully, God cares about each one of them. There is a vision for our lives and for our world without human-inflicted suffering, where humans do not harm each other and ourselves over and over. The Kingdom of God is indeed a vision that is yet to come that we get to glimpse here and now. What is it like? Can we name it? Can we describe it on a vision board? Can we be specific?

There is indeed a vision for life after recovery from addiction, trauma, violence, or hatred. What might that vision board look like? What’s the vision board of our shared life in this valley without childhood hunger? Perhaps that vision will come into focus for us through our struggle and wrestling with God, through prayer, through the persistent lifting of our worries and fears to God until clarity comes. And once we’re clear, perhaps the real wrestling begins to work with God to bring God’s vision into reality. But once we’re clear, like the widow, the road to justice will come.

God has a vision for us, for our good lives and for the good lives of our neighbors. The powers and principalities of our day will hand us the visions they have for our lives all day long. We do not need to accept them. After all, we are adults, as weird as that sometimes seems. We are Christ’s hands and feed, the body of Christ in this world. Us. And God has a vision for us to get clear about, to fall in love with, to explore maybe even with vision boards and mimosas, and to wrestle into life with God’s love and accompaniment all along the way.

AMEN.