The Preacher and the Panhandlers
Luke 18:9 - 14
Text: "God, I thank You that I am not like other people: . . . "
"God, be merciful to me, a sinner!" . . . Luke 18:11 & 25
Belmont United Methodist Church is a very large, attractive, English gothic, stone, well kept church, located very close to Cushing Square, very close to a bus line, in a wealthy Boston suburb. I served as pastor there from 1992 to 1999.
But with the church's location, there are other things associated with this - I call it the law of unforeseen consequences. Being close to the bus-line in and out of Boston, many people looking for handouts frequent the church. Some were up-front and told me they have just been released from prison, others reeked of alcohol. Some came in carrying all their worldly possessions in a backpack and a duffel bag. Most looked like they hadn't bathed in a few days - and smelled that way too. And all of them had a hard-luck tale to tell if given any encouragement.
I could recite many examples, but I remember one well. A man came in off the street just about the time I was about to leave to go to a meeting. He told me he had eaten in two days. He wasn't looking for charity, he said; he was willing to sell me the Walkman (my how technology changes quickly!) he was wearing so he could get enough money for a meal at Friendly's.
Being the totally trusting pastor that I am, . . . well, my first thought was that he had stolen it.
I'm somewhat ashamed to say that, but it comes after years of dealing with these kinds of requests.
I said to him I'd give him $5 and he could take the bus into Boston and go to the Pine Street Inn, a wonderful shelter and agency for the homeless in Boston, for a meal and shelter.
"A church like this can't give more than $5.00?" and then, "I don't go there," said the man with unexpected intensity, "Last time I went there I was robbed."
While his story might have been true, I thought his reaction was a tip-off that he didn't really want food or shelter; he wanted the money for drugs or alcohol.
"I'm sorry," I said, "but this is all I can offer you."
He took the $5 and turned and walked away muttering about something about wondering why there weren't any Christians to be found in the churches.
For a minute or two it was all I could do to restrain myself from running after him, giving him the money. Of course, I could have even given him more. I felt as though I was being tested and I had failed. There are many words and sayings of Jesus that echoed in my head: the story of the rich man and Lazarus; and, of course, those words, . . . "Whatever you do to the least of these My brothers and sisters, you did it unto Me." But there was another story that inspired my guilt - and that is today's parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. I'm afraid I'll always be like the Pharisee - haughty, unsympathetic, and unaware - and that God will accept the poor person I encounter and will reject me for turning that person away.
This remarkable little parable truly troubles me. Fewer than 100 words, exclusive of commentary, and it turns upside down our whole instinctive moral system - everything we've learned from our families, society and even our religion about being worthy and contributing members of the community. According to Jesus, this parable reflects God's perspective.
The Pharisee in this story made four very basic mistakes (not un-coincidentally, the four points of my sermon):
• he thought his heart was pure;
• he thought of himself highly;
• he thought his ethics was a simple matter; and,
• he thought God was a mere bookkeeper.
Unfortunately, I'm always making these same mistakes. I guess that's why I identify with the Pharisee and not the tax collector. I'm as guilty as he was.
1.) For example, like the Pharisee, I think my heart is pure. 34 years of ministry have put it through a lot of efforts at purification - prayer, study, spiritual retreats, constant disciplining of the emotions, occasional self-mortification over the recognition of failure, even prostration and remorse before God. Yet every time I start feeling good about myself, thinking that I am not really such a bad person and am probably a good deal better than most people I meet, I get a little glimpse into my true nature - the nature God must see all the time - and realize I am nothing, worse than nothing. I am a posturer, self-righteous like the Pharisee who has - at least at times - managed to impress himself and the community, . . . but never God.
Have you ever had a dream - or rather a nightmare - where you have done something truly awful. I have. And when I do I awake scared and totally soaked in perspiration. I live for days under the shadow of such a dream, realizing the potential for my doing evil. If my subconscious mind could entertain such horrible thoughts, couldn't I be capable of them someday in the right (or wrong) circumstances? As St. John of the Cross and the other mystics understood; lust, envy, jealously, ambition, greed, hate, and resentment often leap out from beneath the surface most maliciously at the very moment when we think we have subdued or exterminated them.
2.) Second point. Then there is this matter of the Pharisee thinking of himself too highly, especially with respect to other people. "God, I thank You that I am not like other people." Really? Here he crosses from the grammar of gratitude into the grammar of elitism. It can be a very subtle line and we almost never notice when we cross it, but we do it all the time. What betrays us is an unexamined refusal of kinship. It shows every times we use "us-them" language.
