“An
Unlikely Stewardship Sermon”
Luke
18:9-14
First
Presbyterian
The
Reverend Thomas A. Sweet, Pastor
October
24, 2010
At the outset of our reading today,
Luke identifies the intended audience of this particular parable.
“He told it to some who trusted
in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt…”
These are people who manage to mangle the right-relatedness between
God and self and others that the entire sweep of scripture maintains is the key
to wisdom and joy and living in a manner faithful to God’s hope for humanity.
Instead of trusting in God, the people for whom Jesus intends the parable
trust in themselves. I take a deep
breath as I say that for as much as I like to make the phrase “Trust God.
Period.” the mantra of my life and ministry, the truth is that I often
can be numbered among the company of those who trust in themselves.
My intellect.
My cleverness. My
sociability. My
spirituality. The rightness of my
religion and politics and just about everything else.
There is a theological word for all of
that: self-righteousness. It may be
blatant or subtle or, as this little send up of the parable shows, even work in
reverse. A Presbyterian pastor and
an elder were standing in front of the communion table praying together.
The pastor prays, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
The elder prays, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
Just then they hear a voice from the back of the church.
They turn to see the custodian, head bowed and beating his breast,
saying, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
The pastor turns to the elder and haughtily remarks, “Look who thinks
he is a sinner.”
Self-righteousness occurs whenever we
look down on others as a way of maintaining something of an elevated sense of
ourselves. Self-righteousness skews
and skewers a right relationship with God and other people because we live with
a sense of our own superiority or specialness.
We are not special.
I know that has a funny ring to it because we try hard to convince
ourselves that we are. With the best
of intentions, we try to teach our children that they are special.
“You’re so special,” parents say to their kids.
Oh, it might help in the short term to increase their self-esteem and
maybe give them the confidence to become achievers but are we not then setting
them up to think of themselves as the Pharisee in the parable did:
“Thank you, God, that I am not
like those other people…”?
So, then, notice the two ways of
praying in this parable. The
Pharisee (a word, by the way that means “to set apart” or “a separated
one”) begins by thanking God but it has the feel of a perfunctory preface to
self-promotion rather than authentic gratitude.
If the Pharisee truly is grateful for anything, it seems it is only for
his self-assessed superiority that makes him “not
like other people.” The
Pharisee is at the center of his prayer – “I
am not like others.
I fast twice a week.
I give a tenth of all my income.
I am not like that tax collector.”
The Pharisee is parading his piety, complimenting his own commendable
life. For the Pharisee, the real
engagement is not with God but with the tax collector with whom he can compare
himself favorably. God, the focus of
genuine prayer, is given a cursory mention at the beginning of the prayer and
then relegated to the audience to cheer and cheer for the Pharisee’s excellent
life. True to Luke’s introduction
to the parable, the Pharisee trusted in himself and regarded others with
contempt.
Meanwhile, “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!’” The
contrast between the tax collector and the Pharisee seems total.
He does not command center stage but is off in the wings.
He does not trumpet his goodness but bows in respectful reverence and
repentance. The tax collector’s
prayer does not speak of anyone else. He
makes no comparisons that could make him look better: “Thank God I am not like
that child molester over there.” No.
He mentions only the merciful God and his own need for an amended life.
“God, be merciful to me, a
sinner.” The tax collector’s
engagement is with God.
To conclude the parable, Jesus said, “I
tell you, this man, the tax collector, 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.” If
this story and this conclusion were not so familiar to us, we would be surprised
by it. The Pharisee expresses thanks
to God for his superiority. What is
wrong with that? He does seem to be
better than others – tithing all of his income, for instance, and on
stewardship Sunday, how can a preacher fault him for that?
Most pastors would roll out the red carpet for new members like the
Pharisee. Meanwhile, the tax
collector works for the Romans, leans on his own people for their tax payments
and probably inflates them a little so that he can keep the extra for himself
before turning the money over to his Roman bosses.
He does not seem to be a very good person and should expect to get his
just desserts. In our conventional
wisdom, the Pharisee gets our kudos and the tax collector our condemnation.
But Jesus reverses things.
It is the tax collector who went home approved by God and not the
Pharisee. Why?
Why? What is Jesus up to?
Jesus knew that self-exaltation finally
separates us from both God and others. When
we trust in ourselves and our own devices to make a life, when we glory in our
own supposed superiority and specialness, when we are full of ourselves, we
choke off the flow of God’s grace in our lives.
We trust in ourselves rather than take c chance on God.
