Broadway Christian Church ·Columbia, Missouri

Morning Worship ·October 24, 2004

Prayer of the Day

Merciful God, we sense you drawing us closer to you.  We hear your welcoming voice and feel your enveloping arms.  Receive, we pray, the praise we offer this day as we worship you with grateful hearts.  Amen.

Scripture 

Luke 18:9-14

To some who were confident in their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable:

“Two persons went up to the temple to pray.  One was a Pharisee and the other one a Publican.  The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: ‘God, I’m thankful that I’m not like other people – robbers, evildoers, adulterers – even like this Publican, this tax collector here.  In fact, I fast twice a week.  I give a tithe, a tenth, of all that I get and so on.’

“But the tax collector stood at a distance, and he could not even look up to heaven, but beat his chest and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ 

“I tell you,” said Jesus, “this person rather than the other went home justified before God, for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and everyone who humbles himself will be exalted.”

Message

Making Right What We Mess Up

Rick Frost

Today’s text is another one of those Trojan horses of Jesus.  It is one of those parables that is fascinating, that draws us in, and then, of course, surprises us at the end.  It’s a story about the Pharisee and the Publican.  Now, that’s not the “Republican.”  This is the “Publican.”  I want to make sure we get that straight.

Both of them went to church to pray.  Now, according to the text, Jesus sort of lets us in on their individual prayers.  They’re evidently in different parts of the sanctuary.  Then Jesus surprises us with what he says.

At first, this seems like such a simple parable.  It was a surprise to the people of first-century Jerusalem, because the Pharisees were considered to be the good guys, and the Publicans were considered to be the bad guys.  However, the more I thought about this, the more I realized most of us in this room will probably not identify with either one of these particular characters unless we look at those two characters – two different types – with some fresh eyes.  I think this is true because most of us did not grow up thinking of the Pharisees as the good guys.  Did we?  We grew up hearing in our Sunday School classes that Jesus berated the Pharisees over and over again.  They were the bad guys, but why?  It was because Jesus didn’t like them.

Well, what’s not to like?  I mean… They studied the Scriptures diligently.  They lived by the law.  They gave 10 per cent of everything they had to the Temple.  They were leaders of their religion, and, therefore, leaders in the communities and leaders in their nation.  They were not criminals.  They were not evildoers.  They were not adulterers.  In fact, they were clean-living, hard-working, church-going, family-centered Pharisees.

Now on the surface, that sounds pretty good to me.  A church full of Pharisees doesn’t sound like a bad thing.  These folks were committed.  These folks were invested.  They were rigorous.  They were people who walked a narrow and straight way.  So why in the world would Jesus scorn, condemn, cast aspersions upon these villains called Pharisees?

I did a little digging this week, and what I found was very interesting.  I think I understand.  I think I have a good grasp on why Jesus didn’t like the Pharisees.  I found out the root for the word “Pharisee” means “one who separates.”  Isn’t that interesting?  The Pharisees were Jews – Hebrew people, people of Israel – who believed it was their calling to separate themselves, to get away from that which was unclean, to remove themselves from the world of the unwashed, and that meant segregation.  It meant separation from the vast majority of the peoples of the world.  They did that in order to protect their way of life, their core values, and the beliefs they had about everything that was good, and right, and loving, and holy.  They separated themselves.  They seceded.  They literally built a wall around everything that they believed to be holy.  They focused completely on strictly keeping the codes, and the traditions, and the rules, and the way of life they believed was holy.  And because it was holy, they thought it was pleasing to God.  Does that sound familiar to anything going on today?

The problem was, in their effort to build a gated community, in their effort to build a gated religion; their religion became sterile, in fact.  It produced nothing.  It just simply served a smaller, and smaller, and smaller group of people.  Consequently, it became inbred.  It became entrenched in its own conservatism.  And Jesus would have none of it.

For in truth, you and I know Jesus the Christ, the Son of God came, not to live, and suffer, and die for a tradition.  He did not come to live, and suffer, and die for a little sect or a small group of people.  He was one who came to live, and to die, and to be raised again for the masses, for all of humanity, including the poor, and the pagan, and the bulk of the population.  Do you begin to see why Jesus and the Pharisees had this thing going on?

Well… If Jesus was not particularly pleased with the Pharisees, he certainly wasn’t any happier with the Publicans.  They were essentially the scum of Hebrew society.  They were the tax collectors.  This means a different thing back then than it does in our time.  They were like the drug dealers and the slumlords of Israel.  They literally paid a stipulated sum to their Roman overlords in advance, so they would have the rights and the privileges of their little territory where why collected taxes from their own people.

