Proper 25 C
Transcribed from a
sermon given
At St. Barnabas
Episcopal Church
October 2013
By Rev. Valerie Ann
Hart
Luke 18:9-14 C
I’d like you to imagine two
neighbors coming home from work. The one man walks in and says to his wife, “It
is so wonderful that I have such a great job so I can come home and be with
you, and I can buy a new car for you, and I can buy you jewels, and I can be
the perfect husband; not like that neighbor of ours, the one who is out so late
every evening and drives around in that junky car that must be so embarrassing
for his wife.” The neighbor comes home a few hours later, and he is tired. He
says to his wife, “Oh, Honey, I am so sorry that I am not able to be here with
you in the evening. I’m not able to have a job that will pay enough, so I need
to do two jobs. And I would love to be able to buy you a new car and jewels but
all we have is enough to get by. I’m doing the best I can. Maybe some day I’ll
be able to get a better job.”
So I ask you, which wife feels
more loved? Personally I would much rather have my husband come home a little
bit apologetic rather than telling me what a great husband he is, because if my
husband were to be telling me what a great husband he is, there is no room for
me to appreciate who he is, because he is busy doing that for himself. This is
the point of the parable in today’s Gospel.
Jesus speaks of two men. The
first, the Pharisee, is probably a really good man. He does fast and tithe and
do his best to follow all the commandments, but to go the temple to tell God
what a great person you are? I’m sure God doesn’t need to be told what a great
person this guy is.
The other one, the tax collector,
just by being a tax collector means that he was disliked by the other people.
You think tax collectors now a days are disliked? Back then they weren’t
collecting taxes for Israel, they were collecting taxes for Rome, the occupying
power. They were seen not only as money grabbing but they were seen as
traitors. Most tax collectors got their pay by taking a cut. And most tax
collectors took more of a cut then they really deserved. So tax collector was
about the worst thing you could say about somebody. And the tax collectors knows
that he is not living the life that he would like to be living. That he is not
in the right relationship with God and he is willing to acknowledge that.
Jesus says that he comes away
justified. Justified is an interesting word so I looked up the Greek and the
translation is justified. Justified in English has two meanings. One is a
printing concept. Justified means that things are all lined up. You know how
how on your computer you get to choose whether things are left justified or
right justified or even on both sides. So one sense of justified is that things
are lined up correctly.
But most of the time justified is
used in terms of justice. It is a derivative of the word “justice.” So the
question becomes what is justice? There have been lots of different theories of
what justice is - what a just world looks like. And the one that I liked in
thinking about what Jesus said in the parable comes from Plato where he talks
about justice as being the right relationship. So a just world is one in which
the people are in right relationship with each other and with the government.
That it is a just right relationship.
That brings us to the questions
what is the right relationship with God? What is justice? Usually when we talk
about justice we talk about the justice system which is more the punishment
system in our country. What do we do when things are out of whack, when there
is a break in a relationship, when an injustice has been done? What do we do when
someone has been stolen from? Or killed? Or injured? How do we handle that? How
do we move it back to a right relationship?. How do make justice from that? Our
society focus mostly on punishment, that there has to be a balance. You’ve done
something wrong and therefore you need to be punished to balance that out. And
that is one way of trying to achieve justice. But it doesn’t always lead to a
right relationship again. Sometimes people, if someone has been hurt or killed
they will say, “We want justice.” What does that mean? They want that person to
be punished so they can feel better. But that is just one form of understanding
justice.
There is a whole group of people
now in our society concerned about restorative justice, where they take this
concept of justice, of right relationship, and say it is not enough just to
punish someone. They ask how do we help that person when they are finished with
their legal consequences of their action to reestablish a relationship again? So
they often work with both the victims and the perpetrators to restore a relationship. The
relationship and the restoration is always based on the perpetrator taking
responsibility for what has been done. What we would call an apology, an
acknowledgement. Because then the victim can stop being a victim and have
mercy, can have a relationship again. Of course it is much more complicated than
that but it is important.
The whole idea is how do we get
back into the right relationship again, and what is our right relationship with
God? Now obviously we are talking about this tax collector as feeling out of
relationship while somehow this Pharisee that has been following all the rules
isn’t in right relationship. So what does it mean to have the right
relationship with God and how do we get back to that?
There are certain things that are
obstacles to the right relationship with God. Right relationship with God is a
relationship of love and communion. If we close ourselves off to God we are not
in right relationship, and that is really what sin is. It is missing the mark.
It is breaking the tie. It is not living in the way that God intended for human
beings to live. It is not being loving. It is not loving God and loving our
neighbor, and loving ourselves. When we are
not loving we are cutting ourselves off. For example, if we lie, whether
we lie to someone else or we lie to ourselves, we cut ourselves off from the
truth. The truth is of God. If you have ever had a friendship where someone has
told a lie, either you or the other person, you know that from that moment on
the intimacy is limited because you have to keep a part of yourself separate or
they are keeping a part of themselves separate. So when we sin, when we miss
the mark with God, we put up an obstacle for that relationship. So our
relationship, this openness, this intimacy with God gets disturbed by what we
call sin, or missing the mark.
The problem in the relationship
between God and human beings is that none of us are perfect. None of us use the
free will that God gave us in a loving way all of the time. All of us get
selfish. All of us get fearful. All of us hurt others. All of us hurt
ourselves. All of us deny God, deny the creation. We all do it. Not a single
one of us. Not even that Pharisee who was standing there saying I followed all
the law is capable of being perfect in the sense of Christ’s perfection of
loving one another as God loves us. And so we all mess up. We all mess up in
our relationships with other human beings too.
This is nothing new. The question
is what do we do when we mess up? First, we acknowledge it. We go to our friend
and say “I messed up.” And if it is a real friend they’ll forgive us. So what
do we do when we mess up with God? We say “God have mercy on us.” “God have
mercy on me a sinner,” are the words that come out of the tax collectors mouth.
He knows the truth about who he is. He is asking for God’s mercy. You see for
the other side of this relationship with God in which we inevitable let God
down is that God has this incredible, enormous unconditional love for us and
will always be ready to say, “You are forgiven.” God is always yearning for
this relationship to mend itself and is just waiting for us to take down those
barriers that keep ourselves separate.
There is an interesting balance in
this relationship with God. We will mess up and if we ask for forgiveness God
will forgive. So we are living in this wonderful dynamic, and if we can
acknowledge and accept God’s enormous mercy and love we can also be honest
about who we are, and we can keep become whom God longs for us to be.
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