"Humbled"

Rev. Matthew Miller

FROM THE GOSPELS Luke 18:9-14 Click here to watch the sermon "Humbled"

When it comes to the stories that Jesus likes to tell, not all of them are as straightforward as we would like. Some of that is by design. When we teach parables to kids in the Godly Play classroom, they come in a box that is painted gold. The box is painted gold because we want the kids to know how valuable these stories are. More precious than gold, as the psalmist might say. But they also come in a box because parables can be tricky to understand. They don’t always open, they don’t always reveal their meaning to us. Unlike fables which are designed to teach a moral lesson, parables quite literally come alongside some truth or another. The late Presbyterian pastor Eugene Peterson wrote a book on parables titled Tell It Slant. The title was taken from a line of poetry by Emily Dickinson: Tell the truth, but tell it slant, she wrote. The poem concludes with the line, “The truth must dazzle gradually, or every man be blind.” But the story Jesus tells today in Luke’s gospel is very straightforward. Perhaps we might even say, it is too straightforward because it essentially begins, as last week’s parable did, with a spoiler. Last week we heard the parable of the persistent widow and the unjust judge. At the outset Luke tells us that Jesus tells the parable about the need to pray always and not lose heart. This week, Luke once again offers his commentary that Jesus also told this parable to some who “trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.” But hold on. Did you notice the difference in intros. The parable of the persistent widow is told about the need to pray aways. But the parable of the Pharisee and Tax Collector is told to those who trusted in themselves. A story about something feels a whole lot different than a story that is told to someone. What follows is a stock story with some fairly stock characters. There’s the Pharisee, which the late Austin Seminary President Bob Shelton used to say was just another way of saying Presbyterian. Somewhere along the way Pharisees have been made out as the bad guys in the gospel story, a mischaracterization that has led to deadly and devastating levels of violence against Judaism. In truth, Pharisees are some of the most faithful people you’ll find in the bible. I would argue that this is why they so often clashed with Jesus. We never fight so passionately as we do with members of our own family, because we often care about the same things. And truth be told, I wouldn’t mind having the Pharisee in this story in the congregation. Sure, he’s got a little bit of a judgement problem when it comes to other people, but he’s spiritually disciplined, fasting twice a week. He tithes, giving a tenth of his income. Say what you want, he’s not as bad as all that.  The tax collector on the other hand. "Let's remember why tax collectors were so reviled. These weren’t just IRS agents doing their jobs. The way empire works is by enlisting occupied locals, like offering signing bonuses to people who are willing to abduct and detain their neighbors without the due process of the law. Roman tax collectors were local Jewish men who paid to play. They gave the local Roman authority a lump sum for the right to collect taxes from their neighbors. So, they already had the wealth to bid on the right to do this. Then they could increase their wealth by collecting more than the tax due to the empire and pocketing the difference. The offense of such people was multi-faceted. First, there was the simple pain of being taxed by the occupying power- not necessarily to pay for anything of local benefit to the community, but in service to the larger Imperial project that encompassed nearly 5 million square miles from modern-day Portugal to Eastern Turkey. But add to that the fact that people were being fleeced with little to no recourse. After all, a tax collector could call on soldiers of the occupying army as enforcers. And that was the worst part. It was a betrayal by one’s own countryman. It was bad enough to endure occupation without having one’s neighbors participating in and enabling the indignity of it all. There’s a reason Jesus uses these stock characters to make his point. It’s easy to excuse the distasteful behavior of the Pharisee because despite his pious pomposity, he’s one of us, he’s on our side. And let’s face it, he contributes positively in so many ways. But the tax-collector? He may say he’s sorry and ask for God’s mercy, but we all know who he really is. Are you uncomfortable yet? Because this story makes me very uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable because it practically begs us to fall into the very trap that Jesus would warn us about. When Jesus tells this parable to those who trusted themselves, he isn’t just talking about individuals, he’s talking about groups. Groups of people who trust themselves collectively believe their cause is just and will look the other way if one of their own is at fault. Likewise, we are never so convinced of our own righteousness as when we define ourselves in opposition to another. Such definition lends itself to contempt because it is rooted in a deep insecurity about ourselves that we are often blind to. We want our