Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
The Rev. Samuel Kenedy
Pentecost, Proper 25 C - October 23, 2022
Our gospel lesson for today contains one of Jesus’ better-known parables. In fact, one commentator I looked to for help with the sermon rued just how well known and how well-understood the parable is after some 2000 years of reflection on it by the church, and devoted rather little space to it in his commentary. And while nothing we hear today may surprise us, I think this story can serve as a reminder of the message of mercy and hope that sits at the very heart of Luke’s Gospel.
Our lesson for today picks up after Jesus has begun his final journey to Jerusalem. This journey in Luke’s Gospel begins with the healing of a group of lepers and then launches into a series of teachings from Jesus about the nature of the Kingdom of God. In the section in which we find ourselves today we find Jesus describes some of the characteristics of life in this Kingdom to help us begin to understand what are the values, the deep rhythms of wisdom that uphold the kingdom of God? What is a Kingdom-dweller’s life supposed to look like? In last week’s lesson, Jesus taught his disciples about perseverance in prayer, and then this week he further describes some of the essence of Kingdom life by telling a story that is also couched in the imagery of prayer. Admittedly, it starts out sounding a bit like one of our “a rabbi, a priest, and an imam walked into a bar” jokes, but in the end pierces right to the heart of the Gospel message.
In this story, Jesus tells us that “two men went up to the Temple to pray” – this would have resonated with his listeners as they were journeying with Jesus to do precisely the same thing at the Feast. One of the men in Jesus’ story was a Religious leader and the other a tax collector. Our Tradition has wrongly conditioned us to have a bit of an allergic reaction to any mention of Pharisees in the Text, and to think of them as the villains in any story that they may appear. We would do well to remember that in Jesus’ day, unlike our own, tax collectors were considered far more villainous and suspect than religious leaders.
But, as you’ve been paying attention to Luke’s narrative style in this Gospel, you are likely already suspecting an inversion of sorts in the moral order of the story. This is something we know Luke loves to do this in his Gospel -- take our expectations about how the world works and then stand that moral order on its head -- we think of the Beatitudes or the Magnificat as examples of this. It’s a sort of extreme literary disorientation therapy that knocks us off our feet to then reorient us to Kingdom values. Well, if that’s what you came to the text expecting, you won’t be disappointed here. Jesus does precisely that.
So we’ve got these two fellows on their way to the temple, and the respected religious leader gets there and, I have to hand it to him, at least he doesn’t beat around the bush. He gets right to the point. “God, I thank you… that I am not like other people. And just in case God has forgotten who these “other people” are that he should evidently be concerned with, our fellow at prayer is ready to list them off, “robbers, villains, adulterers, -- or even like that guy – the tax collector.”
Now, while this is incredibly relatable and entertaining precisely because it’s so relatable, it’s also clear that this man is not really praying -- at least not to God. Some of our English translations help tease that point out a bit more than others. One reads, “The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself.” This isn’t prayer. It’s projection. And that projection is just one element of a framework that helps that leader feel secure in who he is and in his standing in his community and relationship with God. But as secure as he might feel in that moment, all of that projection is just a thin veneer of plaster over a thick, wall of desperation deep in the human soul.
It's not just this poor religious leader who does this. We humans are all experts at building frameworks like these to help ourselves feel secure and included. In fact, one of the fastest ways for us to build a facsimile of community is to first get clear about who we are not like, and build our community over and against the identity of another. We see silly and rather innocuous examples of this way of creating community all the time. What’s a quick way to build some rapport with fellow Rotarians? Well, poke fun at the Lion’s Club, of course, and if you’re a fledgling Lion’s Club member what do you do to feel more at home? Well, crack a few jokes about the Rotarians.
