Preached at Third Horton (Canaan) Baptist Church, Sunday, July 16, 2023

He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other, for all who exalt themselves, will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

Luke 18:9-14, NRSV

As I said before, I was pastor of First Baptist Church of Sudbury for five years before coming here to Nova Scotia.

One time, I remember doing a house call, and the person who attended my church had a friend there. This friend asked for my card and messaged me about going for coffee.

When we met for coffee, this person confessed to me her struggles with drug addiction, and while I said she needed to seek out addiction counselling, we decided we would go through a book called Addiction and Grace by Gerald May, which is a really powerful book.

So, this became a weekly thing, us meeting and discussing some bible verses, a chapter of this book, and praying, and this really became something I looked forward to. This is why I became a pastor: my love of encouraging folks to grow deeper in their faith in God, to instill some good teachings about the meaning of grace, and to see how that affects a person’s life. I had something she needed.

I remember one morning getting up, hustling to get my kids out the door to the bus, get my breakfast, and shower to make it to coffee with this person. I made it on time despite the coffee shop being on the other side of the city. I remember asking her in our conversations, “What does faith in God mean for your day-to-day life?” I was expecting the usual vague answers I got from folks. She responded by saying, “I don’t know if I really have faith. I don’t know whether or not I am a Christian. I can’t remember the last time I went to church. I have done so many terrible things. One pastor told me that if I really had faith, I wouldn’t do those things. All I know is that every day, I wake up feeling so lost. I pray God be merciful to me today, and all I know is that if I don’t do that, I just can’t get out of bed.”

It struck me that I had gotten up and rushed out the door that day without much thought about God at all. Ironically, I did this in my pursuit to come and help this woman to have more faith.

The thought struck me that maybe this woman, in her own way, knows something about faith that I could learn a thing or two from.

I was so eager to think I was the faithful one (pastor man) here to improve her faith (an addict that really did not, by most outward appearances, live her faith) that I failed to realize that perhaps God sees something different.

As I said last week, I teach theology. And so, if you ever took a theology class with me, you would investigate things like what the Bible says about certain topics, how Christians have thought about things through the ages, and what that means for our times today. Over the centuries, there are those classic statements Christians have been convinced are true that form the core of our faith, one of which we explored last week: We believe God is one being, three persons: Father, Son, and Spirit, all equally and fully  God, which speaks deeply of how God’s essence is love itself. Others include the statements that show up in the creeds like the Apostles Creed or Nicene Creed. These sorts of statements Christians have, throughout the centuries, come to regard as orthodox, meaning “right belief.” If we did not have these, our Christian faith could be compromised.

And so, one of the jobs of theology is really to reflect as best we can on what is true and good, what they mean, so that we can believe truly and act well.

Now, in its own right, this is something all Christians, indeed really any human being, are tasked with doing. We ought to believe what is true over what is false. We ought to do what is right as best we can over what is wrong. When it comes to our faith, it is obviously better to have a good understanding of what the Bible says and what the faith teaches if we want to follow it effectively. Such things are virtuous.

But there is a kind of problem that pops up throughout the Bible that cautions us when we undertake this activity, a kind of Achilleas heel to the whole endeavour. We all must seek to do what is right, but does God love us only when we do what is right? Are outward actions always an indication of what is going on inside?

We all know the answer to this, but we often don’t practice it to its fullest extent. We, Protestants, tend not to believe that we are saved by works, but we are quick to use beliefs to do the same thing. Many of us use theological tests to prove we are good. One writer suggested that we often believe in salvation by mental works, theological righteousness. You see, we must believe what is true, but does that mean God only loves us because we have these ideas in our heads?

And so, we are left with this kind of conundrum. We strive to think what is true and do what is right, and in so doing, we use categories like good and bad, true and false, and we might even use terms like orthodox and heretical (“heresy” means “error” by the way), or just Christian versus non-Christian. But scripture warns that when we use these categories (and use them, we must) there is always a tendency for the human heart to distort them into ways of presuming this is why I know I have an authentic relationship with God and you do not; or that my faith counts and yours does not; or why I belong in the church and you do not.

