Psalm 84

2 Timothy 4.6-8 & 16-18

Luke 18.9-14

The House of Christ

Let’s begin with a good word for the Pharisee; he’s gotten a raw deal from history and maybe we need to make amends.He comes out the bad guy in the parable, but how can he deserve it? It’s a bum wrap: so far as the parable gives us any reason to think, he’s a good man. He says “I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even this tax collector” and what he says is, we can assume, the truth. He is an honest, decent human being. He’s no hollow hypocrite, talking a good line but not acting as he advocates: he fasts and gives a tenth of his income. He’s good and he knows it.He’s not just good, he’s truly religious: he rightly attributes to God the goodness that he has. He’s righteous, and he thanks God for this as a gift. A pious Jew, a Pharisee especially, he sees righteousness as possible only because God has given his Law, and enabled us to live in accord with it. He is a careful, sincere adherent to that Law so it is entirely fitting that he should know he is righteous and thank God for this. He represents the very best of morality and religion.

On the other hand, we’re far too generous with the tax collector. Here too, we introduce alien elements into the parable, tweaking it to make our kind of sense. If there’s a hypocrite in the story, it’s him; he’d be the one who shows up at the temple for the veneer of respectability it provides. Think of those Mafiosos who regularly attend mass knowing they’ll be ordering a hit after Sunday dinner.We have no reason to think he has repented, that he has at last seen the light and is now on the way to amend his life. This crook, this thug – remember, this is Tony Soprano, not an overzealous IRS agent - stands there before God knowing it’s hopeless, that there’s not a thing he can offer in his own defense, not even – so far as this story gives us any reason to believe - the sincere intention to do better. For the story to satisfy our sense of propriety we need to put that in, but it’s not there. All we can get out of what Jesus actually says is that this character stands there in the temple looking into the depth of the hole he has greedily dug for himself and seeing the stark truth that there’s nothing he can offer God to buy his way out of it.We have no reason to think that deep down he’s a good guy who, despite his faults, is at least humble, in contrast to that prideful Pharisee. This guy is a total loser and may well go right on being one.

We have to keep this in mind, and resist the temptation to revise this story so the scandal of what Jesus says is lost.The point is not that the Pharisee is, despite outward appearances, really bad, not acceptable to God, while the tax collector is really good. It’s not even that they are equally bad; the Pharisee is very good and the tax collector very bad.The point is one we find very hard to swallow: when it comes to being accepted by God, being justified, these things don’t count. What counts is being hopeless. What counts is not counting.

I think we can see the same thing in this morning’s text from Jeremiah. The people of Judah find themselves in crisis. There’s a terrible draught and they see that they’ve brought it upon themselves. They land is dead and they’re dying with it because of their sins, their iniquities, their apostasies. They plead with God. But see how they make their case. It’s crazy. They recognize how bad they are, how they’re just getting what they deserve. Do they tell God they will try to do better? Do they tell him they’re going to turn things around and start behaving like God’s elect people for once? Do they at least try to put their best foot forward? Not at all. I’d say they’re so far gone they’re past the point of having what it takes even to convince themselves momentarily that they can change their ways. They talk like people who are totally hopeless, people who have nothing to lose. Listen to the reckless way they address God; they don’t even see the point in trying to get on his good side by being respectful. Their words are irreverent, even insulting: “O hope of Israel, its savior in time of trouble, why should you be like a stranger in the land, like a traveler turning aside for the night? Why should you be like someone confused, like a mighty warrior who cannot give help?” These people are broken and helpless, absolutely undeserving, and they know it. They’re before God empty handed, angry and defiant, bereft of the most rudimentary righteousness. In their extremity they know there’s nothing they can do to justify themselves before him.And yet this God they plead with is the God we meet in the Jesus who called the rotten taxman justified. It’s the God who hears the cries of the truly helpless.

