Sermon 2007 10 28

Today's Gospel story is about two men who go to the temple to pray. One is a self-righteous Pharisee, and the other is a tax-collector (considered a traitor to his people in his time.) How can we understand the meaning that this parable had to Jesus' hearers?

Barbara Taylor Brown tells the story of a man who was observed over her church's closed- circuit tv by the receptionist, who called for help:

"There's a man lying face down on the altar steps. I wouldn't bother you, but he's been there for hours. Every now and then he stands up, raises his arms toward the altar, and lies down again. Do you think he's all right?" Four priests and several staff members conferred over the matter and elected the parish superintendent to go check on the man. As he did so, we all huddled around the monitor to watch. Our envoy appeared on the screen, walked up to the man, exchanged a few words with him and returned to the parish office.

"He says he's praying."

"Aha," we said, thanking him for this information.

It went on for days. Every morning around eleven the receptionist would look up from her desk and there he would be, prostrate before the altar, his hair in knots, his worn clothes covered with dustballs from the floor. The sexton cleaned around him; the altar guild tried not to disturb him when they came to polish the silver; the florist asked if he should leave the flowers somewhere else but we said no, just step over the man and put them on the altar where they belong.

We discussed the problem at staff meeting. "Should we do something?" someone asked. "I don't know," said someone else, "what do you think?" "I think I want to get on that guy's prayer list," one of us said, and we all laughed.

Finally it was Sunday, and my turn to celebrate communion at the early service. He was there when I arrived, blocking my path to the altar, and I did not know what to do. Maybe he was drunk, surely he was crazy--what would happen if I asked him to move? Approaching him as if I were approaching a land mine, I tapped him on the shoulder. He was so skinny, so dirty. "Excuse me," I said, "but there's going to be a service in here in a few minutes. I'm sorry, but you'll have to move."

He lifted his forehead from the floor and spoke with a heavy Haitian accent. "That's okay," he said, rising and dusting himself off in one dignified motion. Then he left, and he never came back.

The eight o'clock service began on time. The faithful took their places and I took mine. We read our parts well. We spoke when we were supposed to speak and were silent when we were supposed to be silent. We offered up our symbolic gifts, we performed our bounden duty and service, and there was nothing wrong with what we did, nothing at all. We were good servants, careful and contrite sinners who had come for our ritual cleansing, but one of us was missing. The foreigner was no longer among us; he had risen and gone his way, but the place where he lay on his face for hours--making a spectacle of himself--seemed all at once so full of heat and light that I stepped around it on my way out, chastened if only for that moment by the call to a love so excessive, so disturbing, so beyond the call to obedience that it made me want to leave all my good works behind.

In today's Gospel story, Jesus doesn't deny the righteousness of the Pharisee. The Pharisee did all the right things - he prayed all the right prayers, he even fasted twice a day and gave a tenth of his income. How many of us can say the same?

It wasn't his lack of doing the right things that was the problem: it was his lack of humility.

The Tax-collector - the most hated type of person in Jesus' society, on the other hand is full of humility. Unlike the Pharisee who probably relishes his place of honour in the temple, it says that the tax-collector was "standing far off." He is humble before the presence of God.

The words, "humility and humble" have the same root word as the word "human." Their Latin root is the word "humus" meaning "earth."

Having humility, then, is about remembering that we are formed from the earth. It is about remembering how in Genesis, God picked up some clay and breathed life into it. Being humble means remembering that it is God who brought us into being, and it is God who sustains us day by day, second by second. Humility literally means being grounded in creation. We are part of the created order, not above it. And if we really are grounded and humble, then we cannot look at another person and consider ourselves the better.

When we find ourselves in the presence of the Divine, humility is the only possible response. The amazing mystery is that God freely lifts us up from our humble earthiness, and gives us the divine spirit. Our faith often symbolizes this spirit as a divine spark or fire or as the flowing and turbulent air - ever moving.

It is nothing which we can do by ourselves. It is wholly by God's grace. The haughty stance of the Pharisee at his worship indicates that, despite his righteousness, he simply hasn't experienced the Divine. The Tax collector, on the other hand gets it. He knows just how earthy he is. And it is he, Jesus says, who will be exalted. He will go home justified.

Today at St. Andrew's, we are baptizing two young girls into the Christian faith. Part of the symbolism of Baptism, is remembering that we are mortal. We go down under the waters of baptism to our death. We are human - we are earth - after all.

But then we rise up and burst through the surface of the water to new life - to the life of the spirit - to the air and the fire and to movement. Halleluiah!

Let us stand in our humble, earthy beginnings. And lets us, in such a stance, reach out in awe to the divine mystery who gives us life. Amen.