Walter
Breuggemann is a tremendously talented preacher and teacher . . . probably the
most widely-respected Old Testament scholar the Christian church has . . . he’s
also undoubtedly the most widely-read – one time I went into the store
at Montreat, the Presbyterian conference center in North Carolina, and you’d
have thought it was the Walter Breuggemann memorial bookstore, there were so
many of his books, he was probably the single-most highly-represented author,
perhaps second only to God . . . he also has a reputation for heading Daniel-like
into the Lion’s den. Back when I knew
him in Atlanta, he was always lecturing to roomfuls of powerful business-people
– CEOs and Chairmen of the Board of Home Depot, Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines and
the like – about how un-Christian their business practices are, how they tend
to increase their own wealth at the expense of everybody else . . . the first
time I saw Walter in action, even before I had him for Hebrew, he was teaching
a Bible study of Joshua, and drawing a lesson from it about predatory banking
practices. This at First Baptist of
Decatur, church home – along with First Presbyterian – of a goodly chunk
of the banking establishment in East Atlanta . . .
In
certain circles, Brueggemann is considered a show-boater, a guy who goes into
the boardrooms and corporate offices for his own aggrandizement and glory. And there maybe something to this, I don’t
know, but in today’s passage we can see that there is scriptural precedent for
it . . . Jesus tells this parable right, smack dab in the lion’s den, to some
of the religious establishment of the day, to – as Luke puts it – “some who
trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with
contempt.” And the first thing we need
to see about this is that here, Luke places Jesus squarely in the tradition of
the Hebrew prophets . . . and just like his predecessors, just like Isaiah and
Jeremiah and Ezekiel, Jesus gets right up into the face of those whom he was
preaching against . . . as Luke calls them, those who trusted in themselves
that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt . . . that’s what
the prophetic tradition is all about, carrying the message right to the people
it’s aimed at . . . and it’s tremendously dangerous . . . Jeremiah got thrown
in the poky. John the Baptist got handed
his head . . . literally! And we all
know what they did to Jesus . . .
Christianity
has lost a lot of that prophetic edge since those days . . . it may have been
inevitable . . . when it went from being a religion of the outcasts – of the
kitchen help, as one biblical scholar put it – to being a religion of the
establishment, it was inevitable that accommodation should occur. After all, the establishment doesn’t like
being yelled at, and if they are your patrons, if they are the ones
whose offerings keeps the church going . . . well. A prophet’s gotta eat, don't you know
. . . and we all know what they did to Jesus . . .
But Jesus is fearless, and he tells about a
Pharisee – one of the dominant religious parties of the day, sort of like
Democrats or Republicans or Libertarians, only much nicer – he tells about a
Pharisee and a tax-collector who go up to the temple to pray, and of course his
audience – who, remember, considered themselves to be righteous and
everybody else . . . not – and his audience are sitting there
identifying with the Pharisee, the most law-abiding person on the planet,
the original law-and-order candidate,
a guy who was a member of the most religious of the religious parties of the
day . . . and he was a pretty good guy, really, somebody you’d not only like to meet in a dark alley, but who
you’d be glad to see your daughter bring home, and his audience was
identifying with this guy, certainly not the other, who was one of the
dreaded tax-collectors, a Jewish man who’d gotten in bed with the Romans, who
was doing their dirty work for them, collecting their taxes, a guy with
whom the people in Jesus’ audience wouldn’t be caught dead, and so they
know what the end of the story’s going to be like, they’ve heard these little
morality tales from their own teachers . . .
And the
Pharisee stands up there and says “God, I thank you that I’m not like those
others . . . thieves, adulterers, rogues or even this” and he sniffs to make
sure he’s not down-wind “this tax-collector here . . .” and Jesus’
audience says quite right . . . here, here . . . it’s right to thank God for
their good fortune, for after all – there but for the grace of God, go I . . . good
form, only right to begin the prayer with thanks . . . and then he goes on “I
fast twice a week, I give a tenth of all my income . . .” and I can see every
preacher in the country going after this guy, he’s a tither,
churches are built on these guys . . . he’s penitent – that’s what the
fasting is about – and a big giver . . . what’s not to like?
And
contrast this with . . . the tax-collector.
He’s hunched over, darting nervous little glances at the powerful
religious leader, and when he prays, what a mean little insignificant prayer it
is . . . he doesn’t look up into heaven – to where everybody just knows
God is – he doesn’t raise his hands up in supplication, he just looks down like
he’s ashamed and beats himself compulsively on the chest . . . thump, thump,
thump . . . and he mumbles so that the great man can barely hear “God, be
merciful to me, a sinner,” thump, thump, thump, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner,” thump, thump, thump . . .
And
now Jesus has got ‘em where he wants ‘em, he’s got his pious audience in the
palm of his hand, they’re on the edge of their seats, leaning forward in
anticipation of the pay-off, even though they know what it’s going to be . . .
They’re thinking “Here it comes . . . here comes the punch line of our little
morality play . . . the Pharisee, who’s done all the right things, hit all the
right marks, has all the right stuff, is gonna come out on top . . .
after all, he’s keeping all the things God told us to keep way back in Moses
time, he’s tithing, and fasting, and all
that jazz . . . and there’s gonna be a big, booming voice, come down out of
heaven, maybe a shaft of light breaking through the clouds, transfiguring the
religious leader in it’s glow . . . and the voice will affirm the man, affirm
him and confirm him as a child of the covenant: “This is my son,
in whom I am well-pleased!”
