The Pharisee and the Tax Collector (Luke 18:9-14)

                                                                 Proper 23C 2013

Joel 2:23-32; Ps 65; 2 Timothy 4;Luke 18:9-14

Father Adam Trambley

October 27, 2013, St. John’sSharon

Today we hear another parable where Jesus lifts up somebody who really doesn’t fit our criteria for a good role model.  In the past few weeks we have heard about the dishonest manager who stayed focused in a crisis but isn’t getting hired as a church accountant anytime soon.  Then last week we heard about the unjust judge who wasn’t going to do the right thing until some old lady called and woke his wife up in the middle of the night.  This morning Jesus uses a tax collector, who happens to be aware of just how sinful he is, to highlight the shortcomings of the good religious people who considered themselves more righteous than others.

Now these parables are only in Luke’s gospel.  The readings we hear in church are on a three-year cycle.  In

the first year, we read Matthew’s gospel; in the second year, Mark’s gospel; and this year, called Year C, we read Luke’s gospel.  John’s gospel gets inserted primarily on special feasts and in the summer of Mark’s year, since Mark’s gospel is the shortest.  The Old and New Testament readings follow a similar cycle so that we hear most of the major Biblical passages on Sunday morning over a three year period.  Of course, the Bible is a pretty big book, so not everything can be included.  There are still lots of great stories that we’ll only hear reading the Bible on our own.  Luke, however, seems to love Jesus’ parables, especially the more surprising ones, so we hear a lot of them this year. 

At the outset of the parable, we are told what to look for.  Some people around Jesus have decided that they are righteous through their own actions and look down on other people.  In fact, going around and listening to Jesus provide all these great parables and teachings would have been one of the reasons they considered themselves better than others.  “I know I am righteous,” we can hear them say, “because I am spending my time listening to this interesting teacher today, even though he doesn’t teach quite as well as I do, as opposed to going to the Galilee State University football game then the Cana Brew Pub for dinner.”  So Jesus tells a story to show them exactly how wrong their attitudes make them.

Icon by Tatiana Grant

A Pharisee, with all the condescension he notices around him, goes up to pray in the temple.  Notice how everything except for his sense of self-righteousness is highly commendable.  He goes up to the Temple to pray.  They say some high percentage of life is showing up, and going to the Temple is a good thing.  He fasts twice a week, taking on a significant personal discipline, presumably as a way of praying for himself and his people.  He tithes everything according to the very strict way the Pharisees tithed at the time, even from their herb gardens.  Please note, as we will be preparing to send out pledge cards next month, that Jesus is not opposed to tithing.  Jesus just is opposed to tithing or fasting or going to church to pray or doing anything else with a sense of entitlement and puffed up pride. 

At least half of what is said about this Pharisee describes his bad attitude.  He is standing by himself, and the original has a word play that standing by himself could also mean praying to himself.  He certainly is talking more to himself than God.  He gives thanks that he is not like other people, and then goes on to describe in detail which people he is not like, including someone else in church with him.  Now we can give genuine thanks to God for putting us in the positive situations we are in, where we don’t have to walk the streets or sell drugs or steal food to feed our families.  Even “there but for the grace of God” is not inappropriate, especially if we are truly recognizing God’s grace, and our prayer helps us deepen our sense of compassion and love for others.  But this dude is not praying that way.  He is just reminding God of how much better he is than other people, and thanking God, as a representative of the universe’s custodial workforce, for ensuring that the world continues to revolve around him. 

Remember what Paul says about love?  If I give everything I have, but don’t have love, it doesn’t matter.  Or even if I hand over my whole body and I feel noble about what I’ve done, there is no benefit without love.  Sounds like the Pharisee.  With the Pharisee there is no love, no mercy and no real prayer.

So Jesus contrasts the Pharisee with a tax collector.  Almost everything about the tax collector is wrong.  He is in a dishonest profession that cheats God’s people and collects money for their oppressors.  He probably doesn’t tithe, and is unlikely to have his family’s name engraved on his kneeler.  Nor does he declare that he’s giving up tax collecting, and then ask the Pharisee to help him find a commendable Israelite job.  But he gets the most important thing right.  He recognizes that he is a sinner and asks God for mercy.  He knows he’s in over his head and he can’t get out by himself.  He is powerless over his sins, and turns his life over to God.

