Christ the King C - "No King Here"

Saint Luke 23:23–33

 On last week on CBS’ Sunday Morning with Jane Pauley there was a segment on something called the “Online Prediction Markets” which is an app that entices its users to gamble on all sorts of things beyond the usual sports books that invite users to predict who will win and who will lose any given contest and by how much. 

This app is not the nickel-and-dime game people used to play in the bleachers at Wrigley where guys {and it was almost always guys} would bet usually a dime and as much as a quarter on any given pitch.  “Bet you a nickel that the next pitch will be a fastball outside.” “Bet you a quarter that the batter gets a hit.” “Bet you a dime that the runner will try to steal second.” 

“Online Prediction Markets” will allow you to not only bet on the outcomes of sporting events but everything from whether egg prices will go up or down next month, to the number of hurricanes that will strike the United States, to how many times a politician will use a certain word in a speech, and even to who Taylor Swift will chose to be her maid of honor.  Only the stakes are much higher then they were in the bleachers or even at Arlington Park. 

One guy reported that he had lost $6,000 on a trade but he smilingly reported that another day he made $11,000.  When pressed he said that, on average he makes about $3,000 a week.  Enough to allow him to stay at home and quit his day job.

Some might say that any of us who has ever bought a stock, invested in a 401k or even purchased green bananas are in “Prediction Markets.”  We buy in the hopes that our stocks will go up, our 401k will increase, and that our bananas will ripen just in time for us to eat them. Looking at the sky and deciding to bring an umbrella is playing the prediction game.  

But I am willing to bet, yes bet, that nobody, absolutely nobody on that grey day at Calvary would have, could have, predicted that one of the guys hanging on the cross would have had a day named after him called Christ the King or that his reign would last through the centuries.

Jesus is not the kind of king they, nor anybody else, then or now, would be looking for.  

While we would like our leaders to be strong, we also hope that our rulers would be compassionate, reasonable, well- mannered, and well behaved.  We don’t want our kings to be like the imperious monarch in Rogers and Hammerstein’s The King and I who at one point tells Anna, “When I ‘sit’ you shall sit and when I ‘kneel’ you shall kneel.”  

If you have spent the better part of your evenings this week watching Ken Burns’ The American Revolution on PBS you know that what began as just a cause for equal and just treatment from the crown became one giant No Kings Rally.  Kings rule by force, by power, by might, by an iron fist, and eventually “in the course of human events” they face rebellions.  

Jesus was a different kind of king who faced a different kind of rebellion.  The people who rebelled against Jesus wanted a different kind of king.  They wanted someone who would overthrow the yoke of Roman Rule.  They wanted someone who would throw off the occupiers and restore their old way of life.  

In some ways our music today is at odds with the message.  All our hymns are grand, triumphant, but our gospel finds the one of whom we sing helpless and hanging on a cross.

Saint Luke makes certain that we don’t miss what happens when human power shows its darker side.  Jesus was killed by people who knew exactly what they wanted, knew exactly what Jesus should do and, when he didn’t do it, a whole host of people, powerful people, and what we would call the rank-and-file conspired to do away with him.

“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.”1 he said from the cross.  But, if you would have asked them, they would have told you that they knew exactly what they were doing.  

The political leaders killed him because he was a threat to their reign and rule. The people killed him because he wasn’t what they wanted him to be – a leader who rode into town on a white horse and overthrew the powers of oppression.  

On Palm Sunday the multitudes shouted “Hosanna!”  “Save Us Now!” but it turns out that while they may have wanted to be saved, they didn’t want to be saved the way Jesus was saving them.  They knew what they wanted and, in the end, they determined that Jesus just wasn’t it.

As Father Robert Farar Capon once wrote:

We crucified Jesus, not because he was God, but because he blasphemed: He claimed to be God and then failed to come up to our standards for assessing the claim. It's not that we weren't looking for the Messiah; it's just that he wasn't what we were looking for. Our kind of Messiah would come down from a cross. He wouldn't do a stupid thing like rising from the dead. He would do a smart thing like never dying.2

 So, this king on a cross business comes as a complete surprise to them and to us.  We know what we know and we know what we want.  

The problem can be summed up in one of my personal life commandments.  It’s a little long to be embroider on a throw pillow or to be framed in needlepoint above the couch but it is good thing to remember.  “The height of hubris is not knowing that we do not know.”

So it is that the people in their know-it-all hubris bet against Jesus.  If they had an “on-line prediction market,” in their know-it-all hubris, they sure wouldn’t have bet that the carpenter turned rabbi who was hanging before them on a cross would change anything let alone the world.

