In about a week and a half you and I and many of our fellow citizens will be
heading to the polls for an election in which we will be choosing senators,
governors, representatives and other various officials.
Although this is only a midterm election and not a presidential election,
spending on this election has set records because of a change in federal
campaign finance law which allows corporate and union donors to anonymously
funnel unlimited amounts of money into organizations which then can use the
money to purchase political advertisements.
The picture that emerges is of a country greatly divided over issues of taxation
and the economy, over the future of our health care system, over the scope of
government oversight of business practices, and over the level of responsibility
the government has to provide a safety net to people who have fallen on hard
times during this economic downturn.
As you hear people debate, as you read between the lines, at its essence this
discussion is really centered on how we relate to other people. There is a large
group portion of our population who see our society primarily as a group of
individuals who are responsible for themselves and who, through hard work and
good management of their own lives, can meet any challenge that arises.
Thirty years ago British Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher said, “There are no
societies – there are only individuals”. Good people rise and the rest fall. One
radio talk show host recently put it this way, “You cannot guarantee that any
two people will end up the same. And you can't legislate it, and you can't make
it happen. You can try, under the guise of fairness and so forth, but some
people are self-starters, and some people are born lazy. Some people are born
victims. Some people are just born to be slaves."
And there is a growing sense among this group that the system of taxation in the
US has forced those self starting folks to pull the cart while everyone else has
been sitting on the cart. For them, this election is about getting those 9
million unemployed people and those 45 million uninsured people off the cart and
forcing them to pull it also.
This group of people senses that they don’t need any help from the government or
any of their fellow citizens, and that they can everything they need to live a
good life on their own.
Another group of people in our society takes a decidedly different approach. For
them, a person’s value comes from within, from who they are, not from what they
accomplish. They believe that given the opportunity to do so, most people will
and have worked hard to better their lives.
They blame an unfair system more than personal laziness and irresponsibility for
the latest economic downturn. They believe that in a time a financial distress
it is a society’s greatest responsibility to help those how have taken the
biggest hit.
And those who have been financially successful, often at the expense of the poor
and ever dwindling middle class, have the greater responsibility to use their
means to help those who are struggling. They feel that people in a society need
each other - that they are inadequate as individuals to do all the things they
need to do in order to have a good life.
I’ve summarized that contrast as best I can, and you may agree or disagree with
me. This is not really a comparison of democrats or republicans because you have
both types of people in both parties.
But I want to take that same kind of contrast and apply it to the realm of
faith. There are strong parallels between these two divergent viewpoints and the
contrast that Jesus draws in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector.
Luke prefaces this parable by saying it was aimed at folks who were self
satisfied and looked down on other people. Again, there are people from all
walks of life who do that very thing. We tend to do what we think is right and
have disdain for people who do what we think is wrong.
As we illustrated in the scripture reading today, a Pharisee and a tax collector
enter the temple to pray. The temple was open for people to come and offer
prayer, usually a prayer spoken aloud to God. The Pharisee was highly respected
by society, whereas the tax collector was universally scorned as a cheat and a
traitor.
It’s my contention that Pharisees have received an unfair rap in our society
because the word has come to be equated with hypocrisy. In fact, Pharisees tried
as hard as they could to be the most law abiding, religiously observant people
in their society.
If you really believed, as most people did, that God gave Moses all those laws
to follow, and that God expected people to follow them forever, which is what
the law says, then the people who please God the most are those who do the best
job of following those laws.
The Pharisees were also involved in teaching Jews who lived outside of Palestine
how to follow the law. They lived with the peasantry and those who lived in the
far flung provinces of the Roman Empire, whereas the Sadducees remained around
Jerusalem.
The Pharisees follow God’s laws very strictly, and they taught others to do the
same. No problem with that, right? On some matters they agreed with Jesus and
his followers, and on others they differed. They agreed with Jesus that someday
God would raise people from the dead – specifically those who followed God’s
laws faithfully.
But they disagreed with Jesus about the need to follow another set of laws
called the oral law – a set of laws passed down orally from the time of Moses –
laws which help people understand how to follow the laws of Moses when the laws
of Moses seem a little vague.
