21st Sunday after Pentecost Jeremiah 14.1-10 & 19-22
24 October 2004 Psalm 84
The Rev. Karen A. H. Wacome, Presiding
Dr. Donald H. Wacome, Lay Preaching
Beneath Contempt
“Jesus also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt” Luke 18.9
Back before the
This week, Jesus’ story strikes close to home, as we begin to assimilate the Windsor report on the divisions in the Anglican communion that have arisen from the attempts by the American and Canadian churches more fully to include gays and lesbians in the life of the Church. The ugly stuff surfaces again: the drawing of lines between the worthy and the contemptible, questions of who is acceptable to God and who unacceptable, bitter charges and counter charges of self-righteous hypocrisy, weak-kneed cultural accommodation, and heresy; the pronouncement: “I’m excluding you because you’re excluding me by not excluding him!” and the temptation to respond in kind” “Fine, and good riddance!”
Luke says Jesus aims this story at people “who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt;” my theological radar locks in on the first part: the great theme of justification by grace through faith in stark opposition to the endlessly creative confabulations in which we try to portray ourselves as acceptable to God. It’s easy to skip over the second part about regarding others with contempt, to see that simply as a symptom of the underlying sin of self-justification: they think they’re good enough for God and ipso facto better than those who are not. But as I thought about it, these two things came to seem more tightly bound together, inseparable, in fact.
What’s wrong with the Pharisee anyway? If what he says is true, that he is not like the thieves, rogues, adulterers; that he really does live by the Law; and, crucially, he does not approach God with all this as a line of credit that buys divine approval, but instead recognizes that whatever in him puts him into right relation with God is itself a sheer gift, and thanks God for it, then it is not obvious where he is at fault. Seeing that pathetic tax collector over there, he thinks, “that’s me—but for the grace of God.” Isn’t our Pharisee’s Reformed theology completely in order? Where does he exalt himself? Where’s the attempt to justify himself?
Yet Jesus says the tax collector is justified, and implies the Pharisee isn’t. To be justified is to be related to God in the right way. There’s exactly one way to be properly related to God: it’s to be on the receiving end of his undiscriminating mercy. Stand there, in that life-giving relation to God, and no matter what else about you is fouled up, so far as God is concerned, you’re in the right; stand anyplace else and, no matter what else you’ve got going for you, you’re in the wrong. The condition you happen to be in—good, bad or indifferent—is of no account. The only way to escape justification is to find a way to deny or reject the mercy God sends your way. Despite getting so much right, the Pharisee must somehow be standing outside the circle of God’s mercy, and this must have something to do with his attitude toward the tax collector.
There’s one part of the Lord’s Prayer that used to seem to me a bit off: “And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” or, in the contemporary version, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” It seems presumptuous; it’s God’s business to forgive sins, not ours. How can we put ourselves on the same level, as though sinners like us are in a position to be handing out forgiveness, instead of just being glad to get it?
But the odd thing about God’s grace and forgiveness, is that it isn’t just done to us; we’re commanded to share in it, to do for others what God does for us, to forgive as we are forgiven, to love as we are loved. Anyone and everyone gets a place the light of God’s life-giving grace, but you can’t stand there alone. As soon as you push someone else into the shadows, you find yourself in the dark. Trying to accept God’s forgiveness for myself, while denying it to someone else, amounts to rejecting it. William Countryman, in his wonderful book Forgiven and Forgiving, writes “God’s forgiveness isn’t available to me as a separate, private arrangement. That’s a fundamental reality I have to live with. It’s available to me only as part of this big package…. If I want to withhold forgiveness from my neighbor, I’m effectively withholding it from myself too. If I am willing for God to forgive my neighbor, I am allowing God to forgive me too. It’s all or nothing, everybody or nobody.” We can’t draw a line around those who are, and those who are not, in the circle of God’s grace without finding ourselves on the wrong side.
This does not imply some sort of easy-going relativism; it doesn’t mean whatever the other guy believes is right, or that whatever he does makes sense in light of what God does for us. But it does mean that as soon as I say there’s something about someone else that excludes him from God’s merciful acceptance—his stupid, heretical beliefs, his deplorable behavior, his asinine fundamentalism, his vacuous liberalism, his homosexuality, his homophobic bigotry, his casual indifference, or overt hostility, to God—I’ve stopped believing the good news that God accepts me just as I am, without one plea, but that Christ’s blood was shed for me. I accept God’s unconditional grace for all, or I reject it for myself.
