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.
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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
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