Minding Our Own Business

Proper 25C
Luke 18:9-14
October 24, 2010

Minding Our Own Business

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

Jesus told a story about two people who went to church, one a Pharisee, the model of piety and righteousness, and the other a despised tax collector. Of the two of them, Jesus said, the tax collector found favor with God.

Honestly, I have to tell you that my reaction is, isn’t there another choice? Because, really, I don’t like either of them all that much. Isn’t there a third alternative?

We’ve all been taught to despise the Pharisee in the story. We’ve been taught to despise all Pharisees. The New Testament encourages us to believe that the Pharisees were all hypocritical folks who bitterly opposed Jesus and everything he stood for. If we read that a character in a story in the Bible is a Pharisee, that’s all we need to know about him. He’ll be the villain of the piece.

This rubs against the grain of our character a little. We mid-western folk, we tend to have our opinions, but we also believe in giving a fair hearing. Condemning the Pharisees out of hand would be a little out of character, even if Luke seems to be encouraging us to do it.

Giving Pharisees a fair hearing is harder than you’d think, though. We know very little about them, far less than we’d like. We know that there were various sorts of Jews in Jesus’ day. There were Sadducees who seemed to come mostly from the Jewish nobility and priestly families and focused on the Temple and its sacrificial system. There were Essenes who lived mostly (we think) in their own settlements, especially in the southern deserts, and about whom we know hardly anything at all. There were Zealots, who seemed to have believed that they could prompt God’s intervention in history by offering armed resistance to the Romans. And there were the Pharisees.

Even this very rough sketch is too detailed. For the last several weeks Bob Shedinger has been introducing some fascinating material from the Qumran scrolls. I don’t know for certain what other folks got from his classes, but I can say that I was struck once again by just how complex the religious situation was in Jesus’ day. It was like Jews had this amazing religious potluck supper and everyone who went through the line made their own selections from what was spread out in front of them. No two plates looked alike. I suspect that is how it was in Jesus’ day. Each community had its own way of doing things with no two alike.

The New Testament tends to make bad guys out of everyone except for the Jesus-followers, but I think that every group and every movement was composed of mostly sincere folks trying to solve a very difficult problem: How to live as people who were faithful to the God of the Jewish covenant in the face of their lives as Roman subjects.

Some people thought that faithfulness called for trusting in God to come to their help as they rose up in revolt against the Roman conquerors who trusted in false gods. Some people thought that life in Roman Palestine was hopelessly corrupt, so they retreated into their own communities to live faithfully by avoiding outside interference. Some people looked at the might of the Roman empire and decided that it would be best to cooperate in order to preserve at least some of their distinct life of worship.

And then there were the Pharisees. The Pharisees studied the Torah and the Prophets to discover how to live lives that were holy and just. They believed that faithfulness was lived out in the dailiness of ordinary life, in activities like prayer and eating and marriage and living with their neighbors. They saw the covenant as God’s gift that let them avoid being damaged by the corruption and immorality in the gentile world. They believed that anyone could live faithfully so they lived in villages and small towns and, generally, spent a lot of time among ordinary people. Pharisees were good people and I think I would have liked most of them.

Even so it’s hard to say much nice about the self-righteous jerk described as a Pharisee in our story. We’ve all known someone like them. They think that life is graded on a curve. The worse that other people are, the better their grade.

They check out the crowd when they pray. For them piety is a performance that needs an appreciate crowd of spectators. They come to church and look down on those who don’t. The come to church and look down on those who do! No one listens as well, sings as well, prays as well as they do, or gives as well as they do.

That may sound like a strange thing to say during a stewardship campaign. Why do we care why people give, as long as they give? Money is money, right? Well, I’m not altogether sure that’s true, to begin with. Money isn’t the morally neutral thing that modern economic theory holds it to be. There’s good money and bad; there’s happy money and sad money; there’s joyful money and grudging money. Motive matters even to the bottom line.

But the bottom line isn’t the bottom line. The bottom line for us is helping each other live lives that are faithful to the God of Jesus as his followers and holding out that possibility to our whole community. In a life of faithfulness motive matters.

Whatever help toward a faithful life the Pharisee movement might have held out toward the first praying person in our story, couldn’t seem to get past his motives. He was conducting his spiritual life in front of a mirror. He caught a glimpse of himself reflected in the “other” of the tax collector and, to paraphrase TV’s Rick Castle, he exclaimed, “I really am a holy guy!”

We’ve all known someone like him. In fact, in my more honest moments, I have to admit there is more than a little of that guy in me. I suspect that I might not be the only one here who has to admit that. It’s okay, we’re among friends here.

So I don’t like the Pharisee, not because he’s a Pharisee, but because he’s a jerk and because I see a little too much of myself in him.