This example of course is rather benign, and we know that kind of behavior is a bit silly even when we engage in it, but the striking thing is that it works. More seriously, however, as humans, we tend to build cultures and religious communities through these mechanisms of individual and collective “othering” and scapegoating. Theologian James Alison writes, “We know of no ethnic group anywhere on the face of the planet, no gang in the periphery of any major city which is not inclined to build its unity at the expense of a social other.” The problem, of course, is that this “othering” is anything but innocuous -- and is the very seed of the division and violence we see all around us.
Perhaps it’s the universality of this tendency to “scapegoat” and “other” that leads Luke to address this story to a unique cast of characters. In all the rest of his Gospel the groups or individuals engaged in conversation with Jesus are ones we can easily identify: Jesus’ disciples, a group of Pharisees, the young ruler, and so on. But this story is addressed “to some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else” and it’s quite likely we are supposed to imagine this group as being comprised of both some of his disciples and some of the pharisees. And if we think about it, this group cuts across every set of diametrically opposed pairs we could hope to name. And if I’m honest, it cuts a path right to the core of my own heart more often than I would like to admit.
The reality is that the greatest danger to the manifestation of the Kingdom of God in our midst isn’t this cast of villains that the religious leader points to: robbers, evildoers, adulterers, and tax collectors. In some sense he might as well have been listing Natsha, Boris, and Moriarty, because the real villain he has to face – the real villain I have to face -- is the part of me that is willing to participate in creating a cast of “others” to exclude so that I can feel secure – at least for a moment -- on the inside.
But in the Kingdom of God, relationships and communities are formed in a radically different way. Jesus teaches and then inaugurates through his death and resurrection a very different way of being together as humans -- a way of being together in which there is no need of a social other as there’s no scarcity of belonging that we have to compete for. And as we drop our projections and desperate attempts at creating a place for ourselves over and against another we can finally begin to discover who we are and get relaxed into becoming who we were made to be. The priest and theologian James Alison has an analogy for this experience that I’ve found helpful and memorable. He compares this abundance of belonging in the family of God and its effect on one’s soul to the experience of being gently and steadily loved by a kind older relative, “Aunt Mildred,” as he calls her. Alison contrasts spending time with her and it’s effect on the soul with the experience of meeting with a potential employer for a job interview. In the job interview we find ourselves in competition for a limited resource – the job – and we are competing with a host of other candidates we suspect are infinitely more qualified than we are. We don’t know the interviewer, and aren’t entirely sure what the criteria are that they will use to judge us. So, he writes, we go “as smartly dressed as we can manage, with as polished a CV as the bounds of honesty will admit, and all the wrinkles of our life’s history ironed out.”
This is radically different from spending time with dear Aunt Mildred, where after our visit find ourselves a bit more relaxed, a bit more settled in our own skin, and a bit more free to love. How is this possible? Alison writes, “Because we know that Aunt Mildred likes us and wants what is good for us. So when we are with her we don’t need to impress her, or convince her of our worth. In fact we can let our masks down and allow ourselves to be teased and our little foibles to be giggled at. You know her enough to know that she is trustworthy, not out to “get” you and won’t hold things she learns about you against you.” THIS is a bit like the experience of being loved in the family of God and how it slowly does its work of transforming our hearts and frees us from the perceived need to compete with others for standing, belonging, worth, and value.
And the tax collector in this story? Well, he seems to get this. Jesus tells us that his prayer is in resonance with the wisdom of the Kingdom, and it is he who leaves the temple justified, at peace and in harmony with God.
What is this prayer of his? It is quite simple. And is one the desert Mothers and Fathers would recommend to us as the heartbeat of our own prayer lives: “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
Note that he doesn’t project or point to an external cast of villains or extenuating circumstances. He just stands squarely, as he is and asks for the mercy that we all need and that God is ever so ready to pour out upon us. And just as the religious leader’s projection and “othering” is the seedbed for division and violence, the tax collector’s honest prayer for mercy can be the seedbed of hope and healing in our lives and in our midst.
May God, have mercy on us, my beloved fellow sinners. In the name of God: Lover, Beloved, and Love Overflowing, Amen.
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