Powerful stuff.  Now Jesus says that tax collector went home justified.  He was made righteous in a way that is going to stick.  But nowhere does Jesus say that everything is changing immediately, and probably never in a way that the Pharisee would notice.  The tax collector may not be changing jobs.  He may not ever become a pillar of the church.  He may never tithe or fast or observe the Sabbath or even wash his hands before every meal.  He may keep all his same friends because he thinks that religious people are stuck-up hypocrites, and he wouldn’t be entirely incorrect.  He may have nothing about him that would make you think you want to introduce him to your children, except that he recognized himself as a sinner and asked God for mercy, which is actually the most important thing.  Without even raising his eyes to heaven to try to look at God, he has come to know God.  He is leaving with God’s presence surrounding him.

What this justification will mean for the tax collector is hard to say.  To say only that he will go to heaven when he dies doesn’t do justice to the power of God’s mercy and grace.  Somehow he is going to be living into the Kingdom of God in new ways from that day in the temple forward.  He may feel God’s peace with him more fully more often.  He may find ways to love the people around him more deeply, whether his family, his friends, his co-workers, or his, shall we say, tax clients.  He may find his usual temptations less compelling, with God’s heavenly angels keeping the most dangerous things away and leading him into better activities.  He may find himself drawn to God more and more, asking for mercy more frequently and receiving it more often, until he turns into a light for others whose lives were also a mess.  Nothing in his life may seem religious or pious, but if God has justified him, then before long his whole being will be a beacon of God’s love and mercy and grace.  Whether he ever goes into the Temple again, or if he only occasionally goes into the Temple basement for 12-step meetings, he’s going to allow those around him to experience the presence of God.  All because he snuck into the back of church one day, beat his breast, said, “God be merciful to me, a sinner!” and meant what he said. 

So here are three thoughts to take home today.

First, if we go home praying, “Lord, I thank thee that I am not like this Pharisee” we have still missed the mark.  Pharisees are tempting targets, but we aren’t meant to feel self-righteous in comparison to them any more than we are to run to the lowest place at a banquet to show that we are the most Christian.

Second, our first and most important prayer is always the recognition that we can’t make it on our own and that we require God’s help, in particular his grace and mercy through the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Everything else flows our initial prayer, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”

Finally, giving thanks to God for everything we have and all our circumstances and all our good works is truly a right and noble thing.  That thanksgiving starts and ends, however, with God.  During our thanksgiving we look fully at God, not at other people who we feel better than, not at other people who we are envious of, not at ourselves and our own efforts.  Thanksgiving is the natural next step once we have recognized our own desperate need for God and then have begun to see him at work all around us.  True thanksgiving is an important way of recognizing our utter dependence on God after we have begun living into his Kingdom.  

So the prayer is easy: Lord, have mercy.  Thanks be to God.

Seek the Welfare of the City Where I Have Sent You

Proper 23C 2013

Jeremiah 29:1,4-7; Ps 66; 2Timothy 2:8-15; Luke 17:11-19

Father Adam Trambley

October 13, 2013, St. John’sSharon

                        

Jeremiah the prophet is sitting in Jerusalem.  The Lord gives him a message for the children of Israel that have been exiled in Babylon, so he writes them a letter.  “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”  Now if you know me at all, you can probably guess that I really like what Jeremiah wrote.  These lines describe core elements of what I think my call is, and what I think all of us have a call to do.

 

To begin with, we should note that the whole tenor of these instructions would have been mind-boggling for

the Israelites in exile.  They had just lost a war and were now being uprooted from their homes by a foreign enemy that worshipped idolatrous Gods.  They were going to be in a different city among people they hated, for very good reason.  The exiles didn’t want to seek the welfare of that city or pray for it.  They wanted to escape at the first opportunity and torch the place on their way out.  They certainly weren’t letting their children play with, much less marry, these people.  And they had no intention of being around long enough to build houses or plant gardens.  Other prophets, nicer prophets than Jeremiah, were saying the exile would be two years at the outside, and most people figured they could hold their nose long enough to survive and get out of there.  But Jeremiah writes to them that this exile is going to take a while, so live in Babylon, thrive in Babylon, be good citizens of Babylon, help Babylon prosper, pray for Babylon, and God’s hand is going to be at work so that all of this works for your welfare.    

