I once came across a blog in which a
woman who shared her experiences of being a kindergarten teacher for an
extremely conservative church run elementary school. She described each of the children in her
class and gave them cute little names.
There was H20 who always had to wash his hands after EVERYTHING. There was Diva who always needed to be the
center of attention and there was Christian.
She was the little girl who always volunteered to pray and whose every
first answer was Jesus, God or sins. At
one point she describes prayer time.
Every day they circled up to pray and each child was asked to pray. Many of the kids would pray for their
parents, their siblings, their animals or someone they knew who was ill.
Christian’s prayer went something like this:
“God help H2O he is making funny faces
during writing time. I don’t like that.
I asks him to stop. He said he woulds but he still does it. God that is lying and you hates liars. Can you tell him that you hates liars? Then
he will stop lying and stop making the faces.
I alsos don’t like his shoes, get him new ones. The ones have holes in them and I can sees
his socks and they are brown. Amen.”
She would do this with each of the
kids in her class, cataloguing for God all the things they did wrong and what
she did not like about them. In many
ways her very childish prayer was very similar to the Pharisee’s prayer in this
passage.
He is thankful that he lives right and
acts right and by all measuring mechanisms he knows, is right with God. This little girl knows what a “good little
girl” looks like and acts like. I am
sure someone has told her that “good little girls” respect other people when
they ask things of them. Good little
girls don’t lie and lying is telling someone something that is not true. Telling someone you will do something and not
doing it is lying. And I am sure her
mother, in good faith, told her that “good girls” dress nicely and wear clean
clothes. She is working hard to live the
way a “good girl” should. She is
struggling to be good and live good and look good and she wants God to see that
others are not trying as hard as she is and that others are failing where she
does not. She feels secure in knowing
that she is living and being the “good girl” God wants her to be. But we can all see that on some very fundamental
level, she is missing what it means to be a “good girl, “ not to mention what
it means to pray.
So we Jesus tells us about the
Pharisee. We have heard enough Bible stories to know from the moment we hear
about this Pharisee that he is not going to be our hero. Also, I think you have
heard enough of my sermons, over the years to know that I am going to tell you,
the Pharisees are the good, Bible believing Church going, holiness folk of
their day, which means whenever see a Pharisee in the gospels, we should be
asking ourselves, “How is this person like us? How am I like this Pharisee?”
Since we know that we are going to
need to identify with this praying Pharisee, let us begin by looking at what he
did right. Like most people, although
he does get things pretty wrong, he does not get it all wrong. This man desires
to live right to live out God’s laws in his life. He is clearly working,
striving, struggling to live right, to
do the right things, to be the person he believes God is call in him to be. He
is thankful that is able to live the way God has called him to live. The
working and the striving are commendable. Not only that, he knows he can’t do
this on his own, and thanks God for being able to live right. Because a part
from the grace of God we cannot live right in our own strength. It is because
of God that anyone is able to live right, to live out God’s holiness in this
world. It is in God’s strength that we are able to be who God calls any of us
to be.
Thanking God for his ability to be the
person he believes God wants him to be is not where this Pharisee goes wrong.
Where he goes wrong is when he compares himself to those around him. Comparing
ourselves to other rarely if ever goes right, but it goes especially goes wrong
when we do so, to make ourselves feel better than those around us. This man
looks around sees the tax collector, who has also come to pray, and sees him as
someone he deems to be less than himself and uses that man to make himself fee
superior. The Pharisee looks at his life, his effort to live right, his
struggle to be the person of God he knows God desires for him to be and not
only sees himself as worthy but sees himself as more than worthy, as worthier.
Meanwhile there is another man, who
has also come to pray, a tax collector. The tax collector is standing off to
the side. Where the Pharisee in his self-assured boldness had placed himself
front and center, so he can be sure to be seen, the tax-collector has found a
quiet place off to the side, where he might not be noticed and might even go
unseen. As he prays he won’t even lift his eyes toward heaven. He knows he has
not been who God has called him to be. He knows he has failed and takes on a
posture of humility and contrition. He knows just as clearly as the Pharisee
does where he stands when it comes to living according Gods laws, statues and
commands and due to his understanding of his own sinful actions does not
approach God with any kind of confidence. When he prays, he asks God to be
merciful, because he knows he is a sinner. His prayer is short and sweet and to
the point. He knows he has failed at being the person God has called him to be
and asks for God’s mercy.
Each of these men comes to God in
prayer. The purpose of the Pharisee’s prayer to thank God for what a great guy
he is and in some ways to make sure God know how great he is; to make sure God
has noticed that he is working hard to do all the right things and be the kind
of person believes needs to be. He also wants to make sure God realizes that he
is doing it better than those around him. He is surrounded by people who are
failing to live right, who lives do not exemplify God’s character, people who
are clearly not doing what is required of them in God’s law and is doing better
than all of them.
