Luke 18:9-14
9 To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: 10 “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’
13 “But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’
14 “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” (TNIV)
“From Ashes to Sunlight: The Phoenix Affirmations” Sermon Series, Week Two
One of my favorite television shows ever is The West Wing, which depicts a fictional US federal government with Martin Sheen playing the President, and if you want to know why it appealed to me, that was why—Martin Sheen as my President! It’d be like…Mother Teresa being my pastor, it just sounds amazing! And the President’s Communications Director, Toby Ziegler, is Jewish, and in an episode he’s recounting a story told to him by his grandfather. During the Holocaust, in the concentration camps, his grandfather comes across a fellow Jewish prisoner who is falling down to the ground and thanking God over and over, and he says to that man, “What on earth do you have to be thankful for?” To which the man points to the Nazi guards and replies, “I’m thanking God that He didn’t make me like them.”
These are almost the exact same words that the proud, pompous Pharisee says to God in today’s Scripture—thank you, God, for not making me like him, like that lowly tax collector right over there. But…to your ears, doesn’t one sound a little more like authentic worship, like true worship of God, than the other? The issue that Jesus is tackling here is self-righteousness, but oh, does authenticity also have lots to do with how many people think Christians are today!
And so begins the second week of our sermon series together, “From Ashes to Sunlight: The Phoenix Affirmations.” This series is based on a book written by a United Church of Christ pastor, Rev. Eric Elnes, who has pastored a very successful church in Scottsdale, Arizona, where they have made amazing use of a diverse array of tools and talents available to them in doing ministry. Eric then wrote this short book called The Phoenix Affirmations, after the town in which it was composed, but also because the image of the phoenix, being reborn out of the ashes, is a hope he has for the vital congregations of mainline American Christianity. Last week, we talked about the importance of Scripture—all of Scripture—in our spirituality as Disciples of Christ. And the affirmation that we will be exploring as our theme for today’s message is, “Expressing love in worship that is sincere, vibrant, artful, and scriptural.”
In that spirit, what, if anything at all, is salvageable from the Pharisee’s stark display of hypocrisy? How can we humble ourselves in worship like the tax collector but do so in public so that we may be with one another in fellowship rather than being off in the corner in solitude? The wording of this final verse is crucial—all who humble themselves will be exalted. Worship is not merely to praise God, it is also to humble ourselves. And I have to tell you, in this day and age, the thought of a church that actually would try to humble itself, to admit its need for mercy, to admit that it does not have all the answers, that thought would run so contrary to the image that many, many people have, especially here in the Pacific Northwest, have of the church.
But the traditional ways and rituals that churchgoers have sought to humble themselves before God seem to have fallen by the wayside—in newer churches, gone are the collective prayers of repentance and calls to worship, replaced instead by movie-theater style seats and messages that tell you that God doesn’t need your good work and compassion, instead, God wants to make you rich if only you put just a little more in the offering bucket! Now, I’m a twentysomething whippersnapper, so I’m fine with the whole out-with-the-old, in-with-the-new sentiment, but not when the “new” that is being brought in is this! I don’t think that Jesus came to earth so that His followers could sit passively in cushy chairs and hear motivational speeches rather than actual sermons. In so many churches these days, bland platitudes about prosperity and good table manners now pass for sacred truth. Jeffrey MacDonald, a United Church of Christ pastor on the East Coast, tells about the story of a church he served about ten years ago when his pastoral advisory team came to him and asked him to keep his sermons to no more than ten minutes long, to tell funny stories, and to have everyone leave feeling great about themselves. That’s not worship—that’s half an episode of the very funny sitcom How I Met Your Mother.
So we know, deep down, that we shouldn’t come to worship expecting to be entertained, but on the other hand, I know that my obligation as your preacher is to be able to engage you, to hold your attention for however long I have asked for your time. I may stumble upon truth, but if I cannot communicate with you what I believe, then we all might as well be back in the high school English class taught by Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. And the same is true for us of anyone we meet in the world after church—if we cannot communicate truth with one another during worship, how can we expect to talk about the church to others after worship?
A worship that offers us the chance to be humble may teach us how. In his book, Eric Elnes talks about how worship and its rituals make God accessible—and if God becomes more accessible to us, we can more easily communicate God to one another. Worship helps us accept that we can never see the entirety of God in all of His infinite love and grace and compassion. And here’s the kicker—it is often easier to do in a community than individually. The European anthropologist Emile Durkheim had a big name for it, he called it collective effervescence, but what he refers to is the tendency for a religious experience of one person to affect the religious experience of the person next them…put a different way, experiencing God is contagious!
Across the world, that singular truth can be seen—that experiencing God is contagious. Almost every religious sect has some sort of communal worship. And while it is remarkable that America, with its long history of individualism and personal freedom, has maintained a rich history of communal worship for as long as it has, that history too, is falling by the wayside as people begin to refer to themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” And in doing so, we are combining the worst of both worlds from the Pharisee and the tax collector—not only are we giving ourselves great importance in worship by talking about how God wants to make us wealthy and to succeed and hold power and authority just like the Pharisee, but in the world outside of the church, if we do not have a faith community then we become as alone as the tax collector, whose message is right on the button, but the Pharisee who needs to hear the tax collector’s message never does! In this parable, the Pharisee never hears the right message that is being offered just a short distance away. The Pharisee’s sin of self-righteousness has been compounded by his reliance upon himself for worship, rather than allowing himself to open up and actually be vulnerable to what the other people in the temple with him have to say.
And so may our worship together on all Sundays transcend that privatization of faith that is taking place, as people tuck away their own spirituality away from others who could support them, accompany them, and challenge them in their quest to experience God. May our worship speak the tax collector’s message in a way so that the Pharisee might hear it, and hear it in a wide array of languages, in the language of praise music and of prayer, of Scripture and of interpretation, and in doing so, may we reassure the doubters and the cynics who believe we echo the Pharisees in pointing to the rest of the world in saying, “Thank you, Lord, for not making me like them!” No…thank you, Lord, for making me like all of your children, for making me painfully, wonderfully, imperfectly, amazingly human, so that I can worship you right alongside them. And with that gratitude, may we be a place of prayer, a center for worship that is sacred, and vibrant, and filled with life and vitality where people can arrive and say, “I have seen God here! Surrounded by my brothers and sisters, I have seen God here!” By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
October 9, 2011
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