October 27, 2013 (Reformation Sunday) – Luke 18:9-14
Luke 18:9-14
Re-formed by Grace
Reformation Sunday [Lectionary 30] – October 27, 2013
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
Okay: the Pharisee is a swell guy.
And let’s face it: we’d love our churches to be filled with Pharisees.
The guy goes above and beyond: he fasts more, he prays more, and he gives more:
he goes above and beyond in giving 10% of all his income to the Temple.
He’s a spiritual superhero, right?
I imagine him putting his spiritual tights and his spiritual cape on every morning and
flexing his spiritual muscles in front of his mirror admiring himself.
So what’s wrong with that? we might ask.
Well, Paul put his finger on it long ago: If I speak with the tongues of mortals or of angels but
have not love I am a noisy gong or a clanging symbol.
His so-called prayer is not really prayer but is more self-promotion:
the Greek actually says he is praying “to himself”:
it is actually a detailed description of his own fabulousness to himself:
Hey God, I’m a thirty-two year old male with good skin who likes to stay in shape with free weights and pilates. I pray, tithe and fast and am so thankful to bear no resemblance at all to other people. Especially that little nothing of a tax collector over there.
Right.
Sometimes when I read this passage I get the impression that really the Pharisee has
almost forgotten about God and really is just trying to impress himself,
as if he were trying to justify his own existence to himself.
“Hey: I’m a good person. Really. I’m okay. Look at all the stuff I do. I’m not pointless at all.”
You know what I mean?
He’s so wrapped up in himself trying to justify his own existence to himself that
there is no room for anyone else, including the divine:
I mean the guy is looking better than God!
On the other hand, we have the poor slob of a tax collector.
Tax collectors were the Bernie Madoffs of the ancient world, the shady bankers and con artists:
getting what they could from the system.
In this case, a Jew employed by the Romans to extort as much money as he could from
his own people in order to pay for
a vast military machine that occupied and exploited them.
A sinner, by his own admission and everyone else’s, who had to stand far off from everyone,
from his own worshipping community and
even from the Holy of Holies in the centre of the Temple where
God was supposed to dwell.
Unlike the Pharisee, the Tax Collector can’t even look at himself in the mirror in the morning.
He’s a sinner, as our translation of the Gospel has it this morning.
Except that the translation isn’t quite accurate: it literally says he is “the sinner,”
as if his prayer were, “God, be merciful to me, the ultimate sinner,”
as if he weren’t just one sinner among others, but the only one,
isolated even his sinfulness!
What you need to know is that the word for “sin” in the New Testament comes from
the world of archery.
The word is harmartia and it means “to miss the mark,” to miss the thing you’re aiming at.
The tax collector has missed the mark with his life,
he has not become what God has intended him to become and
he has not done what God has intended him to do or created him to be.
His life has missed the mark: he is not the full true complete human being he was created to be.
He confesses that. And asks for God’s mercy. For God’s love. For God’s grace.
We call this story the story of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, but we could call it
the story of the priest and the pimp, the reverend and the rogue, the banker and the bum.
And yet, the great surprise of the story, the great dramatic moment of the story,
the tremendous reversal and shock of the story is that
the Tax Collector goes home justified, or simply “right with God,”
or more simply “right” or fully completely human,
and the Pharisee does not.
How can that be? Well, the thing is, the Pharisee says that in himself he is everything,
while the Tax Collector acknowledges that in himself he is nothing.
Sadly, the Pharisee is so full of himself that there’s no room for God’s grace in his life.
The thing is, though, God loves creating something from nothing: it’s what God does.
God loves raising dead people to life: it’s what God does.
God loves turning things around with grace.
Last week, Melinda and David and Diane and I went to hear a Lutheran pastor from Denver,
Nadia Bolz-Weber.
She is the current tattooed poster-girl for Lutheran hipness in North America.
She grew up in a fundamentalist church home, rebelled against it, turned to
drugs and alcohol and drugs, and became an addict.