But there is a Christ the King Sunday because of him.  As Reza Aslan, an Iranian American scholar points out in his book about Jesus called Zealot, “among all the other failed messiahs who came before and after him, Jesus alone is still called messiah.”3

He gained that title by not doing what others were expecting him to do. While crowd stood by watching “the rulers even sneered at him. They said, ‘He saved others; let him save himself if he is God’s Messiah, the Chosen One.’”4

As one scholar, Patrick Oden, of Fuller Theological Seminary wrote:

He may be a loser in the game, but he does not dispute the rules or structures. The only way for Jesus to prove himself in light of the established systems, the only way, is to save himself from the crucifixion.  Everyone seems to agree – except Jesus and, we find out, the other criminal dying beside him.5

 One of the criminals joins with the crowd in mocking and disgust: 

“Some Messiah you are! Save yourself! Save us!” But the other one made him shut up: “Have you no fear of God? You’re getting the same as him. We deserve this, but not him—he did nothing to deserve this.” Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you enter your kingdom.” {And Jesus} He said, “Don’t worry, I will.”6

 That promise is given to us and to all. “If we live with the true knowledge of the kind of King Jesus Christ is, then perhaps we will know what salvation is and is not.”7

Following Jesus we realize that our best bet is to steward our lives as faithfully as we can aligning everything we do with what we believe about Jesus.

This is easier said than done, but we make great strides in our faith if we can, together and individually, grow in our awareness of to what and to whom we give our power. To whom do we give the power to tell us who we are? Who has the power to tell us whether or not we are valuable or successful? Who or what has the power to shape our moods and our minds, influence our decisions, tell us whether we are safe or unsafe, and help us discern what is important and what is not?8

The not-so-well-hidden secret is that ever and always Jesus is with us, accompanying us, offering forgiveness on our behalf even when we are broken and bruised or have broken and bruised others. 

The not so-well-hidden secret is that in his final moments, with arms outstretched on the cross, Jesus exhibits capacities fit only for the King of Kings whose reign and rule extends for all times.

That is something we can predict with certainty.  That is something we can bet our lives on.

________________

1. St. Luke 23:34.  (NKJV) [NKJV=The New King James Version]

2. Robert Farrar Capon, Hunting the Divine Fox; Images and Mystery in Christian Faith (New York: Seabury Press, 1974.)

3. Reza Aslan, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (New York, NY: Random House, Inc, 2013). 175

4. St. Luke 23:35 (NIV) [NIV=The New Internation Version]

5. Patrick Oden, “Luke 23:33-43. Commentary 1: Connecting the Reading with Scripture,” Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, Year C, 3 (Louisville: Westminister|John Knox Press, 2019): 507–9.

6. St. Luke 23:39–43.  (MESSAGE) [MESSAGE:Eugene H. Peterson, The Message (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2004).

7. Chelsey Harmon, “Luke 23:33-43,” Center for Excellence in Preaching, November 17, 2025, https://cepreaching.org/commentary/2025-11-17/luke-2333-43-4/.

8. Kate Givens Kime, “Sunday, November 24, 2013,” The Christian Century, November 13, 2013, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2013-10/sunday-november-24-2013? 

Pentecost 23C - "Jeopardy and Double Jeopardy"

Saint Luke 20:27–38

Everybody who has owned a television set since March of 1964 is familiar with the concept behind the game show "Jeopardy."  The program reverses the traditional question-and-answer format of many quiz shows. Rather than being given questions, contestants are instead given general knowledge clues in the form of answers, and they must identify the person, place, thing, or idea that the clue describes, phrasing each response in the form of a question.

The program, as all quiz shows do, challenges the viewer to pit their knowledge against that of the contestants.  Sometimes the questions are easy, sometimes they are hard, and sometimes they are just unanswerable.

When the contestants are stumped, there is that pause where they all stare, looking puzzled, at the studio cameras, and wait for the dreaded buzzer to sound so that they can take their chances with another question.

Sometimes questions that we do not know the answers to puzzle all of us.

The encounters can leave us speechless, dumbfounded, and maybe a little more than frustrated.

I had a man in my old congregation whose questions were not only frustrating but mostly ill timed.

Just as the bells were ringing and the choir was about to march in, he would inevitably steam up to me and ask a question like: "Do you know how to light the oven on the stove in the kitchen?" 

"No," I would reply and, either unsatisfied or unbelieving that I didn't know, he would ask the same question all over again to which the answer was always no.

This would go on for several attempts sometimes with the accent being placed on different words or syllables.  This made him sound like an American tourist in some foreign land.  “Do you know how to light the oven on the stove in the kitchen?”  Again, I would reply “no” but since he was talking to me like I was I was from a different country I really wanted to reply with a “Nein”, or an “nyet”, or “non.”  Or, if from Britain, “I’m so sorry old fellow but I haven’t the faintest idea.”

Sometimes he would change the word order and pause for effect, as if that would jog my memory, "The oven ... on the stove ... in the kitchen, do you know ... how to light it?" he would ask as if a new approach would bring about clarity.  The answer was still no.

