Note: This sermon was delivered on October 24th. It is a taken from Luke 19:9-14
My education has not done a good job over the years showing Black Hat we like to see the Pharisees wearing when we read the Gospels wasn’t always earned. The fact that the Pharisees were something of reformers, seeking to move the focus of personal religious life away from the temple and into the every-day life of the home – in effect being some of the first “Priesthood of all Believers” fans[1] - alluded me in college. So much so that when I was asked to help design the dorm t-shirt I proposed the witty “4 out of 5 Pharisees agree Warren Hall stinks.” Aren’t I clever?
If what I say is true, if the Pharisees as a whole weren’t crazy about the Temple, then what can we make of the Pharisee in out story? He is labeled a Pharisee but isn’t acting like one. As someone who often gets labeled “Christian” and isn’t always found acting like one, I have sympathy for our lone Pharisee, and through this story find cause to locate those inconsistent places in my own life where I might seek to bolster my own self-esteem by crushing and stepping on others.
Many of you know that I don’t like to write my sermons in my office. Too sterile, and all those books remind me that I am forgetting something but they don’t make it easy to figure out what it is I am forgetting, so I do most of my sermon reading and writing at places like Panera and Coffee Shops like Stauf’s. Safe bet that if it is the 3rd Thursday of the month around 2 pm you will find me, my laptop, a stack of copies, and a plastic cup of soda I have refilled more times than the Panera people might appreciate, sitting by the front window of the Grandview Panera working away.
I was doing some research on a Saturday at the Upper Arlington (UA) Panera Bread, and from the moment I walked in there it was the State of Nature, the Lord of the Flies. Here I am trying to study the Bible, listen for the Spirit, and the UA Panera is kill or be killed. People are getting yelled at for cutting in line, numerous if not countless people are stealing soda and coffee, moochers are trucking in their outside food and laptops are bogarting the free wireless internet connection as their users nurse a cup of the most inexpensive thing on the menu and pilfer the free samples. And here I am feeling like an island of civic responsibility, eating and drinking the things I paid for, and thinking “at least I am not like those line cutting, soda stealing, internet mooching, sample hoarders.” Now, where have I heard something like that before?
Where my sympathy finds its end with regard for our Pharisee is precisely the same place that I recognize my own inconsistency. I too, am like those soda stealers. I too, am like those sample moochers. I too, am like that Tax Collector; I have nothing to boast. I am proud, and I am righteous; arriving at those conclusions on the backs of others. History tells me that I am not alone.
The prayer that the Pharisee lifts up to God, no matter if it is uttered in the Temple or in the home, is nothing unique to the times. Prayers of the day drip with the language we hear in this parable. One well known example praises God for the decision the supplicant to be in the library studying the word of God and not like those shopkeepers opening their stores and hocking their wears. Out in the rabble the shop-keeps undertook lesser pursuits. One should be thankful for God’s ordering their life to desire study over making money and the like. The issue at hand is as real today as it was back then. It is the thing that keeps the Pharisee from going home with God’s justification.
There is nothing wrong with living a Pharisee life. There is nothing wrong with living like the Older Brother of the Prodigal Son. There is nothing wrong with ordering your days around God and seeking to follow God as best as we are able. There is nothing wrong with that; the church wouldn’t exist if it were not for people who sought to live their lives pleasing to God. Live your life, but avoid the word “this” like the Pharisee uses it. Avoid the comparisons, avoid contrasting; stay away from believing yourself to justified because you are not like them. There is already so much of that in the world.
How many of us turned on the TV, the radio, or the computer to find story after story of young men and boys taking their own lives? How many of us heard stories of bullies kidding, joking, exposing these young men and boys to humiliation because they were or were thought to be gay? In perhaps one of the most depressing, anger inducing, crushing news cycles, report after report came in from all over the nation telling us that this was not a local incident; it was a national disease. What this Parable has to teach us, what this parable reveals is that those who seek to bully, those who seek to lift themselves up on the backs of others find themselves in relationships with these so-called “lessers” – the Tax Collectors, the “different” middle-schooler, the closeted college student. These relationships are essential for their own understanding of self. The bully needs a victim. The Pharisee needs a Tax Collector. And as Christians seeking to follow in the example of Jesus, we too often look for the Tax Collector in our own midst; someone to be thankful we are nothing like. Forgive us, O God.
Justification ends this parable as told by Luke. The Tax Collector beats his chest before the Temple and walks home with it. The Pharisee finds justification elusive, and we are reminded that our rightness before God is not found in the purity of humanity but in the love and grace of Jesus Christ. Understanding that no matter how you are, or what you are, or who you are, none of those compares to whom which we belong; we lean into the grace of a God who places us in right relationship to the world around us. Right relationship with the Creator and Sustainer of Life, right relationship with our fellow brothers and sisters, right relationship with the creation, and right relationship with ourselves; this is the justification of a loving God who provides for us the only thing we have in which we can boast: the grace and peace of our Lord Jesus Christ.
[1] Johnson, E. Elizabeth, “Luke 18:9-14 Exegetical Perspective”, Feasting on the Word: Year C, Volume 4, WJK, Louisville, 2010
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