Exalted and Humbled

Scriptures: 2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18, Luke 18:9-14

Are you getting a little tired of the lectionary taking us through these letters to 1^st and 2^nd Timothy?  Me, too.  Well, this is the last one, so by next week we can move on to something else.  And you can tell from the tone in this fourth chapter of 2 Timothy that Paul (or a disciple of Paul’s) is getting ready to hang it up as well:  “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race…..”  So, since we’re all getting a little tired of all this admonishing that’s going on in these letters, I’m not going to spend much time with this text, anyway, but will focus on this oh-so-familiar parable from Luke.

Al got us started pretty well with his introduction to this passage last week, even if it was a week early (though, as he said, we hope that gave you a chance to think about this story during the week).  Who do you identify with in this parable?  O c’mon – we all know that everyone wants to identify themselves with the tax collector, even though that would be a most surprising thing for anyone to have done in Jesus’ time.  But he’s certainly intended to be the good guy here.  At the same time we’re each of us probably surreptitiously looking around the sanctuary trying to decide, “OK, who are the Pharisees here?”  This parable certainly does lend itself to one-up-man’s-ship and finger-pointing, doesn’t it?

And, of course, as you are undoubtedly expecting me to say, that is to miss the whole point of the parable.  For those who were listening to Jesus tell this story, the Pharisee would at least initially be perceived as the good guy – in fact, among the best that that society had to offer.  The Pharisees obeyed the law of Moses; they lived a life devoted to prayer and to God; they were the ones to be looked up to and emulated.  The tax collector, on the other hand, represented the worst that that society had to offer.  He was a man whose whole business was corruption, he was complicit with the Roman Empire, and he was probably skimming money off the top as he went.  He was the Bernie Madoff of his day.  So, those listeners would have expected the Pharisee, with all the good that he was doing, to be justified in what he was laying before God.  And the tax collector should be given nothing – except perhaps the mercy that he was asking for.  And Jesus, as he so often does, turns the tables on his listeners’ expectations.

What I would like for us to consider today is that we are both Pharisee and tax collector.  What I mean is that there are traits being exhibited by both of these men that we can find inside ourselves, and our task is going to be to identify those traits that make us truly ourselves – the traits that God most wants from us.

Maybe you are like me when you go to the doctor.  Your first impulse is to tell your doctor how well you are (unless, of course, you’re a hypochondriac) – how good you’ve been feeling.  You want to get a good report.  (I read about someone who was absolutely thrilled to see an A+ on their doctor’s report….. until they realized that that was their blood type.)  But, as we all know, doctors do best when we let them know what is not working.  The very act of trying to impress, of minimizing our brokenness, can get in the way of our healing.

So it is in our relationship with the Good Physician (one of the names sometimes used for Jesus).  And the cornerstone for this relationship is how we feel about and then how we treat other people.  It’s no accident that this parable follows immediately after the one we considered last week – the story of the unjust judge and the persistent widow – for the key to both stories is found in the interaction between the two key people.  How the judge treats the woman – until he finally relents – how the Pharisee treats the tax collector – is what Jesus wants us to focus on.

I think I may have told you this tale before, but there’s a story about two pastors who fall to their knees at the front of the church, crying out to God, “I have sinned.  I am unworthy.  I am unworthy.”  Just then a janitor walks in, and observing their display of piety he also falls on his knees and joins them in their refrain:  “I have sinned.  I am unworthy.  I am unworthy.”  One pastor turns to the other and sneers, “Now look at who thinks he’s unworthy!”  When I first heard this story it reminded me of Mike Myers and Dana Carvey as Wayne and Garth of “Wayne’s World” kowtowing with their “We’re not worthy; we’re not worthy” act.  The humor in that act was that it always came across more as self-aggrandizing than as real humility.

Self-aggrandizing.  That’s the key to understanding Jesus’ attitude toward the Pharisee.  Note how many times he uses the word “I”:  “I thank you that I am not like other people…..”; “I fast twice a week…..”; “I give a tenth of all my income.”  (Now, I suppose, with a stewardship campaign coming up, maybe we shouldn’t be too quick to criticize someone who gives a tenth of all their income…..but I digress.)  Again, think about when I said that there is something of each one of these men in each of us.  We wouldn’t be here on a Sunday morning instead of on a golf course or at Starbucks or reading the Sunday paper if we didn’t have some sense that we are doing something right before God – if we didn’t experience something in ourselves of being “holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service,” as Paul says in Romans (12:1).  In a word, we want to think of ourselves as people of faith.  But note how Jesus sets this up – his reason for telling this parable:  he wants to put on display “some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous”, and secondly (and this is the truly important point) “(who) regarded others with contempt”.  The Pharisee stood in judgment over others.  And, as Mother Teresa was fond of saying, “If you judge people, you have no time to love them.”  Another quote that’s appropriate for the Pharisee is from one of my favorite authors, C.S. Lewis:  “A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you’re looking down, you can’t see something that’s above you.”

So, this is something of a warning parable about not getting too comfortable in our faith.  And the nature of the warning is found in the question:  who do we look down upon?  Who is it that makes us feel just that much more righteous?  Teen-agers in a rock band or with wildly colored hair?  Gamblers, junkies, alcoholics, others with various forms of addiction?  Poor, smelly, homeless people?  Immigrants and illegal aliens?  You can probably add to this list.  In this political season we’re being given plenty of opportunity to find those who some, at least, would want to cast out from our society.  In fact, the nastiness of the political campaigns this year is a perfect example of the “we-they” kind of mentality with all kinds of aspersions being cast upon the “other” – the outsider – the ones on whom some politicos would want us to look down.