lives, our choices, our worldview to be justified and the easiest way to do that is to treat the question as a zero-sum game. For us to be right, someone else must be wrong. I don’t think we’re talking about Pharisees and tax-collectors anymore. I would love to make this sermon merely about criticizing self-justifying religion. Then I could sit back and say, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: fundamentalists and woo-woo people with their hands in the air, homophobes, and racists, and misogynists.” Listen, Jesus does not tell this story so that he can tacitly endorse tax-collection, or thievery, roguery, or adultery. That really isn’t the point. The point is that the tax collector knows what the rest of us could stand to learn: that when you’re colluding with the enemy there is nowhere to hide and there is nothing you can do to justify the greed and betrayal at the heart of what you are doing. Let’s be honest, shall we. The Pharisee may use God’s name, but he’s praying to himself. He’s praising himself. His sense of who he is relies on believing that his religion and following the rules and being the best little boy and virtue signaling all the things that will make people think so very highly of him are what will save him from becoming the thing that he hates. I don’t know how to break this gently, but it doesn’t. It won’t. It just makes him different version of something that is, quite frankly, equally hateful. And the tax collector? What does he do? He can’t even look up to God. He beats his breast and tells the truth about who he is, what he’s become, and pleads for God’s mercy. That’s it, as far as we know. That’s all the information Jesus needs to declare that he’s the one who goes home justified before God in this scenario. We don’t know if he turns over a new leaf and gives up his practice the next day. We don’t know if he makes restitution to the people he’s defrauded. We don’t even know if he has it in him to try. Jesus needs the answer to none of those questions to declare the man justified.  Our friend, the Rev. Lynn Hinton, shared a story on her Substack this week about a teacher she had for Clinical Pastoral Experience to become a chaplain. He was a hospital chaplain himself, and a smoker. That last detail was something of a sore spot for his employer. He was even asked not to carry his cigarettes so openly in the front pocket of his shirt when he was working, so he kept them in the pocket of a lab coat in his locker. But one day he forgot to put them away and had to console a man who felt himself to blame for his wife’s likely death. This husband wanted to know if he could be forgiven, if God would forgive him for this terrible thing. The chaplain took a minute, then assured him that, yes, God could and would forgive even this. The man sat with that for a minute and confessed that he didn’t believe much that preachers liked to tell people, but he thought he could believe this chaplain. “You a man of God and you smoke. I always heard smoking was a sin, desecration to the temple of God and all that, but you smoke.” The chaplain nodded. “It’s true,” he replied. “I’m addicted to cigarettes,” he confessed. “So, I figure if you so willing to show your sin, bear it like that on the front of your chest, and still stand up as a preacher of the Word, I reckon you’d tell me the truth about getting forgiveness. I reckon anybody who struggles with something like smoking probably understands how I struggle with drinking. I just figure you’d understand.” At the end of the original movie Mean Girls, young Cady Heron stands before her opponent for the final question in her mathlete competition. She looks at the girl in front of her judging her unplucked eyebrows, her outfit, and the 99 cent lip gloss on her snaggle tooth. “That’s when I realized,” she observed, “making fun of Carolyn Kraft wouldn’t keep her from beating me in this contest. Calling somebody else fat won’t make you any skinnier. Calling someone stupid doesn’t make you any smarter… All you can do in life,” she concludes, “is try to solve the problem in front of you.” What Jesus wants us to know is that the solution to the problem we are trying to solve, which is the pain created by a profound awareness of our own sin, our own weakness, our own limits, will not be found in propping ourselves up on a delusional belief in ourselves. No matter what every self-help book ever written says. And trusting religion, or politicians, or internet influencers, and our ability to uphold what any of them would have us say or do to belong to their club and be exalted in the world’s eyes will almost certainly end in our being humbled when we can no longer hold it together and follow along.  

But if we will instead humble ourselves- trusting in the one who forgives sinners, who lifts up the lowly, and promises release to the captive- the one who promises recovery of sight to everyone blinded by their own need to justify themselves in their own or someone else’s eyes. If we will trust in the one whose power is made perfect not in our strength and accomplishment and in what we get right, but in our weakness, then we might begin to believe that not only is there hope for the people and weakness we’re most contemptuous of, there just might be hope for us too.