A Sermon preached by E. Scott Winnette

Imperfect People and Pride, Luke 18:9-14

Have you run around at all week getting life done? Yes? We can pant together. There are too many varied ladders of success and perfection formulas to follow to secure respect and security: get nice clothes, have good hygiene, give to the poor, save lots of money, pray hard, work hard, good grades, good jobs, be a great parent, trim your azaleas, give time for kids & grandparents, write thank you notes, cook your own organic meals, work out 3-4 days a week, shovel your snow neatly, oil and organize your tools. Whew!   It’s hard to escape the great to-do lists of life, those expectations of ourselves and others. There seems to be a right way to do just about everything. The achievement ladders are all around us and if we ignore too many of them our culture may call us names like disorganized, slothful, lazy, dirty, hippy, grungy, deadbeat, crook, cheat, and unfit. Relax. You are at church now and you can let go the to-do list. Let it fall to the floor. We won’t call you names. This is a safe place.

Our confrontational Lord Jesus persistently teaches us to not be obsessive about the ladders and perfection formulas. He insists that we not judge each other by merits drawn from them. He draws for us a picture of a merciful God who is more concerned for who we are than what we’ve done. 

Can you have some mercy and compassion for Pharisees?   Yes, those who climb all the ladders with success can be annoying. But haven’t you felt sorry for those people who preen and posture in public as if they were the pre-Copernicus earth? You know the people who act like the cosmos spins around them.  Everything about them: their clothes, their words, their walking pretend perfection. They constantly glance around seeking the admiring eyes of others.  It’s sad. It seems that the more successful people become, the more they need the validation of others – they need to be noticed and favored.

            That Pharisee went home from the temple without knowing he was really not as favored by God as he thought. But he was doing it all just right. And what does he get? He gets to be criticized in thousands of sermons as the self-righteous villain. Don’t you feel sorry for him? The Pharisee pristine in his religious costume stands regally a distance from everyone else. Clearly disdainful of the riff-raff he stands apart. He gazes to the ceiling hands dancing with self-delight. And he prays. 

            Growing up, hearing this preached, I imagined him praying aloud with contempt dripping off the words, “God, I thank you that I am not like these other people: the crooks, the tattooed, the lesbians, the stupid, the welfare recipients, the divorced, the politicians, and the bankers.” And then he points to a man who was obviously in prayerful distress and says, “God, I thank you that I am not like this sinful tax collector here. I don’t even know why you let them in here. God, I know you know how I suffer fasting twice a week. God, I know you know how generous I am in my pledge. God, I know you know how superior I am.”   Boy, I wish the Pharisee could have just learned to be as humble as me.

            The Pharisee’s judgmental-ism reminds me of the great southern villain, Mrs. Ruby Turpin, of Flannery O’Conner’s short story, Revelation. Ruby is a sturdy farm woman brimming with deep prejudices, fears and divisions . She with her husband, Claud, enter a doctor's office. She quickly surveys the waiting room and classifies everyone. 

            “There was one vacant chair and a place on the sofa occupied by a blond child in a dirty blue romper who should have been told to move over and make room for the lady… Her gaze settled agreeably on a well-dressed gray-haired lady whose eyes met hers and whose expression said: if that child belonged to me, he would have some manners and move over...Next to her was a fat girl of eighteen or nineteen, scowling into a thick blue book... Next to the ugly girl was the child...and next to him was a thin leathery old woman in a cotton print dress. She and Claud had three sacks of chicken feed in their pump house that was in the same print. She could tell by the way they sat -- kind of vacant and white-trashy, as if they would sit there until Doomsday if nobody called and told them to get up.….Sometimes Mrs. Turpin occupied herself at night naming the classes of people. On the bottom of the heap were most colored people,…; then next to them - not above, just away from - were the white-trash; then above them were the home-owners, and above them the home-and-land owners, to which she and Claud belonged. Above she and Claud were people with a lot of money and much bigger houses and much more land.”

            Mrs. Turpin had a severe confrontation with the young girl who calls her a warthog from hell. Later unable to rest because of her anger she hosed down their hogs. And she questions God, "What do you send me a message like that for?" "How am I a hog and me both?" "How am I saved and from hell too?"   She gets God’s response in a disturbing vision, “There was only a purple streak in the sky, cutting through a field of crimson and leading, like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk. … She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black[s] in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.” 

