The Rev. Ann R. Lougee
October 28, 2007|
Heartfelt Prayers
Luke 18:9-14

The message of this parable is obviously against the sin of self-righteousness. This was apparently an important issue when the author of Luke wrote in the middle of the 9th decade of the 1st century.

Even in Jesus' time, Roman domination made life hard for ordinary people in Galilee and Judah by demanding heavy taxes and great sums of tribute. Some at the bottom of society, attempting to eke out a subsistence level of existence, became tax collectors, collaborating with the oppressor, just to survive. They were allowed to extract what they could from the people, over and above what Rome required, thus to provide for themselves, and thus tax collectors were hated by the people.

In Jesus' time, the Pharisees were just one of the several sects of Judaism around the Jerusalem temple. They were the ones most interested in doing things right. The Gospel of Luke gives us a mixed picture of the Pharisees, accusing them in one place of being "lovers of money," but in another place showing that some presumably friendly Pharisees warn Jesus of Herod's intention to kill him.

After the destruction of the Jerusalem temple by the Romans in the year 70, a generation after Jesus had died, the Pharisees took control of Jewish religious tradition. It was they who decided what would be included in Hebrew scripture, and they began the long process of interpretation which ultimately became the Mishnah and Talmud. It was they who insisted on the following of many rules to make one a good Jew in Luke's day.

Luke may well have been responding to this later development, not yet true in Jesus' time, in crafting this parable. He would, of course, have known the ancient prayer that every Jewish man said every morning, thanking God for not making him a Gentile, a slave or a woman. It wasn't a great leap for him to imagine a Pharisee taking it further.

We might here draw an uncomfortable comparison between Pharisees and good church members. Those Pharisees were the ones who did the work and provided the financial support necessary to support their religious institutions. Those Pharisees were devoted to God and righteousness, and most of their faults were the result of over-striving for holiness. Their zeal was often misguided, but at least they had zeal in their desire to please God. When religion became the end instead of the means, though, these leaders could easily lose their way, as the Pharisee evidently did.

These days, some scholars see the Pharisees in a positive light, pointing out that they preserved faith in God even under the crushing force of Roman military domination, and they preserved it by maintaining clarity about the way the goodness of God ought to shape all of faithful life. But we remember, too, the many times Jesus is shown in the gospels to criticize them, calling them not only money lovers but adulterers and hypocrites.

Now, shifting to tax collectors, they, like shepherds, have a more positive image for us than they would have had, as we have seen, for Luke's earliest audience. As long as they stay in the ancient past, we might think that those people Jesus ate dinner with – prostitutes, tax collectors, sinners of all kinds – are the ones we want to identify with. We'd like to think that we'd be included, too, in those meals with Jesus, don't we?

But the hatred that people had for the tax collector was not without cause, as we have seen, for he was the instrument of economic oppression by the Roman Empire. That made him both a collaborator and ritually unclean. So tax collectors were not merely 'misunderstood'; they were on the wrong side religiously, politically, and economically.

Undoubtedly, the images of the Pharisee and the tax collector both must have evoked a strong, but mixed, reaction from Jesus' audience as he taught them about prayer. This is the second of two parables in a row about prayer, the first being about the persistent widow. Jesus almost always used the least likely examples as teaching aids: widows were at the bottom of society, without power or voice, and yet how powerful was the voice of the widow in his story!

Now here, another dimension of prayer is addressed, the heart of prayer, really: that's the matter of who we are, or who we think we are, as we enter into prayer. The Pharisee's prayer is like a Shakespearean soliloquy, praising himself and his works and his own goodness.

He has it all figured out, and things add up rather nicely for him. Perhaps he comes out looking better than even God does! It helps, of course, to have the tax collector nearby for stark contrast, because the Pharisee far outshines him in his virtuous works. In this religious leader's imagination, God has surely noticed how good the Pharisee is. Actually, there isn't much need for God to do anything in the life of this Pharisee except to agree with him.

The tax collector, on the other hand, pours out his heart and buries himself deeply into the voicing of his deepest anguish, his most profound awareness of his own weakness, failures, and sins.

So engrossed is he that he apparently never even notices the Pharisee, let alone compare himself with him. He just flings his heart wide open, and depends on God to do something remarkable and redemptive in his life.

So Luke's Jesus teaches a lesson in justifying the abject sinner, the tax collector, instead of the apparently holy Pharisee. If we come to prayer in humble openness and fervent trust in God's goodness, he says, we make room for God to work in our lives.

For, as the Apostle Paul wrote, "All fall short of the glory of God." That's technically what the word "sin" means, to fall short or to miss the mark, as we all do because we are mortal, fallible human beings. So all of us stand in need of prayer and transformation.

Now, I think it's really important to lift up our joy and gratitude when things are going well, not just to take those times for granted or to be self-satisfied. The poet e e cummings famously said if the only prayer we ever said is "thank you," it would be enough. I like those sentiments.

But some of you have seen this poster that I keep on my office wall. I'll read it for you who are sitting too far back to read it. It says, "A prayer to be said when the world has gotten you down, and you feel rotten, and you're too doggoned tired to pray, and you're in a big hurry, and, besides, you're mad at everybody: Help!"

For me, as I suspect for many of you, some of my most heartfelt prayer happens when I am NOT in a good place in my life – when I'm sad, when I'm anxious, when I'm scared, when I'm feeling betrayed, when I know I'm at fault. Those times make me face how small I'm feeling, how unworthy I'm feeling, how bad I'm feeling.

Those times in prayer also let me sense that I still have a proper place in the universe, let me feel a gratitude for the grace that still comes to me in spite of myself, which we churchy types call the love of God. Those times also teach me to empathize with others when they are in bad situations, to be more understanding and less judgmental than I might normally be otherwise.

Charles Cousar writes, "Prayer is the occasion for honesty about oneself and generosity about others." Honesty flows from openness: an open heart, an open mind, a life open to transformation. Prayer helps us to discover who we are. It also helps us discover what the "God" we envision when we use that word is like: merciful and loving and just.

This is the God being invoked in the prayer of the tax collector, though not, perhaps, in the prayer of the Pharisee. The hook in today's parable is, as we have seen, our own inclination to identify with the tax collector and not the Pharisee.

The Pharisee may, however, resemble us in more ways than we would like to think, in the life of church and society. For we may ourselves be tempted to place our trust in our own accomplishments and in our own deserving of what we have received.

We may ourselves have thanked God occasionally with a kind of self-satisfied, self-centered prayer of gratitude that we were able to achieve our own righteousness. And there may be those, in our church, in our denomination, in our society, from whom we stand apart when we pray.

So in any question raging in the life of the church, we will do well to ask ourselves how is the Still Speaking God calling us to find that common ground of radical dependence on God's grace. That is, after all, what enables us to pray together and to seek forgiveness when appropriate.

Can we recognize ourselves, whether Pharisee (that is, religiously righteous in all of our practices) or tax collector (that is, having stepped outside the bounds of proper society and its rules)? And then can we still pray together? What issues are there that threaten to divide us and keep us from this kind of shared prayer, this kind of shared recognition that we are all sinners, but we all belong to God?

If we believe that we all do belong to God, and yet we are all sinners, how could we possibly leave church this day, thanking God either that we are not like that prideful, self-righteous Pharisee or that we are not like the tax collector, a recognized sinner? Let's sing from our black hymnals now, #519, Standing in the Need of Prayer.