After several questioning attempts he would change the question into a declarative statement.  "So, you don't know how to light the oven on the kitchen stove."  The answer could have been yes, but I chose no because by this time, completely unaware of the cross examination going in the narthex the organist had launched into the first hymn.

Taking a big breath before asking the question another time in another way I had to stop him because, by now, the choir was long gone and the hymn was on its final verse, and no direct revelation had come as to how the stove could be lit.

Finally, exasperated, I said to him.   "Listen Bill, you can ask me that question a million times in a million ways. You can even try asking it in English, French, and German but I'm still not going to know how to light the stove."  And I hurried to the front to repaint the smile on my face and gasp out the greeting, "The grace..."

Unfortunately, I will have no such stories to tell about this congregation in the future because, clearly, there are no eccentricities here.

Difficult questions can be asked at the most difficult occasions.

Dr. Amy Jill-Levine, who may be setting a record for consecutive times being quoted in a sermon, told of the time her mother, who was on her deathbed asked her “‘What will happen to me when I die?’ I immediately answered, ‘You’ll see Daddy.’ My father had died decades earlier. She replied, ‘I look like hell.’ ‘Well, Mom, you’ve looked better, but when you see Daddy, you’ll look as beautiful as you looked the day you got married.’ ‘How do you know this?’ ‘Mom, I‘ve got a Ph.D. in religion; I know these things.’”1

One day, Jesus was asked an impossible question to put him to the test.  If you had a hard time following the question you are not in jeopardy because it’s a convoluted one that boggles the imagination.  It’s about marriage, death, remarriage, and who is married to who in the resurrection.  It could be called instead of seven brides for seven brothers, seven husbands for one bride.  Summed up, the trick question is: “Whose wife will she be in the resurrection? For all of them were married to her!”2

Now if I were Jesus I might have answered: “Huh?” because sometimes this kind of highbrow theological stuff goes way over my head.   Or, if he was feeling a bit more snarky he would have been right to answer, “What difference does it make to you guys? You don’t believe in the resurrection of the dead anyway!”  

Before we make the Sadducees into total bad guys I think they might have just been engaging in the kind of rabbinical rumble that the learned leaders of his day, and our day, seem to enjoy.  Let’s ask each other big complicated, life and death, questions and see if anybody can figure out the answer.

  

“How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” To which my witty, Anglican professor of ethics, Dr. Paul Elmen, said the answer was, “Not as many who would like to?”

I don’t know if this is just lore, but it was said that Billy Graham arrived in a small town to preach, and he asked a boy directions to the post office. The boy told him, and Graham thanked him. Graham said in parting, “If you come to the Baptist church tonight, I will tell you the way to get to heaven.” The boy said, “No thanks, you don’t even know your way to the post office.”3

After entering to the resurrection quibble for a bit Jesus tells us that the whole debate, they just had was irrelevant because God is God “not of the dead but of the living.”4

In my limited understanding of Jesus, I’m pretty convinced that Jesus was less concerned about where we’ll spend eternity and more interested in how we live out our lives in the here and now.  Jesus is more interested in how we treat others.  His question is always about the living: Do we treat them fairly?  Do we treat them squarely?  Are we always honest with them?  Or, as they say in the south, are we so heavenly minded that we are of no earthly good?”

In the Academy every day our little ones pass a bulletin board with some words on it in big, bold, bright letters.

At their age they are probably not pondering the questions of resurrection, or where they will spend eternity. However, I bet if you asked them their answer would be with you, their parents, their grandparents, and we hope and pray, with the members of this faith community or some other faith community who will love them, and nurture them, and by their lives remind them of the bulletin board they saw even before many of them could read.

The first words: “Treat others fairly.”  I think that Jesus and even the Sadducees would agree on that.  That’s a pretty good way to follow Jesus who reminds us that whatever we do to the least of our brothers and sister we do to him.  

So, it seems to me, that blocking food aid to families who receive   – According to a US Department of Agriculture website – on “average ... a monthly benefit of $332. That’s $177 per person based on the average SNAP household size of 1.9 people.”5 seems, if not fair, a little chintzy. 

Let the record show that yesterday I spent slightly less than that on a weeks worth of groceries and that was only for me, one person.

Somehow, this doesn’t seem fair when, it was announced in the same week that lines at food banks were growing longer and longer, that a billionaire would be granted a “new trillion dollar pay package” by his company.6

Perhaps the second sign should be hung on the walls of that company and not just our school for it said: “Do good without expecting a reward.”  Or, as Jesus said once, “if anyone wants to ... take your shirt, give your coat as well.”7

Or, in the perfectly delightful paraphrase called The Message by Dr. Eugene Peterson: “If someone drags you into court and sues for the shirt off your back, giftwrap your best coat and make a present of it. No more tit-for-tat stuff. Live generously.”8

Finally, the sign said: “Invite someone to join you at lunch.”  Jesus ate with and welcomed all kinds and conditions of people.  He welcomed tax-collectors, and people of “ill-repute” – which is pretty much everybody – and he seemed to have a special affinity for foreigners.  Think Samaritans who he kept making the heroes of his stories.

