A Sermon from First Church…. 

A sermon offered by the Rev. Ian F. “Jack” Steeves in the public worship of the First Congregational Church of Scarborough, Maine on Sunday, October 28, 2007.  The principal reading was Luke 18:9-14. 
 

“Peeking While Praying” 

“Two men went up to the temple to pray,

one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector” (Luke 18:10). 
 

The Pharisee was probably singing a first-century version of “Amazing Grace” on his way to temple that day.  He was one of the religious, truly religious, men of his day.  He said his prayers several times a day with real tears in his eyes.  He truly felt all that religious stuff.  He was awash with religious emotion, truly moved to gratitude for the life God had blessed him to live.  Asked what he thought of the tax collector, he would have surely told us, “There but for the grace of God go I.”  He would have meant it. 

The parable forgets to point out that the tax collector was not an elected official but a person under contract to the Romans.  It was all a nasty business, but someone had to do it.  Tomorrow, he would again take money from his neighbors by threat or force.  He would hand over some of it to the Empire to fulfill his contractual obligations and pocket a handsome commission for his efforts. 

To see the tax collector as honorable and the Pharisee as despicable is too simplistic, too superficial.  It is far better to see the Pharisee as he probably was – a thoroughly decent, widely respected, generous, committed believer and a good temple member.  And, see the tax collector as a compromising collaborator who was not about using any means to meet his ends. 

We know which character contemporary churches depend on.  We know which one pays the bills, teaches the classes, visits the neighbors, and feeds the hungry at home and abroad.  We would love a congregation full of people with his sense of individual and corporate commitment.  They are people who care enough to pray, people who keep up their pledges, and people who thank God that they can and do.  As in Jesus’ day, it is people like the Pharisee who hold churches, synagogues and mosques together and keep the faith with diligence and even passion.  The Pharisee was a far better man than I am. 

His prayer would have been very close to some classic Christian prayer or Jewish Psalm, including “Praise be the God who did not make me a heathen... (and) who did not make me an uneducated man.”  Was the ancient Psalmist so wrong to sing, “I have avoided the ways of the violent” (Psalm 17:3)?  Why not gaze on the mystery of having been spared a certain lot or sin and give honest thanks? 

BUT!  And the little words always count; there is one word in his prayer that gives the Pharisee away.  He does not give thanks that God has spared him from being a rogue, a thief, and adulterer, or a tax collector.  He gives thanks that he is not “like them.”  “God I thank you that I am not like other people…”  The Pharisees crossed the line between gratitude and elitism, thanks and pride.  It is a very subtle stroll and we almost never notice when we ourselves cross the same line.  It shows up every time we use “us and them” language. 

“I am not like…this tax collector.”  Wrong, wrong, wrong!  The Pharisee has stopped praying and started peeking at his neighbors.  He looks about himself and measures himself against a neighbor.  He is quietly pleased with the difference.  It is the comparative glance that distorts and destroys so much of human prayer. 

Had the tax collector measured himself against the Pharisee, his prayer would have been just as false.  Rather he said, “God be merciful to me, a sinner.” 

The tax collector has kept his eyes straight ahead, no sideways glance.  He himself has not noticed the Pharisee and is standing a far off.  Jesus tells us, he “would not even look up to heaven.”  His eyes are down in his toes, and he is beating his chest with his closed fist. 

We could draw a cartoon of a contemporary pastor and congregation at prayer with little thought bubbles over their heads.  One would be saying, “Thank you that I’m not like these conservatives,” and the second, “Thank you that I’m not like these liberals, and a third weighs in, “Thank you, thank you that I am not like any of the above.”  Tell me, then, who are you like?  We have missed no one. 

Our human capacity for spiritual smugness knows no bounds.  In the churches what a race or rage is on to assure ourselves and define ourselves by who we are not like.  Could there be any better indicator that we have no ideas of who we truly are as the church?  When our eyes move away from our own hearts, there is no place left to look but at someone else, and little comfort in claiming, “Well, I am not like them.” 

“God be merciful to me a sinner,” whispers the tax collector who is not at all good, buy who is at least looking at his own broken life and offering up what’s left to God.  He is not unlike the more famous tax collector, Zacchaeus whom Jesus find sitting up a tree.  He is not unlike the woman in the temple who throws her last two pennies into the collection box in to the collection trumpets.  Like the widow’s mite, the tax collector’s prayer is poor, not given from any spiritual abundance or merit but from the very depth of his need, and it is all that he holds in his two, little hands.  And somewhere above the temple, a divine voice is cheering and divine hands are loudly clapping. 

Please, understand!  What we have here is the old gospel reversal game.  God is undoing the order of human things as they are, exalting the humble in a great surprise of mercy, filling those who’s “eye is straight,” with light enough to get home again. 

It was the late Dutch priest Henri Nouwen who offered his readers a study of prayer attitudes as symbolized in human hands.  The “person invited by God to pray is asked to open up his/her tightly clenched fists and to pray with open hands.”  Think about it!  To do so, it is necessary to let go of all that would otherwise fill them – whether it be fear, doubt, unreasonable expectation, and misconception about God or simply the inability to trust in another person.  Sometimes our hands are so filled with worries and preoccupations.  Other times they are filled with our own plans as to how things should be or our desires for the future, our own and every one else’s.  “Prayer is a way of life,” wrote Nouwen, “which allows you to find stillness in the midst of the world where you open your hands to God’s promises, and find hope for yourself, your fellow men (and women) and the whole community in which you live.” 

Next time we enter into God’s presence, let us keep our speeches short and to the point and our respective shopping lists folded neatly and in our pockets.  Let us hold out our hands to the Lord.  It is a gesture as old as time itself that says, “Here I am Lord.”  While we are not called to be tax collectors, certainly not in the ancient sense, we must begin to pray more like this one we find in the parable.  If we do, it will certainly make us more hopeful, more honest and just a wee bit more humble.  And remember, no more peeking or staring your neighbors while you are saying your prayers.