Jesus told this parable to certain people who had convinced themselves that they were righteous and who looked on everyone else with disgust: 10 “Two people went up to the temple to pray. One was a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee stood and prayed about himself with these words, ‘God, I thank you that I’m not like everyone else—crooks, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week. I give a tenth of everything I receive.’ 13 But the tax collector stood at a distance. He wouldn’t even lift his eyes to look toward heaven. Rather, he struck his chest and said, ‘God, show mercy to me, a sinner.’ 14 I tell you, this person went down to his home justified rather than the Pharisee. All who lift themselves up will be brought low, and those who make themselves low will be lifted up.” (Common English Bible)
“A Mount Rushmore of the
Soul: Who Inspires Your Faith?” Week Four
Seeing
freedom be granted to people who should never have had it taken away from them
was a formative experience of my childhood.
Being able to meet them, shake their hands, and break bread with them as
free people after they were exonerated for crimes they were convicted of but
did not in fact commit is something I’ll never forget. Their names, strong and sturdy souls like
Dennis Fritz, Ellen Reasonover, and the late Ron Williamson, will be forever
with me.
Through
them, and their stories, I learned of others, of other people whose unjust
imprisonments completely and utterly changed their lives—and how could they
not? Six of their stories—each of them
from death row, from being sentenced to death despite being factually innocent,
were made into a play about fifteen years ago by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen
called The Exonerated.
The
integral figure of the play—the character who combines together every other
character—is a soulful, philosophical veteran and minister named Delbert
Tibbs. He both opens and closes the play
with a similar monologue, saying at first, about prison:
This is not the place for
thought that does not end in concreteness; it is not easy to be open or too
curious.
It is dangerous to dwell
too much on things: to wonder who or why or when, to wonder how, is dangerous.
How do we, the people,
get outta this hole…it is not easy to be a poet here. Yet I sing.
I sing.
By
the end of the play, by the end of hearing all of these stories, Delbert’s
refrain has become this:
This is the place for
thoughts that do not end in concreteness. It is necessary to be curious.
And dangerous to dwell
here, to wonder why and how and when is dangerous, but *that’s* how we get out
of this hole.
It is not easy to be a
poet here. Yet I sing. We sing.
Do
you see the change? He sings, but no
longer sings alone. Yet I sing. We sing.
Together.
This
is a new sermon series for a new year, although it is in fact wrapping up today
in preparation for the transition from post-Epiphany time to the church season
of Lent. And even though the series is
being delivered in 2016, the genesis of this series came in the middle of 2015,
when I posted on Facebook to ask folks what the Mount Rushmore of their faith
would be—which four writers, pastors, theologians, etc. are the ones who have
shaped their faith the most?
Once
my (genuinely beloved) atheist friends had had their fun, I got an amazing
array of responses to that question, with some names that were repeated several
times: C.S. Lewis, Paul Tillich, Hildegard of Bingen, and Martin Luther King,
Jr., all of whom would have made a great reserve squad if, you know, Mount
Rushmore had a bench (I suspect that would have added a number of years to its
construction). But when I limited myself
to four, the four that I eventually settled upon were St. Teresa of Avila,
Soren Kierkegaard, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Nelson Mandela.
This
sermon series, then, will take each of them and offer one sermon each on how
they revealed God’s presence, truth, and love to a broken world in sore need of
the message they had to offer, beginning three weeks ago with St. Teresa of
Avila and continuing with both Soren Kierkegaard and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And today, we are concluding the series with
an appropriately soul-sized, monumentally willed person in Nelson Mandela.
More
so than perhaps any of the previous three, Mandela’s inclusion is personal to
me. The three weeks I spent in
sub-Saharan Africa in the summer of 2006 with Global Ministries, our
international mission arm, was one of the most formative experiences of my
twenties, and it was spent primarily in South Africa, where Mandela was
famously imprisoned for 27 years, released, elected prime minister, and served
as a visible, living beacon of the possible for unity and restoration before
his death a little over two years ago, in December 2013.
For
me to have been imprisoned for twenty-seven years, I would have had to be sent
to the pokey when I was just three. And
while I was undoubtedly a holy terror at age three, they don’t hand out 25+
year sentences for that. But that’s what
Mandela endured in becoming the marbled memory of a man he is now. He collected his letters and conversations
from his time on Robben Island, and compiled them into a book entitled Conversations With Myself. This is the very first entry, the one that
frames all the others, from that book:
The cell is an ideal
place to learn to know yourself, to search realistically and regularly the
process of your own mind and feelings.
