Sermon: Walk Lightly
While I had planned on focusing on prayer for a second Sunday, the sermon had a life of it’s own. As I researched for my sermon I was struck by how many commentaries pitted the Pharisee against the Tax Collector, bad Pharisee vs. good Tax Collector. Oh how we love to pile it on those bad Pharisee’s and love finding a tax collector with a heart of gold. But by judging the Pharisee, “At least I’m not like you.” , are we not like the Pharisee.
I especially enjoyed this reflection from Paul D Duke is pastor of the Kirkwood Baptist Church in Kirkwood, Missouri, and coauthor of Anguish and the Word: Preaching That Touches Pain
THE PARABLE about the Pharisee and the tax collector neglects to mention that the Pharisee was singing "Amazing Grace" on his way to church that day. Or that as he said his prayer, there were tears in his eyes. He feels this stuff. He is awash with religious emotion, truly moved to gratitude for the life God has blessed him to live. Ask him on his way out what he thinks of the tax collector, and he will tell you, "There but for the grace of God go I." He will even think that he means it.
The parable also neglects to point out that the tax collector, when he has wiped his eyes, blown his nose and gone home, will not be quitting his shady job. He can't see any options; it's a nasty business, but he's stuck in it. Tomorrow he'll again take money from his neighbors, hand some of it over to the empire and put some aside for himself.
To see the Publican as honorable and the Pharisee as a creep makes the story false, curdles it to a dishonest (and easily anti-Semitic) morality tale and sends us straight into the trap of saying, "God, we thank you that we are not like this Pharisee!" Better to see him as he is—a thoroughly decent, generous, committed man—and to see the Publican as a compromised, certified stinker.
I know which character my church depends on. I know which one pays the bills, teaches the lesson, visits the sick, feeds the hungry. I'd love a churchful of people with his commitments—people who care enough to fast, people who tithe on all their income and who thank God that they can. As in Jesus' day, it's people like the Pharisee who hold the community together and keep the faith with diligence and passion. We can't color him sinister. He's not J. R. Ewing in a choir robe. He's a better man than I am, and probably better than you.
And is his prayer really so bad? It's very close to some classic prayers of gratitude from that time, including: "I give you thanks, O Lord my God . . . that you have not set my portion with those who sit in street corners," and "Praised be the God who did not make me a heathen . .. [and] who did not make me an uneducated man." Is the psalmist wrong to pray, "I have avoided the ways of the violent"? (17:3). Why not gaze on the mystery of having been spared a certain lot or a certain sin, and give honest thanks?
But there is a word in his prayer that is outside the Jewish form, and that one little word gives him away. He doesn't give thanks that God has spared him from being a thief, rogue, adulterer or tax collector; he gives thanks that he is not like them. "God, I thank you that I am not like other people ..." Really? Here he crosses from the grammar of gratitude into the grammar of elitism. It can be a very subtle line and we almost never notice when we cross it, but we do it all the time. What betrays us is an unexamined refusal of kinship. It shows every time we use us-them language.
I decided I wanted to focus on that confidence of the Pharisee, so sure he is that he knows the mind of God and how this still seems to be the sin of the church, of religions and faiths. Too often we are convinced that we hold the truth to what God is saying, and yet all too often the words we put in God's mouth contradict the words others put in God's mouth. So let's stop saying, "Thus sayeth the Lord" and start saying, "It is our opinion." Nicholas of Cusa's Learned Ignorance is an interesting theological stand. In Nicholas' scheme - the dumbest people are those who think they know, their certainty about what is true, not only pits them against one another, it also prevents them from learning anything new. That is truly dangerous knowledge. They do not know that they do not know. And their unlearned ignorance keeps them in the dark about most of the things that matter. To know that you do not know is the beginning of wisdom.
Wouldn't it be amazing, I found myself thinking if religious leaders everywhere called a press conference and joined hands in a confession of learned ignorance. A humble, graceful act of theological modesty before the infinite mystery that is God.
If just Christians stopped using concepts of truth against one another. Stopped saying, “Thus sayeth the Lord.” And instead learned to say, “It is our opinion that…”
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