Twenty-first Sunday After Pentecost
Luke 18:9-14
I had a Sunday School teacher when I was in Junior High who thought she really had the girls in her class pegged. We girls could be pretty catty to one another, two or three forming a little clique over in the corner talking about the other two or three. Or all five ganging up on one. I suppose our Sunday School class could be a nasty scene. This teacher drove us all crazy with the observation "You know" she would say, "If you're pointing one finger at someone else that means you have to be pointing three fingers back at yourself". What an annoying observation. And who was she to be pointing a finger at our behavior.
I feel that way about the story, if you can call it that, in our gospel lesson today. There's not much to it but what there is is like looking endlessly in a three way mirror. You see yourself looking at yourself looking at yourself ad infinitum.
The thing is this. We're reading this story about the Pharisee pointing in judgement at the tax collector and we leave here saying, Wow I don't want to be like that Pharisee who is so self righteous and pompous. And in our pointing at him we shows ourselves up as being as self righteous and judgemental as he
Okay say we leave here saying "I need to be just as humble and abject and needy as that tax collector. But you can't make yourself humble. Isn't there a bit of pride in the the very observation that one is humble. J.D. Salinger in talking about those honest writers who use their literature to confess their sins said that, "a confessional passage has never been written that didn't stink a little bit of the writer's pride in having given up his pride."
It's like two old men sitting in the synagogue during the Sabbath service overhearing the loud lament of another worshipper near them. "God be merciful to me a nobody! God forgive me a nobody! God help me though I'm a nobody! One of the men looked at the other and asked, "Who's this who thinks he such a nobody?"
What ever way you look at it this story will come back to bite you if you let yourself get sucked in to that endless cycle of judgement and comparison.
Pride takes many forms, doesn't it? "God I thank thee that I don't make a big deal out of my religion and pray showy prayers, not like all those religious fanatics we see on t.V. "God, I thank thee that I know my weaknesses and I admit them, not like that Pharisee." God I thank thee that MY social attitudes are correct, not like those ????"
Like the Pharisee, it's so easy for our best intentioned prayers of thanksgiving to slip into self congratulation, just as even our best acts of charity can become self aggrandizing, a subtle way of making ourselves look good. "God I thank thee for ME."
Like the Pharisee we don't seek God's mercy in such prayers--so we usually find none. We come with hands clenched and full, so it's understandable why we go back home empty. The hard truth of prayer, you often get what you ask for. Like the Pharisee, we don't also ask for God, so we get none.
The publican is not a good man. He is a sinful man. A man without merit. A man without hope. His breast beating humility is not a virtue for us to emulate--it is simply his realistic assessment of his own real wretchedness. He is humble.
Neither man is the hero of this story. Both sin--though one sins knowingly and the othe sins unknowingly, but both sin. Some sin by stealing and others sin by praying, "God I thank you that I am not like others," but both sin. Both come to worship that way. Both come needing God's grace but only onwe is open to receiving it.
I think this is a parable about prayer, about Sunday morning here in church. Jesus says, before any altar of God, in any service of worship, you mainly find two sorts of folk--Pharisees and Publicans. Few of us are one or the other all the time. But most of us are some of each some of the time. There are times we enter worship as good, Bible believing, righteous Pharisees who ask nothing and get nothing. We are so pleased with ourselves, so competent, so well fixed. We go home to lunch with a gnawing emptiness because we were so full when we came. My great niece who is two was visiting last weekend. She was playing with some large plastic zoo animals. She kept wanting to take them off into a corner where her brother couldn't get at them. She had one in each hand but when she'd bend down to pick up another she'd have to drop one of the ones she had. She kept trying to add just one more but her hands were already full. Sometimes we come to worship that way. Our hands are already full. We're already self satisfied people. So we offer our thanks and go home.
As Henri Nouwen writes, we can become so attached to some of these things, good though they be, that they become our glory and our intimate prayer with God is never reached. 4 The purpose of prayer and contemplation and meditation is to know and experience God and to allow that Holy God to become the center of our lives. Whenever our attachment to lesser things, even when they are good things, gets in the way of our prayer life, not much happens when we pray.
The Genesee Diary is the personal diary of Henri Nouwen which he wrote during a seventh month stay at a New York monastery where he went to learn how to pray. At the time, Nouwen was a Catholic priest who taught religion at Yale University. Nouwen became so attached to things like a reputation as a scholar and being in great demand as a lecturer that an unmet need persisted in his life which could only be described as emptiness.
Nouwen tired of all the lecture tours, but became disappointed when there were no invitations. While complaining about all the demands, when none were made he felt unneeded. And even though he despised the arrival of the afternoon mail, he was saddened when nothing came for him.
Nouwen's attachment to these things began to determine his mood, his attitudes, and his energy level. He spent seven months in a monastery in an attempt to allow God to live at the center of his life and to be much less attached to these other things.
When we come to God already full, full of our achievements, our own abilities, our own strength, our own wisdom then there's nothing left for us to receive from God.
But there are times in life when we enter this place as publicans, needing everything, empty lost, without hope and (surprise) return home with more than we dared ask.
In other words sometimes we fail at prayer and sometimes we succeed. Sometimes what happens here on Sunday works for us and sometimes it doesn't. It is not for us to know when we will go home "made righteous". All we know(according to last week parable is that we are supposed to keep at it. The gift of "righteousness, atonement, peace is only God's to give. Grace is a gift, grace is not grace if it is expected. Sometimes it is there for us and sometimes it is not
Why?
Jesus does not answer that one here. The gift is God's to give out of God's unfathomable mercy. Christians do not go back home righteous and justified because we have prayed correctly, or have done it all in proper fashion or have struck a sufficiently humble stance. If we be justified, if we be blessed, in our worship and in our prayers it is only a s a gift of God's love. God's mercy is without bounds, extending to sinners of all kinds and well said or half blurted out prayers. It is only through mercy that we ever return home from church any different than we came.
And so perhaps our only true prayer is "Lord have mercy upon us."
Amen