The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
October 28, 2007

Proper 25 - C
Jeremiah 14:7-10, 19-22
2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18
Luke 18:9-14

If you have no addictions or other serious illnesses, if you enjoy a happy marriage and your children are all good looking and above average and obedient and respectful, if your work is fulfilling and you’ve got the world by the tail, then this sermon, and maybe even church itself, is not for you. This is the caveat with which William Willimon, a Methodist, once started one of his sermons. He said he didn’t want anyone to sit there listening with the wrong expectations.

The Gospel, Willimon said, is not for those who have their lives together. If you fast twice a week and tithe and obey all the commandments, then today’s Gospel reading in particular is not for you. Today’s Gospel reading – in fact, the Gospel itself – is for those who can’t get by on their own, for those tax collectors and other sinners among us who are uncertain of their beliefs and are aware of their adultery, their dishonesty, and their greed.

Today’s Gospel is not for those who are proud of themselves and their righteousness. Today’s Gospel reading is grace, pure and simple, good news for those of us who need God to save us because we can’t save ourselves. It’s a parable, Luke tells us, which Jesus “aimed at those who were sure of their own goodness, and looked down on everyone else.”

Two men came to church one Sunday, says Jesus. One, a lifelong Episcopalian, a frequent leader of Sunday School classes, a member of the vestry and delegate to diocesan convention, prayed, “I thank you, Lord, that my parents reared me right and taught me to go to church and read the Bible. I thank you that my mother taught me to love you and to have a strong commitment to your will. I thank you that I’m not like other people – greedy, dishonest, adulterous – and most of all I thank you that I’m not like some who are here this morning, those who are not pillars of the church like me. I give ten percent of all my worldly goods to the church, I participate regularly on church committees, and I volunteer at Thrift House and tutor underprivileged children twice a week.”

And the other man? Well, the other man owns a convenience store in a shady area of town, and he has recently been fined for selling cigarettes to children and is suspected of being a front for the sale of crack as well. This man also came to church, but sat quietly in the back pew that day. Just the previous week, shortly after his wife told him she was leaving him, authorities showed up to tell him that they were suspending his liquor license. Also last week his son was seriously injured in an alcohol-related accident. The man was really down, and for some reason he himself didn’t understand, he had shown up at church that day. Thus far, though, no one really noticed him. He was lousy at prayer. He didn’t know what to do in church; he didn’t know which words to say or when to stand or kneel, so he only muttered, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

The Bible-believing tither and community volunteer didn’t get much out of the service. He didn’t like the hymns, and once again someone had set the thermostat too low. Something was missing. Nothing in the service touched his heart. Oh, well, maybe next Sunday.

The other man sat crying in his pew long after the dismissal, overcome with joy or grief, he didn’t know which. He couldn’t say what had happened to him that morning. All he had said was, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

The pharisee and the tax collector of Jesus’ parable are not merely characters in a Bible story. They are real people, real people who lived in Jesus’ day and real people who live in Colorado Springs in the Year of Our Lord 2007. Both come to church, hoping to be closer to God. Both offer their prayers. Two people address God, and God comes close to the one and not the other.

Why? Why does one person experience God in church while another doesn’t?

I don’t know. But I do know that this parable is not only about us. It’s also about God, and it’s primarily about God. It’s not a parable about the way we’re supposed to pray and act in church. It’s mostly about the way God acts in church. And I also know that in the parable it’s the humble, low-life tax collector, the one who reproaches his own behavior, not the pharisee who is so proud of himself, whom God moves close to.

But the parable cannot be a story through which Jesus is urging us to imitate the tax collector. The meaning of the parable cannot be, “Now go out there and be humble like that tax collector.”

For one thing, have you ever tried to be humble? It can’t be done. Trying hard to be humble is just another version of the same old story we already know, that story that fails us every time, the story about getting our lives all cleaned up on our own, that story about pulling ourselves up by our own spiritual bootstraps, that story about making ourselves righteous before God rather than being open to God’s giving us something. We know that story by heart already.