Jesus and his followers did not follow the oral law, which is why he was
sometimes criticized by the Pharisees. Jesus would often respond to those
criticisms by pointing out an area of the law that they were not following
strictly enough. He consistently claims to be stricter and better about
following the laws of Moses.
This Pharisee in the parable separates himself from everyone else, raises his
eyes to heaven, as most people did, and prayed to God, thanking God that God did
not make him a thief or a criminal or an adulterer – an especially not a tax
collector.
Now that sounds rather condescending – but it would not have been heard that way
by Jesus’ listeners. He credits God for the fact that he is not like those other
people. I don’t know if that’s any better, because he still feels superior.
He says, “I fast twice a week and give a tenth of everything I get my hands on.”
Those two days of fasting are not required by the Law of Moses, but religious
people went above and beyond what the law required.
Same thing for the tithing. He not only tithed his income, but he also tithed on
things he bought – like produce or something – just in case the person who sold
it to him had failed to give God a tenth of the produce.
By all accounts this guy is doing everything God can ask of a person. He’s
following the laws that God gave people, he’s avoiding the kinds of bad things
that others do. In some ways he’s compensating for the mistakes of other people
in society.
He’s very much like the rich young man in the next parable who told Jesus that
he had followed all the laws and wanted to know what to do in order to inherit
eternal life. But just like with this rich man, the Pharisee was missing
something.
The other character in this parable is a tax collector. There were various types
of tax collectors in that time, but they were generally considered traitors who
collected taxes on behalf of the Roman occupiers. They would bid on the job of
collecting taxes for the government much the way someone bids on a contract to
pave a road or build a building today.
Whoever bid the highest would be awarded the contract. They would collect the
taxes, pay the government what they bid, and any overages would be the tax
collector’s own income.
The problem was that in this system tax collectors had an incentive to charge
people more taxes than they really owed. The more they charged, the more they
made. And that practice made them some of the most hated people in society. They
were associated with the prostitutes, the drunks and the other dregs of society.
The thing is, this tax collector knows it. He knows he’s a cheat. He knows he
has committed fraud, and he believes that God would be totally right to punish
him for what he’s done. He didn’t come to the temple to talk about how good he
is; he came to talk about how bad he is.
He stands off in a corner, trying not to even be recognized. He feels unworthy
to look up to heaven when he prays. He pounds on his chest the way a mourning
widow would grieve after losing her spouse.
He simply asks God to have mercy on him, to refrain from punishing him the way
he deserves. He admits that he’s a sinner. To me he sounds terrified, and maybe
even a little repentant.
Jesus ends the parable by saying that the tax collector went home justified –
righteous by God’s reckoning. Whether or not he went back to doing the same
thing is not a question Jesus tries to answer in this parable because it’s not
the point.
Jesus concludes by saying, in essence, that being a follower of Jesus is not
simply about doing all the things God tells you to do. It is about being humble,
and that those who humble themselves will be exalted by God.
The Pharisee’s problem is not that he wasn’t doing the right things. He was
doing a much better job of them than the tax collector was. His problem is that
he honestly doesn’t need God anymore. He can make God happy all on his own. And
in his arrogance he cannot see or admit his own faults.
Jesus isn’t picking on the Pharisees here. Some of them joined his movement.
He’s calling out all the people in society who think they have earned God’s love
and society’s respect because of the good choices they have made.
He’s chiding people who fail to acknowledge their role in the sickness that
afflicts their community and fail to see any reason why they should help others
who are more symptomatic of that illness than others.
Most Pharisees were not like this guy; rather than looking down on the peasants
they lived with the peasants and worked hard to teach them how to follow God’s
laws. Jesus is trying to challenge those who ignore the human condition and
believe that everyone can be just as good as this Pharisee if they just try hard
enough.
The idea is not to be better than everyone else and to keep those beneath you
from dragging you down. That kind of arrogance has no place in the kingdom of
heaven. It has no place in the church, even though there are millions of
churches where that is the dominant narrative, the lens through which they see
themselves and other people.
The idea is to be humble, to associate with those who are humble, and to admit
our own brokenness. Both the Pharisee and the tax collector lived their lives
basking in the warm light of God’s mercy. The difference was that the tax
collector knew it, and the Pharisee didn’t think he needed it.
Let’s put this lesson in very practical terms. Author Bruce Larson reported a
remark someone made to him in his commentary on Luke, "Larson... you judge other
people by their actions and yourself by your intentions. If you could reverse
that, it would change your life."
