“God,
I thank you I am not like that sinner behind me!"
Luke 18
“Hypocrites” up front!
The “humble” in the rear! That’s
about how seating arrangement went when I was growing up... at least that’s
what we tended to think! The rich, the
uppity and the seriously educated sat toward the front - behind the nuns in the front row. Drunks, the poor and the marginalized, in all their marvelous country-parish variety, staked out the back seats. Nobody made us sit that way, but that was the
pecking order as I remember it. Families sat in the same
locations, generation after generation. In my very early days, families had their names in little holders at the ends of the pews. We knew where people were
“supposed” to sit and God help you if you
dared sit elsewhere. Stares would focus
on you with all the intensity of a laser beam.
We exercised invisible control over each other that way. Anyone who was ever raised in a small town
knows exactly what I mean!
My
family, characteristically, chose the middle… dead center, in fact! After all, we considered ourselves better
than some people and not as good as others.
That’s how we felt and that’s how we sat! We were probably a bit ambivalent toward
God as well. We were neither too close to Him,
nor too far away. We followed the rules,
but we were never accused of being religious fanatics. We chose a safe distance! We were a lot like the religiously ambivalent
woman in The Color Purple. “…it ain’t easy trying to do without
God. Even if you know he ain’t there,
trying to do without him is a strain!”
Now all of you, unaware of what today’s gospel was going to be about, who
unfortunately chose the front seats today need not panic! Neither holiness nor the effectiveness of
one’s prayer has anything to do with where you sit in church. It has to do with one’s attitude toward God
and neighbor. The effectiveness of prayer comes from within the heart and not
in the seating location! This parable is
about attitudes in prayer, not about where you park your body, so you can relax!
The gospel today says that “Two people went to the temple to pray. One went home justified, the other did not!”
The first man, a Pharisee, a meticulously religious man, was very proud of
his success in keeping rules and he knew of the failure of others to do the same. He was proud of his success and had become contemptuous
of those who were not so successful.
When he approaches God, he not only proceeds to inform God just how good
he has been, but also compares his grocery list of spiritual successes to the
man in the back! “Thank God, I am not
greedy, crooked and adulterous, like that man behind me!” He assumed he could be good without God’s help, if necessary, which made him “self” righteous!
The second man, a tax collector, aware of his failures, simply asks for
God’s forgiveness, mercy and acceptance. He knew
he needed God’s love and forgiveness because he was aware of his inability to
be good on his own power. He compared
himself to no one, but God, and was humbled by the comparison!
Often, when we read these parables, we tend to
identify the “good” and the “bad,” “winners” and “losers,” and the “hypocrites”
and the “humble”… as if reality fell into two simple categories! Then when we believe we have identified the
villain, we project that villain onto others whom we have identified. Actually, we end up condemning in others what we really hate in
ourselves. This condemnation of others makes it
easy to believe that we are really different, better and more favored by
God. Maybe we ought to read this parable as if both of these characters exist
in all of us. In truth, there is a part
of both in each of us! Instead of
condemning in others what we do not want to see in ourselves, let us “own” the
Pharisee within us.
The Pharisee exists in all of us. We would like to believe that we
are “not like the rest of men, grasping, crooked and adulterous.” When in actuality we really are “like the
rest of men.” We would like to believe
that we are better, different and even more favored by God! We select out of the truth what we want to
believe about ourselves and project the rest onto a convenient list of those we assign labels like "the
grasping, the crooked and the adulterous.”
Instead of owning our sin, we project it on others so we can disown it! After we condemn others, we often tend to invoke God’s
condemnation of them as well to feel even better about ourselves.
When God
doesn’t join us in our condemnation we pout like Jonah, the older son, the
vineyard workers who worked all day and the Pharisees! Jonah pouted because God was so
forgiving. He wanted the Ninevites fried
in Hell! The “older son” pouted outside
the house because his father was so forgiving of his wayward brother. He wanted him punished! The all-day
vineyard workers pouted because the late comers were paid the same as they! They wanted more for themselves and less for
others. The Pharisees pouted because
Jesus was a “friend of sinners,” welcomed them and ate with them. They wanted Jesus to do what they did:
condemn and exclude! The Pharisee in all
of us resents God taking away our delight in having “sinners” punished. We used to call in theology, the sin of
“morose delectation:” taking delight in others’ failures.
The Pharisee also exists in all of us, in our
subconscious mind where we store those things that we do not like to see about
ourselves, where we store that information we do not want to own. Down deep we know that there is a little Jim
Baker, Richard Nixon, Adolf Hitler and Pharisee in all of us,
no matter how much we try to hide it from ourselves and others. We can come to see this, not by comparing ourselves to
others, but by comparing ourselves to God.
“We only admit to consciousness that which we have the courage to deal
with!” The pain of bringing these
realizations to consciousness so that God can love them away is what spiritual
growth is all about!
When we gather here for prayer, as we stand together
before God each week in this Eucharist, we gather as sinners… one and all! There are no neat categories of “good” and
“bad”, “favored” and “unfavored,” but simply God’s children: broken, sinful,
lost, grasping, adulterous and crooked in one degree or another! No one can see well enough to condemn
anyone else. We can see only externals. God can see into the heart. This God who sees all, did not come to
condemn, but to save! Our prayer, no
matter where we sit in church, will not be heard until we recognize our own
sinfulness, own it and treat ourselves with the same compassion that God treats
us to! When we are able to receive that
compassion from God and from ourselves, we will be able to extend it to others! When we have done that, we have finally
learned to love God, our neighbors and ourselves! When we have done that, the Sunday Eucharist
will have finally exemplified the parable of the wedding feast: a feast where
the “good” and the “bad” are invited to sit down with the great King and bask in
his love and compassion!
