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Expecting Great Things From Prayer

Luke 18:9-14
October 28, 2007

He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous
and regarded others with contempt: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a
Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying
thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or
even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ But the
tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his
breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to
his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled,
but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

There is one of Flannery O’Connor’s incredible stories that has stayed with me for
years, and though I know that she is probably not as well known here in the upper
Midwest as she is in the South, I would highly, highly recommend picking up a copy of
her Complete Stories if you ever happen to have an extra $15 or so languishing around
the house. O’Connor was resident of Milledgeville, GA, a staunch Catholic in the
deeply Baptist region, and, in my opinion, a better writer than another great writer in my
home region, William Faulkner. In a short story called Everything That Rises Must
Converge, O’Connor tells the story of Julian and his widowed mother, living in the South
somewhere in the 1950’s. Julian has just finished college, graduating from a third-rate
school, as he himself admits, but his mother is immensely proud of him and of their
deep Southern roots and she constantly reminds him of the great historic family and
wealth they come from, though, by the time Julian is born, the money is gone and the
family pedigree is well worn, looking a little tattered at the ends. He is now back at
home staying with his mother, until, as his mother puts it, he gets on his feet, but Julian
is deeply cynical about his potential future, and doesn’t see much good coming around
the corner anytime soon.

What does make him feel good is a sense of being better than his roots, his Southern
roots, especially those roots tinged with insidious racism that has plagued the region.
He looks down on his mother because of her pettiness, her fretting over things like a $7
hat she has just bought and is wearing that day; he hates the ways she remarks about
her gladness that all the passengers on the bus they just boarded are all white, at least
at the beginning of their trip to the YWCA for her reduction class, her weight-loss
program. Julian is embarrassed by his mother’s racism, and when an African-American
man finally comes on board the bus, Julian almost taunts her by trying to be friendly to
the new passenger, asking him for a match and sitting close to him. After this man, an
African-American woman gets on board, and she is wearing a familiar looking $7 hat,
and of course, Julian’s eyes widen. Flannery O’Connor writes:

The vision of the two hats, identical, broke upon him with the radiance of a brilliant
sunrise. His face was suddenly lit with joy. He could not believe that Fate had thrust
upon his mother such a lesson. He gave a loud chuckle so that she would look at him
and see that he saw. She turned her eyes on him slowly. The blue in them seemed to
have turned a bruised purple. For a moment he had an uncomfortable sense of her
innocence, but it lasted only a second before principle rescued him. Justice entitled
him to laugh. His grin had hardened until it said to her plainly as if he were saying
aloud: Your punishment exactly fits your pettiness. This should teach you a permanent
lesson. pg 416

I will get back to how the story concludes, but I wanted to stop here to sit with Julian for
a moment, to sit with Julian and his mother, and to see if we can see this morning’s
Scripture through O’Connor story. You’ve got Jesus telling a story here about another
self-righteous fellow, a Pharisee, a man of God, someone you can count on when the
divine chips are down. Again, I just want to remind us that the Pharisees, despite their
reputation in the 21st century, the Pharisees, in general, were a pretty good lot. These
were folks who wanted to take the Jewish law seriously—they wanted to follow the rules,
and they argued that it wasn’t only the priest, or as we often name them, the
Sadducees, who ought to try to follow the laws they believed were given to them by
God. He was a good man, he didn’t steal, he didn’t cheat on his wife—he was
generous to boot, he actually gave away the 10% we are always encouraging
ourselves to give around here. And there is no indication that this Pharisee was lying
in his prayer—he seems to want to authentically live out Jewish law as best as he could,
as far as we know, as did many of the Pharisees of Jesus’ day.