But what of this tax collector? We know some things about him. Tax collectors were not employees of the Roman equivalent of the Internal Revenue Service. Tax collectors were independent contractors, tax farmers who had won contracts to collect the taxes in a district. The Romans knew how much they wanted to collect. The tax collector promised to deliver that much to the Romans. He could (and did) collect more. As long as the extra wasn’t too much the Romans would look the other way and he could keep the difference.

He profited at the expense of his fellow Jews. He made his living serving the interests of the Romans. This went way beyond cooperation. He was a collaborator, a traitor.

So he went up to the Temple to pray and stood a long way away from the other pilgrims. If he hadn’t they would have moved away from him. He unburdened his justly guilty conscience in prayer. Jesus says that the tax collector was the one to imitate. “All who humble themselves will be exalted,” Jesus says. The tax collector had humbled himself. Of course, may I point out that, as Winston Churchill said of a political opponent, “but then he has much to be humble about”? Jesus tells us that the tax collector “went down to his home justified,” which is fine, I suppose. I’d like to know if he went down to his home changed. If he’s still in the same line of work, if he’s still selling out his neighbors for a few coins, then I don’t get it.

You see my problem? Two possible spiritual stances before God, neither of them very attractive. Do you see why I’m hoping for a third possibility? How about a woman who tries her best to live a life of faithfulness to the God of the covenant, but who in moments of weakness takes the easy road, who then goes into the Court of Women in the Temple in Jerusalem, who prays in genuine remorse for mercy, and finally who goes home resolving to keep trying her best? Wouldn’t that be better? Why use these two who, really, are more caricature than character?

Because this is a parable, that’s why. In the world of the parable, a realistic landscape of the universe is reduced to an ink drawing of a very few lines. The range of religious possibilities is reduced to two figures and their relationship with God: the Pharisee with whom we should feel some sympathy but who makes that impossible by being an utter jerk and the tax collector whom we should despise but find it hard to because we can’t help but feel sorry for the guy. Two guys and a choice.

A long time ago, when I was a seminary student, I was a student pastor in Vinton, the county seat of Benton County.. The nearest hospital for anything serious was St. Luke’s Hospital in Cedar Rapids a little to our south. There was a small sign in the chaplain’s office, framed and hanging on the wall. In three words it summarized the human situation: “Humility is truth.” Humility isn’t this great virtue to be carefully cultivated. Humility isn’t a pose, either, or some sort of lifestyle. It’s just the truth, that’s all. Humility is the accurate description of our place in the universe, of our place in the human community, of our place in history, of our place even before God. Humility is truth. To be humble is to know the truth about ourselves.

This is how the Pharisee blew it. He was trying hard to live a life of faithfulness to the God of the covenant. He had let that effort shape his behavior, determine how he used his resources, and how he treated his neighbors. That effort even led him to express his gratitude to God. But when he stood before God and prayed, what came out was “truthiness”¹ instead of truth.

The tax collector, for all his moral failure—and there was and remains a mountain of moral failure—gets it. He knows the truth about himself. In his own words he is a sinner. It’s an old-fashioned word, one that makes us cringe sometimes, one we’d like to avoid, but it says something about us that can’t be said in other words. With this word the tax collector accepts responsibility for his own moral failure and places his own behavior within a framework of accountability to God. When I’m most honest with myself I have to admit that I don’t like the word “sinner” precisely because I’m not really keen either on responsibility or accountability. I’d like to imagine that I can avoid them both. But the tax collector knows better. He knows himself as a sinner.

He knows something else, too, something the Pharisee does not, something that I forget all too often: he is not being graded on a curve. Our relationship with God does not depend on how much better in comparison to others we are doing. It’s not as if God comes to us and says, “I guess you’ll have to do!”

How I’m doing in comparison with someone else really isn’t what matters. This life of faithfulness that you and I are trying to live isn’t a competition. I don’t get extra points if you finish behind me. Which is really good, because that means that you and I can give each other every bit of help, encouragement and support we can muster, and it won’t cost us anything. This isn’t a season of Survivor.

The tax collector knows one last thing. He knows that love doesn’t speak the language of earning and deserving. He knows that he comes to God with nothing in his hands that amounts to a claim on God’s love. As Gregory Palmer has been heard to say, “God loves you and there’s nothing you can do about it.” The tax collector knew that. Of course, the flip side of that is, “and there’s nothing you can do to earn it, either!”

That’s the truth. And if that doesn’t make us humble, nothing will.

©2010, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

1A word coined by Stephen Colbert meaning “truth that comes from the gut, not books” and named as Miriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2006, http://www.merriam-webster.com/info/06words.htm.