Two Sinners Walk into a Temple

10-23-16 (Proper 25/Ordinary 30 Year C Semi-Continuous)

Joel 2:23-32; Luke 18:9-14

Two Sinners Walk Into A Temple

Two sinners walk into a temple.  It sounds like the start of a joke, but it’s actually the start of the next of Jesus’ parables that Luke introduces in his gospel.  Except - if you listen to the story the way the characters tell it, it only seems like one sinner walks into the temple, even though there are two men introduced.

We peek in first at the Pharisee - it’s pretty clear that he’s full of himself, if nothing else.  And yet his resumé is pretty impressive, nevertheless - if we’re being completely honest here, at least at the surface level, he’s the kind of church member we all wish we had at least 50 or 60 of: he tithes 10% of his income to help the temple meet its yearly needs; he fasts twice a week and engages in good spiritual practices.  Bring him into the church today and I’m sure he’d be the first one rushing to the nominating committee telling them he wants to be an elder, the one who steps up and volunteers to coordinate the next Lord’s Acre Supper.  He’s in both the bell choir and the chancel choir and he never misses a rehearsal.  He wakes up each morning and reads his devotional, never misses a Sunday at church, and takes five to ten minutes minimum every night to reflect and pray, particularly for all the joys and concerns he wrote down from church on Sunday.

And now let’s look in on that tax collector for a minute - we realize pretty quickly that we know next to nothing about him.  He comes in to the temple to pray, but he doesn’t go in very far.  He keeps toward the back, where he won’t draw attention to himself.  His head hangs down, almost as if it’s bowed down under a heavy burden.  He seems almost afraid to even lift his eyes up in his prayer.  And as he starts to pray, you can see the pain written on his face.  His hands bunch into fists and he beats his breast, wringing his shirt almost as if to tear his own heart out as he bares his soul to God.  And in that moment of pure vulnerability, his prayer is made known: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”  He doesn’t say what his sins are - he’s a tax collector, so Jesus’ audience knew full well the kind of sins they could have expected him to confess.  After all, the only thing worse than a tax collector in the minds of Jesus’ audience would have been a Samaritan.  But without knowing the man’s sins, we know the more important thing: that he is, in fact, a sinner.

Two sinners walk into a temple.  They both pray earnestly and with conviction.  They both even offer their prayers to God.  One prays a prayer of thanksgiving, the other a prayer of confession.  And both pray with the kind of language that is not only familiar to them and to us, but is expressed even in the words of the Psalms.  Though we’ve painted him with an ugly brush for centuries, the Pharisee’s prayer actually echoes similar sentiments to what we find expressed in Psalm 17, which has verses that read: “If you try my heart, if you visit me by night, if you test me, you will find no wickedness in me; my mouth does not transgress. As for what others do, by the word of your lips I have avoided the ways of the violent. My steps have held fast to your paths; my feet have not slipped.”  The tax collector, similarly, prays with the simplicity of Psalm 51: “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.”

And yet Jesus tells us in this parable that it is the tax collector who returns home justified.  Two sinners walk into a temple.  Two sinners offer up their prayers to God.  One sinner walks home justified.  But it is the other sinner, the one never even lifted up to us as a sinner in the first place, who should catch our attention the most.  Because when we listen to this parable, it’s always so tempting - too tempting, even - to automatically place ourselves in the place of the tax collector, to project ourselves onto this man and to know that because we offered up a prayer of confession during our worship service, that we heard the words of that assurance of pardon and know that we are already forgiven… surely we must be the tax collector in this parable.

And yet… what if all this time that we put ourselves in the shoes of the tax collector, it’s only been because we’ve been hiding the fact that we’re more Pharisee than we’d ever like to admit?  How many times have we caught ourselves offering a similar prayer: “Thank God I’m not like that person…”  Or how many times have we allowed ourselves a few pats on the back as we’ve mentally checked off the list of things we’ve accomplished for God this week?  How many times do we fall into the trap of thinking that it’s all about us?

You see, even though Jesus isn’t explicit about it in his telling of the parable, there’s a reason the Pharisee ends up being the one who heads home un-justified, in a manner of speaking.  It’s not so much that his prayer is terribly egregious, or that he’s somehow in the wrong for living out the expectations that his religious customs would have placed on him - it’s the fact that, in doing so, he thinks that this somehow has earned him a better standing than the other people in the temple, that he’s somehow that much more “holier-than-thou” for all his accomplishments.  And in so doing, he ends up not only neglecting to see the others around him as his neighbors, as fellow children of God worthy of his compassion and respect… he also ends up placing himself above God in his prayer.  In recounting his own good deeds, he has forgotten for whom those good deeds are done in the first place.  And in looking down his nose at the other people around him - particularly at the tax collector - he’s managed to blind himself from seeing that the tax collector is also doing what God expects from all of God’s creation.  The Pharisee doesn’t know the tax collector - he doesn’t know what the tax collector’s sins may be for which he is seeking forgiveness.  All he sees is the man and the man’s career, and for him, that’s all he needs to see, all he ever needs to know.  The man is a tax collector - and so the Pharisee has already written him off.

We find ourselves in a time and place where it feels our entire world is divisive.  We do our best to seek out groups and tribes in which we share the same values, the same ideologies, the same thoughts and ideas.  And within the safety of those groups, we give thanks that we’re not the other guys.  We blind ourselves to the other, refusing to see our neighbor unless they share the same views as us.  And yet it is a certain special kind of humility that Christ calls us to - we may be thankful that we’re in a better circumstance than the single mother struggling with the crying children, or we may look down our noses at the woman with the tattoos up and down her arms who pays for her groceries using a food stamps card.  We may shake our heads and tisk tisk at the political bumper stickers on the back of the car in front of us because they don’t represent our particular tribe, or we may roll our eyes and sigh at the sign in our neighbor’s yard.  And yet it is to these same people that Christ calls us to reach out, to remember that we are all sinners together in need of the love and grace of our savior.

Two sinners walk into the temple.  One walks out forgiven.  The other walks out convinced of his own self-worth and importance.  Which do we truly want to be?  May God give us eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts to understand together.  To God be the Glory.  Amen.