In judging our progress as individuals we tend to concentrate on
external factors such as one’s social position, influence, popularity, wealth,
and standard of education. These are, of
course, important in measuring one’s success in material matters and it is
perfectly understandable if many people exert themselves mainly to achieve all
these. But internal factors may be even
more crucial in assessing one’s development as a human being. Honesty, sincerity, simplicity, humility,
pure generosity, absence of vanity, readiness to serve others—qualities which
are within easy reach of every soul—are the foundation of one’s spiritual
life. Development in matters of this
nature is inconceivable without serious introspection, without knowing
yourself, your weaknesses and mistakes…If for nothing else, the cell gives you
the opportunity to look daily into your entire conduct, to overcome the bad and
develop whatever is good in you…You may find it difficult at first to pinpoint the
negative features in your life, but the 10th attempt may yield rich
rewards. Never forget that a saint is a
sinner who keeps on trying.
Never
forget that a saint is a sinner who keeps on trying. Mandela was a Methodist, but there is a
another version (as it were) of this notion in Lutheran thought, simul justus et peccator, which means “simultaneously
saint and sinner,” that someone can be both saint and sinner at the same time,
that we are not necessarily just one or just the other. Rather, Mandela says, through our efforts to
do good and to better ourselves, to develop the spiritual virtues he lists off
here—honesty, sincerity, simplicity, humility, pure generosity, absence of
vanity, readiness to serve—we come closer and closer to sanctification even as
we still remain our sinful selves.
Think,
then, of this tax collector, hiding in the corner of the temple and
flagellating himself out of pure, unadulterated shame over who he is and how he
makes his living (the tax collectors in New Testament Israel were not simply
the ancient version of the IRS—no matter how much you resent paying taxes. They were Roman-sanctioned thugs who extorted
from their neighbors at a profit).
This
tax collector has his eyes cast downward and is begging God, pleading with God,
please have mercy on me, for I am a sinner.
He is a prisoner of his own self, judging his progress as a person.
Of
course, he judges himself wanting. But
this is in stark contrast to the other sinner present, the Pharisee standing in
the very middle of the sanctuary, who cannot possibly see himself as a sinner
in the way that the tax collector sees himself—or as he, the Pharisee, sees the
tax collector, making sure to point him out in the “prayer” to God he gives
thanking God for making him just so durned great.
In
truth, the Pharisee could do with more than a bit of the sort of inner
introspection that prisoners go through—the tax collector, as I said, as a
prisoner of his own psyche, but also physical prisoners like Delbert Tibbs,
like Nelson Mandela. We lose part of our
freedom, even our mental freedom, and it puts so many other things in
perspective.
That
was what made the vestiges of apartheid in South Africa so viscerally
disturbing for me to see and begin to grasp, even for just a small dimension of
it. The taking of that freedom from
another human being is something so sinful that there is no other way to make a
saint of a slaver, their enslavement of fellow people is on face disqualifying
for sanctification. The enslaved, the
wrongly imprisoned, the segregated, they lose their freedom and potentially
their lives. The slavers, the
imprisoners, the segregationists, they lose their spiritual purity.
We
all lose something. We all become less
than whole when we treat others thus.
Maybe
you know it, because of how you have treated someone thusly, or had someone or
even the world treat you thusly. In the
face of such hurtful treatment, how will you decide to develop yourself as a
person and as a Christian?
Seek,
then, the metamorphosis of a Mandela, of a Tibbs, of a person who has been to
the dark side and back, not because they deserved it, but because they did not
deserve it, yet emerged as people still able to inspire others to hear their
words and be moved by the fruits of their lives.
Perhaps
more than anything else, this is what I have striven to do with this sermon
series: to show you how the fruits of the lives of four very different people
all impacted me for the better.
I
hope and pray the same for you, that there are saints—or simultaneous saints
and sinners—who have been called and redeemed and are calling out, singing out, other sinners
just like you, just like me, to something far greater than ourselves: a life of
service to the One we call God, who came to earth, died, and resurrected in who
we know as Jesus the Christ.
Because you sing. We sing.
May
it be so. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
Longview, Washington
January
31, 2016
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