October 28, 2007 Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 84; Jeremiah 14:19-22; Luke 18:9-14
Imagine a person who is miserable. You can supply your own choice of
circumstances. Maybe it is a person who is sick and has been sick a long time and
may never get well. Maybe it is a person who is experiencing tension or conflict
with someone at home or work. Maybe it is someone in debt or trapped in an
uncomfortable commitment they cannot escape. Maybe it is an addiction or bad
habit that is making them miserable. Maybe it is anxiety about making ends meet
or obsessing about scary things that are happening in the world.
Imagine this person in their misery, and imagine that for a long time all
they can feel is how miserable they are. They become so fogged in by their pain
or stress or fear that they cannot even imagine anything else. Things seem
hopeless.
Then one day something happens that gives them a momentary glimpse of
another possibility for their lives. They hear about someone like them who
escaped from their misery. They hear about someone or something that could help
them escape. Or they feel something of how they felt before all this happened,
and it fills them with a rush of hope, joy, grief and love all rolled together into a
jolt of longing—the longing to be different than they are, the longing to be right
again, the longing to break free.
That moment in a person’s life is among the most important they will ever
have. It is one of life’s turning points. It is a crisis in the Chinese sense of the
word, combining both danger and opportunity. The danger is that the
overpowering longing for relief will lead them to latch onto something that looks
helpful that in fact will do more harm than good. They could come under the
influence of a quack or a cult or an inflated sense of their own ability to fix things,
and after a short improvement they could find themselves spiraling into a deeper
despair, thinking that all such hopes must be illusions.
Extremist groups do their best recruiting among people with this kind of
longing. They offer relief for misery in exchange for blind obedience, often in the
cause of putting their misery onto someone else. There is the danger the
oppressed will become the oppressor, the victim the victimizer, as so often
happens with those who are miserable from abuse they have suffered.
These are some of the potential dangers of the intense longing to be free of
misery. But the moment of crisis presents opportunity as well as danger, and
ultimately all the different forms of opportunity can be seen as one and the same.
It is the opportunity for healing and freedom, for peace and love, that in our
Christian tradition we identify as belonging to God’s realm. Any crisis of longing
directed toward the right instrument of hope can lead to the transformation of our
lives into the realm of God. For some the gate into that realm takes the form of a
compassionate doctor or wise counselor who helps them to regain their well-being.
For some the gate is a 12 Step group. For some it is a church where they find
themselves accepted as they are and supported to start anew. For all, it is their
longing that moves them to take the opportunity.
There are many, many gates leading into God’s realm, many paths up the
mountain, but unlike the many gates into danger that each lead into a different
form of solitary confinement, the many gates into God’s realm all lead to a
common dwelling place. The way to tell whether a crisis of longing is leading
toward opportunity or danger is to see whether the path is leading to isolation or to
community, to self-absorption or to serving others, to oppressing others with
contempt or helping free others with universal compassion and love.
Once upon a time there were two Jewish men who both were miserable.
The story does not tell us why they were miserable, but out of their crisis of
longing they each found a path of escape that they latched onto for dear life. One
became a Pharisee, which was a very strict, legalistic, extreme form of Judaism. It
oppressed him with all kinds of special things to do, but in exchange it made him
feel special and set apart, and it allowed him to oppress others with his judgment
and contempt. It made him feel very good about himself.
The second man chose to join the side of the main oppressors of his own
people as a tax collector for Rome. Tax collectors exploited their neighbors by
demanding far more than was owed Rome in order to enrich themselves, often
using force to collect. This second man paid a price of being hated and shunned as
a greedy, traitorous oppressor, but he relieved one form of his misery by getting
rich and another form by making others as miserable as he was.
One day these two men reached another crisis of longing. Maybe they
heard the 84th Psalm read that day in the temple, with its beautiful description of
God’s realm. “How lovely is your dwelling place, O God of hosts! My soul
longs, indeed it faints for the courts of God….No good thing does God withhold
from those who walk uprightly.” Or maybe they heard Jeremiah, “We
acknowledge our wickedness, O Lord, the iniquity of our ancestors, for we have
sinned against you. Do not spurn us…Can any idols of the nations bring rain?..Is
it not you, O Lord our God? We set our hope on you, for it is you who do all
this.”