You can feel the distance and disdain in his use of the word "this": "this tax collector." Now he has stopped praying and started peeking, judging others behavior more than paying attention to his own. When I was in the first grade we began each day with opening exercises. We would start by standing at our desks pledge allegiance to the flag, sing the National Anthem, then sit down at our desks, close our eyes, fold our hands and recite the Lord's Prayer. One day after we had finished our opening exercises, my cousin, Peter Myers, quickly raised his hand and said to our teacher, "Mrs. Fog, David had his eyes open when we prayed." Like the Pharisee, my cousin had measured himself against a neighbor and was quietly pleased with the difference. Had the tax collector measured himself against the Pharisee and despaired at the difference, his prayer would have been just as false. It's the competitive sideward glance that distorts prayer. It is the "us/them" attitude that that moves the Pharisee from a prayer of Thanksgiving into a posture of elitism. P.S. Mrs. Fog responded to Peter with these words, "Peter, how did you know David was peeking?"
3.) Point three. In my more naïve moods, I too, think ethics is a simple matter. I'm a good family man - at least I try to be. I try to live altruistically; and, I have surrendered my life to "the high calling." In the Pharisee's words, "I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers" - or even like panhandlers. My life is structured, balanced, controlled, and constructive.
Then I watch the evening news reports of riots in Palestine, the war in Iraq and other hot spots of the world, hunger and disease gripping Africa, epidemics spreading as a result of unfair and inconsistent health care. And I have to cry out, "God, be merciful on me, a sinner!" I am part of humanity, part of the intricate web of global affairs. I have a home and have not taken in the homeless. I have money and have not bought food for the hungry. I have arms and have not embraced the outcasts.
But those faults are obvious - and somewhat far-fetched. It's the not so obvious that haunts me. I often contribute unwittingly to the problem. In a culture that favors white people, we are caught in an economic web that discriminates against people of color whether we want to or not. Often the clothes we buy, the sneakers we wear, are made in sweatshops in distant developing countries where workers are inhumanely treated and are not paid an adequate wage. Even the coffee we drink (unless it is the Fair Trade Coffee sold at Coffee Hour) takes unfair advantage of the farmers that grow and harvest the beans. Ethics is not a simple matter. Sometimes we are linked to others by the complex machinations of multinational corporations and economies over which we have little control.
4.) And as sophisticated I like to think I am when it comes to matters theological, I too, occasionally think of God as a mere bookkeeper. That's how I imagine I am on good terms with God merely because I live a fairly routine and harmless existence. I haven't done anything really bad, I haven't been to prison, and I haven't scandalized my family. And surely, being a pastor has gotta be a trump card! Sure, I've done a few things wrong - but if you total it all up; surely my ledger is on the plus side. Therefore, I am a pretty good guy and God must be happy with me.
Jesus' story discounts this attitude. The worst sin of all is to stand in the presence of the Almighty and not be overcome by a sudden sense of fear and unworthiness. To stand about casually in God's presence is the highest form of insolence. I should be on my face begging for mercy like the tax collector, not be proud like the Pharisee. God is Ultimate Being, not some chum.
George Hendry of Princeton Seminary expressed it precisely in his an article entitled, "Is Sin Obsolescent?" He says that, "Our problem today is a loss of a sense of authority. As our world becomes more and more egalitarian, we no longer perceive anyone or anything to be over us. We ourselves become the measure of everything."
The Pharisee, too, saw himself as the measure of everything. He stood and prayed "with himself", as if no higher authority were present. We also have lost our sense of the Ultimate Being. We do not think of ourselves as sinners because there is no God beyond our polite and "gussied-up" ideas of God, before Whom we are sinful. So we become self-congratulatory and go down to our houses, unlike the self-effacing tax collector, without being justified.
And this is where the parable gets real hard. Because to see the tax-collector as honorable and the Pharisee as evil sends us straight into the trap of saying, "God we thank you that we are not like this Pharisee!" The fact of the matter was that tax-collectors were despicable, dishonest, cheats and fully worthy of his confession. Pharisees, on the other hand were thoroughly decent people, generous, committed, and the pillars of the first century Jewish community.
And I know which character our church depends upon. I know which character pays the bills, teaches the lessons, visits the sick, and feeds the hungry. I'd love a church full of people with the commitment that a Pharisee would have - people who fast, tithe all their income and who thank God that they can. As in Jesus' day, it is people like the Pharisee who hold the community together and keep the faith with diligence and passion. We cannot color the Pharisee sinister. He's not J. R. Ewing in a choir robe. He's a better person than I am, and probably better than you.
Well, this story is set in a fine little frame. It begins, "Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector." After they pray, two men leave the temple; but Jesus only mentions the tax collector. Nothing is said of the Pharisee's destination, but the tax collector has a justified homecoming.
He went to his home justified.
Home - it is a repeated warm image in the Bible.
After this kind of prayer, you go home. It's the grand old gospel reversal all over again - God undoing the order of things as they are in our lives and today, even in our temples, and allowing those whose eye is single with light enough to return home.
There is something hopeful about this, despite its emphasis on self-mortification. Maybe in the process something will happen to us - an epiphany, a slight conversion, a glimpse of the inner reality of things - and we shall be saved. Or, if that is too much to ask, perhaps we shall, at least for a moment or two, experience a sense of true justification.
Then we shall feel not like guilty preachers but like the redeemed panhandlers at the threshold of the Kingdom.