The following sermon
was preached August 19th 2012 at Lighthouse Lutheran Church in Freedom,
Pa.
It is a tremendous privilege to be
here at Lighthouse Lutheran and invited to preach. As pastor Whalen said, I am
a student at Trinity School for Ministry, and studying to be ordained as a priest
in the Episcopal Church. I haven’t always been an Episcopalian though. I was
actually raised as a Presbyterian, and my family is still active in the Presbyterian
Church. I’ve visited quite a number of different churches before finally
landing in the Episcopal Church. For a while I even attended a Lutheran Church.
I found much to admire there and have learned that it has a lot in common with
my own Anglican/Episcopal church.
Not only have I had the opportunity
to experience a bit of the diversity of the Christian faith, but I’ve also sat
in on a few services from entirely different religious traditions. I took a
class in World Religions a few years ago, and our professor asked that we visit
a variety of places of worship from outside the Christian faith. His hope was that we would gain a greater
appreciation for what it felt like to be an unbeliever or seeker visiting one
of our churches. He wanted us, in a kind of reversal, to know what it felt like
to be the outsider looking in.
Following these instructions, my
wife and I visited Beth Hillel-Beth El, a Jewish Synagogue, on a Saturday
morning. We certainly did feel like outsiders. At the door to the sanctuary there
was a bowl full of yarmulkes. I awkwardly took one and fastened it to my hair.
Inside there was hardly anyone there, accept a few worshipers. All of the
prayers were being sung in Hebrew. I tried to follow along, putting my very
limited knowledge of Hebrew to the test, but didn’t have much success. The
service seemed to go on forever and eventually the sanctuary was full of
worshipers. There was a brief lesson (given in English thankfully) and I began
to feel a bit more comfortable, especially when I looked across the way (they
met in the round) and caught the eye of a familiar face, a co-worker of mine
who seemed extremely amused and bewildered to see the young man she knew from
work who was studying to be a Christian pastor.
Although the service was largely in
another language, I felt I could connect with the scripture readings, many of
the prayers, and even a lot of the lesson. The biggest moment of
cultural-religious vertigo came not during the service, but afterwards as I
looked over the welcoming table in the lobby. There was a small stack of
newsletters with a title that certainly raised my eyebrows. The name of their
newsletter was “The Pharisee.”
My gut reaction was to think,
“Don’t they know that the Pharisees are the bad guys? Why would anyone, especially such warm and friendly people as these, want to
be associated with that vicious, arrogant, self-righteous rabble?” In Christian circles we are accustomed to
thinking of the Pharisees this way. When the Pharisees come up in a Gospel
reading our programmed response is to boo and hiss saying, “I can’t wait to see
how Jesus nails them this time!” Seeing the Pharisees lifted up as a standard
of godliness and faithfulness seemed like a highly ironic reversal to me.
The original audience of today’s
gospel reading would have had the opposite response. Among the people of God who were serious
about being faithful and living according to the Holy Scriptures, the Pharisees
would definitely have been considered the good guys. They distanced themselves
from the Temple establishment that had become corrupt and compromised by its
association with the Pagan Roman Empire, and instead emphasized that fidelity
to God was to be found in everyday actions such as gathering around the table
and having a meal with family. They shared with Jesus a belief that the
writings and prophets were holy scripture, along with the law, as well as a
belief in the resurrection of the dead, the final judgment, and the age to
come. Believe it or not, out of all the various religious movements of his
time, Jesus appears to have most in common with the Pharisees!
When Jesus tells a story about two
men who went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector,
it would seem immediately obvious to his listeners who the good guy was and who
the bad guy was going to be. Pharisees
were known for their piety, but one wouldn’t expect to see a tax collector in
prayer at all. Tax collectors were notorious for being greedy colluders with
Rome, traitors, and oppressors of the poor. Jesus, however, turns the people’s expectations
on their heads.
The Pharisee is outwardly
blameless. He does all the right things and then some. The Law requires the
faithful to fast on the Day of Atonement, but this guy fasts twice a week! The
Law requires the faithful to tithe on certain crops, but like a good Pharisee,
this guy tithes on everything – even garden herbs. Everything the Pharisee says
about his actions is true. The problem is the spirit in which it is said. The
Pharisee does not come to God humbly acknowledging his utter dependence on him,
but instead is full of pride in his own accomplishments. The Pharisee’s prayer
offers praise to himself rather than to God! The Pharisee finds his justification,
the validation for his standing before God, in comparison to other people. He
isn’t like the wicked tax collector, he is one of the good guys, and on that
basis he believes he can come boldly into God’s presence. The Tax Collector, in contrast, stands far
off and beats his chest. He acknowledges
that he is a sinner, and begs God for mercy.
At this point, we may be tempted to
compare ourselves to both of these characters. You may say, “God, I thank you
that I am not like this wicked Pharisee who seeks to justify himself on the
basis of his good deeds, but I am a good Lutheran and know that I am justified
by faith alone!” Do you see how doing
that would be another ironic reversal? We are more like the Pharisee than we
care to admit, even if most of us wouldn’t be quite as blatant about it. It
seems like an unavoidable part of our human nature to find our identity and
justification by comparing ourselves to others. I once read a sermon by Debbie
Blue that put it this way,
“We construct, we
know, our goodness over against some other person or philosophy or way of
being. How can we feel good if we don’t know what out there is bad, or define
ourselves over against it? And it works better if there’s a bad that seems “out
there,” something we think we are not really a part of (corporate America,
fundamentalism, decadent living, worldliness, repressive government,
whatever).”
We saw this principle illustrated
well recently in the media. The president of Chick-Fil-A came out against same-sex
marriage and in defense of traditional marriage, and suddenly it felt like
everyone was scrambling to take sides. One side was congratulating themselves
that they weren’t like those backwards bigots who hate gay people and the other
side was congratulating themselves for not being like those liberals who don’t
support freedom of speech and mock traditional values. For a couple of weeks it
seemed like the whole nation was seeking to justify themselves on the basis of
whether they did or didn’t patronize a particular fast food restaurant.
Jesus commends the tax collector
because of his humility. The tax collector knows that his life is not pleasing
to God. He doesn’t try to justify himself by comparing himself with someone more
sinful than he is. He is remorseful and realizes that he has nothing to stand
upon but God’s mercy. The Pharisee’s prayer tells us very little about God and
much about himself, but the tax-collector’s prayer is rooted in his faith that
God is merciful and gracious. Because of his humility, the tax collector’s
prayer is accepted but because of the Pharisee’s pride and presumption, his
prayer is rejected. “For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the
one who humbles himself will be exalted.”(Luke 18:14 ESV)
Our justification lies not in our
righteous deeds – how well we stack up against others, or with whom we
associate ourselves. It lies rather in
the most dramatic reversal of all. “For
our sake God made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become
the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21 ESV). The very Holy One of God,
God’s only begotten son, in whom he was well pleased, became despised and
rejected for us. The wrath due to us because of our sin was poured out on him,
and God’s blessing, love, and forgiveness was poured out on us guilty sinners. God
the son humbled himself to become man, to suffer for us upon the cross, and
even descend into Hell itself. Although he was laid low by the powers of sin
and death, God exalted him through his resurrection and ascension, so that we
too might share in his glory. It is to Christ and Christ alone that we should
look for our justification.
God, be merciful to me, a sinner!
Amen.
