380 Same Pan, Different Label

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Same Pan, Different Label”, originally shared on November 4, 2025. It was the 380^th  video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   The world grants justice to regular people when it is bothered. God grants justice right away. How many of those statements are true? Today, we’re going to find out.

   I worked in an aluminum manufacturing plant during some of the summers when I was in college. I worked in a factory that sanded, primed, and then baked a non-stick surface called Teflon onto kitchen pots and pans.

   At one point in the process, the goods were stamped on the bottom with the manufacturer’s logo, Mirro Aluminum.

   But sometimes, they were stamped with the logo of some other company, like Sears or Montgomery Ward, as part of a manufacturing sub-contract. They had different logos, but they were all the same pan.

   We have been re-created in our baptisms as Children of God. How can we live as God’s people, as we were created to be, but not allow the world to put its stamp on us?

   Jesus once told a parable about the “need to pray always and not to lose heart”, and it’s called the parable of the unjust judge. How can those two things, prayer and corruption, go together?

   I found part of the answer to how we can live in a corrupted world in a candy called “Bazooka Bubblegum”.

   Bazooka Bubblegum was sold by the piece when I was growing up. Inside the outer wrap, each piece was enclosed in waxy white paper with a colorful graphic comic printed on it.

   One of the first jokes I ever read was wrapped around that pink gum.

   The comic showed a police car pulling up to a cartoonishly drunk man. He was standing near the curb, hanging onto a streetlight.

   “What’s the trouble, buddy?” asked the policeman.

   “I’m looking for my house keys,” said the drunken man.

   “Where did you lose them?” asked the policeman, getting out of his car to help him look.

   “Down the street,” answered the man, waving his arm.

   “Well,” said the policeman, “if you lost them down the street, why are you looking for them here?”

   The man answered, “Because the light’s so much better here.”.

   That joke could be read as a parable, and its lesson would be pretty close to the one that Jesus tells in Luke18:1-8, the reading from the Gospels that is being read in the vast majority of the churches in the world today.

   This part of Luke’s gospel is happening in the small towns and villages just north of Jerusalem toward the end of Jesus’ public ministry. The 12 disciples were following Jesus, along with thousands of others. Jesus was preparing them for his death, and for the life that they would experience after his resurrection and ascension into heaven.

   Here’s the story, beginning with Luke 18:1-5,

18 ¹Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. ²He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. ³In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent.’ ⁴For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, ⁵yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’” 

   This judge was a bad judge. The requirement to care for widows and orphans and resident aliens was a significant part of the Old Testament religious law. This judge didn’t care.

   When Jesus was asked to name the greatest commandments in the law and the prophets (what we would call the Old Testament and what Jesus would then call “The Bible”) Jesus answered, in Matthew 22:37-40,

37 He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

   God and people. Today’s reading tells us that this judge, “neither feared God nor had respect for people.”, and certainly not for the powerless widow in Jesus’ story. 

   Nevertheless, the judge agrees to “grant her justice” because she has bothered him.

   Then comes what appears to be the point of the parable, but it isn’t, in Luke 18:6-8a,

⁶And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. ⁷And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? ^8aI tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them.

   So, is the message, “the squeaky wheel gets the grease”? Whiners win? God answers prayers based on volume?

   Not exactly. Let’s look at why.

   First, let’s look at what it means to be “his chosen ones who cry to him day and night”.

   When we pray, we aren’t telling God anything that God doesn’t already know. Prayer is an expression of a living relationship with the one true living God, that is, of faith.

   Faith is received, it’s not achieved. It’s a gift from God. Faith becomes who we are.

   Paul says, in 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18,

¹⁶Rejoice always, ¹⁷pray without ceasing, ¹⁸give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.

   How is that possible? How can we pray without ceasing? He is not telling us to be unfocused when we’re driving, or not really present when we’re with our families.  He is saying that prayer is the expression of a relationship with God, of the faith that is God’s gift to all who repent and receive it in their hearts.

   So, when we live from our true selves in faith, when our faith defines everything about us because it defines the new Creation that we have become, that faith is the substance of our prayer. Prayer is not just said, it is lived “day and night”.

   Second, let’s look at what it means to receive “justice”.

   Justice, in the Bible, means to do God’s will.

   This takes “justice” out of the coercive political realm and places it into a question of how God reigns.

   There is no delay in God’s help because God is always present, and what we seek is what we pray for in the Lord’s Prayer when we say, “thy will be done, on earth as in heaven”. 

   Evil enters the world through rebellion against God, through people like the unjust judge and through people like us. We struggle for justice. We pray in that living relationship of faith 24/7 and we struggle to do God’s will, to make this world more like the world God intended it to be, more like the life of faith for which we were created.

   And ultimately, God’s will will be done. And it will be done speedily, at the right time, in God’s time. But now, we struggle for justice, for God’s will to be done in our rebellious world.

   And then comes what appears to be an addition to the parable, but is the point of it, in Luke 18: 8b,

^8bAnd yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

   That's a chilling question, isn’t it? But, it is a fair question.

   There is no question that Christianity, measured by numbers, is in decline in the Western world.

   Every church wants to grow, but like the cartoonish drunk in the comic, we are often looking in the wrong places for the key to do so.