We know that some of the exiles took Jeremiah’s message to heart.  We know the stories of Daniel and Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, Israelites who were great administrators who helped Babylon prosper, and how God saved them from danger as they helped their city and their own people thrive.   But Jeremiah’s message was not just for Israelite exiles in Babylon, however.  What he writes is instruction for all of us, in whatever city or town or situation God has sent us into. 

Jeremiah says “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you.”  God has sent all of us to someplace, and that someplace includes this area, because he cares about this place.  God’s concern does not stop with whatever group defines itself as “God’s people.”  In Jeremiah’s time, some of the Israelites certainly would have seen themselves as God’s concern, and then seen the rest of the world as a bunch of people belonging to other gods that were supposed to bring them presents at appropriate times.  Some churches have a similar attitude.  But Jeremiah’s message is different.  Jeremiah knows how much God loves all his children; how much God wants every city to prosper; how much God wants every community to be a life-giving place to live, to work, to raise children and to come to approach the fullness of life of the Kingdom of God.  Part of how the cities of the world come to prosper is by God’s people using their skills and their gifts and their blessing to love the city where they have been sent. 

This attitude is not a universal one, however.  Too often churches ignore the cities where they have been placed by God.  Maybe at best, they see their surrounding city as a neutral sea from which they will fish for people.  At worst, the community can become a source of funds to be raised or people to be used so the church can maintain itself in the way its members have become accustomed to.  Engagement with the world becomes about taking, sometimes taking in good ways and for good reasons, but the prevailing attitude can be that the world is rich, the church is poor and we need to get some of the goodies out there and bring them in here.

But Jeremiah challenges that attitude because we are not poor, and we are not called to be takers.  We are incalculably rich and we are called to pour ourselves out for the good of the city around us.  We follow Jesus, who died for the welfare of a whole lot more than the church.  Remember, “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.”  What God has given us, in gifts, resources, buildings, time, skill, expertise or anything else, we are to use for the welfare of the city where we have been placed. 

In this congregation, we know this call so strongly that we have even identified one of our strategic directions as supporting the revitalization of the wider community.  Yesterday, we once again had two comfort stations at Waterfire, and this time in addition to changing tables and privacy for nursing moms, we offered free children’s activities.  A beautiful children’s piece or artwork made up of children’s handprints from yesterday can be seen this morning on the first floor landing by Allen Hall.  We’ve offered kettle corn at Night of Lights, we’re feeding people, and we’ve invited artists and twelve-step groups and a variety of others in to use our facilities.  God is blessing us in these endeavors as we seek the welfare of the city where God has sent us into exile.

OK, those last two words, “into exile,” kind of stop us short.   A good portion of you have been here most of your lives.  You probably didn’t know you were sent into exile.  Maybe those of us who have moved more recently feel sent in a different way, even if most days it doesn’t feel like sent into exile.  But we are all exiles because we are in a land that is not our home.  First and foremost, we are citizens of the Kingdom of God, and we are just passing through here, whether our time in the Shenango Valley is a day, a week, a month, a year, a decade, or all hundred years of our life.  We do not ultimately belong here, but neither are we here by accident. 

God has placed us where we are, with the commission to seek its welfare, so that this community can prosper with us in it.  As exiles, however, two things are required.  The first and most important obligation is that we live according to the values of the Kingdom of God.  We exhibit the fruits of the Spirit to those around us – the love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control that are the marks of God’s presence.  We maintain honesty and integrity in our lives, even when, and especially when, the prevailing public practices are corruption and exploitation.  We care for the poor, the sick, the elderly, the children, the prisoners, and the needy, even though some around us may think such actions are soft or stupid.  We make time for worship and prayer, for family and friends, for Sabbath and celebration, even when the world says that “my time” is the supreme value and unbridled consumption often replaces developing loving relationships.

