Becoming Acquainted With Our Need for God’s Mercy
TranscriptioN
Well, good morning again, everybody. It is good to see you this morning. I'm grateful to see some new faces. Those of you who are new and visiting, welcome. We're so glad that you're here. I'm Father Morgan Reed. I'm the vicar here at Corpus Christi Anglican Church, and I am really glad to be here with you worshiping our Lord this morning.
So each year around this time, I'm reminded of something I used to do before I was planning on being ordained. Back in my old life, I was planning on going into academia, and every year around this time, I would go to—it's called SBL or the Society of Biblical Literature—and those meetings were really fun for me. We get to travel the country to wherever they had it each year, and we would have lovely discussions about things like the Dead Sea Scrolls, Aramaic paleography, Syriac and like a headstone inscriptions, you know, all sorts of really interesting things that are interesting to everybody, right? And so this was fun for me, and one of the interesting dynamics about Society of Biblical Literature is that—you may not know this, but academic jobs are really hard to come by.
So imagine 10,000 people coming to a conference center jockeying for position, who are trying to either further their academic careers or who are trying to find an academic job for the first time. It was sort of a weird thing, but you know, each session would have four to five talks, about 20 minutes each, and each was followed by a Q&A session. And now there were people who were very secure in themselves, and they would go to these sessions, and they would ask a very thoughtful question that was engaging with the talk.
But then, inevitably, there would be somebody who would then raise their hand, and they would say something like, well, I guess this isn't as much of a question as much as it's a statement. And then you could feel the room go, oh, here we go, you know, what's gonna happen? And so there was one paper I went to, and there was somebody in the audience who was well-known. He's like the godfather of Old Testament textual criticism, which means something to about like three of you.
And so I was in there, and I knew this guy was there. And then when the person gave this talk, this guy raises his hand, and he does one of those, okay, I don't have a question, this is more of a comment. I thought, oh no, what's gonna happen next? And for the next like five or ten minutes, which could have been its own talk, this guy proceeded to disagree with this poor graduate student who was kind of pouring themselves out after pouring themselves into a paper.
It was humiliating, and you felt the collective response of the group in there lose respect for this scholar as time elapsed, and this person was just berating this young graduate student. It really didn't matter at that point what this man's brilliance or achievements were. His hubris was starting to overshadow his good work.
And we all can think of times where we know people who, because of pride, it's begun to overshadow the good things that they've done in their lives. And so the questioner who says, well, you know, this is more of a comment than it is a question, reminds me a little bit of the hubris that we find in today's gospel passage. And it reminds us of the kind of humility that we need when we're approaching the Lord in prayer.
This passage is this warning against pride, against self-justification. It's a passage about the difficulty of repentance and contrition because of the honesty involved, and then it's a passage about God's disposition to those two different kinds of attitudes. So as we look at our gospel text this morning in Luke 18, let me pray for us.
“In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and Redeemer. Amen.”
So Jesus tells us a parable in Luke chapter 18, and he actually tells us who he's talking to in this passage. He says, to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt. So this first man in the parable is a Pharisee, and this isn't to say that all Pharisees are like this, but there were certainly Pharisees who in Jesus's day prided themselves in their discipline, self-discipline, and their ability to keep the law, even going beyond the law. There were set hours of prayer in that day, and you can imagine that this man is making it every single day to those prayer times.
In the passage, he sort of waltzes right into the temple, you can imagine into the holy place, with a bit of a smug air of contentment with himself and a little bit of entitlement, and he opens his mouth, and I'm gonna paraphrase what he's saying. ‘God, I thank you, not for your grace, but, or of the good things that you've given, but I give you thanks for me, because I'm really great. I go way beyond what you require in your law. I fast twice a week. You didn't even ask me to do that. You didn't, but you know what? I'm really great, and I thank you for that. You know, I give a tenth of my income. Did I mention how grateful I am for how great I am? Thank you so much, Lord, that I am not a bad person, like thieves, people who cheat on their spouses, people have no sense of justice, or worst of all, that guy over there, that tax collector.”
