Grateful To a Fault

By

Reverend Litton Logan

October 28, 2007

Scripture:

⁹He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: ¹⁰“Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. ¹¹The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. ¹²I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ ¹³But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ ¹⁴I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” Luke 18:9--14 (NRSV)

Sermon:

Worshiping Who She Used To Be

R. Curtis Fussell, Deadly Sins and Living Virtues, CSS Publishing Company, Inc.

Girolamo Savonarola was one of the great preachers of the fifteenth century. He preached in the great cathedral of Florence, Italy, which contained a magnificent marble statue of the Virgin Mary. When Savonarola started preaching at this great cathedral, he noticed one day an elderly woman praying before this statue of Mary. He then began to notice that it was her habit to come every day and pray before the statue.

Savonarola remarked one day to an elderly priest who had been serving in the cathedral for many years, "Look how devoted and earnest this woman is. Every day she comes and offers prayers to the blessed Mother of Jesus. What a marvelous act of faith.” However, the elderly priest replied, "Do not be deceived by what you see. Many years ago when the sculptor needed a model to pose for this statue of the blessed Mother, he hired a beautiful young woman to sit for him. This devout worshiper you see here everyday is that young woman. She is worshiping who she used to be."

It has been said that the most debilitating sin a Christian can commit or experience is religious pride. Moreover, it is a sin, which at times may be committed in all innocence and honesty. It can be an overt pride like the Pharisee’s—thank God that I am a good Christian or it can be an inverse pride—I was so bad that God had to jack me up to get grace under me. Religious pride whatever its form robs us of an authentic relationship to God and openness to God’s leadership in our lives. A leadership that can take us beyond our current sense of self, our sense of others, and God’s will for our lives. Another case in point.

At one end of 4^th Street in Helena Oklahoma is Crabtree Medium Security Correctional Facility, and at the other end of the street is the First Christian Church. When I was pastor in Helena the prison chaplain, a friend and an ordained Disciple minister, asked me to come to the prison and do a pre-baptismal counseling with a young man and possibly later do his baptism. I eventually learned that the young man came out of a Disciples of Christ background but had never made a public profession of faith and had been baptism.

The Chaplain asked me to do this because she didn’t want the inmates to get the idea that if they joined “her religion” they could receive preferential treatment. She also believed, as I do, that baptism is baptism into a community of faith not just some vague institutional rite.

The Chaplain had contacted the pastor of the church that the young man had grown up in and asked him if he would accept a statement of baptism from her as well as receive the young man as a member of his church under her watch care during his incarceration. The pastor wholeheartedly agreed.

As I visited with the young man, I learned that he had come from a good family and had grown up in one of the major churches in our denomination in Oklahoma City. He had attended college for several years hoping to major in business. It was while in college that he became involved in drugs, which eventually landed him in prison.

He shared with me that the night he was arrested as he sat in the jail in Oklahoma City beating himself up, lamenting his stupidity; he bowed his head and prayed the Lord’s Prayer that he had leaned in Vacation Bible School. He said he felt a sense of peace sweep over him. In those moments he told God, he was sorry for all he had done and asked God to forgive him and to help him get his life back on track. Now, after his plea of guilty and sentencing, he wanted to be baptized in recognition of that forgiveness and as a sign of his new commitment to God.

We talked a while, had prayer, and scheduled a series of pastor’s classes. Later I arranged to baptize him on a Sunday afternoon when his dad, mom, and sister could come up.

As I was leaving the prison after one of my meetings with the young inmate, I noticed groups of men in orange jumpsuits standing around talking, playing basketball, or just setting and watching time pass. Some of these men were my age and minus the DOC’s orange jumpsuits, they could have been anyone you would meet on the streets, see in a movie, or set next to in church.

As I walked, I thanked God that I was at the other end of the street and not at this end of the street like these men. I thanked God that I was not like these men—extortionist, thieves, drug dealers, pimps, rapist, etc.

I thanked God for my life. I thanked God that I had had the discipline and courage to get an education and to answer my call to the ministry. I thanked God that I was able to turn my life in the right directions at some very crucial moments of decision. I thanked God that I was not like these men.

Just as I reached the gate and was about to be let out by the corrections officer, it dawn on me what I had just done. I had prayed a prayer not unlike the one the Pharisee had prayed in Luke’s Gospel. In that same moment, I remembered the time and the place that I had truly felt the weight of my sins and shortcomings and had asked God to come into and direct my life. I might not be a criminal as those men, but I was still a sinner. I stood there looking through a chain-link gate, listening to the clanking of steel on steel and the whirring of motors as the gates slid open. I walked out into freedom but for some reason I didn’t feel very free at that moment. I wave of shame enveloped me. I had forgotten the essence of my relationship to God and the true power of my life—not my piety, not my intellect, not my education, not my call to ministry nor my good works, but simply acknowledging my need for God’s grace each second of my life.

Without any question, the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax collector would have shocked its first listeners, as it would us if we had not been conditioned by years of sermons and Sunday school lessons interpreting the Pharisees in a very negative manner and the outcasts and marginalized tax collector through western, romanticized notions of the poor lost soul.