   The key is in God’s hand. It’s in the pierced hands of the risen Jesus Christ who invites us to find our way home by following Him.

   And where is Jesus taking us? I think that he is taking us to the place where we lost the key.

   Jesus says, in John 14:6,

⁶ Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

   What does this mean?

   First, as it has been said, Jesus taught adults and played with children and we do just the opposite. We need to refocus on teaching adults as a means for the Holy Spirit to make disciples, increasing expectations, and for life transformation.

   We have a God-given path to new life to offer. Jesus is the Way.

   Second, the world needs robust Christian communities. It needs people who can point to a path forward for the lost, the outcast, the unpopular, the needy, and the alone, and for those who cry to God because they have nowhere else to go, who are beloved by God.

   For those who know they need to be saved, we have an answer. Jesus is the Truth.

   Third, there is nowhere in the Bible that says, “Go build some churches.” The command from Jesus is to go make disciples.

   Most non Christian people in our country aren’t really interested in maintaining our buildings, or our human traditions, or our personal legacies. They aren’t looking for political or social service groups thinly disguised as churches. They are seeking new life, and God is seeking them through us. We have good news for them. Jesus is the Life.

   But some churches have allowed the world to put its stamp on them. They have left proclaiming new life in Jesus Christ and seek instead to use the coercive power of the community to seek political or social justice. They no longer seek God’s will, they have become only community organizers using religious language. What they accomplish will not last; it may not even help.

   They seek to do whatever political and social influencers approve

   This is why the first Christians were persecuted. They refused to bow to any worldly authority, only to the authority of God.

   They were expected to believe and worship only in the manner that the government approved. Some of us have lived under these conditions, and many of us know people who are living under them today. Even now, if someone tells you that you don’t have believed it, you just have to do it, you can be pretty sure that you’re living in an oppressive system.

   The world wants to use us. The world wants to tell us that we have no value in and of ourselves, only the value they tell us that we have.

   God tells us that we have such value to God that he died for us. All of us. So that we could be with him together forever in heaven.

   How can we live as people of God in today’s world?

   We don’t have all the answers. But I think that we have one great question that our increasingly secular country could benefit from hearing: “Have you heard about Jesus?”

   Christ will come again and, when he does, will He find faith on earth? We have a message to proclaim about Him, and we are called to proclaim it. Nobody else will proclaim God’s love for all people on the cross except us: Christ crucified, risen, and coming again.

   What do we have to offer the world that it can't get anywhere else? Jesus.

   How do we re-covert our church organizations into being Christian communities? Jesus, but we can’t do it by ourselves.

   That is the work of the Holy Spirit and it has already begun within us. We don’t bring Jesus to people. He’s already there. All we can do is to name the name of Jesus to them, His essential reality revealed in the Holy Spirit. All we can do is to make an opening with the question of our time, “Have you heard about Jesus?”

   The challenge is great in our times, but we follow a great God.

   We struggle with all that would hold people back from living as the new Creation we have been reconciled with God to be.

   Look at our world today. It is like the unjust judge in today’s reading from Luke. It neither fears God nor respects people. It cares only for itself, and some of us have been seduced by its belief in coercive power.

   But we take a longer view. We long for the day, at the right time, when Christ comes to judge the world and bring in a new heaven and a new earth.

   One of my uncles, Uncle Jimmy, was developmentally disabled. He lived with his parents, my grandparents, then with his sister, my aunt, then in a home. He worked in the warehouse of our family business his whole life, until he retired.

   He barely spoke, except in words of one syllable. I’d call him once a month or so and our conversations were usually always the same, “Hey, Uncle Jimmy.” Hello.

   “This is your nephew David.” Yeah.

   “How are you doing?” Fine.

   “Are you getting enough to eat?” Yeah.

   “Are you getting fat?”  HaHa. No.”

   Are you keeping busy?” Yeah.

   “What are you working on?” Coasters.

   “I think the Packers are going to do pretty well this year.” Yeah.

   “Well, talk to you later” OK.

   Then he would call his sister and say, “Guess who just called me!”

   When his sister, my aunt, died, one of her sons, my cousin, told me a story.

   He said that when he went to tell Uncle Jimmy that his sister had died, he was quiet and looked out a window for a long time. Then he said, “But, who’s going to take care of me?” My cousin answered, “Ann (another cousin) will, and we’ll all look out for you. But, someday you and Barbara, his sister, and all of us will see each other again in heaven.”

   My uncle said, “Won’t that be a wonderful day, when Jesus comes and opens up all the graves, and we’ll all rise and be with him forever.”

   That was the highest number of words I ever heard that my uncle had spoken, and it was a statement of God’s promise and of our future hope. The outcome of the faith we have been given by God.

   Like the pans I made in the factory, God tells us that we are valuable to Him because of what we, God’s people, have been made and saved to be. Not because of the labels that the world stamps on us.

   Christ will come again and, when he does, will He find faith on earth? We are the means that the Holy Spirit uses to share the faith we have first been given. We have a message to proclaim about Him, and we are called to proclaim it. Nobody else will proclaim God’s love for all people on the cross except us: Christ crucified, risen, and coming again.

   Let us share the good new with everyone, near to us and far away, and live in God’s peace.

   And when Christ comes, may we bear the stamp of Jesus.