In Jesus’ time a tax collector would certainly belong on this list (actually, maybe that’s still the case in our time).  As with the clergy and the janitor in the story cited above, there is a pecking order here – and those on top were the ones who “trusted in themselves that they were righteous.”  Jesus’ hope for them is that by seeing the fallacy in using righteousness to put oneself above someone else, they will discover a true humility.

Humility.  Again, there’s an arc apparent in the lectionary texts.  Not only have the last several weeks been teaching us to focus on the foreigner in our midst – the despised one – but also each of them is pushing us to discover the meaning of humility for each one of us.  The unjust judge who learns humility from the persistent widow.  The healed leper who turns back and thus who learns a call to obedience through humility.  Timothy, who is not to give in to a spirit of timidity, but rather, in all humility, to practice self-discipline and sound judgment.  If you’ve been here for all four of these October Sundays, you’ve gotten a healthy dose of Biblical texts that extol us to accept and love the foreigner and the outcast and to find ways to do this in all humility (and if you haven’t heard all four sermons, you can find them on our church’s web site).

However, humility is the most difficult of all virtues, because there are so many ambushes waiting to trap a person who truly wants to practice humility.  We even make a joke about it, talking about the person who proclaims, “Thank God I’m so humble!”  In effect, this was the case with the Pharisee:  he was proclaiming his good deeds in order to show off his faithfulness.  He was exalting himself.  It is an all too easy thing to do.

So, having recognized that of the Pharisee which we have within us, what is there of the tax collector?  In a word:  our brokenness.  Note that the tax collector hardly even seems to be aware of the Pharisee there with him.  Rather, he is focused on what has been going on in his life, on his relationship to God, and what it is that God wants of him.   He knows he is a sinner.  That’s always the first step, that piece of self-insight.  He knows that he is in need of God’s mercy.  And then, most importantly, he knows that that mercy – that grace – is always there.  Note the significant difference between this man’s prayer and those of the two pastors I told the story about a moment ago:  their emphasis, like the Pharisee’s, was “I” directed — “I have sinned.  I am unworthy”.  But  the tax collector’s was God directed:  “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”  John Knox says, “For the Pharisee the key word was I:  it repeats like a hurdy-gurdy.  He thanked God, but actually his thoughts were on himself….. The tax collector…offered a cry rather than a prayer…..”

In this way we find the tax collector inside ourselves.  Our cry is a cry for mercy…..and, most wonderfully, it is there.  Rebecca Messman puts it this way:

“What Jesus wants is ourselves.  The worst part of our lives finally aired out, no longer weighing us down with perfectionism, but thrown off at the foot of the cross.  Jesus is seeking tax collectors, who dwell within every person, ready to be made whole again by his amazing grace, ready to receive his radical love that gives us what we do not deserve in the radical commonwealth of Christ’s love where the last shall be first, the sick will be healed, the blind shall see, and the poor shall be rich, and you and I will be called children of God.”

This is what Jesus wanted for the Pharisee and what he saw in the tax collector.  He is not simply condemning the one and affirming the other, but rather he is holding out to his disciples – to us – a picture of what humanity is like (self-centered) and an image of what humanity can become (humble before our creator God, and so turned outwards towards others).  This parable is really about the nature of prayer and our relationship with God.  Jesus is saying that when we pray God cannot hear us if we despise others.

And now Jesus really brings it home for his listeners.  The man who humbled himself is justified.  Dr. Ralph Wilson asks:  “Can you imagine the impact Jesus’ parable had on the Pharisees present?  They must have been livid with anger.  How about the crowd?  They were amazed, wondering, pondering. But the prostitutes and tax collectors, thieves and adulterers in the audience may have been weeping, for Jesus had declared that it was possible for them to be saved, to be forgiven, to be cleansed, to be justified before God.  There was hope for them yet.  Jesus had given them hope.”

That’s what Jesus does:  Jesus gives us hope.  No matter what our brokenness, no matter how prideful or exalted we may make ourselves, no matter what has gone on in the past, God is there when we humble ourselves before God.  As Kate Huey says, “If we, too, come before God in humble openness and fervent trust in God’s goodness, we make room for God to work in our lives.  That is much closer to righteousness than all the good works we can manage.  Honesty in prayer flows from openness:  an open heart, an open mind, a life opened to God and to transformation.  Such humble and trusting prayer helps us to discover who we are, and who God is:  merciful and loving and just.”

And what does our other text from 2 Timothy have to say about all this (I bet you thought I’d forgotten about it and wasn’t going to circle back to it, didn’t you)?  At first blush the writer – Paul or a disciple of Paul – seems to be contradicting the thrust of the parable when he declares:  “From now on there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give me on that day…..”  But the context here is that Paul is at the end of his life, looking back on what he has accomplished and the persecution he has suffered.  He is not exalting himself, but in all humility he offers that life’s work to his Lord:  “The Lord will rescue me….. To (God) be the glory forever and ever.”  Like the tax collector, Paul is giving the glory to God and is accepting God’s grace and mercy and love.  It is all he needs to do.  It is all you and I need to do.  God’s grace is there for those who, in all humility, come before God in prayer.

Amen

Dave Pomeroy

First Congregational Church/United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
October 24, 2010