So we get the sense that this Pharisee comes to the temple multiple times a day, if not per week, to thank God about his own greatness. He truly believes that he is God's gift to humanity. What would you do without me, God? Sort of his disposition. Meanwhile, the tax collector in the parable is standing far off, probably in the court of the Gentiles, and he comes every once in a while, hoping not to be really noticed by anybody, and worse than being noticed in this case, he's pointed out by this guy who's known as being pious in the community, and he's now the object of the contemptuous gaze of the righteous person in the community.
So I hope as you hear my paraphrase and my retelling of that, that none of that sits right with you. It's not supposed to sit right with us. It's supposed to feel really icky, and it was supposed to when Jesus said it as well.
That person, the Pharisee, was doing all the right things on the outside to make them look right before God without any of the substance to actually do what was to make him right before God. It was a form of avoiding the reality of his own brokenness, his disordered loves, his dysfunctional attachments to the world, which those things are sort of the nature of sin. One of the church fathers, St. Augustine, says this about the passage, he came to the doctor.
It would have been more worthwhile to inform the doctor by confession of the things that were wrong with himself instead of keeping his wounds secret and having the nerve to crow over the scars of others. It's not surprising that the tax collector went away cured, since he hadn't been ashamed of showing where he felt pain. And so I really like how he puts that in a medical frame, thinking of the doctor and healing.
I can imagine the kind of person that goes to the doctor just to brag about how healthy they are, to check the box, and you know, look at all the things I'm doing in my life, doctor, but they fail to inform the doctor of those lingering headaches that keep persisting or the pain they're having in their foot. They sort of ignore those things in order to, well, they brag about the things that are going well in order to ignore the things that might be causing them harm. It's easier to brag about our accomplishments and credentials than it is to confess our sins or to be honest about our brokenness.
As you think through the last week, there are places that have invited us into examining our brokenness. What emails gave us a rise this week in our spirit? As you think of the conversations you had with co-workers, friends, or family, which one of those caused a disproportionate amount of angst, contempt, anger, envy, sadness? What meeting are you dreading coming up this week? Who is it and why? Those are the moments that are invitations to examine ourselves and to ask the doctor for health. I think we move through those things too quickly without reflection because those are the places that point out to us where brokenness is, where disordered loves or where loves have become disordered, where attachments might be to this kingdom of darkness.
Sometimes we define sin just as this overarching category of rebellion against God, and it's not wrong, but it needs more definition. When you get down to it, sin is rebellion against the goodness of who God is. It's rebellion against the goodness of how God created the world, which he calls very good. It's rebellion against them being truly human because we were meant to be God's good image-bearers on this earth. And so, disordered loves, attachments, and pride make us less human. So the way that the monastic tradition in the past has talked about these things is disordered attachments or disordered loves.
And I find that helpful to give specificity to this overarching category of rebellion against God because to rightly order loves and rightly order attachments with the kingdom of God is to rightly order the world, is to understand the world as God intended it to be. So somebody might come to church regularly, they might say or not say certain things because they know it's right or wrong, they might pray at certain times, they might hold very public ethical positions, and they might do all those things to avoid dealing with the humiliation of living comfortably with a secretly disordered interior life. It's possible.
And the Pharisee shows us that. They might not even know what they're doing when they're doing that. And that's exactly what Satan wants. That's the very thing that makes us less human, holding on to a secret life, bypassing the brokenness, ignoring the disorder through our spiritual achievements. The very thing which could save us, which could be spaces of redemption, then become traps through religiosity. And so the Pharisee, he's also, it's interesting to me, he's characterized not just by pride but by other-centered contempt.
And I wonder then if the flip side of the coin of pride is other-centered contempt. So contempt for others and pride being flip sides of the same coin. Because if I can name the faults of other people really well, sometimes I can do that in order to avoid the humiliation of looking at my own brokenness. And like a doctor, naming those things for which I need forgiveness and healing. And so we can see in the Pharisee the dangers of pride, self-justification.