Knowing she needed help, she became involved in Wicca, which introduced her to the idea that
we have the divine within us, that we are divine. But she writes about this:
I just couldn’t be comforted by my own divinity or awesomeness, although I’d love it if I could. . . . What I needed was a specific divine source of reconciliation and wholeness, a source that is connected to me in love, but that does not come from inside me. (Pastrix, 45)
Then she went to an A.A. meeting.
And there she found something quite different:
What the drunks taught me was that there was a power greater than myself who could be a source of restoration, and that higher power, it ends up, is not me. (Ibid, 48)
What she needed was the same mercy and grace and love that
the Tax Collector asks for this morning.
God, have mercy on me, grant me a love that I cannot generate on my own,
for I am always missing the mark.
The Tax Collector wants so badly to be re-formed by God’s grace.
With his simple prayer he’s inviting God to re-form him – by grace.
He wants mercy to re-form him, to re-make him, to make him new.
Well: that could be the prayer of each one of us, every moment of every day, couldn’t it?
To be re-formed in the image of Christ, who did not exalt himself, but humbled himself by
coming among us and healing the sick and feeding the hungry and
forgiving the sinner and embracing the stranger and outcast.
And let’s face it: that prayer – to be re-formed by grace – could be the prayer of
our congregation: every year, every month, every week.
To be re-formed again and again and again by grace, by love, by mercy.
If the great dramatic moment in the story is that it is the Tax Collector who is right with God,
then surely the great tragedy in the story is that there are two brothers here who are
in great need of each other who are being kept apart by sin and prejudice and –
yes – religion.
The tragedy is that the Pharisee is so wrapped up in his own goodness that he can’t see or
attend to a brother in tremendous spiritual and human distress.
As Jonathan Swift said long ago, “We [often] have just enough religion to make us hate,
but not enough to make us love one another.”
Or, as Martin Luther said even longer ago,
“God doesn’t need our good works, but our neighbour does.”
I mean, what you really want in the story is for the Pharisee to get over himself,
go to where the Tax Collector is, put his arm around him and say,
“Brother, let’s go for a beer and you can tell me all about it.”
But it doesn’t happen, because the Pharisee is too full of himself, and not full enough of God.
We are celebrating the heritage of the Reformation this morning.
Both this parable and the Reformation seek to turn our attention away from ourselves and
our achievements to God and to our neighbour in need.
According to Luther, neither you nor the Pharisee need to impress God.
God loves you just as you are, and God always has.
In the religion of Luther’s time, religion was viewed as a ladder of good works you used to
climb up into heaven, like the Pharisee seems to be trying to do this morning.
But Luther turned all that upside down:
he said over and over again that Christianity really is about God coming down to us,
giving us grace, loving us as we are, re-forming us and raising us to new life.
Thinking about our good works shifts our attention inward toward ourselves,
rather than outward toward our neighbours in need.
Luther’s message: don’t worry about yourself: God will look after you.
God couldn’t love you any more than God does right now.
God loves those who miss the mark, God loves sinners, God loves you.
And – though Winnipeggers will find this hard to believe –
God even loves the Blue Bombers. Really.
Luther’s big idea was that our lives have nothing to do with climbing a spiritual ladder,
but rather that they have everything to do with receiving a mercy and a grace that
come down to us over and over again – and sharing that mercy and grace
with our neighbours as freely as it has been given to us.
His idea was that the church isn’t just re-formed once,
but re-formed over and over and over again by a God who loves creating
something from nothing over and over and over again by
coming and coming and coming to us over and over and over again
especially in the bread and the wine and the stranger.
We are re-formed when, as one of our Thanksgivings at Table has it,
when we come “with nothing in our hands and we yearn for the healing, the holding,
the accepting and the forgiving that Christ alone can offer.”
We are re-formed when we accept that gift, and take it into ourselves, and then
take it out with us to share it freely with all who are in any need.
This love changes us: it re-forms us and makes us new and raises us to a new life.
What changes us more and better but the love we give one another?
What truly re-forms is the mercy we wish the Pharisee had given the Tax Collector.
What re-forms us is the grace we receive this morning, and the peace we share with one another,
and the love we give away to our neighbours.
May we be re-formed once again by this love, and together let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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