Sermon for October 23

Pentecost 20-C

10/23/22 St. John’s

Luke 18:9-14

 

In seminary I had a history professor who used this little graphic to describe the central point of the Reformation – exactly what I said to the kids. It was about the rethinking of the idea that we go up to God somehow in our lives of faith with the biblical truth that that is not how it happens at all. No, the Reformers said, God comes down to us.

 

The biblical truth is that God meets us right here in our lives – especially in our suffering, struggle, and pain. That’s incarnation – God made human. That’s the message of the cross – we meet Jesus, we say, at the cross.  Jesus taught us that we follow him by taking up our cross, by embracing our cross and not running away from the pain of life it or trying to escape it.

 

I heard a quote this week by the great writer Fredrick Buechner who died just recently and who was himself an ordained pastor said he found church boring (including and maybe especially the sermon) and the ideal worship service should be like an AA meeting. Which is, I think he meant, that it’s a lot of people sharing how unmanageable their lives are and how they are turning everything over to God.

 

Jesus sums it up in today’s gospel reading: all who exalt themselves will be humbled and all who humble themselves will be exalted. First he tells a parable that kind of explains that tag line “to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.” Probably Pharisees, folks who were still trying to climb up to God and looked down at the folks who weren’t.

 

Jesus was always coming up against people who thought they were righteous and better than other people. In all the gospels, the Pharisees stood for all those folks. They are Jesus’ nemeses and they serve a purpose for the evangelists. They are symbolic of the kind of religion that Jesus came to challenge. The top down kind of religion, the kind that some call the way of ascent – trying going up to God, leave behind the flesh we might say, and then expecting to be rewarded by God – not only the afterlife, but in this life as well. Rather than the way of descent, which Jesus taught, the way of the cross. And that way doesn’t try to leave behind the flesh but embraces it, the way of incarnation. God with us, God among us, God in us.

 

So Jesus was probably telling this parable to some Pharisees, or their compatriots in scripture, scribes, teachers, leaders of the synagogue.

 

 

And, one of the main characters in this parable, is not surprisingly, a Pharisee. And he is just being a Pharisee –  he is thanking God that he is so much better than everybody else. And he is expressing, even to God, scorn for people who he thinks are below him, they’re as sinners unlike himself. And to be fair, that was the way religion and society was structured, not so different from today. The official position of the culture was that church folks were righteous and that those on the fringes of society – thieves, rogues adulterers – were not. He even goes so far as to throw shade a fellow worshiper in the temple – or even this tax collector! And he gives God a short list of a couple of key things he does in his “ascent” into blessedness. I tithe, I fast.  So that’s the Pharisee.

 

And then Jesus contrasts him with the one who is on the path of descent. The one who stands up in front of the group and says, “Hi my name is Bob, I’m an alcoholic.” Who confesses his sin. Who hits bottom and he knows he needs to hit bottom because that’s where he meets himself and the living Christ. He knows that on his own he doesn’t stand a chance – he needs God so much more than the Pharisee does. This guy is a tax collector – another iconic symbol in the gospels of someone who is a sinner. He is hated by society and known to be a traitor to his people. But this is one of the people the gospels tell us who gather around Jesus because they know, sinners that they are they’re a mess. Along with the prostitutes and lepers. They knows they don’t have a hope of climbing up to God and that their only hope is that God comes down to him. His prayer is “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”

 

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t do good works, but as soon as we think we are doing good enough we are in trouble.

 

I saw a documentary one time about people being evicted from their homes, by greedy landlords, and the film maker interviewed the sheriff who came and evicted them and asked him how he felt about throwing people out of their homes. Reminded me of this tax collector. Making his living off of other people’s suffering. He said it’s horrible, I feel awful about it. But at least I try to care about people and treats them with respect and dignity, rather than someone who is cruel and uncaring. So maybe, the tax collector had his own way of doing good works.

 

Because there’s nothing wrong with doing good – that’s how we live our faith. But that’s now how we enter the kingdom of God.

 

And Jesus says, predictably because he whole point is to critique the Pharisaic point of view that you can keep the law perfectly and earn salvation, it is the tax collector who is justified, or we might say is in the right relationship with God.

 

And then he give us the zinger, which fits right in with so much of his other important teaching. All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.

 

So, that’s the way of the cross, that’s the lesson Jesus has for us today.