Now we want to look at this tax collector and the difficulty of repentance. Remember why tax collectors are so hated in the time of Jesus. People in those days purchased rights over a territory. They had to collect taxes to pay to some municipal leader. And so private, the tax collection was almost like a privatized industry, where individual tax collectors had to collect enough taxes not only for those that they owed money to, who were paying off the land, but also to make an income. And so it was really common for somebody who's a tax collector to charge extra fees. And what those fees were was up to the tax collector.
So in a society like that, extortion is commonplace. In fact, it's not just commonplace, it's actually acceptable. It's just common. Everyone assumes it's going to happen. And so, for any Jew who's going to become a tax collector, they're already on the outside of society. They're considered a traitor. Somebody who doesn't really trust that Yahweh is king, they're a tool of Caesar.
And so, imagine the amount of self-hatred in the life of the tax collector. He knows exactly where he stands in the community, what everyone thinks of him. He's viewed with suspicion by everyone he meets, and he probably doesn't choose that job for himself. Unfortunately, because of his life circumstances, that job has found him. We don't know what they are, doesn't matter.
The point is, no one who is self-respecting says, I aspire to the place of tax collector, right? He is so aware of his own brokenness and sin as a tax collector, he hardly needs anyone to tell him how broken he is. And so hearing the voice of condemnation from the Pharisee is only echoing the very thing that he feels about himself. He says, yeah, you're right, that's exactly who I am. It's just echoing the shame voice. We all have one of those. We all have a shame voice, and what echoes it for us? He knows that he has nothing to approach God with.
But maybe, just maybe, if he can get close to God's presence, then he's gonna rediscover some semblance of his humanity, and this relationship with God that he longs for. Contrition is really difficult because it requires us to join the tax collector in risking humiliation to express our needs to God, to admit that we have, that we are not the one who God needs to build his kingdom, that we need God more than he needs us, right? And the tax collector, he wants to know that God is in control. He wants to know if there's somewhere that he can go where all the poor decisions in his life that he may have made aren't going to define him, where he finds somebody who's going to attune well to the sorrow of his heart, and discover the delight in him and the love that he's longing for.
That's what he's hoping for. And so, he approaches the temple cautiously. He takes himself to the most unassuming place, the edge of the temple in the court of the Gentiles, at the edge of grace, where he hopes to meet the grace of God, to find answers, to find love, and to hopefully reframe his own world.
And the incredible truth of this parable is that it's that man who's on the edge of grace that's actually at the center of God's delight and God's pleasure. And so as we think about the Pharisee and the tax collector, as we close, I want to look at God's disposition towards these two people. Jesus says that it was the tax collector who went home justified, who went home right in the sight of God rather than the Pharisee.
And I can imagine in my mind's eye that the Pharisee walks smugly back out of the temple with no knowledge that he has gone from the temple unjustified and looking poorly and not at the center of God's pleasure. So what Jesus invites us into in this passage is a life that is in search of the mercy and grace of God to rearrange the disordered loves and attachments that have formed for us, and then to become truly human because of that in Christ. And I've said this before, but I love, there's a patristic quote, I think it's attributed to St. Irenaeus, about the glory of God is a human fully alive. The glory of God is a human fully alive. To become fully human, we have to seek out Jesus and we have to constantly keep our need for God's grace in front of our eyes.
The humble don't compare with others, but they're keenly aware of their own brokenness and their own need of God's work of restoration in their own heart, their own need for the death and resurrection of Jesus in their own specific places of wounding.
The self-righteous, by contrast, are constantly comparing. They're known for bypassing their own dysfunction and they're coasting through life on a wave of other-centered contempt. And they can often find themselves amongst very religious people, but this person finds themselves very far from the pleasure of God.
So I want to encourage us from this passage to make a habit of being needy. Make a habit of being needy. Specifically, to recognize our need for God to reorder our world, to make us new in the person and work of Jesus. And so, come with your need and reflect deeply on the grace of God. And whenever every opportunity comes up for you in prayer, come in stillness and quietness to notice where we are longing for God's grace to make the world new again. Let me pray for us.
“Almighty and everlasting God, you govern all things both in heaven and on earth. Mercifully hear the supplications of your people. And in our time, grant us your peace. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.”
Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Edited using ChatGPT.