There didn’t seem to be any jeopardy with Jesus.  He didn’t care if you got the answers right or wrong, but he did seem to care if you thought you knew all the answers.

So, I guess what Jesus might be asking us now is about “how we are going to live our lives and create our communities. Are we going to get any better? 

“Are we going to get any better, or will we continue to allow politics to divide and make us self-righteous about our views? 

“Are we going to get any better, or will we continue to make groups of people feel invisible and marginalized? 

“Are we going to get any better, or will we continue to live in estrangement from each other and from God?”

What Jesus’ questioners forgot, and Jesus reminded them is that the resurrection reminds the world that the partnership God made with humanity, is a partnership aimed toward life.

So, it seems to me it is by how we live our lives, how we treat others, that will show how much we believe in the promise of the resurrection and the one who gave his life for that promise.

So, for me, “I’ll take resurrection for a bazillion, Alex” and only hope that I not only get the question, but the answer correct. 

By the way, since we are in church, the answer is always, Jesus.

________________

1. James C. Howell, “What Can We Say November 9? 22nd after Pentecost,” James Howell’s Weekly Preaching Notions, January 1, 2025, https://jameshowellsweeklypreachingnotions.blogspot.com/.

2. St. Luke 20:33. (TLB) [TLB=The Living Bible]

3. Camille Cook Howe, Sermon preached at The Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago, September 28, 2025.

4. St. Luke 20:38. (NRSVue) [NRSVue=The New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition]

5.    “Characteristics of Snap Households: Fiscal Year 2023,” Food and Nutrition Service U.S. Department of Agriculture, accessed November 7, 2025, https://www.fns.usda.gov/research/snap/characteristics-fy23.

6.    Julia Shapero, “Tesla Shareholders Approve Trillion-Dollar Pay Package for Musk,” MSN, November 6, 2025, https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/tesla-shareholders-approve-trillion-dollar-pay-package-for-musk/ar-AA1PXoKr?ocid=BingNewsSerp.

7. St. Matthew 5:40. (NRSVue)

8. St. Matthew 5:38–42. (Message) [MESSAGE=Eugene H. Peterson, The Message (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2004)]

9. Camille Cook-Howe, Sermon preached at The Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago, October 12, 2025.
 

Pentecost 21C - "Don't Stop Saying Their Names"

 

Saint Luke 6:21-31

The quote has been attributed to several people some famous, some infamous, and some nobody has ever heard of. Some internet sources trace it all the way back to ancient Egypt. I first saw it on a friend’s Facebook page, and I have been sharing it around ever since.

"They say you die twice. Once when you stop breathing and the second, a bit later on, when somebody mentions your name for the last time." So, the wise friend concluded the way to keep somebody’s memory alive is to keep saying their name.

I think that’s why people carve the name of their loved ones on tombstones so that even strangers walking through a graveyard will look at the headstone and say their name.  Some of those names we read will be famous, some infamous, and other’s known only to us.  We might look at the marker and say something like “Boy! He was young.”  Or “Gee! She lived to a ripe old age.”  If the cemetery dates back to the nineteenth century, as our does, with a row of markers devoted to the children of the same family one can only wonder how hard that must have been on the family but, still they bought a marker to in the hopes that somebody wandering around some cemetery somewhere would stop for a second, notice all the names in the family, and perhaps say them out loud.

I’m not making this up, but in Maryhill Cemetery in Niles there is a substantial monument that is inscribed only with the word “Mom” in big, bold, script letters.  At first the funeral director friend and I speculated that it might have been a floor model like the refrigerators that are available at Abt Electronic for a significantly reduced price.

I thought it some more and pictured the woman’s eight children sitting together at the monument office and being asked by the salesperson what their mother’s name was.  I pictured them all looking at each other with blank stares until one of them finally spoke up and said, “You know, all any of us called her was mom.” And so “Mom” it was and “Mom” was probably tribute enough.

Every culture has different ways of remembering their loved ones.

There’s All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. Halloween and Día de los Muertos. There’s the Gaelic festival of Samhain, in which the dead are guided home by lights left in the windows.  

In Barbara Kingsolver's novel, Animal Dreams, there is a wonderful scene describing how the citizens of a town called Grace observed the Day of the Dead: lavishly decorating the cemetery, nothing solemn, but much laughter, running, and many flowers.

Some graves had shrines with niches peopled by saints; others had the initials of loved ones spelled out on the mound in white stones.  The unifying principle was that the simplest thing was done with the greatest care.  It was a comfort to see this attention lavished on the dead.  In these families you would never stop being loved.1

 That is what we are doing today.  We are naming names, lighting candles, placing pictures, and tolling bells so that our blessed dead will never stop being loved.  We’ll keep their memories alive by “saying their names.”  Their names will never be spoken of for the last time.