Besides living Kingdom values, the second part of our job as exiles is to act like gracious guests.  We are not entitled to anything.  We don’t need to judge anything.  We can’t make others change for our preference or conveniences, even when we are right.  But changing those around us is God’s job, not ours, and if we live like true citizens of God’s Kingdom with a gentle grace and winsomeness, God will take care of whatever else he needs.

The one specific instruction Jeremiah gives the people about how to seek the city’s welfare is to pray to the Lord on its behalf.  Prayer is the one gift that God’s people can bring to the wider community that even non-believing people of good will cannot offer.   While the Israelites were in exile in Babylon, scripture records how Daniel prayed.  We are called to do the same.  Our prayer opens up avenues for God’s blessing to reach into our cities.  With prayer, we can see unbelievable things happen for the good of the community.  Those who regularly pray for their communities can tell incredible stories of God’s blessing.  I myself have seen amazing things happen in the community following intentional, focused prayer by God’s people yearning for God’s renewal. 

I would suggest two specific avenues of prayer to the Lord on the city’s behalf.  The first opportunity is to incorporate prayers for the city in our daily and weekly prayers.  We should be mentioning our leaders, our schools and hospitals, our police and firefighters, our homes and business, our media centers and our church.  Our prayers should ascend regularly for the places that influence important parts of our communities, especially concerning government, education, business, media and religion.  We incorporate those prayers into our Sunday prayers of the people, but we can also incorporate them into our daily prayers, and if we don’t have daily prayer disciplines, spending some time every day lifting up our community’s welfare is a good place to start.

From the cover of the SEAPC book "Attack Lambs"

The second venue for prayer is prayer walking, or even prayer driving.  As God’s people take the time to go through our neighborhoods, or our downtowns, malls and other areas, and lift what we see to God, God’s blessings flow through the entire community.  We can take a short walk every day and lift up our block and our neighbors, and if we know them we may know exactly what we need to pray for them about.  Making intentional time with someone else to walk around for a half-hour or an hour and quietly offering prayers for whatever God shows us is incredibly powerful.  Asking God to send his presence and angels with us as we drive around on our errands and being intentional about praying for what we see makes a huge difference.  If we don’t know what to pray for we can imagine God bathing a place or a person in light or we can ask God to bless people with health, happiness, or a sense of his presence. 

Imagine the entire Christian population of the Shenango Valley praying for their neighbors every day.  Imagine people from all the area churches scattering God’s blessings everywhere they drive.  Imagine God’s people walking every street in the area, lifting up the problems they notice and calling down God’s presence to fill every home and business they pass.  Imagine the entire region so bathed in prayer that no one could go very far before feeling that where they stand is holy ground because they have encountered the presence and glory of God in an overwhelming way.  Pray to the Lord on the city’s behalf.

Then Jeremiah says, “for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”  We are tied to the place where God has sent us.  In the same way that we cannot help but be affected by what happens to the people that we love, we are connected to our surrounding community.  As we use our gifts to raise it up, as we live out the values of the Kingdom of God in its midst, and as we pray to the Lord on its behalf, not only will the city around us prosper, but so will we.  The paradox, however, is that if we focus on ourselves first, our community withers and eventually so will we.  So we give first from the abundance of the gifts God has given to us, and thereby open ourselves up to God’s blessings coming back through the community we have helped raise up.

Maybe it seems presumptuous that a church could bring blessing and prosperity to an entire community, and maybe it is presumptuous.  But we are servants of the Most High God, the creator of the entire universe, as well as the Shenango Valley.  He is longing to bless this region beyond our wildest imaginings.  If we are willing to be agents of that blessing, we can expect to witness first hand incredible transformations for the welfare of the city where God has sent us, and for our own welfare, as well.