No, it is not the life he is leading that is the problem, but his attitude about the life he’s
leading that causes him to stumble, and makes him such a repugnant figure to most of
us. His self-righteousness, his better-than-thou attitude, his thinking that his willingness
to follow the rules made him automatically better than this tax collector beside him.
That’s why we don’t like him, I think. But before we get to smug in our look at the
Pharisee, I want us to also look at this tax collector a little more closely—I mean, its also
too easy to automatically take his side against this self-righteous Pharisee, but there is
some stuff we probably need to know about tax collectors in the first century. If you
lived during that time, you were tripled taxed: once by the Romans, once by Herod and
his family, and once for the upkeep of the Temple in Jerusalem. Plus, if you were the
tax collector, you also got to charge extra for simply collecting the tax—a surcharge, so
to speak, and you could usually charge anything you wanted. Now, no tax collector is
ever loved or adored in ANY culture or ANY time, but what got under the skin of the
Jews was that these Jewish tax collectors, their brothers through faith and blood, often
enriched themselves with those extravagant bonus fees they charged for simply
collecting the tax. Not only were they overtaxed by all these entities looking for
payment—they were taxed by a fourth entity, the tax collector himself, who added insult
to injury by adding his own bonus to an already heavy tax burden. The reason I’m
sharing this with you is so that we don’t make the mistake of thinking this tax collectors
was a good guy—he wasn’t, and he was despised by others for very good reasons. In
our parable today, he deeply repents for what he has done and is doing—and he ought
to, because it doesn’t get much lower than what he has been doing to his own people,
becoming a pawn, a tool, of a brutal oppressor. If you want a historical parallel,
consider the Vichy government during Nazi occupied France during World War II—
these tax collectors were as despised as the Vichy collaborators were amongst the
French people. These are not good people, and if we were that Pharisee, there is a
good chance we would have definitely felt superior to the tax collector, even if we hadn’t
been the perfect Pharisee!

So, here you are, two figures before us, both of them less than heroic figures, one
because his attitude, his self-righteousness, and the other because of his greed and
his betrayal of his people, though, of course, one of our characters does he is indeed a
hero…and maybe that is the point Jesus seems to be making. Again, the Pharisee
here is a good man—he does the right thing—but his heart is in the wrong place, and
for Jesus that makes all the difference in the world. We all know people that play by the
rules, who pay their taxes, stay out of trouble, honor their covenants, pay their bills,
vote every time the polls open, treat their kids right, and go to church on Sunday, every
Sunday—and yet, we can’t stand ‘em. Yes, I admit it: there are some Christians I do
not like, not matter how good they are, even authentically good they are, because they,
like the Pharisee assume their own goodness, and want you to it assume it as well, and
they really do think they are better than others, ready to cast judgment, and even
readier to condemn people that haven’t paid their bills, or haven’t stayed out of
troubles, or run around on their spouses, or are least than perfect parents, or worse,
not show up on Sunday, ever. We all know good people we don’t like because of how
they treat less-than-perfect people, sometimes people like us—they, like the Pharisee
in the story, are very ready to cast judgment on people who don’t have it together like
they do…and it makes them and the Savior they follow, the Christ they believe in, look
very bad.

Walker Percy, another great Southern novelist, and himself a Christian, has one of his
characters say in his novel The Second Coming, something that gets to the effect
people like our Pharisees and others like him, have on our perception of Christianity:

Take Christians. I am surrounded by Christians. They are generally speaking a
pleasant and agreeable lot, not noticeably different from other people—even though
they, the Christians of the South, the USA, the Western world have killed off more
people in recent centuries than all other people put together. Yet I cannot be sure they
don’t have the truth. But if they have the truth, why is it the case that they are repellent
precisely to the degree that they embrace and advertise that truth? One might even
become a Christian if there were few if any Christians around. Have you ever lived in
the midst of fifteen million Southern Baptists? (Of course you have. You’re from
Alabama)…A mystery: if the good news is true, why are its public proclaimers such ___
holes and the proclamation itself such a weary used-up thing? Page 188-189

Now, as a proclaimer of this Good News, I have to admit that these are hard words to
hear, but I get the point of them, even as I read them years ago, before I had even
entered into the ministry. It’s the good people, sometimes, that give our Christian faith
a bad reputation, because they know they’re good, and they’re pretty sure everyone
else isn’t!   And I want to make clear that this parable really isn’t about hypocrisy—there
is no hint that the Pharisee wasn’t anything less than what he said he was, in terms of
doing the right thing by God and by other people. But what got him into trouble was
thinking that God saw the world the same way he did, as being divided up between the
good people and the bad people. Instead, what God sees is deeper than our
goodness, our acts, our faithfulness to our spouses, to our church, to our civil and
criminal laws—what God sees is the heart of us, and what God saw in that Pharisee’s
heart was arrogance, was judgmentalism, was a man who used his goodness as if was
as a weapon to be used against others. Ever known someone who got religion, and
then found that their faith made them even more insufferable and arrogant than they
ever were before, at least to the people around them? Well, that is this tax collector:
his goodness, his morality, oddly enough, has killed off his compassion for others, his
success has made him intolerant of failure, and thus his righteousness has turned into
self-righteousness.