We are also clinging to Jesus’ promise: “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.”2 That’s what St. Luke remembered Jesus saying once. Only, for this day, we might prefer Matthew’s account: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.3  We can hold on to both those promises.

For Jesus’ first listeners they were even more profound then they are for us. 

We do not have to work very hard to imagine the lives of 1st century Palestinian Jews as very susceptible to poverty, hunger, and loss. Nor do we have to work very hard to imagine the lives of many of our 21st century sisters and brothers.” 

In a strange twist of fate many of Jesus’ listeners then, many of his listeners now, lived in fear of a government that was supposed to protect them.  Many of Jesus’ listeners then, many now, eked out a modest day to day existence living, as we might say, from paycheck to paycheck, while others lived in the lap of luxury. Not so much different than our day when eight families have more money than 3.5 million people combined.

While most of us delight in the “blessed” part of Jesus’ first sermon sometimes we need to be taken aback by the “Woes.”

As my good friend Sarah Hendricks, emeritus professor at Luther Seminary wrote: 

There is, then, a kind of divide between the blessed and the woeful. It is, however, precisely NOT the divide that our world would create between winners and losers, successful and unsuccessful, elites and non-elites. The blessed are those who have caught at least a glimpse of God’s future and trust that it is for them. The blessed may be poor or needy, even weeping in life by the standards we humans have in our very bones, but they are blessed in both trust in God and in God’s future, in their hope of justice. The woeful are those who have forgotten that the “fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” The woeful are those who say “yes” to the title question of an old song, “Is that all there is?”4

In the end those who live their lives at the expense of and with a distain for others may just discover that the words of another not so old song may prove to be true — “No one mourns the wicked. No one cries...” or “lays a lily on their grave. Goodness knows ... The wicked's lives are lonely ... the wicked die alone. It just shows when you're wicked ...You're left only on your own.”

And it is not long before people stop mentioning them for the last time.  It is not long before people stop saying their names.

So we’re going to say the names of members of that great untold number of saints who were known to us — our relatives, our friends, our beloveds who came into our lives and, in ways large and small, made them richer, fuller than the world would have been without them.

They were saints to us and so were going to keep saying their names. We’ll say them now.  We’ll say them forever.  We’ll say them until people are remembering to say our names to keep our memories alive.

The names of your loved ones.  Keep saying them and I promise you in the words of an old Irish proverb: “The day will come when their memory, their name, brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye.”

Shed a tear, smile, but say their names as a testimony that they will never stop being loved.

________________

1. Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams (New York, New York: HarperCollins, 2018).

2. St. Luke 6:21. (NRSVue) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Edition Updated Edition]

3. St. Matthew 5:4.  (NRSV)

4. Sarah Henrich, “Commentary on Luke 6:20-31,” Working Preacher, November 11, 2020, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/all-saints-day-2/commentary-on-luke-620-31-2.

Pentecost 20C - "Reforming the Reformation"

 

Saint John 8:31–36 & Saint Luke 18:9–14

On darker days when divisions seem to run so deep I wonder if the celebration of the Reformation hasn’t run it’s course.

All of us in this room can remember that, in not-so-distant past, the people we now think as our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters in Christ were thought of heretics of the first order.  They prayed to Mary, had a boatload of saints who also could be called to intercede on their behalf, and had a great affinity for the pope and the papacy that we had long since rebelled against.  In other words, they were not like us and perhaps you, like me, have seen some of them who were our friends, treated as outcasts.

Sadly, I remember one time back at Saint John’s when my good friend, Father Greg Sakowicz, then the pastor of Saint Mary of the Woods and now the Rector of Holy Name Cathedral, and I decided to have a preaching exchange.  One of my members, who was clearly against the idea and made his opposition well known, when he saw Father Sakowicz coming toward him, turned his back and headed off in the opposite direction in order to avoid shaking his hand or even so much as saying “hello.”  Clearly, he thought that a Roman Catholic had no business being in a Lutheran church.

Another guy, at another church, would refuse to say the word “catholic” in the creed and instead bellow out for everyone near him to hear, “Christian.”  “Holy Christian Church” not holy catholic church because we’re “Christians” not “Catholics”!

Get it! 

Sometimes these divisions are not theological but sociological. 

This moment still leaves me puzzled.  

In a very staid downtown church I worshipped in when they introduced the very radical idea for them of passing of the peace with one another a woman who I really, really liked, said to me as we shook each other’s hands, “This is so suburban.”  I am still trying to figure that one out.

All of these examples are really examples of how we can divide ourselves one from another – Roman Catholic from Lutheran, Lutheran from the rest of our Reformed brothers and sisters, and even, I guess, urban from suburban.

