Month: October 2022

Be like that Pharisee?

Notes for a sermon on Luke 18:9-14 at Holy Trinity, Strathcona, Oct. 23, 2022

Many interpretations of today’s Gospel reading end up saying, “Thank God we’re (I’m) not like that Pharisee,” portraying the Pharisee as the “bad guy.”

Don’t be like that Pharisee? I would suggest that there is much about him for us to emulate. He is almost a paragon of faithfulness. The things he points to go far beyond what the Torah (the written Law) requires.

We tend to see the Pharisees in the negative because of the bad press about them in the Gospels, but they were held in high esteem by many of their contemporaries. They appeared as a movement around the time of the Roman occupation of Judea, almost a century before Jesus. They were a religious resistance movement, dedicated to keeping themselves separate from the Romans by keeping the Law in its fullness, keeping covenant with God to remain in God’s favor, observing both the written Law (the Torah), and what is often called the oral law (Halakah). One of its principles was “building a fence around Torah,” which means doing things to ensure you will never violate the written Law. For instance, the third commandment forbids taking the name of God in vain. How do you know if you have used God’s name in vain? The easiest way to avoid doing that is never to utter the name of God, the norm among Jews to this day.

The Torah has laws about fasting and tithing, the two practices the Pharisee in our lesson points to in his prayer. Fasting and tithing more than the letter of the Law requires ensures that you don’t miss your legal obligations. He is striving actively for the purity to which all faithful Jews were to aspire. He appears to be an admirable and pious person, worthy of emulation.

I have no hesitation in saying, “Be like that Pharisee.”

Then there’s the tax collector. While most citizens of Judea detested the Romans, and the Pharisees and most other Jewish sub-groups had their own ideas about how to shed the invader’s yoke, some actively collaborated, including tax collectors. Operating under contract, they collected the taxes levied by the Romans, allowed to add something for themselves. Laborers do deserve their wages, but it seems that many used their position to line their pockets. Out of greed, they were both actively working for the oppressor and oppressing the people in their own way. Their practices may not be expressly banned in the Torah, but they were certainly regarded in the same light as sinners. They weren’t necessarily ritually impure, but they lived on the edge of the community, unwelcome in most places.

I have no hesitation in saying, “Don’t be like that tax-collector.”

If Jesus had told the story up to the content of the two men’s prayers, and then asked which of them went home justified, most of his hearers would have replied “The Pharisee,” the seemingly obvious answer.

However, Jesus did not ask a question, instead making a pronouncement which stood the standard view right on its head. Which of these two went home justified? Not the well-intentioned and pious Pharisee, but the sinful tax collector. The likely response from the listeners was likely “What?!” The response from many of us today would likely be the same.

Why does Jesus upend his audience’s perception of the story? The second half of the pronouncement is “…all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted”, reflecting one of the major themes of Luke’s Gospel, reversal of fortunes, seen very clearly in Mary’s song in 1:52-53:

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
   and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
   and sent the rich away empty.

Reversal of fortune challenges our comfort with the way things are and contrasts it with God’s desire for the world. If we are seeking like the Pharisees to fulfill God’s desire for the world, we need look no farther than Micah 6:8:

He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
   and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
   and to walk humbly with your God?

The Pharisee’s prayer is all about himself and his acts. Do we hear justice in his word? Kindness? Hard to find. And humility? I think not. The prayer is more a pride-filled boast about the pious life he has achieved, mostly without ascribing it to God. He sets himself above others, using the tax-collector as a handy target.

The other man is “standing far off,” perhaps meaning just inside the door to the Court of the Israelites, where Jewish men went to pray. (Not women, who had their own court, separate from the men.) He is on the edge of the inside. Where he gets it right is in acknowledging his sin and casting himself totally on God’s mercy. His prayer is about what God can do, and which the supplicant hopes will happen. Will he leave his work and make restitution in the community? We aren’t told. What we can see is that he has placed himself in God’s hands in a way that the other has not.

If we hold up his prayer against Micah’s words, I believe we can see self-understanding of his lack of justice and kindness, and true humility before God. Humility does not mean to count ourselves as worthless. It means being honest about ourselves—our gifts, achievements, and failures—before others and before God, without exalting ourselves in any way.

There’s no sin in being pious like the Pharisee. But let us seek to understand that our piety is not of our own doing, but rather a Spirit-led response to the God who is already at work in our lives.

Friends, let us seek to be like the Pharisee, living faithful and pious lives, striving to do what God needs done in this world. But let us do so as we seek to be like the tax-collector, presenting ourselves humbly before God and others, seeking to be as God has called us to be.

May we know who we are before God, giving humble thanks for what God has already done in us, seeking to amend our ways where needed, and praying for the grace to put God’s gifts to work for all of God’s people.

Amen.

Surfacing – with thanks!