Similarly, we can only attain elevated status in our own estimation if
there are others in our judgment who are beneath us.
We cannot feel ourselves superior unless we adjudicate others as
inferior, and so a chasm develops between “us” and “them.”
Self-exaltation separates us from God and others.
But there comes a time in our lives
when we feel the isolation that self-exaltation brings, the competitive drive,
the proud spirit. For all the
seeming goodness of our lives, we somehow do not feel connected to God and we
find ourselves unable to relate to those outside of our own social location.
We realize we have engaged in activities and a lifestyle that on the
surface seems good and righteous but turns out to be alienating.
And we become more and more aware that we are not as happy as we think we
should be for all of our supposed superiority and maybe we have missed something
important along the way. It is
either high irony or just the way that life works that those who exalt
themselves eventually are humbled by their own self-exaltation.
But being humbled can be a good thing
in our lives for it gives us the possibility of choosing a different way, of
changing one’s mind, of turning in a different direction, of living more
broadly and deeply. It is after he
was humbled that the prodigal’s father said of his son, “He
was dead and is alive again; lost and is found.”
The tax collector had been humbled.
He had lived an isolating life, too, and wanted to change.
He did not try to justify his life or to put a good spin on it.
He knew his life was broken and that he felt estranged both from God and
from the people around him. So he
cries out, “God, be merciful to me, a
sinner.” It is our need of
mercy that unites us to all people, that makes us brothers and sisters, that
comprises a common family. And thus
begins our true exaltation as God-graced people whose joy is found in the
oneness of our humanity and the breaking down of dividing walls.
Maybe that sounds like a stretch, like
pie in the sky, like naivete, like Pollyanna unleashed.
But we are people of the gospel and we believe that with God all things
are possible and that is why we sometimes may be misfits in the mainstream
culture and, in the description of a writer named Brennan Mannings, ragamuffins.
We are those who do not blithely run with
our culture but who run counter to
much of it, who call out and proclaim with
Here is how this parable is working on
me as I live with it this time through: We
have not been taught the value of living humbly.
Mostly we try to make ourselves distinct or “special,” to
differentiate ourselves from others, to stand out.
Our common humanity becomes the backdrop for our attempts to make a name
for ourselves and to separate ourselves from the mass of people.
But what if we begin to value more the
gift of our common origin – that all of us come from God and that all of us
are born into the world to share a common life – what if we come to value the
gift of our common origin more than we value what individually we make of the
gift? It does not mean that we cease
to develop our talents and abilities and interests, but we do it in order to
serve others and not to separate ourselves from them as others also serve us and
do not wish to separate themselves from us.
Thomas Merton, the Trappist Monk who
lived at an abbey in
“In
Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping
district, I suddenly was overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those
people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one
another even though we were total strangers.
It was like waking from a dream of separateness, or spurious
self-isolation…This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a
relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud.
And I suppose my happiness could have taken form in the words: ‘Thank
God, thank God that I am like other (people), that I am only a (person) among
others.’” (Merton,
Thomas, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.
William Sloane Coffin, to my mind one
of the greatest preachers of the twentieth century, one time said that “if we
are not yet one in love, we at least are one in our sin and that is no mean
bond, for it precludes our being separated in the judgment.”
Another minister I know paraphrased Coffin to say simply, “We all are
Bozos on this bus.” I like that.
Bozos on the bus all in need of God’s grace.
Do you see why the tax collector was
approved of God? The Pharisee’s
prayer left him with nowhere to go and nothing to do except to exalt in his own
grandeur and glory. He had no need
of God and he wanted nothing to do with his neighbors – “thank
God I am not like them.” But
the tax collector – he wanted to be rightly related to God and he wanted to be
a part of the neighborhood and he knew he needed help in doing both.
“God, be merciful to me, a
sinner.”
In his Beatitudes, Jesus calls that the
blessedness of being poor in spirit. Why
is being poor in spirit a blessing according to Jesus?
Because the poor in spirit receive the
Well, this is a stewardship sermon
though it may seem an unlikely one since I have not yet mentioned money and
giving. But, to me, stewardship is a
big, encompassing concept. To me,
stewardship means “caring for what God cares for.”
It is not just about giving money or our time or our talents.
The Pharisee gave plenty of money. Stewardship
is about having a heart after God’s own. It
is about having the mind of Christ. It
is about being melted and molded by God’s Spirit for service after the manner
of Jesus. Caring for what God cares
for.
I fully trust the Lord when he says
that if we seek first the
Amen.
Copyright © 2010 First Presbyterian Church