SUNDAY’S SERMON

 

                Saints and Sinners, All

                                                 Luke 18:9-14

 

 Pastor Robyn Hogue                         October 27, 2013               Skyline Presbyterian Church

Actor Ben Affleck was once standing in line with a friend, waiting for a table in a crowded Los Angeles restaurant. They had been waiting for some time, the diners seemed to be taking their time eating and new tables weren’t opening up very fast. They weren’t even close to the front of the line. Affleck’s friend became impatient and asked Peck, “Why don’t you tell the maître d’ who you are?” Affleck responded with great wisdom, “No, if you have to tell them who you are, then you aren’t.”

This is a lesson the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable apparently has not yet learned. His prayer, if it can be called that, is largely an advertisement. (We sometimes get a ministry advertisement thrown in to our shared prayer time, but this fellow’s advertisement wasn’t for Peanut Butter and Jam Ministry or for a good turn-out for the Men’s Fellowship this week. This man’s advertisement is for himself.) He is selling himself to God. Little wonder that Luke describes him the way he does, “The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself.” (v. 11) This is a very apt description, isn’t it?—he prayed about himself. He would do better if Ben Affleck was there to whisper in his ear that if he has to remind God who he is, then he isn’t. 

The tax collector, on the other hand, didn’t have to tell God who he was. He knows who he is and he knew that God knew who he is. His prayer is not an exercise in self-promotion, but a confession and plea for mercy. He is not selling himself, but opening himself. And Jesus said, “It is this man who went home justified.” To be justified means to be declared “not guilty.” It means to be declared right. The tax collector is declared to be in the right relationship to God while the Pharisee, who is so certain of his own righteousness, is shown to be in the wrong.

This does not mean that the Pharisee is a bad person and the tax collector is really a good person. There’s no suggestion of this in Jesus’ parable. The Pharisee is probably every bit as good, moral and generous as he claims to be. When he gives his speech about how he fasts and tithes, gives alms and prays frequently, he’s not guilty of false advertising. There’s no suggestion that he’s a hypocrite pretending to be something he isn’t. Nor is there any suggestion that the tax collector is really a good guy at heart—something akin to the Hollywood version of the bank robber with the heart of gold in order to give to the poor. The tax collector is most likely every bit as bad as his reputation makes him out to be. The contrast in the parable is not between the hidden goodness of the tax collector and the hidden hypocrisy of the Pharisee. Such a construction misses the point. If that were the case, it would not be at all hard to understand why it is the tax collector and not the Pharisee who is declared to be righteous and who goes home justified. 

No, this parable is much more radical than this. It goes to the root of the problem of our sinful tendencies. The gospel Jesus proclaims in this parable is radical in at least three aspects: first, the parable tells us that God knows us as we really are; second, that God accepts us as we are; and third, that though God accepts us as we are, God loves us too much to leave us as we are.

The first of those three aspects is familiar to us, though we may not live in awareness of it all the time. God knows who we are. We don’t have to do a snow-job on God and sell ourselves to Him. Like the line in the Christmas song about Santa Claus, “he knows if you’ve been bad or good…” God knows. But God’s knowledge of us goes much deeper than knowing if we’ve been bad or good. God knows our actions, and God knows our motives, intentions, our private and most intimate secrets. God even knows what is in the depths of our unconscious minds. Psalm 139 says it well, “While I was in my mother’s womb, while I was being created in secret, behold, O Lord, you knew me altogether” (verse 13, 15).

Such knowledge can be a frightening thing if we operate on the “God-rewards-the-good-and-punishes-the-bad philosophy”. If this is the way things work, then we’re in trouble. We’re in trouble because we’ve got things inside us that we wouldn’t want anyone else to know. There are parts of us that are too private, too painful, and just too intimate to share with anyone. So if we think that our acceptance by God depends on God never finding out who we really are on the inside, then we are lost.

That’s why the news that God knows exactly who we are, better than we know ourselves, can be such a liberating piece of good news. We don’t have to pretend. We are who God knows us to be. We don’t have to be afraid of God finding out something we’re ashamed of, we don’t have to close off part of our lives to God; God knows us with a knowledge that is deep, intimate and infinite. Paul reminds us that when our time comes to finally stand in God’s presence our own knowledge will be full and complete: “One day,” he says, “I shall know, even as I am fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:12). So if we’ve got something to hide, don’t bother. God already knows more about us than we will ever know until that day when the Lord grants us fullness of knowledge in heaven. 

God not only knows who we are, but God accepts us as we are. I say this is radical because it goes against the way most of us think. If something good happens to someone we know, we say, “Well, you must be living right,” meaning that their goodness has been rewarded. When something bad happens to us, we immediately begin to wonder what we’ve done to cause God to punish us. It is common for us to think that God blesses those who are good and punishes those who are bad. That’s the way we would do it if we were God, and we project our own ideas of justice and reward and punishment onto God. The only problem with that is that God doesn’t quite fit our expectations. 