When it comes to being unworthy, when it comes to being humble, you either are or you aren’t. “Humility” – a word that reaches far back to the root word, “humus,” back to that “brown and black substance that comes from the partial decay of plants and animals,” back to the moist soil from which we human beings are created, back to that which lies low, close to the ground, at the bottom.

The tax collector wasn’t trying to be humble. He wasn’t trying to be unworthy. He wasn’t acting as if he didn’t know what to do in church. He didn’t know what to do in church. He was unworthy. He was just being who he was. He had much to be humble about. He was humus, a down-low creature, human.

But fortunately for the tax-collector this parable is not primarily about us human beings. It is primarily a parable about God. It is not a parable about how we are supposed to act. It is a parable about how God does act. Two people come before the presence of God, and God comes close to the one, and not the other. God touches the heart of one, and not the other.

Why?

I don’t know. That’s the way God is. God comes close to one, but not to the other. That’s what the parable is telling us. God looks into one person’s heart, into the heart of the one, the pharisee, who has done all those good and wonderful things – and they are truly good and wonderful things! – but God does not come close to the heart of that person.

The pharisee is who we all work hard to be, a person altogether socially respectable and morally solvent. But God senses something there, I guess, something that does not attract God, or that tells him to keep his distance. Maybe it’s that the man is so puffed up about himself and his own importance that there simply isn’t room for God, and for the kind of righteousness God is. After all, righteousness – real righteousness, God’s righteousness – and contempt for other people cannot occupy the same heart.

Perhaps God does not come close to the pharisee because the pharisee doesn’t realize that he too, just like the sinner across the room, is but humus, of that “brown and black substance that comes from the partial decay of plants and animals.” Clearly, in his imagination, he is proud that he is not like the other man. Perhaps he suffers from what someone once called “spiritual inflation.” He talks a lot when he prays, but who is he really talking to? To God, or to himself? Maybe God doesn’t draw near, because, after all, he really hasn’t had an invitation.

The one, the Bible-believing member of the vestry and community board volunteer, didn’t get much out of the service. Something was missing. Nothing in the service touched his heart. Oh, well, maybe next Sunday.

The other, the tax-collector, the sinner, sat crying in the back pew long after the dismissal, overcome with joy or grief, he didn’t know which. He couldn’t say what had happened to him that morning. He wasn’t trying to be humble. He wasn’t acting like he didn’t know how or what to pray. He didn’t know how to pray. He was just being who he was. He had much to be humble about. He was down low, of humus. And he knew it, so all he had said was, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

And then he realized something: “God loves me.”

I’m thinking that some of you know what this means. You come to church, not knowing whether you ought to be here or not. After all, you have secrets. You’ve done things you ought not to have done, and you’ve not done those things you ought to have done. And some Sundays everyone else looks so pious and righteous, so close to God, so near to getting it all right. But as for you, you’re feeling far off from God. Distant. When it comes time for prayer, you don’t know what words to use. You’re down.

The good news is: that’s when God meets us. That’s when God acts. That’s when God blesses us.

When you’re on top of the world, when you can say the words of the Creed with all your heart, when you know the Bible backwards and forwards and have a ready verse for every occasion on the tip of your tongue, when you’ve counted all your good deeds and believe that they add up to spiritual solvency, when prayer comes easily for you, when you can pray, “Lord, I’m thankful that I’m not needy. I’m thankful that I’m not empty, confused, bereft, and difficult like some other people here,” when you have the world by the tail like that, you don’t need a gift from God. What can God do for you when you’ve got it all together?

But when you know you are of humus, when you know you are down close to “that brown and black substance that comes from the partial decay of plants and animals,” when you are empty handed, unsteady, unsure, close to the bottom, humble, then today’s parable is your story.

Jesus’ parable this morning holds up a mirror to us. In it we can see our distorted perspective about righteousness and salvation, our distorted perspective about how closeness to God happens.

“Works” won’t cut it. Human righteousness and good works don’t bring us close to God. Neither does “faith,” when faith itself is seen as a kind of human work: “OK, gang, now let’s get out there and believe! Go out there and be humble!” That kind of “faith” is not Gospel, not good news. But grace is good news.