If there were anyone within the community of Judaism who should have left a time of prayer in the temple acceptable before God, it would not have been a tax collector. Jewish tax collectors worked for the Roman government collecting taxes from their own people. They were participants in a cruel, immoral, and corrupt system; they were political traitors, and therefore always ceremonially unclean. A tax collector was a reprehensible character. While the Tax Collector’s prayer may have been true in spirit at the moment, his life before and maybe even afterwards would have been morally and religiously offensive to most people.

The Pharisee in his prayer like many of us in our prayers recounts his religious devotion—Thank you dear Lord, that I can go to church three times a week; thank you Lord that I can pray six times a day, thank you Lord that I can tithe and help the poor. The Pharisee indicates in his recitation of his religious devotion that he exceeded the law's demands, possibly out of his desire to show his love for God, and to be fully in God’s will as he understood it. He may have also wanted to demonstrate his appreciation for his blessings in life.

Let me also mention that the Pharisee’s prayer of thanksgiving is a modification of a common rabbinic prayer where in a devote and conscientious Jewish male thanked God every day of his life that he was not born a Gentile; he was not one of the uncouth, undisciplined, irreligious, and common people of the land, and that he was not born a woman.

The Pharisee in this parable has generally been portrayed, erroneously I might add, as an arrogant, religious snob because he stands off by himself and negatively comments on the tax collector—thank God, I am not like this man or …these men. However, if this were to be Jesus’ intent it would have undermined the truth of the parable. I would invite you to see this Pharisee as many in Jesus’ audience would have seen him--a devote person who is highly committed to the moral and ethical codes of his faith. He is the faithful, dependable, tithing type, who keeps the doors of our churches open. He is the person who volunteers to serve as a church officer and on church committees. He is the first in line sincerely and caringly to help the widows, the orphans, and the disadvantaged.

The Pharisee is not a villain and the tax collectors some misunderstood, down on his luck good guy, who has been forced by circumstances beyond his control to do bad things to make it in life. In truth, one might say that the Pharisee and the Tax Collector are the best of us and the worst of each of us. If we can say anything bad about the Pharisee it is that, he was Grateful To a Fault.

When the two men are viewed in terms of character and community expectations, without labels or interpretive prejudices, the parable shocks the listener, turns his or her expectations of God and righteousness upside down. Jesus’ audience would have thought if the Pharisee is less justified than the Tax Collector is, then where do we fit into the scheme of things.

It appears that Luke has joined last week’s parable concerning the nagging widow and the unjust judge with today’s parable because they both deal with the subject of prayer. Closer reading reveals more than just parables about prayer at work here.

According to the story of the widow and the unjust judge, God will soon vindicate the saints so Christians persist, hang in there. However, in the story of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, it is not those who think of themselves as saints who are vindicated but those who confess they are sinners who are justified by God’s grace.

Our scriptures today present the ageless story of God's loving justification of sinners and the ultimate failure of works righteousness. Misunderstanding one’s righteousness before God through human efforts and understandings reminds me of another story.

It seems that there were three lawyers at a convention, and they got to bragging about how prominent they were. The lawyer from Arkansas was bragging that he was so prominent people often mistook him for the governor of Arkansas. The lawyer from Oklahoma said, “That’s nothing, why last week I was in Washington visiting the Capitol Building and the guards started pushing the crowds back while saying, ‘Make way for the President, make way for the President.’ ”

The Texan waved his hand in dismissal, “Mighty impressive, mighty impressive, fellas” he said. “However,” he went on, “The other day I was standing on a crowed bus in New York City and a woman standing next to me looked up into my eyes and said, ‘Oh, my God! … You are standing on my foot!’ ”

Sometimes it is easy for us to forget who we really are and to thank God with some justifiable pride that we are moral, ethical, and charitable people. It is so easy to say God, thank you that I am not like ole so in so or those people at the other end of the street. However, hear the emphasis on the “I.”

Let’s say it another way, O God, thank you for your unmerited grace to me a sinner each second of each day of my life. Thank you Lord for leading me in the paths of righteousness for YOUR glory. Lord, I pray that you will help me never to forget that when it comes to my relationship to you I can do nothing of my self to deserve your love, your forgiveness, and your blessings.

Jesus will later say that we must accept God’s forgiveness and God’s unmerited grace just as a child trusts, accepts, and depends upon its parents’ love and care. If we do not live in this state of constant childlike dependency, we run the risk of the debilitating sin of religious pride.

I didn’t keep up with the young prisoner after I left Helena. I knew he was coming up for parole shortly after I left. All I know is that night in the Oklahoma City jail, in his acknowledgement of himself as a sinner and his need for God; he stood more justified before God in that moment than I did as a minister as I approached the gate to Crabtree Correctional facility.

People who think as I did, reasoned as I did that day are locked in a prison of self-righteousness that can be demonic at times as well as they are missing out on the freedom to be authentically human, forgiven and justified before God in Christ through God’s grace--⁸For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: ⁹Not of works, lest any man should boast. (KJV) (Ephesians 2:8-9)