Whatever its cause, both the Pharisee and the tax collector felt a sudden
rush of longing to be seen as justified in the eyes of God. They wanted to be right
with God, or righteous. In the Greek language of their day, the same word meant
both justified and righteous.
The Pharisee came to the temple and made a case for himself before God.
He said, “God, I fast, I give a tenth of my income to your temple, and I am blessed
not to be like the scum of the earth like that tax collector over there.” The
Pharisee longed for the healing and freedom, for the peace and love of dwelling in
God’s realm. So he repeated to himself the myth of his sect, the myth that he
could trust his own righteousness to justify himself to God. After repeating the
myth, he went home not healed, not free, but feeling his misery relieved once
again by his spiritual pride.
But the tax collector, in his moment of crisis, turned away from his
oppressing and profiteering, and he turned toward God in humility, not presuming
on his wealth to stand with the righteous, not daring even to look up, not having
any illusion of his own powers of self-justification anymore. He begged God to
have mercy on him, miserable sinner that he was. He had reached rock bottom,
that place where, no longer trusting himself, he entrusted his life and his will to
God’s direction. He went home feeling nothing except the realization that he had
to change his life in this one way: he had to keep crying out to God, keep reaching
out, trusting God’s mercy to lead him out of his recurring misery into God’s realm.
Jesus told this story saying that it was the tax collector who went home
justified, not the super-virtuous Pharisee. The tax collector was not justified in the
sense that the Pharisee meant it. He was not justified by his credentials or his
virtues. He was not justified in the sense of having reason to feel correct or just.
He was justified in the sense of a justified block of text in word processing, where
you take it and shift it so that it is aligned, as in a justified right margin.
The tax collector laid his whole life before God and said, here, God, take
me and reshape me, justify me. Out of the longing of his misery, out of the hope
of his glimpse of a way free, he responded to the vision of God’s realm with
repentance, with a turning back to God, with the choice to dwell in the simple trust
of God to make him right.
We do not know what changes God led him to make in his life. Maybe like
other tax collectors who followed Jesus, he gave back all he had taken from others
and more. We do not know or need to know. We can be sure that wherever God
led him it was back into community, into the service of others, into compassion
and love for even the least and worst. His paths probably led him through
suffering and back into the misery that led him astray in the first place, but now he
found healing and freedom in the midst of his struggle, a humble love and peace
that made his presence a source of hope to those around him.
What happened to the Pharisee? He became an ever prouder man, rich and
powerful. He became a builder of empire. His empire grew and grew until it
became the world’s only super-power. When it suffered attack and lost three
thousand lives, it would go out and kill three hundred thousand, and do so in the
name of self-righteousness and God. And it would not oppress or torture or kill
just the guilty but anyone who stood in the way of what it wanted. The Pharisee’s
empire eventually threatened the peace of every sovereign nation in the whole
world, and even the global climate was in danger of collapse under the strain of its
self-righteous exploitation.
The empire kept going until it was on the verge of taking the entire world
down with it, all based on the logic of the Pharisee’s love of self and contempt of
others. But then one day, in a final moment of crisis, the Pharisee woke up to the
error of his ways through the millennia. He saw the truth of his arrogance and the
true cost of his violent oppression. He caught a glimpse of what God’s beautiful
realm is like, a vision kept alive by a few faithful churches that had continued to
stand up to the empire in the spirit of Jesus Christ, and he felt a longing strong
enough to shake his foundations. Remembering the prayer of that tax collector
long ago, he cried to God, “Have mercy on me, a miserable sinner!”
It was the beginning of a new era for the empire and for all the earth. It was
the beginning of the earth’s final journey into the realm of God’s healing and
freedom, peace and love. In the end, God’s entire creation was justified, made
right. And the people of the earth sang the 84th Psalm, “My heart and flesh sing for
joy to the living God. Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest for
herself, where she may lay her young, at your altars, O God of hosts, my Ruler and
my God. Happy are those who live in your house, ever singing your praise…O
God of hosts, happy is everyone who trusts in you.”
Let us pray in silence………
Sermon 10/28/2007