            Mrs. Turpin's prejudices, her hierarchy of human value, the boundaries she erected around God’s love were turned upside down. Those she saw beneath her were at the top honored, loved and accepted by God. Flannery O'Conner's story cooperates with today’s parable where Jesus closed, “I tell you, this tax collector went down to his home justified rather than the Pharisee; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

            I don’t see the Pharisee as quite the villain as Ruby Turpin. He was trying to follow God. She only seemed to follow her interior prejudices. He was heartily attempting to be like the God of his imagination and the imagination of his fellows. To them God was holy. God was holy, holy, holy set apart from creation, brilliant in difference, judgmental of humanity, and too glorious to be approached by a dirty humanity.   The Pharisee sought to emulate this God. He worked hard to separate himself from all who were considered unclean due to deformity, to illness, to wrongful physical practices. He climbed the ladders and separated himself from sinners. He fasted. He gave generously. He was a good guy. 

Jesus teaches us that the man was misguided. The Pharisee was not receptive to God’s natural mercy for himself or others. The point of the parable is not that we are to dislike Pharisees, nor is the point that we are not to work hard and seek to be good people. Jesus is teaching us a lesson about God.  Jesus is teaching that God is not far away from us but kneels down among us.

            Remember the parable of the Prodigal Son. The younger child asks for his inheritance early from his father and then sets off into the world with the wealth in his satchel. He squanders it in riotous living. After suffering as a servant to pigs, he decides to return home and see if he could get a slave’s job with his Dad. The younger son due to his behavior and the contact with pigs would have been considered both very unclean and a horrid sinner in the eyes of the religious establishment. The tax collector in today’s parable due to his close contact with the Roman Gentiles and the sinfulness of his accused extortion of the people would have been considered very unclean and a horrid sinner.   Both the prodigal son and the tax collector seek mercy. The son goes home. The tax collector enters the temple to pray to God. With humility and in pain he beats his breast praying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”  

            Thank God the rebellious son and the sinful tax collector are received into God’s embrace. The Abba Father rushes out, kneels down to them and welcomes them home.   Our God is a merciful God.  

            The Pharisee was unfortunately stuck in the same rut as the older brother of the prodigal son story. The older brother when invited to the father’s welcome-home feast for the prodigal rants about how he had done everything correctly and did not get a party. You can hear the two, the Pharisee and older brother, laying out their litanies of perfection. They had sought to emulate a perfect God with perfect behavior. They with Mrs. Turpin believed they deserved an award.

In both parables, Jesus is revealing an alternative God to the Pharisees’, Abba Father rather than Emperor Judge. The Pharisee’s theology defined God as Holy and they dictated a covenant with God of holiness. To them faithfulness was defined by right behavior. Jesus promotes a covenant centered on God’s mercy.  To him faithfulness is determined by relationship with God.  

The parables are not encouraging us to squander and cheat so that we can receive God’s mercy. The parables are not communicating that good behavior is bad. The father loves his oldest son and urges him to join the welcome-home party. Jesus does not criticize the Pharisees’ devotion. Abba even loves the Mrs. Turpins too. Yet, we are encouraged to dismantle their systems of value that limit God’s mercy, that limit our human mercies.   We are encouraged to stop casting God into the farthest reaches of the cosmos separating ourselves from God’s mercy and love. We are encouraged to stop spinning the world around our orbits believing we create our own salvation. We are encouraged to accept that we are all imperfect people in need of God’s grace. And we are all welcomed into God’s embrace. 

I close with a poem attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi. Francis had lived at the apex of the ladders of wealth, education, and power. He was called by God to climb down from the achievement ladders and to learn God’s mercy.   Listen with me for Christ’s image of God taught in the parables, taught through the life of Saint Francis, taught through our lives together.

GOD WOULD KNEEL DOWN

I think God might be a little prejudiced.

For once He asked me to join Him on a walk

Through this world,

and we gazed into every heart on this earth,

and I noticed He lingered a bit longer

before any face that was weeping,

and before any eyes that were laughing.

And sometimes when we passed a soul in worship

God too would kneel down.

I have come to learn: God adores His creation.

Amen.