Of course, these were not taxes used as they should have been.  This was money that went straight to Rome.  It was money paid as a tribute to a foreign overlord.  It did absolutely nothing to help with the care and maintenance of the people.  It didn’t do anything for the betterment of public life.  It did nothing to promote social order or the common good.

Tax collectors, in the biblical sense, were a despised and hated lot in Jesus’ day.  Tax collectors and robbers were named in the same breath.  They were lumped together with sinners, and prostitutes, and anybody else who flaunted and offended common morality.  Indeed, in the New Testament, if a follower of Jesus – if a disciple of Jesus in a community of faith – misbehaved and refused to listen to the correction of their own church, Matthew says, “Treat that person like a tax collector.”  Isn’t that interesting?  Shun, ostracize, throw out, turn your back completely on such a person.

Now, as you know, Jesus didn’t wall himself off from these Publicans.  Indeed, Scripture tells us he ate, and he drank, and he socialized with them.  But be very clear about this.  Being with, relating to, did not mean he tolerated, condoned, affirmed their activities.  On the contrary, Jesus loved them and had compassion for them, but the reason for that was in hopes of leading them in a new direction, a better direction, a path, a way of life that was better.

People who behaved immorally were expected to respond to his love and to his guidance by turning from the way that is not right and is not working, and to turn toward what is good, and what is right, and what is loving.  Evidently Jesus had some success, according to the New Testament. 

A guy named Matthew, who is also a Levi, gave up being a tax collector and became a disciple.  In fact, the Gospel attributed to Matthew is one we are going to be studying for a whole year next year.

Zacchaeus, the chief tax collector of Jerusalem, met Jesus, and his life was turned around, changed, transformed.  He ended up giving back four times what he had taken and swindled out of other people.  Half of his capital went to charity.  What a turnaround!

So, here we have two characters: one a Pharisee, one a Publican.  They are in our text today.  There may be something of each of them in all of us.  But the bottom line, and this is what I want you to hear, this is not so much a story about them as it is a story about our God.  He is a God who just loves to forgive sinners, who loves to help us make right things we just have a way of messing up.

Perhaps this will help us connect with this teaching of Jesus.  My guess is there are not too many people in this room who are saying, “Yeah, I’m just like that Pharisee, or I’m just like that Publican.”  There are not many of us in this room who think that way.  What if the parable were written something like this?

Two parents went to church to pray.  One parent stood before God and said, “God, I thank you that I’m not like other parents.  I’m thankful I’m not like that couple who abandoned their children in Connecticut or that parent who drowned her kids in a car in a lake in South Carolina a few years ago.  I’m thankful I’m not like those parents who turn their undomesticated children loose and let them run wild in public places.  I thank you that I have researched, I have planned, and I have sacrificed to place my children in the best developmentally appropriate child program known to humans.  I have sent them to the best schools.  I have enabled them to participate in soccer camps, computer camps, church camps, pastor’s class, Sunday School, and youth groups.  I have given them music lessons with Mike.  I have sent them to New York City with Terry.  I have sent them to work camp with Chuck and Belinda.”  It goes on and on.

But there is another parent in the sanctuary, back in the back.  They pray this prayer with bowed head.  “God, be merciful to me, a lousy parent.  The truth is my marriage is a wreck.  I work all the time so I just don’t have to spend much time at home.  I leave the house before they get up.  I come home after they go to bed.  We’re strangers in the same house.  We don’t know each other.  We don’t talk.  I don’t tell them how I feel.  They don’t tell me how they feel, and I’m afraid, Lord.  I’m afraid it may just be too late to make a new start.  Forgive me, God, for making such a mess of things, for being such a lousy parent to my kids.”

Two parents go to church.  They pray, and they listen to Jesus tell a story.  And one of them who saw himself or herself as always getting it right, whose children are the envy of everybody in the community with good manners, good choices, good grades, got nothing out of the service that day.  After all, what can God do for the perfect parent?

But on the other hand, for the parent who saw himself or herself as having made a pretty good mess out of things, who had trouble communicating with the kids, who didn’t know how to discipline them properly, and who made wrong decisions developmentally, he or she thought it was the best worship service ever experienced.  There was a story told that day about a Savior who forgives sins and makes right people who are getting it wrong.  They knew that Jesus was talking about them.  They were the ones who went home that day empowered to begin making right what they had messed up.

“For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and everyone who humbles himself will be exalted.”

And we all say together… “Amen.”

Benediction

Exalted One, we lift our prayers to you asking for your tender mercies.  We humble ourselves in awe of your forgiveness and your ability to work wonder and change into our sinful natures.  Thank you for your grace.  Amen.