To think that we are not just different from one another but better than one another is a dangerous place to be.  To think that we and our kind are the sole possessors of the “truth” and therefore we are “free” can cause that freedom to be abused when it is used to divide rather than unite.

Jesus told a story about that once.  It could have been the biblical equivalent of a priest, and a minister walk into a bar but, fitting for his time, Jesus told his listeners about a pharisee and a tax collector who walked into the Temple.

It is an outrageous story told by Jesus with almost a wink and a nod because the characters are painted with such a broad brush.

Jesus lets us listen in on the Pharisee as he prays and it appears that he considers himself to be quite a guy.

Looking at his resume, he is something.  Not only does he keep the basics.  He is not a robber, or a crook, or an adulterer and living in the time that we do we may pray that his kind increases.  He’s perfect in every way and he knows it.

As Amy Jill Levine points out in her book Short Stories by Jesus, “The Pharisee has gone beyond even the strictest of strict understanding of the Torah.”  But “In sum, the Pharisee’s prayer is a caricature and might have brought a smile even on the faces of real Pharisee bystanders.”1

Those of us who like musical theatre can see a little of Lancelot in Camelot when he sang his own praises in “C'est moi!”  “His heart and his mind as pure as morning dew. With a will and a self-restraint. That's the envy of ev'ry saint.  Had I been made the partner of Eve,” Lancelot claims modestly, “We'd be in Eden still.”

The laughter stops when the Pharisee turns his gaze to a nearby worshipper, the tax-collector and adds “ ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people ... or even like this tax collector.”2

That is always the problem.  When we start to compare ourselves to others trouble starts.  When we say, “I’m better than them because they pray to saints and my prayers go directly to Jesus.  I’m better than them because I worship at a church were everything is done decently and in good order not someplace where people are singing, and dancing, waving their arms, and doing anything they want. When we say self-congratulatory stuff like “they drink we don’t.” Or “their churches are just glorified country clubs.”

Whenever we compare ourselves and think for a second that because we are who we are we are better in God’s eyes we are acting like that Pharisee.

At least the tax-collector knew who he was.  His prayer was simple because he had no accomplishments to bring.  As Richard Lisher has said of him: “The tax collector’s prayer does not draw on his moral achievements, since apparently, he has none and makes no reference to his own sinful life.  After such an honest reckoning, the only possible prayer can be a prayer for mercy.”3

He prays and we smile but there is a warning in this peachy little parable for us too.  For, as Dr. Thomas G. Long warns that one can come away from this parable “with the impression that when this grace-saturated tax collector leaves the temple grounds he goes home not only ‘justified,’ as the parable states, but also ready to found a Baptist or a Lutheran church.”4

As Dr. Fred B. Craddock warns, that if we “leave the sanctuary saying ‘God, I thank thee that I am not like the Pharisee.’ It is possible that the reversal could be reversed.”5

While we are comfortable seeing ourselves as the tax-collector admitting that we have fallen short we also try in numerous ways to justify ourselves— “intelligence (GPA and SAT), alma mater ("This is where I went to school thirty years ago"), money ("I'm frugal toward myself and generous to others"), family ("Great kids!"), sports ("I'm in shape, you're a slob"), politics ("My vote is enlightened, yours is ideological"), and work ("I work at X; what do you do?"). A common form of self-justification invokes your zip code ("Where do you live?"), a transparent insinuation that net worth equals self-worth."6  In other words, suburban versus urban, city versus country.

For most of us over-achievers – and I need to add here that I may the chief among sinners in this regard – living without the self-justifications of our accomplishments makes me feel vulnerable but living without keeping a tally or good deeds or accomplishments is extremely liberating.  Once we realize that we have been accepted by a good and gracious God, we never need, for any reason, to prove ourselves to anybody. 

We’ll never need to puff ourselves up in the buildings we’ve built.  We’ll never have to look down on others because of the way they entered this great land.  We’ll never have to frighten women and children of all backgrounds and colors by our macho parades of impotent bravado.  We’ll care that the policies we make help others lives to be better and not worse.  In short, we’ll stop thinking of only ourselves and live in the freedom of someone who has been saved by God’s grace and God’s grace alone.

The rich and powerful people tend to forget this as they are “complacently pleased with themselves and looked down their noses at the common people.”7

That’s the tag line on Jesus’ parable and Saint Luke tells us so right up front.  They want God to be gracious to them, notice them, while they look down on everyone else who because of their lot and station are regarded to be less then.

The gift of the Reformation is that there are no less thens.  There is no one we can look down our noses at because we all have been saved by grace and “we all come to the place of prayer as beggars in need of the mercy of God.

Jesus clever parable that fills out the message of the Reformation for us this day and calls us to see “the kingdom of God in those places where people bow in awe toward God and reach out in humility, need, and hope.”8

It’s there for everybody – Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Pentecostals, Presbyterian, United Methodists and everybody else in between.  

