A Sermon for the Twenty-first Sunday After Pentecost
The Reverend Robert Furniss

Jeremiah 14:1-10,19-22
Psalm 84
2 Timothy4:6-8,16-18
Luke 18:9-14

Back eight or ten years ago the comedian Dana Carvey used to do character on the Saturday Night Live show called the Church Lady that I used to enjoy. The Church Lady in her proper and discreet dress, was always on the lookout for Satan, even one time noticing that if you rearrange the letters of Santa and what do you get? Could it be Satan. She would look down her nose at the woman with four kids who brought the little jello mold to the church pot luck dinner when she herself had brought the 34 quart turkey hotdish. And she would revel in the pain and despair of fallen sinners and just have to do a little “Superior Dance” around the likes of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart--“hit it Pearl!” she would say to cue in her organist that she was about to proudly strut her stuff in front of the mighty who have fallen. We laugh at these skits because we probably have known church ladies, who probably haven’t been as brazen and extreme as this Church Lady, but who demonstrated some of these same qualities of character, quick to notice the faults of others, especially in a way that would cast a favorable light on themselves. If we are bold enough to admit it, we may even realize that there is a bit of the Church Lady in us.

It would be easy enough for us to take the parable that we have been given in today’s gospel reading and see the Pharisee doing a little superior dance before God and this tax collector, especially with the passage ending on the note that it does, “for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” It’s not that I don’t think that humility is a good thing, it’s just that we need to know that it is not by making ourselves humble that we are right before God. And so I think that we need to look more closely at this parable.

It’s pretty obvious from the way that the parable is written that Jesus is not out to praise the Pharisee and his lifestyle. But I think we ought to ask why. This is an upstanding citizen, he keeps the religious and civic law flawlessly, he is generous to a fault, sure he is proud, maybe even a bit stuck up, but as far as we can tell he “walks the walk” as they say. Imagine if this person walked in and joined us for this service today. I picture him accompanied by his attractive and friendly wife, and two well-behaved children. Over coffee downstairs he would ask for a pledge card right away and the Treasurer’s jaw would drop when he saw the amount and the check mark on the yes box next to the question “is this a tithe?” He would ask how he could help, maybe there is an unfilled seat on the Vestry he could fill, and would it be alright if he offered a contemplative prayer group at the church, and pulled together a youth group, and chaired a fund raiser on behalf of the parish. We would be falling all over him right?

Now take a look at the tax collector. Tax collecting then, was considerably different from tax collecting now, although it has never been popular. At least now we have a tax code that puts all of the expectations in writing, not to say that it is necessarily fair, but at least you can see on a table that applies to everyone exactly what you owe. Back in Jesus’ time certain people, the tax collectors, had a franchise right to collect taxes. There was a certain amount of money that they had to pay to the Roman government per person in their district, but only they knew what that amount was. So they would try to get as much money out of the people as possible because they got to keep anything above what was required by the Romans. They usually did pretty well for themselves and lived lavish lifestyles with all the best of everything. If this person were to join us today for worship we might recognize him as the politician who has been disgraced by being caught embezzling public funds, or accepting bribes, or soliciting for prostitution. I don’t suspect that we would be falling all over him the way we did the other man, but may rather be saying, to ourselves, if not out loud, “what in the world is he doing here?”

When we look at this particular gospel passage we are faced yet again with another difficult parable which seems to be saying to us, at the very least, that the way of God, is not same way as our human conventional wisdom. Humility is a good and honorable thing, but it is not the moral of this story. I think that the moral of the story, if it has a moral at all, is that self-righteousness is ultimately not righteousness before God at all. Being right with God is not a matter of carefully following some particular moral code or the commandments, or the Law and the prophets, its not about accruing points on the scorecard of goodness, or earning ourselves a good standing with God. Rather the Tax Collector is held up for us as an example because he recognizes that he is dead in the water when it comes to helping himself look good before God. He is as good as dead and he knows it. The Pharisee too, is as good as dead, but in the midst of his successful life he hasn’t a clue.

What’s the old saying?--there are only two certainties in life: death and taxes. Death is what God is interested in. No matter how successful or how much a failure we are in life, a common end awaits us all: death. Death is the great equalizer, the common denominator in all of life, we will all die. And if we watch carefully enough we will see that death plays an important role in the gospel story. Much of the gospel story is about Jesus on his way to his own death on the cross, in fact he offers this parable as he is well on his way to Jerusalem and the death that awaits him there. The good news of the gospel story is that death does not get the final word on life. Easter morning testifies to the fact of resurrection and eternal life, and this is our salvation. Jesus promises to bring salvation to all people, eternal life in the resurrection, but the only way to get there, and in fact the only thing required, is our death. If you need a moral for this story here it is in a nutshell: Jesus came to raise the dead, not to tell us to straighten up and fly right. And the sooner that we recognize that we are dead in the water in terms of making ourselves right before God, the sooner we can really appreciate and enjoy the life we do have, we can enjoy a foretaste of the risen life in Christ we will know in our death.

The Church Lady in all of us probably balks at this kind of grace, that counts good works for nothing. But I think that there are at least two consequences that we might find beneficial. First of all, if we are really honest about ourselves and our lives we would realize that we really don’t want goodness and badness to count, because none of us is always good. And anyway, trying to always be good, is no way to enjoy the life we’ve got. The good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that we don’t get what we deserve, rather salvation and eternal life are offered to us as God’s free gift. Secondly, if we don’t have to make ourselves superior to others, then we can dare to show compassion to others who know that they are unable to help themselves, sinners, addicts and the like. We can welcome the stranger, celebrate the diversity of all God’s people, be open to hearing the story that the other has to tell, because we know that we are all in the same boat, a boat dead in the water that is. But we know that we are not abandoned, adrift in death, rather we know that just as we all share in Christ’s death, we will be raised with him to new life.

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