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Luke 18:9-14

October 28, 2007


Whenever Jesus tells a parable we either have it all figured out and stop paying attention, or we can’t understand a word he is talking about and stop paying attention. But when people heard the Bible and Gospel read, it was not about history, about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, David and Solomon as great people of the past. The Gospel is not about, it is today, and it is written about you and me.

Nobody asked Jesus for this parable. He has just finished the story of the widow and the unjust judge for the sake of all of us who need to keep praying and not lose heart. We needed that odd rough-edged story to bolster us, to lift us up. Jesus keeps going targets those who need to be knocked down a peg. Who needs to be knocked down, all of us? Do you think Clarence Jordan read it that way?

“Also, he gave this Comparison to certain ones who had a high regard for their own goodness, but looked down their noses at others: “Two men went into the chapel to pray. The one was a church member, the other was an unsaved man. The church member stood up and prayed to himself like this: ‘O God, I thank you that I’m not like other people – greedy, mean, promiscuous – or even like this unsaved man. I go to church twice on Sunday, and I am a faithful tither of all my income.’ But the unsaved man, standing way off, wouldn’t even lift up his eyes, but knelt down and cried, ‘O God, have mercy on a sinner like me.’ I’m telling you, this man went home cleaned up rather than that one. For everyone who puts himself on a pedestal will be laid low, and everyone who lays himself low will be put on a pedestal.”

Employees of Canada Revenue can breathe more easily with this version, the heat is off them as the tax-collectors, for the other guy was only “unsaved.” But, hey, are not you and me church members? And who else do you expect to be a Pharisee? Pharisees are always religious people, not atheistic sinners outside the doors.

Roberta Bondi, a retired professor of church history, remembered with a wince having to substitute lead a Baptist adult Bible class in her seminary church. Can studying the Bible turn into a disaster? Pharisees can be controversial fellows.

It opened with a prayer led by the class president, a self-confident, obviously successful man. Then Bondi began to read: “Two men went up to the temple to pray....” The reading ended in chaos. Apparently there were people there who had not heard it before. “What do you mean, ‘one went home justified and the other did not’?" demanded someone. “Didn’t the Pharisee do all those good things? Are you telling us they don’t count for anything with God?” another challenged. “And that tax collector,” someone else added. “Did I hear you say that God doesn’t judge sin?”

Bondi couldn’t remember much of what she had answered that day. She tried to make it clear that she hadn’t made the story up. What she does remember is that the class complained about her the next day, and she ended up never wanting to work in a church again.

Most of us have heard this parable many times. I can’t believe a bunch of Southern Baptists hadn’t heard it before. We know the “correct” interpretation, just as Roberta Bondi knew it. The Pharisee didn’t recognize himself to be a sinner, was a braggart and moreover, looked down his nose at somebody else. The tax-collector never looked up, took it all on the chin, asked for forgiveness. That’s the way you do it.

Yet... what did the Pharisee really do wrong? Don’t you and I watch the news and think, “Whew! Am I glad I don’t live in San Diego.” Another suicide bombing in the Middle East and there is a silent prayer of gratitude, “Thank God, that doesn’t happen here!” Can’t I say with genuine gratitude, “I am grateful that I have faith in God, that it’s made a tremendous difference in my life. I can’t think of myself not being a church member. Thank you, God!”

The prayer that the Pharisee prays appears to be a standard Jewish prayer of thanksgiving in the first century. It was a familiar prayer to those who heard it, just as it probably sounded quite normal to that Baptist adult Bible class. Hearing the tax-collector’s groveling probably had some of them shaking their heads quietly about the degradation that human beings bring upon themselves and each other. But then to hear that only this degraded, unclean, unsaved man, obviously a Jew or else he would not have been able to enter the Temple to pray, had been the only one justified was outrageous. It is mete and right that one who has sinned greatly must repent greatly.

No one argues otherwise. Yet it is Jesus’ conclusion that whoever exalts himself will be brought low and whoever lowers herself will be exalted that brings home the parable. This spiritually poor tax-collector was brutally honest, left himself no excuses, and reduced himself to the bottom of the human pile. This was no “cheap grace” as some have accused. Again, we do not know what happened outside the words of this terse parable, but it seems unlikely that he would have collected another shekel of Roman taxes.

The Pharisee, however, and note we may be Pharisees in church member’s clothing, prayed a conventional prayer of thanksgiving, and scorned and reviled this other fellow, but one must presume he never heard the mumblings of the publican. The Pharisee left the sanctuary having heard only one voice - his - and that voice exalted him. At least he was superior to one other person known to him. How many voices do you hear upon exiting the narthex?

The Reformation, that historical one of the 16th and 17th centuries and the continuing Reformation of the Church and our faith, is a matter of hearing more than one voice. When we pray in holy sanctuary a tried and true prayer and affirm only what we hear ourselves repeating, there is the human tendency to look down upon those who are not like us. We live in the changeless glory of our church and do not recognize either how we have fundamentally changed or desperately how we need to change radically.

We need to reform ourselves, our faith and our church continually precisely because we have changed, the way we express our faith has to change in order to remain in synch with the spirit of that relationship with God, and our church is also a human institution and human institutions always are changing and in desperate need of changing. There is a lot of human error involved in all of that, a lot of pride and prejudice and arrogance, we have a lot of issues with other people, and yes, we even sin a lot. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me! The tax-collector knew he was a wretch - that was what he was like - that he was unlike other men and women in that sanctuary, and that the only thing he could now do was to re-form everything.

Reformation in the best tradition of our 16th century forerunners is to be unlike what we have been, to acknowledge that being unlike others is not a disgrace, but our calling as Christians. Those English in our company know that for several centuries our Protestant ilk - Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists - were labeled as “non-conformists” by the Church of England. Non-conformists worshipped in chapels, never real churches, even if the chapels were occasionally larger than this sanctuary.

Today, this “non-conformist” label is politically incorrect, a residue of a less sensitive era, but I don’t know, I really like being a Non-Conformist. They can call us anything they want - Presbyterians or Methodists or Congregationalists or United, or even! Baptists - but what we should always call ourselves is Non-Conformist. Not only should we not conform to the way the rest of the world and church thinks is proper and dignified and traditional, but we should never conform to the way we have done things in the past. Amazing grace it is that saves wretches like us, who are called to be unlike others, but starting from the bottom, considering everyone better than herself, reforming our non-conformity, a Reformed Church, a Reformed faith, always reforming.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan