The Pharisee and the Tax Collector: Last after Trinity

Last after Trinity 2019

Psalm 84, Luke 18.9-14

A Pharisee and a Tax Collector walk into a Temple…

It does sound a bit like the beginning of a joke, and maybe Jesus meant it to. There’s something wonderfully over the top about his description of these two men. Jesus is definitely hamming it up in his description of the Pharisee’s pomposity and the Tax Collector’s humility. This is a tiny satire, just over a hundred words long, but with a world of meaning in it. 

Who are these people? Jesus’ first audience would have known very well, but we might not. 

The Pharisees, who often feature in the Gospels, were one of the main religious groups of Jesus’ time, one of many factions within Judaism fighting for their version of the true faith.  They were known for being very serious about the religious law. They saw it as a gift from God to help them live well. They delighted in it, debated it, argued about it zealously.   

But zeal about anything can easily slide into legalism and puritanism, and some of the Pharisees – not all, but some – seem to have behaved like this. They were offended by what they saw as Jesus’ lax observance of the law, as he welcomed all comers and accepted people as they were. They’re often treated as stock villains by the Gospel writers, which really isn’t fair, because we are all capable of behaving like this.

The Pharisee Jesus describes in his little story is, on the face of it, a good man. If we take him at his word - and I think we are meant to - he isn’t a thief, a rogue or an adulterer.  He takes pains to establish publicly  here that he isn’t a tax collector either. They were despised for very good reason. They collected taxes on behalf of the Romans, to fund their occupation. They were seen as collaborators, traitors, and they often lined their own pockets at the expense of their own people, making them pay for their own oppression. When the Pharisee in Jesus’ story says that he is not like one of these, most right-thinking people would have nodded in approval.  

But however good he looks superficially, there are hints in the story that he isn’t going to turn out to be the hero. He stands by himself – making sure that everyone can see and hear him – but there’s no real conversation with God happening. He might as well be talking to himself.  It’s the tax-collector, Jesus says, who “went down to his home justified”, not this apparently pious Pharisee. ‘Justified’ in the Biblical context, means ‘put right’, sorted out. The tax collector, for all his sins – and they probably were many – goes home having done the business with God that he needed to do. The Pharisee, though, goes home exactly the same as he came in. Nothing has changed in his heart, so nothing will change in his life, because he doesn’t think there is anything to change, or if he does, he isn’t willing to acknowledge it, to others or to himself. God can’t do anything with him, because he won’t admit that he needs help. If we don’t acknowledge our need, how can God meet it? If we don’t accept that we need to change, how can God change us? There’s a lovely promise in the book of Revelation that God will “wipe every tear from our eyes”. John Donne, the 17th century poet and preacher once commented in a sermon on it  “then what shall God do with that eye that hath never wept?” If we deny our need for help and consolation, we miss out of the joy of that beautiful moment, he says.

The Pharisee thinks he’s got his life all sorted out – or he wants others to think that. What can God possibly need to do for him? God has been made redundant! But the tax collector, knows that he needs God. He knows that he can’t do this whole messy business of living on his own and he’s not pretending that he can. He comes to God because he has to, and, as a result, he is the one who goes home set right, with his tears wiped away, knowing he is loved. 

The Psalm we heard this morning, Psalm 84, is thought to have been sung by Jewish pilgrims on their way to the Temple in Jerusalem for one of the big festivals there.  Zion is another name for Jerusalem. As they slogged along the path in the scorching heat, they sang to remind themselves of why they were making this journey. They were going to the place which was, for them, their true home. “How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts! My soul longs, indeed it faints, for the courts of the Lord.” Even the birds were welcome to make their nests there! 

It wasn’t just the physical beauty of the place which drew them. They expected to meet God there. Of course, God could be encountered anywhere, but this, for them was his dwelling place, the focus of their faith. The Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD and there is a mosque on the site now, but Jewish people still go to its last remnant, the Western Wall, to pray, and they do so for the same reason as their ancestors. It’s the symbol of their relationship with God, a reminder of his presence with them wherever they are. 

For Christians, it’s Jesus who embodies God, who is his Temple, his presence with us. We encounter him in the words of the Bible, in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, in one another, and in those we are called to serve and love. The Psalm invites us to look on those places with the same delight those Jewish pilgrims expressed.

But however we meet God, this parable tells us is that if it’s going to change us, it has to be an honest meeting.  We may seek God in an ancient sacred site, an ordinary parish church, at home, at work, out shopping, on the weary commute on the train, in a conversation with a friend, or even a confrontation with an enemy conducted with integrity. The important thing is that we are ready and willing to do the business that needs to be done with him, to hear his word of comfort or challenge, or welcome, or guidance, to take it in and let it change us, not to try to hide, to pretend that all is right, to justify ourselves – we’ve seen plenty of that from politicians in recent weeks, but it’s something we are all capable of. 

 “Happy are those in whose hearts are the highways to Zion”, says the Psalm.  “Happy are you” in other words, “if you have, deep within you, well-trodden paths, familiar routes that lead you into God’s presence”. Highways aren’t made by accident. They take work, and time and intention. There’s likely to be mess and disruption too. Our pathways to God are no different. Sometimes God has to dig around in us, blast away the obstacles, move tons of spiritual earth - and we need to let him, opening our ears and our hearts to him so he can change us. 

A Pharisee and a tax collector walk into a temple… and so can we, if we want to, into the place where we meet the living God. But will we go home, like the Pharisee, the same people we were when we came in, or will we go home justified, changed, even just a little, like the tax collector?  That depends on us.

Amen

Trinity 18: Wrestling with God

Trinity 18 2022

Genesis 32.22-31, Luke 18.1-8

One of my favourite sculptures is a representation of the Old Testament story we heard today, the story of Jacob and the Angel, which can usually be seen in the Tate Britain in London. It’s sculpted from a gigantic block of alabaster, and it was made by Jacob Epstein in the 1930’s. Epstein has caught the moment when Jacob realises he can’t win this wrestling match. It’s a very ambiguous image. Is Jacob being crushed by the angel, or upheld and embraced? Epstein probably meant us to be unsure, just as the Biblical storyteller does. 

To understand the story, and this moment of ambiguity, we need a bit of background. Jacob is one of a pair of twins, who have been at loggerheads since before they were born, wrestling in their mother’s womb. Esau is born first, but only just. Jacob is holding onto his heel. Jacob’s name, means “the supplanter”, because that’s what he spends most of his life trying to do – supplant Esau, take his place as the first-born. In his culture the first-born son got everything. He became leader of the family, the head of the clan. He controlled all the property, and he got the blessing of his father. Jacob thought that role should have been his, that he would do it far better than Esau, and he may have been right. Esau comes across in the stories as more brawn than brain, a good hunter, but none too bright. So, in a series of events too long to explain here, Jacob tricks both Esau and his father, Isaac, and at the crucial moment, Isaac gives the blessing of the first-born to Jacob instead of his brother. 

He seems to have won, but his trickery does him no good. Esau is furious, and Jacob has to run for his life, back to his mother’s family home hundreds of miles away in on the border of what is now Southern Turkey. There he makes a new life for himself, with his mother’s brother, Laban. Decades pass, but in the end, the pull of home is too great, especially as Laban turns out to be just as manipulative as Jacob. So Jacob decides to go back, and face the music with Esau.  . 

The story we heard takes place on the night before Jacob crosses the boundary into Esau’s territory. The Bible is deliberately vague at first about who the mysterious figure he encounters is, but you don’t have to be a psychological genius to see this wrestling match as a reflection of the struggle that’s going on inside Jacob, torn between the desire to go home and the fear of how Esau might react. He is still hoping there might be a way to manipulate and manoeuvre himself out of trouble.

The stalemate in the wrestling match is, perhaps, the moment when he realises that there is no magic solution to his dilemma, no way forward without pain and cost to him, not least the pain of admitting that he wronged his brother. But he seems also to recognise that it is in the struggle and the pain that he will find the peace he longs for, that there are some things you can’t trick your way around. “I will not let you go, unless you bless me”, he says to his opponent. Epstein’s sculpture captures that moment of relief for Jacob in this, as the wrestling becomes an embrace. Here is someone, finally, who pushes back as hard as he does, who won’t let him go, who holds him accountable. Jacob realises that this figure represents the God who loves him even when he loses. 

Jacob is blessed not despite his struggles, but because of them. He’s given a new name – Israel – which means “one who struggles with God”. It’s a very significant name. Earlier in his life, when Jacob had run away from Esau and from home, he thought he was running away from God too. On his journey he found himself in the desert, with nowhere to sleep but the hard ground. But as he slept, he had a dream of a ladder set up between earth and heaven, with angels going up and down on it. “Surely God is in this place, and I did not know it” he said, in wonder. He thought he had left God far behind, but he discovered that God was still with him, as much at home in the desert as anywhere else. This wrestling match at the ford of the Jabbok tells him that again, as he is confronted with the reality he has tried to walk away from, and the God whose challenge and whose call he has tried to ignore.  

People often apologise to me if they feel they are wrestling with faith, questioning or doubting or feeling angry with God. When we are going through tough times we often try to put on our best face, to say all the right things. But this story tells us that God would rather we wrestled with him and shouted at him than pretend that everything is fine, treating him with distant politeness, or ignoring him completely. The Bible is full of people having a go at God, demanding to know “how long, O Lord!”. Even Jesus, in the Garden of Gethsemane, tells his Father that he really doesn’t want to do what he's called to, and in today’s Gospel reading he tells us that it’s ok to feel we are being like that desperate widow, stroppy, mouthy, so long as we keep showing up. God isn’t an unjust judge. He doesn’t need to be battered into submission, but it’s important for us to feel we can be honest with him and tell it like it is. If we argue with people, it is, at least, a sign that they matter to us, that we care about what they think, even if we disagree with them. And where there is an argument, there can be a reconciliation. It’s when we ignore people, avoid them or treat them as irrelevant that there is nowhere to go, nothing that can be done to change the situation. 

In modern jargon people call it “ghosting” when a friend abruptly stops replying to texts, emails, phone calls, blocks you on social media, vanishes from your life. Often I find that people try to  “ghost” God. They stop praying, stop coming to church, avoid the people and places that remind them of him, or they just hide behind pious platitudes.

The message of these stories we have heard today, though, is that not only does God want us to be honest with him, he also wants us to know that it’s safe for us to do so, and that this is the gateway to the blessing we long for, because we can then discover that we are loved indestructibly, whatever we have done, and whatever life has done to us. Jacob’s story starts with him longing for the blessing of his earthly father, which he can only get by cheating, but it ends when he discovers the blessing of his heavenly father, which nothing can take away from him. 

We don’t have to be polished, polite or dignified. We don’t have to pretend. We just have to show up as we are. God does not bless us despite our struggles. He wants us instead to find the blessing that’s within them, to let our prayers change us, bit by bit, into people who know that however far we run, God runs with us. Amen

Harvest: Stone soup

 Harvest 2022

2 Corinthians 9:6-10, John 15.1-11

I began last week’s sermon with a folktale, and, as it happens, I’m going to begin this week’s in the same way. This week’s story goes like this:

A traveller came to a certain village, and asked for some food, but none of the villagers would help him. So the traveller said to them, “never mind, I’ll make myself some soup, using my magic stone, and then there will be plenty for us to share.” He produced a stone from his pack, and asked if he could borrow a pot. The villagers were intrigued, so someone fetched him a pot – a large pot – which he filled the pot with water. He built a fire, and set the pot over it, and then, solemnly, dropped the stone into the water. Now and then he stirred the water about a bit, and eventually he took a sip from his spoon. 

“Is it ready?” asked the curious villagers.

“Hmm” he said. “It is tasting good, but it would be even better if I had an onion to put in it.”

One of the villagers happened to have an onion – she’d had a glut in her vegetable patch that year - so she fetched it and gave it to him. 

Once again they waited, until he tasted it again.

“Not bad,” he said, “but it would be even better with a carrot, if anyone happened to have one.” Someone scurried home to fetch one, and the traveller added it. 

They waited, until he tasted it again, and said that, with a little salt it would be truly excellent. So, someone gave him some.

Again and again, he tasted and added herbs and vegetables, a few bits of bacon, some beans to thicken it, all given by the villagers.

Finally, he proclaimed that now the soup was ready, and that, if anyone wanted some, he was very happy to share it. So, everyone fetched a bowl from their homes, and everyone ate their fill, and said that it was the best soup they had ever tasted. The traveller thanked them, cleaned off the stone, which was all that was left in the bottom of the pot, put it carefully back in his pack and went on his way, leaving everyone to wonder what, exactly, had just happened…

That story, called Stone Soup, is told across many different cultures in many different forms. Sometimes it’s a magic nail, sometimes magic wood, rather than a magic stone but the essence is always the same – people who didn’t want to share what they had being persuaded, or some might say tricked, into doing so, but everyone benefitting at the end. Like most popular folktales its power is that we recognise ourselves in it.

Like those villagers, we can all be reluctant to give, and for all sorts of reasons. We may not be sure of the person we are giving to – the traveller in the story was a stranger, why should the villagers help him? We may not want to get involved; what if more is asked of us later, and we find we can’t back out? We may be fearful that if we give something away we won’t have enough for ourselves and our families – we often cling to our possessions, even become hoarders, out of fear rather than greed. 

“God loves a cheerful giver,” said our reading today, but like those villagers we often have to be cajoled into it, persuaded by glossy adverts or gimmicks like buying red noses or sponsoring someone to do some extraordinary challenge. If we really care about someone, though, none of that is necessary. If it’s a friend or a child or a parent or a partner – someone we have a loving relationship with, we will usually give very generously to support them. It’s as natural as breathing. We don’t think twice about it. Our gifts are a token of our love. It doesn’t occur to us to hold back, or calculate the return to us, because our lives are linked to those we are giving to. That’s the kind of giving Paul’s talking about in his letter to the Corinthian church. 

The background to the reading is that the Christians in Corinth have promised to help out the Christian community in Jerusalem, who are suffering – there has been a famine and persecution there. For some reason, though, they haven’t yet come through with the promised cash. Paul is reminding them that these are their brothers and sisters, fellow human beings who happen to be in need, part of their own family. He is calling them to see their relationship with those they are helping. Jerusalem may be far away. They may not know the people there. But they are family. He also reminds them that their giving is rooted in and tied up with their relationship with God. If they are secure in his abundant love, they will be able to be generous and abundant in their love for others [, just as, in the Gospel reading Jesus tells us that we need to be grafted in, linked to one another and to God, the source of our lives.] We may not always feel we have much to give, but in giving it, we discover that we are richer than we thought, because we become part of something that is so much bigger than we are, and generosity breeds generosity.

At our Harvest services we support Rochester Diocese’s Poverty and Hope appeal.  Like those Corinthian Christians, we will never meet most of the people who benefit from our gifts, but they too are our brothers and sisters, part of one human family. What happens to them happens to us too. That’s always been true, but perhaps because we now get ‘as it happens’ rolling 24 hour news from all around the world, we are much more aware of that. Whether it’s the effects of climate change, or unfair trading practices, the world is getting smaller by the year. It can be quite exhausting, quite overwhelming, but the key to not being overwhelmed is in that story I began with. It might be that no one in that village had all the ingredients that went into that soup, enough to feed an entire village, but everyone had something to give, and through making the soup together, they didn’t just create some food, but also new relationships, which perhaps lasted long after the traveller had left them. 

The money we give today to the Poverty and Hope project is designed to do just that, to build relationships. As the book of Proverbs says “Like cold water to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country.” Whether it is empowering people in the shanty towns of Brazil, or supporting rural education in Myanmar, providing clean water in Tanzania or supporting communities in Zimbabwe to make their voices heard, we can be good news to people who are struggling, and they can be good news to us, challenging us to change the structures that keep inequality going,  so that we can all live in a fairer world which, in the end, will be good for everyone.

I’m going to finish with a message from the Bishop of Tonbridge, which tells us more about the projects this year’s appeal supports.

The way to faith: Trinity 16

 Trinity 16 2022

There’s an old German folktale recorded by the Brothers Grimm in which, for reasons far too complicated to explain, the hero finds himself ambushed by robbers in a forest, and bundled into a sack. The robbers tie a rope around the sack, haul it up into the trees and scarper, leaving him dangling up there with no way down. Fortunately, he hears someone coming along the forest track on horseback. He peers out through a tiny hole in the sack and sees that it’s a student from the local university. He doesn’t know, of course, whether he will be a friend or foe, so he decides to use a bit of low cunning. As the traveller comes closer, he calls out a cheery greeting from the sack. The student asks him what he is doing up there and whether he needs help.

“Help? No, not at all. This is no ordinary sack. It is the sack of knowledge, and anyone who spends time in it will know everything there is to know about everything – philosophy, science,literature…

The student’s eyes light up – this will be a lot easier than all that book-reading he has to do. “I don’t suppose you’d let me swap places with you for an hour or so?” he asks. 

The man in the sack agrees, trying to sound as reluctant as he can. The student lowers him down to the ground, and changes places with him, and is hauled up into the trees instead.  The sack swings there for a few minutes, and then the student shouts down “Tell me, how long does this take to start working? I’m not feeling any more wise than I did before.”