You see, humility is not about pretending to be nobody—humility is about seeing
everyone as a somebody, worthy of our respect and presence, even when they do
horrible, horrible thing to themselves, or to other people. Humility is all about the
moment when we sense that our self-righteousness is about to overtake us when it
comes to that mean person at work, or that church member we think isn’t doing
enough, or that murderer on death row—humility is all about tending to that moment
within us when we’re about to go into that deep hole of self-righteousness and wallow in
our own goodness. In turning inwards, in looking at our own hearts deeply to see why it
was so important for us to feel as if we were better than they were, that our sin was far
less egregious to God than their sin is—it is in those moments when good people
become humble, become self-aware of how close they and the tax collectors of this
world really are, at least in God’s eyes. Again, its not about ignoring the goodness in
ourselves and others—humility is just about realizing that the shadows that run deeply
in others also still run deeply within us, even if we are not willing to acknowledge it, and
even if those shadows are diminished by the good light within us at that moment in our
lives.

And the thing of it is, life and circumstances and maybe even God will always, always,
will take us down a peg, when we get too high up that ladder, too willing to look down on
others for their imperfections, or perceived imperfections—just ask Ted Haggard, or
Jimmy Swaggart, or someone you know in your own life, somebody who always thought
they had it just a little bit more together than others did—maybe God will take you and I
down a peg because we are like the Pharisee, or we are like Julian, the character from
O’Connor’s story, who, near the end of the story I shared with you earlier, is humbled,
horribly humbled about his self-righteous attitude towards his less-than-perfect mother.
His mother, after fumbling a paternalizing attempt to be friendly to an African-American
child, is knocked to the ground, and she is embarrassed and humiliated and wobbly on
her feet—Julian immediately realizes something is wrong.

“Let’s wait on the bus”, he said.
“Home,” she said quickly.
“I hate to see you behave like this,” he said. “Just like a child. I should be able to
expect more of you.” He decided to stop where he was and make her stop and wait for
a bus. “I’m not going any further,” he said, stopping, “We’re going on the bus.”
She continued to go on as if she had not heard him. He took a few steps and caught
her arm and stopped her. He looked into her face and caught his breath. He was
looking into a face he had never seen before. “Tell Grandpa to come get me,” she
said.
He stared, stricken.
“Tell Caroline to come and get me,” she said.
Stunned, he let her go and she lurched forward again, walking as if one leg were
shorter than the other. A tide of darkness seemed to be sweeping her from him.
“Mother!” he cried. “Darling, sweetheart, wait!” Crumpling, she fell to the pavement.
He dashed forward and fell at her side, crying, “Mamma, Mamma!” He turned her over.
Her face was fiercely distorted. One eye, large, and staring, moved slightly to the left
as if it had become unmoored. The other remained fixed on him, raked his face again,
found nothing and closed.
“Wait her, wait here!” he cried and jumped up and began to run for help toward a
cluster of lights he saw in the distance ahead of him. “Help, help!” he shouted, but his
voice was thin, scarcely a thread of sound. The lights drifted farther away the faster he
ran and his feet moved numbly as if they carried him nowhere. The tide of darkness
seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into
the world of guilt and sorrow.

In that moment of being swept into the darkness of that guilt, that sorrow about being
so judgmental, so “better than thou’ than his mother, Julian also realizes how much he
loves this woman he only moments earlier had despised and looked down upon. Julian
is helpless, stunned, and, in that instance, he is also broken of his arrogance, of his
self-righteousness and suddenly he realizes how human she is, and how much they
have in common, being imperfect and all. He is now painfully humbled by God or the
universe, or simple circumstances, but it doesn’t have to be this way, for him or for us.
We don’t have to be humbled by life—we can choose to humble ourselves, to see the
common humanity we all share, the light and shadow that runs within us, within all of us,
between us and the man on death row, and all the other people we’re pretty sure we’re
better than, and we can choose to be like the tax collector, who cried out in his
imperfection Be merciful to me, a sinner! He is a person in need of as much grace as
the person next to him, and the person next to them, and on down the line it goes,
people imperfect as we are, trying to do the best they can in this world, sometimes
doing it very well, and sometimes doing it very badly. We all need grace, we all need
mercy, especially from each other and we all need to be as good as the Pharisee and
as self-aware and humble as that tax collector in this a story told thousands of years
ago by the Christ. Amen.