Sermon - The Rev. Dr. Paul Kolbet - October 23rd, 2022

Hello St. Paul’s! I’m Paul Kolbet, your Interim Rector. I’m honored to accompany you in the next chapter of the life of St. Paul’s. No matter what you may hear from others, don’t think of this time as one of merely standing by or treading water. Think of it instead as a special time of spiritual creativity and renewal that does not come around too often. With the help of Jesus, we’ll do great things together!

 So let’s begin with the meditation of scripture otherwise known as a sermon that I owe you this morning. Jesus tells a story of two men who go up to the Jerusalem temple to pray. One everyone thinks is a good man and the other everyone knows is a bad man. The good man was a Pharisee, meaning that he was lay person who voluntarily worked hard to observe the whole Jewish law, or in our words, to always do the right thing. He was not a priest. He was not professionally religious at all. He was never paid for any of his good deeds. He was an impressive man in every way. According to Jesus he prayed, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector [over there]. I fast twice a week [far more often than the law requires]; I give a tenth of all my income [away, more than is specifically required by the law].”

The bad man, as the Pharisee recognized, was a tax collector. The Gospels pick on tax collectors because they were very different than how they are in our American system. Tax collectors in Jesus’ time were really the worst kind of people for a lot of reasons. For one, they were traitors to their own people because they chose to work for the occupying power that had conquered their country. The Romans made subjugated peoples pay for the cost for their own occupation and needed locals to help them identify where the wealth was. The real business of these tax collectors was extortion because the Romans let them keep whatever they collected above and beyond the legally mandated assessment. As people handed over land they had had for generations because they couldn’t pay the taxes, they hated the tax collectors. Jesus’ tax collector evidently possessed no good qualities to be grateful for. He went to the temple and prayed, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” That is all.

To everyone’s surprise and outrage, Jesus asserted that it was the horrible tax collector whose prayer was heard that day. That bad man was heard and justified in a way that the good man, the Pharisee, was not. Clearly Jesus meant this story to be offensive. And it is! What is important this morning is that we understand what he meant so that we are offended in the way he intended us to be offended. Or, in other words, we need to ensure that the surgeon’s knife hits the right spot if we are to be cured of what Jesus believes afflicts us. Jesus didn’t intend this story to condone any of the evils the tax collector engaged in, certainly not the dishonesty or daily betrayals. He also in no way sought to diminish the Pharisee’s good deeds. After all, Jesus himself did many of the things the Pharisee was so proud of and Jesus encouraged others to do the same. Jesus fasted, his disciples fasted, Jesus gave away what he had, his disciples gave away what they had. Outwardly Jesus and his disciples were not that different from that Pharisee. They looked the same. Jesus’ life and message were more profound than simply classifying people as good and bad. Jesus’ point instead is a subtle one that pushes past outward appearance; it is a deep one that gets underneath our moral judgments.

So what is really wrong about Jesus’ Pharisee? Notice that he was no hypocrite. He really was who he said he was. His credentials were real. His various excellences were… well excellent. His prayers expressed his gratitude that he was “not like other people.” Unlike the tax collector, he would never steal from anyone, but after each moral victory how could he not congratulate himself for not doing wrong and inevitably judge others for falling short of his high standards? How could he not spend his life admiring the distance between himself and other people? While admiring that distance between himself and others, how would it be possible for him to connect to other people as if they shared anything at all? His own value, worth, and righteousness depended on his ability to maintain that distance between himself and other people. He was not like other men, but at what a high cost? To become who he became required cutting himself off from the vast majority of human beings who were not like him.

It doesn’t seem to me that one even has to be religious to live like this well-intentioned Pharisee. In assessing our own worth, we are constantly asked to state what skills and talents we have that other people do not have. Think about every job interview anywhere. In a competitive economy, one way to get ahead is to constantly put forward what you have accomplished that other people have not. To justify yourself by explaining how you asserted yourself when others held back, how you grabbed what they did not grab, how you became what they could never be. In this way, we are pushed into a world of division. What is valued and carefully cultivated is what separates us from one another. This living in division costs us the deep connections to others that are so meaningful to human beings. It is like finding the meaning of life in breathing air that other people don’t breathe. It isn’t normal, but somehow it has become so.

There are well-attested prayers that likely go back to Jesus’ day where individual men would express their gratitude for not being born a woman, or a gentile, or a Barbarian, or a slave. Jesus’ story seems to be an outright attack on the mentality and spirituality informing all such prayers. He says, “all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” But it is hard to imagine human worth not being determined by competition over scarce goods and talents. How do we imagine a world that no longer admires the distance between individuals, that does not feel the need to divide people into categories, but instead values the connection and inclusion of all?

This is where Jesus’ horrible tax collector comes in. What Jesus underscores here is that the tax collector’s prayer was not one that separated him from anyone. It made absolutely no mention of any of his unusual abilities (although surely he had some, that is why the Romans picked him). Instead his prayer joined him to the whole human race as one sinner among others. It was a prayer that united him to the long tragic story of the children of Adam. Jesus in no way understates the severity of the tax collector’s crimes, but uses this dreadful character to show us a way forward. Instead of condoning sin, Jesus uses the shared experience of sin to redeem us, to connect us to God, and to one another. The moral, social, and spiritual failures of the human race are indeed appalling in every century. Who would not want to raise oneself as an individual above it all like that ideal Pharisee? But Jesus himself descended to the very depths of the human experience. Though he was without sin, he took the sins of the world upon himself. Like his tax collector, he joined the whole human race. He never admired the distance between himself and other people, but constantly bridged it. He didn’t live in division and found life breathing the same air as everyone else. Jesus distinguished himself by how passionately he shared in the common plight of all. 

This was a truth Jesus knew well was in his own Bible, including from our reading from the prophet Jeremiah. Listen to the righteous prophet’s language where the most conspicuous words in the passage are “we, ours, and us.” He pleads, “Although our iniquities testify against us, act, O Lord, for your name’s sake… we have sinned against you… Yet you, O Lord, are in the midst of us, and we are called by your name; do not forsake us! ….Do not spurn us, for your name’s sake.” The long and profoundly moving book of Jeremiah, shows in chapter after chapter how experiences of God don’t elevate us above other people or set us apart from them. On the contrary, genuine experiences of God’s Spirit enable us to connect with what God is doing outside ourselves and in other people.

The isolated Pharisee of Jesus’ parable, for all his virtues and excellence, looked at the Tax collector and only saw a man that he had nothing in common with, a man he judged to have had nothing to do with God. The tax collector, on the other hand, in his sin had found what he had in common with everyone and became free to venture out of himself into a world filled with God’s Spirit. The time and effort it takes to experience the world as a Christian is not in order to not be like other people, but to join them on the most fundamental level, and overcome internally the divisions that afflict us externally. Jesus used the image of the sinful praying tax collector to direct us to find God in what unites us to other people­–even if that is the experience of sin itself–rather than in our distinctive qualities that set us apart from them. Like the rain that falls on all (Matt. 5:45), the Spirit of love is no one’s possession. It is not scarce. Unlike so many other things, it doesn’t become less by being given away. It doesn’t become less by being shared with others. In fact, the sharing makes it more for all. The sins of Jesus’ tax collector are not too powerful for God’s Spirit to overcome. He takes his place with you and me and everyone else.

May the God who rains grace upon the just and the unjust and upon more kinds of people than we can imagine, fill our hearts with Christ’s love to such a great extent that we don’t need to cling to what sets us apart, but by the power of the Holy Spirit discover ever anew the deep connections we share with one another. Amen.