“Ah, give it a little while,” says the man down below, “and I can guarantee you will have learned a very important lesson indeed…”

And the student did, even if it was only that you should never trust the word of a man who is tied up in a sack… 

Of course, we all know that you can’t acquire all the knowledge of the world by sitting in a sack, but the promise of a quick fix is still very tempting. The enticing gym membership offer which we buy, but then never use, the language learning app which says you’ll be fluent in three weeks, which we never open, the musical instrument bought in an enthusiastic moment, but never actually played… We’ve probably all been there, hoping it would all happen by magic somehow.

The story of the sack of knowledge came into my head as I read that desperate request from the disciples to Jesus in today’s Gospel. “Increase our faith!” they cry. They’re starting to realise that living as he calls them to, living justly in an unjust world, is more challenging than they thought it would be. And they know they aren’t up to it. So, they ask Jesus for more faith, as if it is some sort of magic substance which you can go into a faith shop and buy half a pound of.

They are making a category error, like asking “how big is yellow?” The question makes no sense, because yellow doesn’t have a size. In the same way, faith isn’t something that can be dispensed – one lump or two? It’s something which we discover within us as we do the things God calls us to, and find that he is right there helping us. Jesus tells his followers that faith the size of a mustard seed is enough, if you actually do something with it, because it’s the act of doing something with it which makes it grow. 

Jesus goes on to develop the point by painting a little word picture. “If you’re a slave or a servant,” he says – the two words are the same in Greek -  “you don’t expect your master to drop everything and do your work for you – it’s your work”. It’s a problematic image for us, because we automatically start thinking about the evils of slavery and exploitation, but Jesus is just using a scenario he knew people would be familiar with. 

His words may sound rather harsh, but essentially he’s telling them that the growth of faith is an intrinsic, natural result of doing what they are called to. It’s not some sort of magic, nor is God is not a sort of heavenly slot machine who’ll give out goodies if we put in the right coins – saying our prayers, turning up at church. Helping others too, can be just a bargaining chip, if we do it in the hopes it will get us into God’s good books. That sort of transactional view of faith insults God, treating him as if he can be manipulated, put into our debt. But on top of all that, it doesn’t work, because it produces a faith, if we can call it that, which tends to fall apart as soon as anything bad happens to us. 

If we believe that God will give us health, wealth and happiness if we do the right thing, then where does that leave us when sickness, poverty and unhappiness strike, as they almost will? The natural conclusion is that either we’ve done something to deserve punishment, or that God has reneged on his side of the contract. It leads to us stigmatising others who are suffering too. 

The prophet Habakkuk was battling that sort of ‘transactional’ thinking about God in our Old Testament reading, probably written just before the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem. The nation was falling apart politically, socially and morally in front of Habakkuk’s eyes, knowing that they would soon be overrun by mighty armies. Some of the other prophets said that the nation had brought all this on itself. It was a punishment from God. Whenever there is a disaster – plague, war, earthquake – you can be sure someone will say this. It’s attractive, in an odd sort of way, because it gives us at least some sense of control. We can kid ourselves that if we had acted differently, we could have prevented these bad things happening. Even if that’s nonsense, it’s better than feeling we have no power at all.

But Habakkuk took a different position which faced up honestly to our powerlessness. Bad things happen to all sorts of people, he said, the good and the bad alike, without any rhyme or reason we can fathom. What we are called to do is to look for God even in the midst of them. It is fine to lament and to cry out to God, as Habakkuk does,  to ask “how long, O Lord?” but his faith doesn’t depend on getting an answer , still less on God swooping down and delivering him miraculously. He’d learned to find God in the darkness and the troubles, and that meant that he had a faith that was indestructible. The book of Habakkuk ends with the lovely words, “Though the fig tree does not blossom and no fruit is on the vines; though the produce of the olive fails, and the fields yield no food; though the flock is cut off from the fold, and there is no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord… God the Lord is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, and makes me tread upon the heights”. 

Habakkuk has learned to trust God, not because he understands what God is doing, but because he knows who God is, what his character is, that he is a God who never stops loving his creation, or withdraws from it, no matter what we do. 

Jesus, whose way of salvation led through the pain of the cross and the darkness of death, knew how important it was that his followers learned Habakkuk’s lesson too, not to look for a magic bullet or a quick fix, or even just someone to blame, but simply to get on with living in his way, walking in his path, doing the work he calls us to.  As we do so, his promise is that we will discover that God is with us, in failure as well as success, weakness as well as strength, death as well as life and our faith will be indestructible too.  

Amen