Meanwhile the purpose of the tax
collector’s prayer is to ask God for mercy, for forgiveness. He is letting God
know that he knows who he is. He knows what he has done and what he has failed
to do and he is coming before God with nothing and asking for nothing more than
mercy.
Both finish their prayers and they
walk away. Then Jesus tells us about the state of their beings when they walk
away. The tax collector was not right with God when he entered the sanctuary.
He was a sinner. He had failed at being who God called him to be. He knows this and he asked for mercy and
forgiveness. He prayed a sinner’s prayer, and walked away a righteous man. The
Pharisee on the other can into the temple, having lived a righteous life, he
strove in all things to do what was required of him, like us (more times than
we would like to say), he clearly does somethings he should not have done. The
two greatest commandments are to love God with all of who you are and to love
your neighbor. We can only conclude, if this is the way he is willing to talk
to God about his “neighbor” in prayer, and fails so miserably here in the
sanctuary of God, at loving his neighbor, that he is not so good at all the
other times, in all the other places. He
walks away unjustified, unforgiven. He did not see that he was in need of God’s
forgiveness, and mercy. He does not ask for it and therefore does not receive
it. He prayed a righteous person’s prayer walks away a sinner.
I already told us that we are more
like this Pharisee than we would like to admit. We can tell ourselves we would
never do what this man did. We never pray like that. We don’t think about
others like that. But, Jesus tells us a story about a “good”, “God fearing”
person, who is working and striving to all the right things and that is who I,
would like to think I am. So I am pretty sure he is talking about me, and my
guess is that this is true of you as well, so Jesus must be talk to you to. We are doing it. We are living it. We are here in God’s sanctuary on a Sunday
morning. We are God’s chosen, the people
of God, the Church, we are the Pharisees.
As “good Christians” is so easy to get
caught up in WHO we are. What we are
doing. We strive, we struggle, we work,
we read our Bibles, we pray, we give to the poor, we donate to Hope’s Cradle,
we volunteer at church and in our communities, we participate in all the serving
activities of this congregation with a faithful heart seeking for God to shape
and change us. But we do not really
allow God to shape and change us.
Because we are not willing to see HOW God needs to shape and change us.
This Pharisee obviously struggles with
pride, seeing himself as better than others.
He sees his own righteous struggle, and all he can see is how he has
succeeded in doing all the things he sees as the things God would want him to
do. He is doing all the things a good
Christian does. He sees his life and he
knows how he measures up. He is good with God.
He is living right, being right, and doing right. He is righteous. He is “a good girl” like the sweet dear
kindergarten prayers I told you about and he just like that little girl is
painfully aware how those around him are not “good girls.”
This passage is about more than just
pride. Although I do suspect many of us
could use a little less of it at times, esp. when it comes to our own
righteousness. We are good “Christians” we know this passage. We know its admonitions to not look down on others,
so what do we do? We add that to the list of things to “not” do so we can be
good Christians. Always speak kindly of
others. Check. Never look down on others, even when they are not as good at
following Jesus as we are. Check. Never think more highly of our selves because
we are good, holy, sanctified Nazarenes, who love God and everyone around us
just like we should, unlike those Baptists and especially not like those
Methodists (God help them as their denominations struggles right now). Check.
Some Christians make humility a cloak
they wear with pride. This is bigger than pride. This is knowing we are always in need of
God’s mercy. Always knowing where we stand with God, and that we are always at
God’s mercy. God is merciful and God will forgive, but we have to know we need it;
we have to know that God is offering it to us, even us. Even when we are doing it all right, we still
stand before God receiving God’s amazing, beautiful mercy. We are receiving mercy, constantly, always;
it is being poured down upon us at all times. We all need it and we all receive
it, if we are willing to ask; willing to admit our need of it; willing, even in
our righteousness, to humble ourselves before God.
So here is the thing. This is what is hard for us good holy, sanctified
Nazarenes who are not supposed to believe that we sin in thought word and deed
every day. We Nazarenes know that God
has called us to live holy lives of Christian love and perfection. We know that God does not call us to an untenable
life. But that God enables us; empowers
us to be holy; to love fully and to be the people God is calling us to be. But even in our holiness, we too approach God
humbly knowing that we live in the constant flow of God’s mercy. We are not righteous because of our great
effort. We are not righteous because we
have struggled and strived for holy perfection.
We are the people God has called us to be because of the grace and mercy
of God.
We all come into God’s presence
knowing we need to pray, “Be merciful to me a sinner.” We all need to remember, we are living in
God’s mercy, we are swimming in it. We
all need it; we all rely on it so that we can be the holy people God is calling
us to be. So we can be the loving people God wants us to be; so we can be the holy
people God expects us to be.
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