Ironically, it can be harder to believe this when it comes to those within the Christian Church. Back when I wasn’t yet, but wanted to be, an Episcopalian, I would visit a parish and love the liturgy, but I would find myself wondering if the guy sitting down the pew—a complete stranger— really meant what he was saying, like me, or if he was just repeating the words by rote. Part of what got me over this was realizing that I needed to attend church where I worried that people might not mean what they were saying, rather than one where I was afraid they did mean what they were saying! But part of it was facing up to the sheer incongruity of finding myself grasped by God’s utterly unconditional love and acceptance, but at the same time wondering whether these other folks were satisfying God’s conditions. It is impossible to sit down for a meal with Jesus while pushing someone away from the table. Archbishop Rowan Williams writes, “the first thing you know about any other Christian in any context is that they are the desired guests of God.” Even if you have a hard time not feeling the invitation is in some cases ill-conceived, the fact is, as Williams puts it, that “being close to Jesus is something which never lets off being close to neighbors we have not chosen…to be in mysterious proximity to all kinds of people who have not signed up to anything but whose neighbors you now are.”
The good news would not be so good if it stopped here. For whose heart doesn’t house a homuncular Pharisee of one persuasion or another? Who doesn’t hold others in contempt? Who doesn’t exalt himself and inwardly embrace a vision of order that denies God’s anarchic mercy? If we weren’t inveterate, hopeless, compulsive self-justifiers we wouldn’t need God’s absolutely free grace. We may exalt ourselves, attempting the impossible: to transform God’s grace into something we deserve and others don’t. But God doesn’t; he is faithful, steadfastly humbling himself, accepting us even as we do our best to reject his acceptance of us. God reaches down, past our contemptuous self-righteousness, to save us despite ourselves. We try to push others beyond God’s reach, to send them off to hell, but succeed only in putting ourselves where we cannot see the love God has for us, the love that is there no matter our denials. The limitation, as Countryman puts it, is not on God’s love, but in how we take hold of that love. Whoever our tax collectors might be, they appear to be separated from us, unlike us, cut off from God’s love; but this is an illusion. The metaphor I’d use is that the world God reconciles to himself in Jesus is like a Möbius strip—remember: you take a strip of paper, give it a twist, and attach the ends together—the thing at first seems ordinary, but then it seems impossible; the topological freak has just one side. Two points on its surface might seem to be on opposite sides but they’re not; there’s just one side for them to be on. We delineate boundaries; we distinguish who is within, and who is outside, God’s saving grace—we hold others in contempt—but God doesn’t; for him, there is just the one side, the side on which Jesus is crucified and resurrected for all.
The
tax collector went home justified, but the parable does not tell us what
becomes of him after that. But Luke has
assembled his narrative so that, in a way, there is a follow up. In the next chapter he tells the comical tale
of a tax collector, Zacchaeus, who was too short to see Jesus over the crowd,
but because he climbed a tree to have a look, has a life-changing encounter
with him. Like the tax collector who
stands a ways off, seeking the God concretely present in the
What happens to the
Pharisee? It’s easier for the tax
collector to throw himself on God’s mercy.
His quest for security and identity, his wretched pursuit of wealth and
power over others, is so obviously hollow, so obviously deadening. It has the great advantage of marking him as
a moral leper, a traitor to God and Israel, so he cannot fool himself too
easily; he can’t be too far from turning to God in desperation and crying out “Be
merciful to me a sinner!” Beyond all hope, despising himself, he
finds the God who brings himself low to save those who are beneath contempt.
The Pharisee is in a more precarious position: he is dangerously good. There is enough truth in his view of things
to stand between him and acceptance of God’s love. He wants to do what’s right;
he aspires to serve the true God, but his vision of heroic integrity for the
sake of
My favorite story of a Pharisee saved despite herself is in Flannery O’Connor’s story “Revelation.” Mrs. Turpin: it is hard to believe one middle-aged Southern lady can contain so much prim self-righteousness. She takes God’s approval for granted and has no doubt that he shares her polite disdain for the lazy, irresponsible, morally suspect, and badly dressed people she encounters every day. She is equally sure her Maker appreciates her respectability, regular habits, modesty, and sunny disposition: until she has a shattering epiphany, a gift from God she did not expect or want.
The revelation comes in two stages. First, in a doctor’s waiting room, a mentally disturbed young woman—named Mary Grace (!)—has some kind of fit and, before she is sedated and taken away, as she convulses on the floor, her lunatic eyes lock on Mrs. Turpin and she hisses: “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog.” This being a Flannery O’Connor story, poor Mrs. Turpin has no doubt that this is a message from God, one she resents. Why has it been delivered to her, a respectable, hard-working, church-going woman? Why is she treated so unfairly? “How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?” She gets her answer, a second epiphany as she looks toward the setting sun: a vision that is her unmaking but also her salvation:
A visionary light settled in her eyes…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 niggers 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… had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right….They were marching along behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they always had 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….At length she…made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry fields and shouting hallelujah.
Amen.