Sermon - Reformation Sunday / 20th After Pentecost - 10/27/2019
Jer. 14:7-10, 19-22; Ps. 84:1-7; 2 Tim. 4:6-8, 16-18; Lk. 18:9-14
“The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: God, I thank you that I am not like other people, thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even this tax collector.”
What a self-righteous jerk. Thank God I’m not like that.
You see the problem.
It would be so easy to hear this parable of Jesus and think, So the worst sin of all is being self-righteous and judgmental, so the Pharisee is actually a worse sinner than the tax collector. Bad Pharisee! But as soon as we take that step, we fall right into the trap again. The trap of thinking that a meaningful life is one where we do certain things, or at least more of those things than others do.
No one who heard Jesus tell this parable would have failed to be impressed with the Pharisee’s good deeds; no one would heard Jesus would have had any romantic illusions that the tax collector was anything other than a Mafia thug.
And yet the Pharisee’s prayer gets his relationship with God exactly wrong. The Pharisee’s mistake is one that religious people are always tempted to make – to think that because we are doing the right things that God will be pleased with us. That we deserve to be rewarded for all of our good deeds and that a just God will so reward us, and so in the end we receive what we have earned, and we need not depend on God for anything.
And then we are unable to make the authentic prayer of the tax collector: God, be merciful to me, a sinner. Which at least has the virtue of being honest – the tax collector is, in fact, about the worst kind of person imaginable in first century Palestine. And it’s a prayer that recognizes dependence on God. And it’s a prayer of someone who is not in competition with anybody else for God’s favor. This prayer, and not the prayer of the Pharisee, expresses the right relationship of human beings to God.
In this parable, Jesus communicates through vivid characters and narrative, as he usually does. Theologians, who prefer more abstract and technical language, make the same point as Jesus with the expresson “justification by faith apart from works.” Which is why this gospel passage fits so well with Reformation Sunday, as Martin Luther and the other Reformers defined their calling as bringing the whole church back, again and again, to the message of the gospel that cannot be summarized any better than Jesus does in this parable.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Luther believed, many practices of the church had come to embody the approach of the Pharisee – trying to win God’s favor by heroic deeds and accomplishments, rather than by trusting in God’s mercy and love which are so much wider and deeper than we could begin to imagine. But Luther did not see Reformation as a one-time project. Luther thought that the church would always, continually, be in need of reformation. Because people – perhaps, especially, religious people – will always be tempted to trust our own works rather than trust in God. And so the project of centering our Christian communities, counterinuitively, in the position of the wicked tax collector, and not in the position of the pious Pharisee, will never be completed once and for all.
Earlier this year, some of us spent some time reading the great 20th century Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. One of the most striking and relevant things we read was Bonhoeffer’s reflection on how people can often feel alone even in a Christian community, “notwithstanding their corporate worship, common prayer, and all their fellowship in service.” He suggests that this is “because, though they have fellowship with one another as believers and as devout people, they do not have fellowship as the undevout, as sinners. The pious fellowship permits no one to be a sinner. So everybody must conceal their sin from themselves and from the fellowship. We dare not be sinners. Many Christians are unthinkably horrified when a real sinner is suddenly discovered among the righteous. So we remain alone with our sin, living in lies and hypocrisy.
“But,” Bonhoeffer says, “it is the grace of the Gospel, which is so hard for the pious to understand, that it confronts us with the truth and says: You are a sinner; now come, as the sinner that you are, to God who loves you. God wants you as you are; God does not want anything from you, a sacrifice, a work; God wants you alone. This message is liberation through truth. You can hide nothing from God. The mask you wear before others will do you no good before God. God wants to see you as you are, God wants to be gracious to you. You do not have to go on lying to yourself and your siblings, as if you were without sin; you can dare to be a sinner. Thank God for that.”
This is the gospel; this is the good news that the Reformation tries to put back in its proper place at the center of our faith. But it is good news that, Bonhoeffer says, is “so hard for the pious to understand.” Just as the Pharisee, no doubt, found it hard to understand how the tax collector’s prayer could find more favor with God that his own. Yet if we imagine the church to be a fellowship of Pharisees, of people who gather to give thanks that we are not like other people who spend their Sunday mornings reading the paper and going to brunch – then we have missed the boat.
This week I participated in a course I’m taking with some other pastors in the area. Most of us are relatively new as pastors of congregations that are smaller than they used to be, and we are all trying to figure out what to do about it. One pastor expressed the possibility that people today are happy and content with their lives and don’t feel the need for anything more. I responded that I thought most people do feel the need for something more in their lives – they just don’t expect to find it in church. They expect that church will offer them less – less freedom to be their authentic selves, less joy, less wrestling with questions and doubts, more judgment and rules and thought police.
The Reformation was, at least in its intent, about becoming a different kind of church – people confident enough in God’s grace to dare to be sinners, to dare to admit their flaws and imperfections and struggles and questions. A community where the Spirit’s presence is so strong that we can have fellowship, as Bonhoeffer says, “not only as devout people and believers, but as undevout people and sinners,” since one of Luther’s most famous teachings is that we are always both at the same time. A fellowship that would welcome and embrace the tax collector who does not yet dare to lift his eyes to heaven, who cannot yet fathom how he will get out of the mess that he is in, but who at least has the faith to say, God, have mercy on me, I need help. That’s the kind of community that Jesus gathered around himself, and the kind of community that Jesus is still gathering to himself.
May we continue to be a congregation committed to the Reformation, the one that took place in Luther’s day and the one that is happening right now. May we continue to be a congregation focused on Jesus who proclaimed the good news of God’s forgiving love and who comes among us in the Word and at the table. May we continue to be a congregation confessing faith in the gospel that frees us to dare to be the redeemed sinners we are. May we continue to be a congregation that strives to welcome all people and celebrate the amazing diversity of the people whom God loves. May the Holy Spirit move upon God’s church, and reform us again and always, in the name of Jesus the Lord. Amen.