Luke 18: 9-14
October 24, 2010
Maybe you are like me. Maybe when you hear this passage about prayer you feel a little angst – angst over exactly which one of the characters you are most like. When I hear Jesus condemn one and praise the other I can’t help but ask, “Which one am I?” Am I like the Pharisee, sure of myself and my goodness, happy with my pious practices, feeling good about how religious I am, how much I volunteer, how much I give, how much I read the bible and pray? Do I, like the Pharisee, say to myself “I’m glad I’m not like that misguided person over there!” Or, am I like the tax collector, humble and honest?
I hope I am like the tax collector. I certainly do not want to be condemned by Jesus. I even try to be like the tax collector. I check myself from time to time: do I think I’m too great, always right, pious, better than everyone else. Sometimes I don’t pass the test and I realize I do think these things. But other times, I can honestly answer, “no, I am pretty darn humble,” and I feel good about that. I feel safe in the glow of Jesus’ praise. I don’t exalt myself and so I am exalted by God. Most of all, I feel relieved to not be like those Pharisees….oops. It’s one giant trap. As soon as I have any sense of clarity that I am the tax collector, and I feel pretty good about that, I have become the Pharisee.
The truth is, when I read this parable I realize that the Pharisee and tax collector both live in me – within my one person. It’s not about the Pharisees verses the tax collectors of the world. When we see the Pharisee and the tax collector as prototypes for distinct groups of people, it tempts us to categorize ourselves and others as either one or the other. The truth is, as we all try to be faithful people, both live within us.
The Pharisee was well intended, I suspect. He was doing what he thought to be the faithful thing…giving to the temple, praying regularly, fasting. Pharisees were not the bad people we often make them out to be; they were as well intentioned as you and me. It’s just that human brokenness crept in and he began to feel quite righteous in his faith, and judgmental of those who weren’t like him. “I’m glad I’m not like the tax collector,” he says. Many Pharisees believed the tax collector’s whole life was an affront to God. Tax collectors colluded with the Roman Empire – taking money from ordinary folks to fill the coffers of the royalty and elite. The religious folks thought tax collectors were bad, by definition. Much like we would feel about any member of the Taliban, for example.
That Pharisaic tendency lives in me…I think it lives in all of us; that tendency to revel in our religion and believe we’ve got it and others don’t. We are well intended, but we veer off course – and often we can veer off course when we think we’re being most religious. We think we are doing what God wants us to do, and others are clearly not. But the fact is we will be wrong sometimes – it’s inevitable. We will be wrong and others will be right, even when we truly believe we are being faithful.
The tax collector is the antidote to our tendency to slip into the Pharisee inside of us. What was it that Jesus was praising in the tax collector? Well, he names it: humility. Instead comparing himself to others, the tax collector looks to God and confesses his own brokenness. He was the same mix of good intentions and human frailties as the Pharisee, but instead of seeing the frailty of others in order to feel justified in who he was, the tax collector looked first for the log in his own eye.
He, like everyone else was living in an imperfect world and the terrible system of which he was a part was also the system that supported him, made it possible for him to work and go about his daily affairs. He could no more escape his system than we can escape, say, capitalism. Capitalism both provides us a way of life that we pretty much like, and it taints us because when we participate in it we automatically participate in the bad as well as the good. As my dad says, when I’m complaining about the bad parts, “You’re right, it’s not perfect, but it’s the best thing out there.” It’s not perfect. And actually, to assume that it’s necessarily better than everything else out there might be a bit Pharisaic.
We buy more clothes if they are cheap, which pressures companies to make things cheaper, which means they find cheaper labor in other countries and these countries have less just labor laws than ours. And that’s just one example. We’re in it and we’re in it deep. So we have to figure out how to be faithful in it, rather than believing we can somehow rise above it.
As we try to live our lives in an imperfect world, sometimes we respond from that Pharisaic part of ourselves thinking we can rise above it all through religion or moral action or free markets or the right government. And sometimes we respond like the tax collector – confessing our brokenness and the brokenness of the world. We are, plain and simple, a mix of both.
I continue to be dismayed by what I’m hearing out there as elections approach. Here’s one example: Recently, someone told me that she was talking to one of her friends. Her friend was upset by what some politician in the opposing political party was saying. At some point in the conversation he said to her: “You simply can’t be both a Christian and a member of your political party at the same time. It’s impossible.” I was stunned when she told me this. These were friends. But we all know how much of this is out there, and when there is not even the veneer of friendship, it gets really nasty, hurtful and spiteful. It reminds me of the Pharisee: You can’t both be a tax collector and have a relationship with God. Jesus sought to challenge this notion that some are suited for religion and faith and some are not based on who they are, what they do, or how they vote.
