|
|
|
Rev. Tom
Lenhart Let us pray. O God you are behind us and before us. Lay your hands upon me as I utter these words. And may we all feel your presence in our souls. Amen Imagine a local contest for the man of the year. Here are the profiles of two of the candidates. First, there is William. He is a member of the local volunteer fire department. He attended an excellent local college and then went to NYU Law School where he was an editor of the Law Review. He clerked for a NY State Appeals judge after graduation. Today he is a senior partner in a large Westchester law firm; he is the one in his firm that all the other lawyers go to for advice on the most technical of legal issues because he knows the details. He lives religiously by all the rules himself – you know the type. He is a respected leader in his community -- having served on various County commissions and been elected to local government. He has been moderator of his church twice, tithes annually to the church (what a role model at stewardship time) and never misses a Sunday service– sitting right down front in the same pew every Sunday. Many have concluded that he is more devout than the parish’s minister. And then there is the other guy, Bernie. He finished two years of community college after taking a couple of years off in Key West to find himself. He runs a small sales operation behind the local mall, making money by selling financial instruments on commission, preying largely on the elderly. There have been suspicions about his apparently sharp business practices over the years. Despite this he has done very well for himself financially. He, too, is a member of the local church but attends sporadically and keeps a very low profile showing up at the holidays and occasionally for an all-church picnic. He avoids church work like the plague and gives only when cornered by the stewardship chair. And the man of the year is? – I am sure you will agree it is, as they say, a no-brainer -- William in a land slide; he is a pillar of the church and community – the kind of person that one hopes their children grow up to be like. I have, of course, tried to restate in more modern terms Jesus’ famous parable -- found in Luke -- of the Pharisee and the tax collector. Pharisees were the Bible equivalent of today’s lawyers. In Jesus’ time much of the rules of conduct were found in the Torah and in other sacred texts. The books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, among others, provide in remarkable detail the rules and regulations, civil and religious. They include instructions on what to eat and on proper behavior in most every situation -- even identifying the specific punishment for a transgression of the rules. The Pharisees were the experts on these religious laws and most often were the most observant adherents. To serve in the role as interpreter of the law – religious and otherwise – was an honor and the Pharisees had to be, and were, the most learned of their era. Tax collectors were at the other end of the “respect” spectrum. You might ask why – for though we make jokes about the IRS no one really looks down on an IRS agent – they are simply a necessary part of our civil service system. But in ancient times it was different. The government did not pay tax collectors. Yet, these were highly sought after positions. Why, because you got to keep a percentage of what you collected in taxes. Indeed, the government didn’t care what you got as long as it got what it expected and needed. In modern parlance all the incentives were wrong for tax collection to be honest. And it was not. William and Bernie, therefore, fairly reflect the outward positions of these two figures in Jesus’ parable. And so you would think that God exalts the Pharisee – the pious law arbiter -- and the tax collector – the irascible crook – is humbled and condemned. But, of course, that’s not how it comes out -- it’s just the opposite in the parable. Now I expect all of you knew that and have for that last couple of minutes been thinking that I have mischaracterized the situation. In point of fact I haven’t described anything incorrectly but I did omit one small detail – how each of our characters, William and Bernie, sees themselves and their fellow human beings and that makes all the difference. Let’s look again at this wonderful parable and set the record straight. In the parable God didn’t approve of the tax collectors actions and didn’t disapprove of the Pharisee’s. Cheating taxpayers was and is wrong, like all kinds of cheating and fraud. Being faithful was and is not wrong but desirable. So what in God’s eyes was critical in reversing the positions of these two? Here we have two people in the midst of prayer and we are given a glimpse into what they are saying to God in this most intimate moment. This is a moment when we expect to hear candor and honestly. So it is that the Pharisee prays God, I thank you I am not like