It’s even there for the two guys in Jesus’ parable if only the tax-collector would stop staring at his shoes and thinking he was so awful and the Pharisee would stop looking in the mirror and thinking he was so wonderful, most assuredly grace would be there for them too.

________________

1. Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus (New York, New York: HarperCollins, 2014), 203.

2. St. Luke 18:11. (NRSVue) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition]

3. Richard Lischer, Reading the Parables (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014), 110.

4. Thomas G. Long, Proclaiming the Parables: Preaching and Teaching the Kingdom of God (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2024), 356

5.  Fred B Craddock, Luke: Interpretation Bible Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1990).

6. Dan Clendenin, “Seven Little Words: The Only Prayer You’ll Ever Need,” Journey with Jesus, October 28, 2007, https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/3637-20071022JJ.

7. St. Luke 18:9–12. (MESSAGE) [Eugene H. Peterson, The Message (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2004)]

8. Long, op.cit. 359

Pentecost 19C - "Persistance"

Saint Luke 18:9-14

Wouldn’t you know, the one guy who could answer this question in a heartbeat isn’t here this morning.  Never-the-less, I am going to ask it anyway.

What do Anton Chekov, Michael Crichton, Walker Percy, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle have in common with Saint Luke who we commemorate today?

The answer.  Before they began their writing careers, they were all medical doctors.

Yes, Michael Crichton the “author of techno-thrillers including Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain began publishing fiction while at Harvard Medical School.”

“After completing his medical degree at Columbia University,” Walker Percy contracted tuberculosis. And “during his convalescence, he decided to devote himself to writing.”

And here’s a fun fact to wow your friends at the next cocktail party you attend.

While studying medicine in Edinburgh, Doyle served as a clerk to Joseph Bell, a pioneer of forensic science famed for his ability to deduce a stranger’s occupation and recent activities by close observation. Does that ring a bell? Yes, Dr. Bell was the primary inspiration for Doyle’s fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes.1

And then there is Saint Luke, who perhaps the most famous and most quoted of all theses authors, whose thorough accounts of the life of Jesus and the early days of the church penned us the Gospel named after him but the second volume in his set, The Acts of the Apostles.

Luke was a literary detective who filled in some of the blanks in the life of Jesus that others left out.  Reading his gospel, one can discover that the great Saint was not just a masterful storyteller, but an incredible story remembered.

I like to think of him hearing the stories surrounding Jesus' birth and remembering them so that we might never forget them.  I like to think of him listening in while friends recounted some of what some of what Jesus said, writing them down, and leaving us with unforgettable wisdom that we are mulling over to this day.

Like the somewhat strange parable that he remembers Jesus telling about a widow who faces down an unjust judge.

Scholars take great pains to remind us that we all too often “tend to search out the most powerful figure in the parable, the richest person, and associate their behavior and ideas with God. The mistake here would be to link the judge’s corruption and God’s character.”2

The judge is not God, and he certainly wouldn’t be considered to be an observant Jew at all as Dr. Richard Lischer reminds us in his book on parables.  

His life is a photographic negative of the summary of the law in Luke ... love of God and love of neighbor. He has no regard for either, and he admits such.  Although he occupies an exalted position in Jewish society, this judge’s inner attitude and outward actions represent violations of role. He lives in a world whose justice is so unlike God’s that the very symbol of God’s righteousness is completely perverted. The poor widow lives in the same ugly world, and all she wants is ‘justice.’”3

 We know leaders like him only our leaders only pretend to be on the side of the people.  Associating with only their ultra-rich friends they may say they have “the American people’s” best interests at heart while they are cutting aid to some of those very same people while indiscriminately chasing down others in the streets based on nothing more than where they live or the color of their skin.  

It will not take a historian like Dr. Luke to look back at these days and conclude as did The Smithsonian Magazine about another time in our nation’s history about which we should be profoundly embarrassed. 

Seventy-five years after the fact, the federal government’s incarceration of some 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent during that war is seen as a shameful aberration in the U.S. victory over militarism and totalitarian regimes. Now, with immigration-reform proposals targeting entire groups as suspect, it resonates as a painful historical lesson.4

 It’s a painful lesson that everyone, when they give into paranoia, can loose their way.  It is important to remember that anybody can be an “unjust judge” even the liberal president Franklin D. Roosevelt order the rounding up and ceasing property of people who looked because of their Asian decent were deemed to be threats to national security. 

 And it is also important to remember that no “person of Japanese ancestry living in the United States was ever convicted of any serious act of espionage or sabotage during the war.”5

Jesus reminds us that because “unjust judges” have always existed we will also need people like the woman who challenges them and challenges them boldly and without ceasing.

“According to the well-known phrase, ‘well behaved women seldom make history” this widow has decided to make history.’”6

She goes after the judge with a persistence and tenacity like no one else.

You can almost see her, can’t you?”

