Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
Pentecost 20C - Proper 25 - Sunday, October 27, 2019
Sirach 35:12-17
2 Timothy 4:6-8,16-18
Luke 18:9-14
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Jesus told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and who regarded others with contempt. Who trusted in themselves that they were righteous. And who regarded others with contempt.
Does that sound like anyone you know?
If you answered “yes” and the person you’re thinking of is anyone other than yourself, this story is for you. Don’t worry, it’s for me, too. For all of us. Because we all, especially those of us in churches and monasteries, need to be reminded regularly of the dangers of trusting in our own righteousness.
Like the Pharisee in this parable, we all set ourselves apart. We literally and figuratively stand by ourselves and thank God for all the ways we are not like other people. Now, most of us probably went immediately to the political. I thank God that I don’t think it’s acceptable to keep children in cages. I thank God I don’t fly a Confederate flag. I thank God I am aware of the impending environmental collapse.
But when you live in a monastery and operate a large guesthouse, you come to see that contempt is often much subtler and therefore more insidious than the political reading our current context makes so easy. Of course, we show contempt to those who differ with us politically, but contempt strikes closer to home, as well. And when it does it has the same effect on us as on the Pharisee in this parable: it isolates us. Or, rather, through our contempt and our trust in our own righteousness, we isolate ourselves from God and one another.
Let me tell you a story.
I have recently given up meditating. Now the secret is out. I’m a bad monk. And you shouldn’t listen to anything else I have to say. It’s all a lie.
Nevertheless.
If you can believe it, it was actually my spiritual director who told me to stop. She even went to so far as to order me to put my meditation cushion in a closet so that it would stop taunting me.
The problem was that my prayer had become work, and not in the Benedictine sense of ora et labora. In the striving, grasping, trusting in myself that I am righteous sense of work. Without my knowing it, I had come to feel that if my prayer didn’t feel onerous, if it didn’t take me away from something I’d rather be doing, then it wasn’t really prayer. If I actually enjoyed it, if the activity brought me pleasure, then it must be the opposite of prayer.
My meditation, which had once led me deep into my longing for God, had become a stumbling block, something I could point to to say “See, I’m a good monk. I’m working hard. I’m choosing to do this thing that isn’t bringing me any joy, because this is what prayer really looks like.” Oh, and by the way, thank God I’m not like those people who think prayer is all butterflies and rainbows. I know the truth. Prayer is hard. It requires commitment. It isn’t about feeling states or consolation. Bring on the dark night!
Never mind about beauty, generosity, warmth, and pleasure, which are all a sign of God’s goodness and a foretaste of the heavenly banquet.
As so many of us do, in our various ways, I had fallen prey to the modern-day version of what Martin Luther called “works-righteousness,” which is to say, to the heresy that we can save or heal ourselves by our own actions. We cannot. The good news of Jesus Christ is that we don’t have to.
When we trust in our own righteousness, we make an idol of our strength. We come to worship, not God, but ourselves and our own distorted sense of what we and the world need. We rely on rules and distinctions and self-improvement schemes. And like the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable, we set ourselves apart, standing far away, both from those we regard with contempt and from God, who makes her home in the imperfect fragility of the human heart.
Really, I think, we regard ourselves with contempt, and so we try to make ourselves good and pure enough for God to draw near. What a foolish project. For God has already drawn near. And all of our groping toward God is really God’s urging within us, God’s longing for us, flowering in our desire for God. You see, God is already at work within us, bringing to fullness the plan of our salvation, our healing, and our flourishing. Our own striving usually gets in the way.
Let me tell you another story. This one is from Cardinal Basil Hume, who late in his life recalled the cookie jar in his childhood kitchen. His mother told him that those cookies—they were English, so they called them biscuits, I’m sure—were for teatime only. And that if he took a cookie at any other time, God would see. Finally, as an old man, he realized that his mother was partially right. God was watching him. But if he had taken a cookie, God would have said to him, “Here, son, have another.”
Despite all we tell ourselves, and all we have been told, we don’t need to be good for God to love us. God is good, and that is everything.
Prayer, and life, need not be all toil and rule and discipline, though those certainly have their place and time. Beauty, warmth, and pleasure can as easily draw us into the heart of the one who made and sustains us. Sometimes God is even inviting us to sit in bed, wrapped in the warmth of a quilt, with a cup of coffee in our hands and a cat at our feet, and to call that kind of resting attention prayer enough.
And if we enjoy ourselves while we’re at it, we, too, might find God saying to us in whatever way we most need to hear it, “Here, my dear one, have another.”
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