other people: And what is unspoken in the prayer but hanging in the air -- is the Pharisee’s ultimate belief that “I am superior – thank you God.” On the other hand the tax collector head bowed mumbles seven simple words in prayer– “God be merciful to me a sinner!” If you listen closely to the Pharisees prayer it is laced with one word “I” -- “I thank you, “I fast”, “I give a tenth”-- in the Pharisee’s mind what is important is what he does and who he is. He has separated himself from the others -- looking down on them from a high mountain of self-satisfaction and virtue. The Pharisee does not realize that while he is different from others in some ways -- in the most fundamental way he is no different and no better. The tax collector on the other hand does not catalogue his virtues but humbly and candidly says have mercy on me, a sinner; there is no superiority in this comment but an implicit recognition of a common bond among human beings in our imperfection. What we share is far, far greater and more fundamental than what separates us. Two experiences have brought this point home to me. Many years ago I clerked for a federal judge, who had been assigned a particularly grim criminal case. A gang of self-styled urban guerrillas had been arrested for robbing a federal bank. In the process they had severely beaten and permanently injured a teller-- all of which had been caught on tape. The FBI in making the arrests in the case had seized a large cache of weapons, including bazookas and grenade launchers. The defendants rightly plead guilty. While there had been discussions between the prosecutor and the defense counsel on the length of the sentences to be imposed, the judge was free to sentence as he saw fit. Now the judge I worked for always wanted me to think about the sentences to be imposed in his cases. He would dutifully ask me my thoughts and then quite rightly do what he thought was best. In his own way he gave me the opportunity at a young age to think about how justice, punishment and mercy really work. I thought I had a good sense of these defendants, especially the gang leader – objectively a really bad guy with an unbelievably long record of violent crime for one his age. And so I was not generally surprised when I read the pre-sentence report. It documented the gang leader’s life growing up on the meanest streets with little family around him. And then I read that three years earlier he had given a kidney to his younger brother. By doing this -- going through major surgery and giving up his own second and back-up kidney – he had saved his brother’s life. Even this angry, violent young man, who rightly was going to prison, had an element of profound humanity and love within him as I believe do all of us. That experience and lesson have stayed with me throughout my life. More recently I saw a collage of photos of mother’s faces taken in Rwanda, Bosnia, New Orleans, Chechnya, Palestine and Israel all holding in their arms an injured child. Despite their differences of race, religion, and economic circumstance --all bear the same expression of incalculable pain and anguish. Such bonds among us strong and deep. And we are alike too in our shortcomings as the tax collector’s prayer reminds us. Much as we might wish otherwise, we are all truly in the need of God’s mercy and forgiveness. We all fall short of living -- albeit in different ways -- as God wants us and we would want to live our lives. But we should not understand in the tax collector’s prayer an endorsement of self loathing. Just because we can recognize our capacity for sin doesn’t mean we should hate ourselves or live our lives wearing a symbolic “hair shirt”. That is not Jesus’ message! There is too much self-loathing in the world, especially I fear among the young. To confess and seek God’s mercy is right. It is honest and is necessary for us to be forgiven and to forgive our selves. But it must always be coupled with the knowledge that when we are forgiven – we are given a new day and a fresh start. When I came to this church, I felt it was important to add after our “prayer of confession”, “words of assurance”. Why? Precisely because as we acknowledge and confess our sins, we must also be assured that God always loves us no matter what we have done. We must never loath ourselves for God loves us. The Pharisee misses the point because he does not understand that the things we share are more important than our outward circumstances that are different. The Pharisee is wrong, however, not only in how he understands his fellow human beings but also in how he understands God. The Pharisee believes that God weighs our accomplishments and actions and acts accordingly. So when he prays – he catalogues all the things he has done right – praying, tithing, and fasting. He sees his faith as a kind of investment enhanced by his actions. He expects either a lucrative stock split or at least a nice quarterly dividend from God in heaven. The tax collector does not come to God with a litany of his achievements --quite the contrary. He acknowledges his failures and asks for mercy. The tax collector is trusting: he has faith that God is a God of love. He may have some qualms about his actions but that doesn’t keep him from humbling himself before God. We do not earn God’s love, mercy and forgiveness; we simply receive them each and every one of us in the same measure. That unmerited love of God that we each receive binds us together as beloved creatures of God. This awareness is the basis for truly loving our neighbors. It is difficult to love your neighbor when you think you are superior. Real love is premised on understanding that we are all God’s beloved children; the tax collector understood that – the Pharisee despite his piety and ritual observances did not. I could end this sermon here and some of you
surreptitiously looking at your watches probably think I should. But one final
brief point is in order. I don’t want you to leave believing that how we act --
what we do does not matter. It does. The difference is that what we do is not
the key to salvation-- those who exalt themselves (by pointing to their
achievements) will truly be humbled. What we do matters not so we earn God’s
love but as the response to and fulfillment of that love. Amen |
|