Worthless Servants/God's Beloved Children -- 24/7

Proper 21C 2013

Lamentations 1:1-6; Ps 137; 2 Timothy 1:1-14; Luke 17:5-10

Father Adam Trambley

October 6, 2013, St. John’s Sharon

In the Gospel today, Jesus discusses our service to God in terms of expectations we might have slaves.  This concept can be difficult for us since none of us here have slaves, which we think is actually a good thing.  Most of the time we can’t even get our children to jump up with joy and exuberance when it is time to set the table and prepare a meal for their loving parents that have worked all day to provide for them.  We don’t even have servants.  If we go out to eat, we might have servers, although Christians in those situations really need to have the opposite attitude to the one Jesus describes.  A lot of waitresses and servers in some places would rather not serve the quote-unquote Christian tables, or be on duty for the after-Church crowd.  Why?  Because people who identify themselves as Christians can be ruder, more demanding, and tip less than the plain old folk that go out to eat.  In some cases,people leave cute Bible sayings or other church propaganda instead of money fortheir tip.  (Although this report from the Journal of Applied Social Psychology has a different perspective.) That’s no way to attract people to the Kingdom of God.  We’re to be generous, as God is generous with us.  Or at least don’t tell them you’re from St. John’s. 

But back to Jesus this morning.  He tells us that our service to God should be like slaves who go do the farm work all day, then come in to do the domestic work with a good attitude, and then, when all of it is finished, say, “We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!”

Now this rubs us the wrong way, since we don’t like being called worthless, and to call ourselves worthless seems to indicate an unhealthy self-image.  Certainly in one way we are the very opposite of worthless.  God loves us and has made us his children.  We could have no greater worth than to be loved by the creator of the universe.  He made us.  Jesus died for us.  The Holy Spirit fills us with spiritual gifts.  If only for us, God would have still created the universe and Jesus would have died if only to redeem us.  Our worth is off the charts by any standard of human reckoning, and if we actually believed we were as loved by God as we are most of our problems and the world’s problems would melt away.

But at the same time, we are utterly worthless.  God has made us with a purpose, to live in the Kingdom of God.  We have a commission from our maker for service twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three-hundred-sixty-five-and-a-quarter days a year, from the time we are conceived until the time we return to the dust of the earth.  We’ll come back in a few minutes to the fact that we really don’t really stay on the clock, as it were, the whole time.  But we also need to realize that the job we do when we are working, evening working hard, even working seemingly effectively, has almost nothing to do with our own capacities, skills, or effort.  We’re basically worthless.

Why do I say that?  Because everything we do is totally dependent upon God setting it up for us in advance.  At our best, we accomplish anything only because everything has been prepared for us to the point that we almost can’t help but stumble into it.  We are like the pre-school students whose teachers have spent hours cutting out colorful construction paper and setting out supplies so that when we take five minutes of unfocused craft-time while wielding a glue-stick, we come out with some beautiful holiday artwork that our parents can hang on the refrigerator.  They probably proudly love it, just as our heavenly Father loves our efforts for the Kingdom, but if you ask Sotheby’s to appraise the work, their evaluation is “worthless.”  Our efforts, compared to the work that God is doing around us, are also worthless.  When we do what we are supposed to do, we are only doing what God gives us to do, but which he would have been able to accomplish another way if he chose.  If we don’t do what we are supposed to do, our efforts fall far below worthless.

Now the tension for us is to hold both of these truths, our supreme value as children of God and our worthlessness based on our own efforts.  Somehow if we try, we are just able to almost grasp them both together.  Being loved by God allows us to admit our own worthlessness otherwise, and a sense of our worthlessness allows us to let go of everything outside of the all-encompassing love of God.   

The problem comes when we try to merge them onto a human yardstick that we can control, and we are continually tempted to do so.  We decide that we aren’t so worthless, and we try to work our way out of it.  We decide that God loves us, but we only believe he loves us slightly more than other folks we know who love us, and not enough to want to run into his arms with abandon.  The most insidious warping of these truths, however, allows for God’s love to water down our worthlessness so that we all come out somewhere in the middle, which means we have an eye out for our relative value compared to everyone else around us.  Neither of God’s love nor our worthlessness allow for human judgment.  We are all beloved children of God, absolutely, and we are all absolutely worthless compared to God, which means we have no legs to stand on when we try to judge our own worth or that of others – those yardsticks of judgment we make on our own are as worthless as any other activity we try to take outside of what has been pre-ordained for us by God.