But
instead of that, instead of sustaining their expectations, instead of
substantiating their world-view, Jesus tells them the exact opposite: “This
man” – and he meant the tax-collector! – “This man went down to his home
justified, made righteous, not the other.” Jesus Christ, Son of the great reverser,
child of the One who is constantly doing a new thing, stands their expectations
on their ears: the tax-collector, that scum-bag Roman collaborator, that
weasel who lives off his fellow Jews’ miseries, is made righteous, is made
right with God, and the religious leader, a symbol
of all that’s good and right about their religion, a stand-in for all who were listening to Jesus on that sunny Palestine
day, was not. Evidently, his
prayers didn’t work, while the prayers of the tax-collector did.
Talk about your reversal of fortune.
And
over the two millennia since that day in the Judean sun, this parable has been
interpreted in a variety of ways from a variety of Christian pulpits. Perhaps
the most straightforward way is to pay attention to Jesus’ last words – for all
who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be
exalted – and thus, the Pharisee’s sin is pridefulness, it’s boasting . . .
he’s standing up there, praying in public for all the world to see, and he’s
bragging about his own wonderfulness.
The tax-collector, on the other hand, looks down, ashamed, and admits he
is a sinner . . . he humbles himself, so he is exalted; the Pharisee exalts
himself, so he is humbled. The first
will be last, after all.
Another
way of looking at it is to view it as an illustration of grace versus law,
something old Martin Luther might’ve done.
The Pharisee, he might say, follows the law to the letter – he
fasts to be cleansed of sin, he tithes a tenth of what he has, he praises God
in all things – OK, so we only assume he does that last thing, but hey,
he’s a Pharisee – the point is he does everything the law requires, but still
can’t get to heaven, only the tax-collector – who does nothing but confess – is
saved. Thus the great truth: you can’t
get to heaven by following the rules, you’ve gotta throw yourself upon God’s
mercy, you have to trust in God’s manifold grace.
And
the thing to notice about this interpretation is that it’s kind of a weird
re-casting of the story. This story
casts us Christians – both in Luke’s time and today – squarely in the
tax-collector’s camp. We’re the
Christians, we’re the ones who are saved by grace, thank you very much, we’re
the righteous ones, and the Pharisee . . . isn’t. And if the Pharisee isn’t, the Jews as a
whole aren’t – because that’s who the Pharisees are in this story – and
if they’re not righteous, then they are ripe for subjugation, which has happened
time and again in the two millennia since Christ. anytime there’s a majority culture and a
“different” minority – whether different racially or religiously or whatever –
they are susceptible as scapegoats, convenient whipping-boys when times get
tough. Think Esther. Think Hitler.
Think the Crusades . . . and having a sacred text that can be
interpreted as supporting that scapegoating – oppressors are righteous,
oppressed are not – is just icing on the cake.
What
I’d like us to think about this morning is . . . who are our Pharisees? Who do we see as going home from the temple
unrighteous? Is it the Jewish
people? They’re always handy . . . every time some group of Aryan skin-head
types decides they’re being oppressed, a synagogue goes up in flames, or
gets defaced . . . maybe it’s other Christians, Christians not like us . . . I
must admit I’ve engaged in a bit of that . . . back when I first started
preaching, I got in trouble with a friend for – jokingly, of course –
dissing the Baptists from the pulpit . . . look at it within our
denomination. The conservatives see the
decay of our denomination, the loss of members and influence and power, and
blame the liberals . . . the liberals do the same thing, of course . . . or
what about so-called “illegal immigrants?”
What about the folks from below our borders, who are desperate for a
better life, who come into our country and do the jobs we don’t want to do?
And
of course, how could I preach about scapegoating without mentioning our current
election? Nobody’s ever seen anything
like it . . . the feelings running so high . . . the rhetoric is down-right
nasty . . . Immigrants are being scapegoated at a scale that makes my head
ache, and makes me nostalgic for the old days, when they were just supposedly
taking our jobs, before they were called rapists and murderers . . . And
there’s more than enough of it to go around . . . Smug TV comedians and cable-news
talking heads mercilessly make fun of Southerners and people in the “fly-over
states,” and blame all the ills of the country on them.
Brothers
and sisters, I ask you: who are your Pharisees?
Who are the people you associate with the unrighteous? Maybe you don’t have any – if so, you’re more
advanced in your faith than I am
– but I suspect we all have a few . . . the poor are a drain on our
economy, why don’t they just go out and get a job? Those immigrants demand, demand, demand . .
. free medical care, schooling for their children, they’re sapping our country
of its resources. We all, I suspect,
have our Pharisees – it’s after all a mark of our imperfect humanity.
But
Christ calls us to a more perfect humanity, he shows us – through his
own life and example – what we can aspire to . . . and our walk as Christians
here on earth can be considered a movement, a journey toward our perfect
humanity which will not be fully realized until time’s end . . . But Christ
provides more than just an example . . . he himself is with us, every step of
the way, and the Holy Spirit as well, powering us, supporting us, uplifting
us as we seek to do his will. Amen.
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