November 2nd is coming and I’m here to tell you: There is no perfect vote; we know this. Some things the republicans will do better than the democrats and sometimes it will be the reverse. And of course sometimes – if not often – they both get it wrong. And we could respond to this like the Pharisee and be convinced that we are somehow able to rise above it all because we are moral, upright, intelligent people who do know what’s right and which party does the right thing. Or, we can realize that we are complicit in all of this imperfection whether we vote republican, democrat, green or not at all. No matter what we do, we are a part of an imperfect system, and we must act within it, make decisions, take part, and try as best we can to be faithful in everything we do. At the same time we also have to remember that no matter who or what we vote for, we will endorse something or affirm something we don’t really believe – that doesn’t really reflect our faith and values.
Of course some of us will vote one way, some another way. The vote doesn’t indicate people’s faithfulness. Turning to God does, and trying as best as we can to live out what we hear from God. Maybe the most faithful thing we can do as a congregation is to vote in different ways. If we as a congregation sought to figure out which vote was the most faithful and everyone decided the same thing, we would be making a pretty extraordinary claim: That one party is always more on the side of God than any other. A moment’s thought should make us shrink from such a claim. All parties have their moments, and all work contrary to God’s purposes at times. All have been known to pander to people’s self interests, and they all have corrupt politicians. Power, lies, money, and other things often win out over service to the people. Our different, imperfect, faithful votes are a witness to both the imperfection of the system and the complexity of the faith journey where good, faithful people vote differently.
If we think that the faithful decision matches up perfectly with our decision every time, we’re probably relying on that Pharisee inside us. The key is to constantly be honest that we need God’s forgiveness – sometimes for things we are very aware of and sometimes for things we don’t even know about. Like the tax collector, we’re part of the system, whether we like it or not. And as a part of that system we do things and participate in things that put us in need of confession, of God’s forgiveness.
In worship, we always have the prayer of confession right near the beginning. In some ways, we are trying to emulate the tax collector knowing that we are a mix of good and bad, and the way forward is to confess the brokenness and then act as one freed and forgiven: forgiven not because of our own actions, not because we are more faithful than others or because we vote the right way or think the right way or feed the poor or tithe our earnings or pray every day, but forgiven because of who God is. When we are honest in confession it opens the way for God to work through us. If we don’t know forgiveness, if we aren’t freed, we will be paralyzed by the imperfections of this world and stuck in indecision. We will be unable to choose or act because often, if not always, there is no perfect choice.
The prayer of confession is a call to our best selves – the good parts of the Pharisee inside us: generosity, faithful practices, serving others. Having confessed to God, and opened the way for God to work through us, we can act with conviction – not a conviction that lacks humility, but a conviction that comes from our faith – a conviction that God is with us and doing things in and through us. The conviction is not that we are always right, or that God is always on our side, or that my way is more moral than yours: we might be right, we might be doing what God wants, we might be making the more moral choice; but not always and not completely. Each choice will be tainted with the brokenness of this world, and some choices will be flat out wrong. But the awareness of this, and the honesty about this is what gives us the Christ-like attitude toward others and this world – and that’s at least as important as how we vote on November 2nd.
There’s really no “good guy” / “bad guy” story in this parable. It’s both / and. It’s a story about the brokenness of this world: the political systems are broken, the economic systems are broken, and yes, even the religious systems are broken. And yet we live and operate in all of them. We can and should try as hard as we can to heal and restore these systems, but in the meantime, being aware of our own imperfections and the inevitability that we are complicit in the sinful parts of each of these systems will go a long way toward reconciliation with people with whom we disagree or that we judge.
It’s a story about a good ole’ dose of humility – which is really the art of recognizing ourselves in the other and the other in ourselves. The Pharisee and tax collector are just two parts of the same person. We aren’t one or the other, our neighbor isn’t one or the other, we all struggle with being faithful in an imperfect world faced with impossible decisions. That awareness alone – that confession – will make us more connected to God. Forgiven and freed by God, we can make our choices, love our neighbors, and depend always on the grace of God no matter what we do. Amen.