God is not created in our image. God is Other. God is God and we are not. God acts as God acts. And Jesus says in this parable that God is a God who declares sinners to be in right relation. By human standards of justice, this is positively scandalous. God accepts the sinner? Why, because they are sinning?  No! God hates sin. Then why does God accept them? Because they trust in God for their acceptance and that is the right or “righteous’ thing to do. To throw oneself on the mercy of God is the right thing to do and God declares us righteous when we do it. This is the meaning of faith: believing that God will act like God and have mercy on us. The problem many of us have is that we are scandalized when God acts like God. 

Samuel Colgate, the son of the founder of the Colgate business empire, William Colgate, was a devout Christian. He was educated at Harvard and Baptist Theological Seminary. He was licensed to preach the gospel by the Presbytery of New York in late 1899. And he told of an incident that took place in the church he attended. During an evangelistic service, an invitation was given for all those who wished to turn their lives over to Christ and be forgiven. One of the first persons to walk down the aisle and kneel at the altar was a well-known New York prostitute. She knelt in very real repentance, she wept, she asked God to forgive her, and meanwhile the rest of the congregation looked on approvingly at what she was doing. Then she stood and testified that she believed God had forgiven her for her past life, and she now wanted to become a member of the church. For a few moments, the silence was deafening. 

Finally, Samuel Colgate rose and said, “I guess we blundered when we prayed that the Lord would save sinners. We forgot to specify what kind of sinners. We’d better ask him to forgive us for this oversight. The Holy Spirit has touched this woman and made her truly repentant, but the Lord apparently doesn’t understand that she’s not the type we want him to rescue. We’d better spell it out for Him just which sinners we had in mind.” Immediately, a motion was made and unanimously approved that the woman be accepted into membership in the congregation.

God accepts us as we are. There’s not a sin too black, not a deed too awful, not a thought too horrible for God to forgive. What cuts us off from God’s forgiveness and the freedom such forgiveness brings is our thinking that we have to prove ourselves. Trusting in our own righteousness does not bring God’s verdict of not guilty. Trusting in God’s righteousness does.

But if we say that God accepts the sinner, doesn’t that appear to condone sinful behavior? If Jesus doesn’t require us to change before He accepts us, then what’s the use of being good at all? Why not sin boldly and have a good time? After all, there is pleasure in sin…for a time. Ah, but here that third truth comes into play. God knows who we are; God accepts us as we are; and God loves us too much to leave us as we are. When Jesus justifies us on the basis of our faith in Him, He also transforms us and makes us better than we are. 

The theological term for God’s forgiving and claiming work in us is justification. The theological word for God’s cleansing and purifying within us is sanctification. God starts with us just where God finds us, whether in the palace or the pit, but God never leaves us there. God’s purpose is not just to rescue us from hell, but to get us ready for heaven. So God’s in the business of making us like Christ, or as Paul writes in Ephesians 4:15, helping us “to grow up spiritually.” Maturity in Christ, spiritual adulthood, perfection in love—these are ways to describe God’s work in our lives. 

This sanctifying work of God’s spirit within us, does not turn us into stained-glass saints nor people who walk around piously with their hands folded in prayer all day. God’s work within us is the most practical, down-to-earth (or perhaps we should say up-to-heaven) work imaginable.

When we open our lives to God’s gracious presence, when we no longer trust in our own morality or good behavior or willpower, we find the most amazing things beginning to happen. As we experience more of God’s love for us, we find ourselves becoming more loving toward others. People with bad tempers find that God’s spirit within them enables them to control their temper. People with enslaving habits find a resource that is beyond themselves and a source of strength to overcome those diseases of the soul. People with too much love of money and material things find that their values begin to change along with their grip on their possessions. People with deep insecurities begin to see themselves and love themselves as God loves them and sees them.

This doesn’t all happen at once, of course. Spiritual maturity is a life-long process. It’s a journey. We don’t become saints overnight, but that is the direction of lives. That’s the nature of the Christian life—becoming conformed to the image of Christ. Whether it’s our gossip, ambition, lust, prejudice, materialism, pride, self-righteousness, or whatever else our besetting sin may be, the Holy Spirit will not be content until Christ’s image is perfectly formed in us, and that is why God will not leave us as God finds us.

What aspect of the gospel speaks most to your needs? Is it the fact that God knows you, and knows you intimately and fully? If so, then accept the freedom that God offers you. Open yourself to Him, confess who you are to Him, and you will find Him gracious. Perhaps it is the second aspect which speaks most keenly to you—that God accepts you as you are and declares you righteous on the basis of your trust in Him. That too is liberating. Not only do you not have to hide your real self, but you do not have to make yourself good. Accept His love. Accept His forgiveness which He offers you in Christ. Accept His claim upon you. Accept your adoption into the family of God. Or maybe you’ve experienced that much of the gospel—the knowledge that you are loved and accepted and justified—but you have not experienced the transforming work of the Spirit in your life, because you have not understood or because you have not been open to allow the Spirit to work. If so, then open yourself to the Spirit as fully as you are consciously capable of doing; give the Spirit the freedom to cleanse away all that is incompatible with the love of Christ, accept the Spirit’s discipline, then commit yourself to growing into maturity. It is God who makes us like Christ. We will have better morals or better ethics or more willpower when we allow God to change our inner nature into conformity with the nature of Christ. When Christ is formed in us, then we will be better people with better behavior. It is the work of God’s grace and the product of faith. From beginning to end, we are saved by God’s grace.

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