This week I want you to think of someone who you look down on. Come on – we all
do it. I do the same thing. Ask yourself, “Why do I look down on this person? Is
it because of their choices? I may not like their choices, but what do they
intend to do with their lives?”
Are they really trying to do the right thing as they understand it most of the
time? Do they feel sorry for the mistakes they make? I would think that he
answer to both of those questions is usually “yes”. In that regard, we’re like
them, even if our lives take an entirely different course.
We live under God’s grace and mercy, just as they do, God loves them just as
much as God loves us. And, truth be told, we don’t really know what it’s like to
walk in their shoes, to suffer the wounds they’ve suffered, to deal with the
issues they’ve been born into.
So how could we in good conscience come to the conclusion that we’re better than
they are in God’s sight? Who knows – they may be sorrier and more penitent for
their shortcomings than we are for our shortcomings. They may actually be
justified in God’s sight while we delude ourselves in a sea of self
righteousness.
A couple of weeks ago I was walking on the treadmill at the YMCA, listening to
some music. They have four TVs in the room with all the treadmills. A show came
on which was painful for me to watch, even if it was appropriate for my
situation.
There are some shows on TV which are there for no other reason than to make the
rest of us feel better about ourselves. They remind me about why Michelle and I
don’t have cable or even TV in the house.
One of those shows is “The Biggest Loser”. They parade a group of morbidly obese
people around, hiring personal trainers and paying these folks to spend their
lives in a gym lifting weights and working out. It sounds good because in some
ways they’re helping these people achieve a better state of health.
Then these folks compete against each other to see who can lose the most weight.
It’s completely unfair because the women have to compete against the men, and
everyone knows that men lose more weight in these kinds of situations than women
do.
What was hard for me to watch was the looks on these people’s faces as they
stood in front of the entire nation and had themselves weighed. Nothing could be
more humiliating than having millions of people see how fat you really are and
thank God that they’re not so obese.
These people know that society sees them as a bunch of slobs. Obese people have
heard the message loud and clear – they’re unattractive, unacceptable, and they
bring down the rest of society. All they have to do is choose a salad over a
hamburger and they won’t be such defective people.
Meanwhile that show is being watched all over the world by people who are
smokers, who are alcoholics, who are drug users, people with eating disorders –
and all of those problems are just as bad or worse than obesity. Did you notice
that there aren’t any shows on TV about getting those people to quit?
That’s how the Pharisee looked at the tax collector. “At least I don’t look like
that guy” really means “At least people can’t see the part of me that looks
really ugly.” That kind of double standard is the very thing Jesus tells us to
avoid.
The Christian Church is not a society of integrated personalities, nor of
philosophers, nor of mystics nor even of good people. It's a society of broken
personalities, of men and women with troubled minds, of people who know they're
not good. The Christian Church is a society of sinners. It is the only society
in the world in which membership is based upon the single qualification that the
candidates shall be unworthy of membership.
That's a humbling definition of being a church member and appropriately so. It
doesn't lead me to claim some lofty moral status nor does it relegate me to the
dung heap of failure and worthlessness. It enables me to be quite honest about
myself, both my failures and my capabilities.
The reason we speak of Jesus Christ as the "Incarnation" is that he embodies God
in human flesh. But that isn't all he reveals. He reveals not only what we mean
when we say "God," he also reveals what God means when God says "human being."
Jesus was forever reminding us not to discount ourselves. At one point, you'll
recall, in the wake of having done something remarkable, he told his disciples,
"Greater things than these will you do."
Our calling, yours and mine, is to become that kind of human being, to become
Christlike. That doesn't mean we would all become carbon copies or that all of
us who sought to be like Jesus would be a fellowship of indistinguishable
clones. It means that each of us would become the person Jesus would be if he
had our personal history, our talents, our limitations, and our possibilities.
I think the late Trappist monk Thomas Merton identified the secret to humility
when he said, "Humility is being precisely the person you actually are in the
presence of God," which means that the secret of humility is not to focus on
behaving in a certain way but to focus on the presence of God and yourself being
in that presence always.
I am persuaded that if I behaved consistently in the awareness of being in the
presence of God, I would be satisfactorily humble.