Most of you know Victor Hugo’s great story, Les Miserables. Its main character is Jean Valjean. Valjean has just been released from prison, where he spent 19 terrible years, the first four for stealing a loaf of bread, the rest for various escape attempts. As a paroled convict, he carries the dreaded yellow passport that describes him as wicked and dangerous man. This is a description that in his broken heart he accepts. He is condemns himself; yet he thirsts for revenge. He is, Hugo tells us, a man who has lost all hope. He is crushed by the world: “If a millet seed under a millstone had thoughts, doubtless it would think what Jean Valjean thought.”

Exhausted after having tramped for miles, he arrives in a town looking for a meal and a place to sleep.Obeying the law, he shows his passport to the authorities; word spreads through town and no one will take him in, He is evicted from the inns and turned away at door after door. He can’t even buy a drink of water from poor peasants. He tries to sleep in a dog kennel, but even the dogs bite him and drive him away, as though they too know who he is. He decides to sleep under the stars, but it begins to rain: God above all is against him. He comes to one last door, the door of the bishop. Desperate and beyond caring, he knocks. When it opens he announces exactly who he is, defiantly presenting himself as a dangerous criminal, a man beyond human law.The bishop calmly invites him in, treats him as an ordinary person, and offers him a bed for the night.As they prepare to retire for the evening, Jean Valjean expresses his amazement: “You don’t despise me. You take me into your house, you light your candles for me, and I haven’t hid from you where I come from, and how miserable I am.”The bishop responds “You need not tell me who you are. This is not my house; it is the house of Christ. It does not ask any comer whether he has a name, but whether he has an affliction. You are suffering, you are hungry and thirsty; be welcome.”

The bishop’s graciousness seems to have no effect on Valjean. He wakes up in the middle of the night and leaves, taking the bishop’s silver dinner plates with him.The next morning, there is a knock at the rectory door: it is the police; they have Valjean in tow, caught red handed with the stolen goods.The bishop tells the police that yes, the story Valjean told them is true: the he had given Valjean the silver. The police leave and Valjean once again sets off, but not before the bishop speaks to him one last time: “Jean Valjean, my brother: you belong now longer to evil, but to good. It is your soul I am buying for you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.”Valjean is shocked beyond comprehension but, if you remember the story, he still has not changed his ways. It will not be until he commits one more shameful crime, robbing a poor, helpless child, that the power of the grace he has been given starts to change him. But notice: his welcome into the house of Christ does not start then. He was accepted completely as soon as he stood at the door, hopeless, miserable, angry, confused, defiant. Exactly like the wicked tax collector, he was justified simply because he turned toward God in his hopelessness. His being good or bad, ready to change his life or with larceny in his heart: it doesn’t matter. Nothing counts but the grace of God, who is in the business of justifying the unrighteous. His interest is not in reforming the reformable, or in helping those who are ready to help themselves.God is dedicated to raising the dead.

While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.God welcomes us wholeheartedly into the house of Christ, not because we are bad, not because we are good, but each of us as the particular mess we happen to be right now, simply because he is in the business of bringing the dead to life. That good man, that Pharisee in Jesus’ parable had one problem: he took it for granted that his goodness, as admirable and valuable as it might be in some other context, could give him an in with God, that it gave him life, a place in God’s presence. In reality he was absolutely powerless to move an inch toward God. He was a dead man who didn’t even know he was dead, like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense.Fortunately for the tax collector, his being dead was to all too obvious. He could not deny the stench of putrefaction. The same with Jean Valjean: his advantage over those respectable townspeople who turned him away from their doors was that he at least realized he was a lost cause, completely worthy of rejection; they still considered themselves alive and well, acceptable to God.Hugo says Valjean’s “wretchedness was constantly before his mind;” theirs was hidden behind their good morals and right religion, their hopes for respectability and good standing.It was the same with those people of ancient Judah: all they had going for them was that they had been brought down so far that knew they were a lost cause, beyond hope or help, but for the mercy of a God who decides to throw out the sensible idea that the we make ourselves acceptable to him by doing what’s right.Instead, beyond all imagining, the God who accepts all comers, no requirement but being there in need of him.