Frederick Buechner, a Presbyterian, is one of the really well known Christian writers of the past twenty or thirty years, and a number of years ago he told the entire General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) that he was no longer a regular churchgoer. “I hate to say this,” he confessed, “but for many years now I’ve taken to going to church less and less, because I find so little there of what I hunger for.... It’s a sense of the presence of God that I hunger for. It’s grace that I hunger for.” And what Buechner was saying, of course, was that he wasn’t finding much of it in church.

Garrison Keillor confesses a similar hunger. He says that recently he went to a church service in Baltimore. “It was a formal high Mass,” he says, ”none of that hi-and-how-are-we-all-doing-this-morning chumminess.... There were less than thirty of us in the pews, fewer than the names on the prayer list, [but]the singing was O my God just heartbreakingly good, and the homily [simply] summarized the Scripture texts about [God’s offer of] healing. It didn’t turn [the Gospel] into a an essay on health care.” It was for Keillor, in other words, a moment of the presence of God, an experience of what God is doing, not a pat on the back for ourselves and what we are doing. (Garrison Keillor, “A Church, a Choir and a Splendid Fall Day”)

Funny, isn’t it, how we flee from grace? Funny how even in church the pharisaic way of looking down on those whom we imagine are not as pious or righteous as we are has a way of creeping in. Even for the heirs of John Calvin, even for Presbyterians. Even for Episcopalians.

And that’s why John Wesley, one of our own, an Anglican, reminds us that this mysterious thing we call life is not, finally, about us. It’s about God, and about God’s grace. Wesley reminds us “to observe that great and important truth that ought never to be out of our remembrance: ‘It is God that worketh in us both to will and to do of his good pleasure.’”

“The meaning of these words,” says Wesley, “may be made clearer by simply transposing them: ‘It is God that, of his good pleasure, worketh in us both to will and to do.’ This transposition of the phrase, connecting “God’s good pleasure” with “worketh,” removes all imagination of merit from man and gives God the whole glory of the work. Otherwise, we might have had some room for boasting [like the pharisee], as if it were our own desert, some goodness in us or some good thing done by us which first moved God to work. But this [transposed] expression cuts off all such vain conceits,” Wesley adds, and “clearly shows that [God’s] motive to work lay wholly in himself, in his own mere grace, in his unmerited mercy.”

Consider the way Josiah Condor expressed it in the hymn we sang just a moment ago:

In your mercy, Lord, you called me,
taught my sin-filled heart and mind,
else this world had still enthralled me,
and to glory kept me blind.

Lord, I did not freely choose you
till by grace you set me free;
for my heart would still refuse you
had your love not chosen me.

Now my heart sets none above you,
for your grace alone I thirst,
knowing well, that if I love you,
you, O Lord, have love me first.

That’s what Buechner and Keillor long to hear in church. That’s what the tax collector prays for: “Lord, have mercy.” It’s what you and I hunger for as well. It’s Good News, the news that God sent his Son into the world to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, the good news that God Sent his Son not to condemn the world, but to save it.

Grace – gratis, free, a favor. A blessing received, not because we’re such great shakes ourselves, not because you’ve earned it, but just because God desires to give it to you. God loves you, not because you can beat your own breast about how much better you are than someone else, but just because. And God draws near, not because of all the good things you’ve done, not because you’re on the right side of some theological argument, not because you are right about how people, especially other people, ought to live their lives, not because you believe all the articles of the Creed, not because your beliefs, in your own imagination at least, are more orthodox than someone else’s, not because you’ve somehow earned God’s presence, but God draws near when a heart is truly humble, truly open to him, and invites him in.

Faith – not “faith” as a kind of work, by which we imagine that we believe and do all the right things – but real faith, faith not in our own worthiness, but faith in God’s desire to love regardless of righteousness – that faith is our “yes” to the good news of God’s desire and power to save.

That’s the good news of today’s parable, the good news of the Gospel. We call it grace. Don’t worry about what you ought to say to God. Listen for what God has to say to you. It’s free.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.