Late in his life, the great composer Ludwig van Beethoven poured his soul into a work for string quartet, the third movement of Op. 132 in A Minor. He subtitled it “Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an der Gottheit, in der Lydischen Tonart” (“Holy song of thanksgiving of a convalescent to the Deity, in the Lydian mode”). I was privileged to hear a riveting performance of the whole quartet recently, which helped the Isidore String Quartet win the first-place prize at the Banff International String Quartet Competition (aka “BISQC“). If you have 15 minutes available, give it a listen here.

When I heard this performance, I was recovering from an ailment that had troubled me since mid-June. Most of the summer had been lost, while I sat and stared at the walls, without the energy to do much of anything except pant for breath after walking from the living room to the kitchen. The doctors were puzzled, running all sorts of tests, all normal, but finally one came up with a symptomatic remedy, which I was still on when we went to Banff. I was doing much better by then, but it took until mid-September for me to feel almost myself again.

During these long months of the COVID-19 pandemic, I have heard many people lament the virus and its effects, especially from those suffering with “Long COVID.” Fortunately, my wife and I have both escaped it to date. When I first got sick in June, I tested for the virus five times in ten days, and all were negative. While I did not have the “virus of the day”, I was experiencing ill-health in a way I had never done before.

For much of my earlier life, I saw myself as a healthy person. I have had only one in-patient operation, a tonsillectomy when I was five, which was the only time I have ever been hospitalized. I have never broken a bone that I know of for sure. (I might have broken a toe some years ago, but I was able to get around well enough that visiting the doctor seemed pointless.) In 26 years in parish ministry, I never once missed a Sunday due to illness. Prior to about three years ago, I had experienced only one blip in my health, during my second year of my theological studies, when I was diagnosed with a mild case of lupus. Regular medication, reasonable precautions, and some modification of my life-style kept the disease at bay, until 25 years after diagnosis, when I was declared disease-free. Hallelujah!

I retired a few years later in good health, with a lot of energy which I proceeded to pour into various activities. All was good until I started to have severe pain in one hip, which was determined to be osteoarthritis. This is almost certainly traceable to when I fell while skiing at the age of 16, and tore up my knee. Some years later, a physiotherapist noted that I walked crookedly, turning my left foot out. It appears that the old injury had never properly healed, so I had been twisting my hip and knee for decades. Result? A knee which occasionally hurts, and a hip which hurts most of the time. I have had to learn new physical habits, which have helped the condition become more or less manageable, although a hip replacement was a possibility in the early times after my diagnosis.

A hip replacement is very probably off the table now, because of the next diagnosis, which I received last February. It was found that I had prostate cancer which had already spread to various bones, including the femur just below the arthritic hip. I doubt very much that I would be seen as a candidate for a hip replacement, when the bones around the joint are not in good shape.

In the meantime, I am dealing with the cancer diagnosis. It was devastating at first. A horizon had appeared in my life in a way that I had never before experienced. The doctors gave various predictions of time-lines, but all of them had an end-point. They said that this condition is not curable, but it is controllable. Because of the bone involvement, I was not a candidate for surgery, so I am on Androgen Deprivation Therapy (aka “Hormone Therapy”). All appearances seven months later are that this is having the desired effect, but I will be on the medication for the rest of my life, or until it ceases having effect.

I had not previously been very public about this, because I was really unsure about how things were going to go. Things now seem more predictable and manageable. I’m not looking for sympathy or an outpouring of prayer intentions, but if that’s your inclination, so be it.

The effect on my life has been to spur me to get some things done that had been left lying for years. People often call this “putting your affairs in order.” The realization of the need was made very real to us right around the time of my initial diagnosis, when our son-in-law died suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of 54, leaving no will.

Aside from some rather intimate matters (Permit me not to overshare!), the main physical effect of the cancer and the treatment has been a general reduction in my energy. I have found it necessary to back away from some activities, especially some that take place in the evening. I was just getting used to this new normal when the other thing happened in June, and I was knocked flat on my backside for the next two months. You might understand if I describe my state of mind in most of this time as depression and anxiety. I would sit down to a meal, often not feeling much like eating, and try to give thanks, when I really could not see much to give thanks for.

The last few weeks have given me new hope, new energy, and a new resolve to live my life to the fullest as I am able in the months and years ahead, however many they may be. I was invited to preach at another parish on October 9, the weekend of the Canadian holiday of Thanksgiving, and prepared for it by pondering Paul’s exhortation in Philippians 4:6 to “…not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.”

The message? Even when things seem awful, there is still much for which to give thanks, which should underpin the whole of our approach to God. As the medieval mystic and theologian Meister Eckhart said “If the only prayer you say in your life is ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.”

I listen to Beethoven’s wonderful music, and I am reminded that the call to give thanks becomes very profound when one has faced one’s destiny. I wasn’t anywhere close to dying last summer, but there were times when I wondered if I would ever recover. But now…

I am surfacing. I feel well. I am enjoying life more.

Thanks be to God!