What a thing to let loose upon the world! We can sympathize with that worthy pagan Celsus, writing in the fourth century to criticize the Christians, whose scandalous ways horrified him: “Those who summon people to the other mysteries, make this preliminary proclamation: ‘Whoever has pure hands and a wise tongue.’By contrast with that universal stipulation of worthiness, let us hear what folk these Christians call. ‘Whoever is a sinner’, they say, ‘whoever is unwise’, ‘whoever is a child’, and in a word, ‘whoever is a wretch sill be received by the kingdom of God’.”Celsus, plausibly enough, finds this as senseless as did those who heard Jesus say the bad tax collector, not the good Pharisee, went home that day justified.But it is, we must say, the gospel truth.

It is not the whole truth but only its beginning. God rejects all calculation of who deserves what and justifies the undeserving, making acceptable to him all who turn to him, no matter their state or condition. Justification, being made right with God, is salvation. Jesus could have said that the taxman went down to his house saved.The word “salvation” comes from the word for health; to be saved is to be healed. Jesus our savior is our healer.We don’t know how it might have gone with the tax collector’s healing; there’s nothing to know since he’s just a character in a story. There are only possibilities. He might have gone no further than that initial recognition that he stands condemned before God and gone on in his wretched existence.Or that initial realization of his need, and of the persistent offer of God’s mercy, might have enlarged and deepened, so that in time God the healer could have gotten at him. We know how it went with Jean Valjean. Most of the 1222 pages of my Modern Library edition of Les Miserables are devoted to Valjean’s being transformed, healed and made whole by God’s grace, to his becoming a new man who gives rather than steals,trusts rather than fears, loves rather than hates.All this the intricate working out of his being unconditionally welcomed into the house of Christ.(Part of that, we cannot forget, is his being pursued over the decades by the mad inspector Jarvet, the man who would rather die than give up living by the law.) Dimly enough, we have some sense of how it’s going with us, as we come to learn our need and the grace of the God who is with us in it.

The other night Karen and I saw the film K-PAX.Its hero, Prot, claims he is a visitor from the planet K-PAX, 1000 light years from Earth. The well-meaning authorities regard him as crazy and confine him to a psychiatric ward.Before long, the doctors and other scientists notice some remarkable things about this inmate; he has some surprising knowledge and abilities. They’re starting to suspect that his unbelievable story might be true after all, and they go to work investigating some intriguing bits of evidence. What they don’t see is what’s obvious:the other residents of the psychiatric ward, long time schizophrenics, psychotics, obsessive compulsives are being made whole.The professional healers do not notice that all around them their patients are being healed. Thanks to Prot’s presence among them, the mists of madness are clearing away, life and lucidity are returning. He is the true healer and the health and hope he brings to those hopeless lunatics is the overwhelming proof that he is who he says he is. That Prot is the man from space is obvious to all the hapless psychiatric cases, to the crazed ex-doorman who wanders around telling everyone they stink, the young man who is morbidly frightened of dirt, germs, death, the young woman reduced to utter silence by a great weight of guilt…those without hope know salvation when it comes.Yet it is invisible to those who have a stake in their own health, to those who think they’re alive and whole and still have something to lose.

A colleague of mine has a five year old daughter.She has been raised on Children’s’ Church, Sunday School, Bible stories, Veggie Tales…the whole bit.So it was with some consternation one Sunday when on the way home from their very conservative Church she mused “I wish God were real.” Taken aback to discover that his child is an atheist, my colleague asked her why she wished that. She said “Then he could help me out.”I don’t see cause for concern. In time it’s likely that she will come around to belief in God.She’s got the hardest thing right, our neediness, a neediness we need a real God to satisfy. Far better to be confident of your need for God yet only wishing he were there to help than to be one of the many who are supremely confident that there is a God, indeed one they own the truth about, but who are oblivious to their infinite need of his help.

God’s grace is the point where his love and mercy meets our need.God grant us the mercy to see our hope in him, to find our lost lives in the house of Christ.

Amen.

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