There she is when the judge opens up his front door to get the morning paper, “My rights are being violated. Protect me!”7 she says loud enough for the neighbors to hear.  He slams the front door in her face and heads off via the back way to the coffee shop for a double shot espresso to fortify him for the day and there she is.  "Grant me justice against my accuser."8

There doesn’t seem to be anywhere the judge can go where she is not.  He thinks he’s as tough as she is, but he is not.  In the J. B. Phillips paraphrase his exasperation is becoming evident when he says, “‘her continual visits will be the death of me!’”

Death might be a relief from his immediate fear because what we have before us as “wear me out” according to Dr. Thomas G. Long, has language that “is borrowed from the world of boxing ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps punching me, I will grant her justice, so that she won’t give him a black eye.'”

While that may be an unappealing analogy in the sport of boxing while the crowd gathers and anticipates that one blow that will knock an opponent out – and to the disgust of many of us cause irreversible brain damage – it is often the continual pounding that does an adversary in.  

That is what the woman has to teach us and with Debbi Thomas, I wonder if this parable isn’t about God at all.  I wonder if it’s about us..."

What does it mean to “lose heart”? The words that come to my mind include weariness, resignation, numbness, and despair. When I lose heart, I lose my sense of focus and direction. My spiritual GPS goes haywire, the world turns a murky gray, and all roads lead to nowhere.

In sharp contrast, the widow in Jesus’ parable is the very picture of purposefulness and precision. She knows her need, she knows its urgency, and she knows exactly where to go and whom to ask in order to get her need met. If anything, the daily business of getting up, getting dressed, heading over to the judge’s house or workplace, banging on his door, and talking his ear off until he listens clarifies her own sense of who she is and what she’s about.

There is nothing vague or washed out about this bold, plucky woman. She lives in Technicolor, here, now, today. “Give me justice! I will not shut up until you do.”11

 That’s the kind of faith Jesus is looking for, and it is especially the kind of faith we need now.

It’s the kind of faith that Lincoln had when in his first inaugural address looking at what might possibly happen said: 

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching ... to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”12

It is what Dr. King believed when he said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." an idea that was not his originally but dates back to a sermon given in 1863 proving that indeed that justice sometimes indeed a long time coming.13

Which is why in moments of upheaval when even the bravest among us wonder if the guardrails of life will hold it is time for us to not only keep praying but not give up.  

To shout with one voice over and over again or tens of thousands of voices all at once that justice will prevail.

To hold on to the hope that the “unjust judges” of our day who “care nothing what God thinks, even less what people think”14 and put their faith only in themselves and the lesser gods they have created might have their day but in the end the everyday people who may believe themselves to be powerless may, like the widow that Saint Luke remembered Jesus telling us about,  find themselves to be powerful forces for good and Christ’s plan for the world.

So, let’s keep praying and working for peace that in the end Jesus may find that better angels of our nature have prevailed.

________________

1.      “Joseph Bell” The Arthur Conon Doyle Encyclopedia, accessed March 14, 2026, https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php/Joseph_Bell.

2. Eric Barreto, “Commentary on Luke 18:1-8,” Working Preacher , August 7, 2025, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-29-3/commentary-on-luke-181-8-6.

3. Richard Lischer, Reading the Parables (Louisville, , KY: Westminster| John Knox Press, 2014), 114-115.

4. T. A. Frail, “The Injustice of Japanese-American Internment Camps Resonates Strongly to This Day,” The Smithsonian Magazine, January 2017, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/injustice-japanese-americans-internment-camps-resonates-strongly-180961422/.

5. Ferrell F. Lord, “A Brief History of Japanese American Relocation during World War II (U.S. National Park Service),” National Parks Service, accessed October 18, 2025, https://www.nps.gov/articles/historyinternment.htm.

6. Thomas G. Long, Proclaiming the Parables: Preaching and Teaching the Kingdom of God (Louisville, , KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2024), 351.

7. St. Luke 18:1–4. (MESSAGE) [MESSAGE:Eugene H. Peterson, The Message (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2004)]

8. St. Luke 18:3b. (NRSVue) [NRSVue=The New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition]

9. Saint Luke 18:2–5 (PHILLIPS) [PHILLIPS=J. B. Phillips, The New Testament in Modern English (London, ENG: HarperCollins, 2000)]

10.    Long, loc.cit.

11. Debie Thomas, “October 16, 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time,” The Christian Century, September 28, 2016, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2016-09/october-16-29th-sunday-ordinary-time? 

12. Abraham Lincoln, “Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address,” Abraham Lincoln Online, March 4, 1861, https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/1inaug.htm.

13. Melissa Block, “Theodore Parker and the ‘Moral Universe,’” NPR, September 2, 2010, https://www.npr.org/2010/09/02/129609461/theodore-parker-and-the-moral-universe.

14. St. Luke 18:4–5. (MESSAGE)