Let’s turn  back now, to this idea that we are supposed to go do the plowing and shepherding outside and then come in and make the meal, as well.  On the most straightforward level, Jesus is just letting us know that all parts of our life are meant to serve him.  We don’t have a time that is just “my time.”  Our work life is meant to glorify God, as well as our home life.  Our business as well as our leisure.  Our religious efforts as well as our secular efforts.  Our community interactions as well as our family interactions.  Our waking as well as our sleeping – think of all steps in salvation God brought about with the help of dreams.  All of our life is meant for God.  Now having a life for God doesn’t mean we have to be in church twenty-four/seven.  Nor does it mean that our existence should be like one endless vestry meeting, or even an eternal ECS give-away day, which would probably be preferable.  But we are meant to be God’s servants, doing the work of the Kingdom, even when we leave church and church ministries and are in situations that might be harder to see what God wants us to do or at times when we have never paid all that much attention to what God wants us to do.

Before we are likely to be effective with anything else, we want to think about how we can be praying in all aspects of our life.  Our goal is to take the worship and prayer that we do here in an intentional and corporate way, and make it possible to allow that to infuse all aspects of our life.  We want to have a rhythm to our lives that lets us regularly check in to see what God might be saying to us.  Maybe we go to an on-line daily office web-site to read the day’s scriptures during a lunch break.  Maybe we take time each night with our family to read a Bible story and say thanks to God for whatever good things happened that day.  Maybe we put a Bible on our nightstand and when the alarm goes off, we allow ourselves to read a chapter of the gospels before we make ourselves get out of bed.  Maybe our alarm goes off to a worship CD, or we fall asleep to a chant CD (the great part about being Episcopalian is we can appreciate all kinds of inspired music, including the occasional 1970’s camp song.)  Maybe each evening we call a friend, read a verse of a psalm and spend five minutes talking about what it means in our lives.  Maybe, like many Episcopalians, we read the Forward Day-by-Day reflections and scripture. Or maybe we sit with God in silence for twenty minutes. If anybody is looking for ideas, or a good Bible translation they can understand or good sources of inspirational music, please talk to me or other folks around you at church.  If we aren’t praying and reading scripture outside of church, we are like the slaves in Jesus story, only when we are done in the fields we don’t even come into the house, but just knock off and hit the bar after work instead of coming home.

Once we do get home, however, and decide to give our time outside of church to God, as well, we have to figure out how to do that.  How do we serve God in other parts of our lives?  First, of course, we ask him to show us.   Much of the answer will depend on our own particular needs, gifts, and preferences depending on where we are in our lives.  Often, though, the answer will involve opening up our lives to people and experiences from our church community in ways that allow them to also intersect with the rest of our life.  If we love the Pirates, and have a big TV, we can invite some folks over to watch the game, maybe including someone we don’t know real well from church and a few friends that may not regularly attend church.  We don’t need to hold prayer services between innings to be building relationships that God can use for his Kingdom.  Or maybe we have difficult clients or customers or students or co-workers or supervisors.  We can ask a couple people to pray for them and offer to pray for a couple people in their workplace each day.  Take a church friend and a work colleague or two and everyone could put three first names down on a sheet of paper to pray for.  Once a week or once a month everybody meets for dinner or coffee somewhere to make a new list and report on how God has changed the situation.  Other ideas could be groups that help each other with home repairs, or by using the breaks in children’s sporting events to talk about something beyond just school fundraisers, or even gathering some folks together to play video games or watch a sci-fi movie and then read parts of the book of Revelation and look for similarities.  The important element, though, is to look for opportunities to take things that mean something personally to us or that we enjoy and build on that for the glory of God.  Instead of starting from “what do I think I’m supposed to do,” we want to start with “what am I excited to do” or “what do I need to do for me and my family,” and think about how to be God’s servant in that. 

Probably the best tools we have to open our own passions and needs up to God are our guiding principles.  By asking for God’s guidance and power, by developing loving relationships, by inviting newcomers and strangers to join us, by doing what we do well for the glory of God, by having fun, and by engaging the wider community, we are going to let God into whatever we do in our lives. And letting God into our whole lives, so that our whole lives serve him, is precisely the point.  He calls us to be his worthless slaves so that as we give all our lives to serve him twenty-four/seven, we will also come to know ourselves fully as his beloved children twenty-four/seven.