There is a big difference between believing in the right things and believing in the right way. Both are important, but one is a lot harder to see.

This causes a lot of problems for folks like me as a professor because I can evaluate beliefs, whether in an exam or an essay, how well someone thinks about something, but I can’t see why people think it or, more importantly, how they hold these convictions in their heart. You can test words on a page quite easily. The heart is a bit more tricky.

Yet, it is there that faith really resides. This is something only God can see, and we so often miss. We often only get little glimmers of what is going on in a person’s heart when all the layers of performance and presumption are pulled back. And these moments are really when the reality of the kingdom of God shines through the clouds of human religion most powerfully.  

It is this fact that Jesus tries to instill in this parable. You see, throughout the Gospel of Luke, Jesus has been teaching folks about what the kingdom of God means, what it looks like when God has his way in our world, and, more surprisingly, who belongs in God’s kingdom.

God’s kingdom is, says Luke’s opening chapters, for a poor, young Jewish girl whose fiancé discovers she was pregnant before they were married, but she is, in fact, the mother of the Messiah.

God’s kingdom is for some rough around the edges fishermen, folks from the wrong side of the tracks in Galilee, yet these are the people Jesus makes into apostles.

God’s kingdom is for the sick and the suffering, the poor and the hungry, and against the proud and the powerful: the people that seem to have their faith well put-together.

In this kingdom where the lowly are raised up, where the first are last, and the last are first, I am constantly bewildered at who Jesus sees as having faith.

Jesus sees the trust of a centurion, a military commander of the legions that are oppressing God’s people (the man literally had idolatrous images on his breastplate and shield) – Jesus sees this person as having profound faith.

Jesus sees a sinful woman who comes to him when he is surrounded by religious folk, a woman who pours wastefully-expansive perfume on him and weeps, and without her even saying anything, Jesus says she has saving faith.

Jesus uses the example of a Samaritan man, a person who was regarded as a heretic by the Jews, over a priest and a Levite, as an example of someone who really knows what eternal life is about.

Here, it says Jesus tells them this parable because “some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.” Jesus tells the parable of a Pharisee, a religious expert, you might say, coming into the temple and praying, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ 

While the Bible does say to do pious things like give of one’s money and fast and pray, and obviously condemns stealing and things like that, it is how he does it that is the problem. Notice that he thanks God for all the things he does, not what God does. And when it comes down to it, his faith rests on comparisons to others, how he is superior. As I said, there is a big difference between the right belief and believing in the right way.

Do we ever do that? Perhaps we have more subtle ways of saying it: “Thank God I was never exposed to those kinds of things. Thank God I wasn’t raised like that. Thank God my life did not turn out like that.”

Thank God I am not like those others. Who are “those others” for you?

Is it our coworkers, friends, or family members who just refuse to take God seriously and come to church? Unlike us! Is it those lukewarm Christians that don’t take their faith seriously? Unlike us! Is it those liberal Christians who have allowed the culture to infect their faith? Unlike us! Is it those fundamentalists who just refuse to open their minds and educate themselves? Unlike us!

Whoever it is, we know we are saved, we have an authentic relationship with God, and they do not because we believe these things and we do these things, unlike them.

Jesus sees it differently, and he tells us about a tax collector: tax collectors in those days were people that the Roman Empire recruited to intimidate and extort money from their own communities to help fund their own oppression. They were traitors and thugs who got rich off of extortion. To put it plainly, there is simply no way a member of God’s people could do those kinds of things.

What does this person do? “Standing far off,” it says, “he would not even lift up his eyes to heaven but was beating his chest and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’”

Mercy for a tax collector? Some might call that cheap grace. I knew one pastor who would call grace without changing one’s ways “loosey-goosey, lovey-dovey grace” (a good theological phrase if there ever was one).

And yet, Jesus says, “I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other, for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” Jesus uses a really important term here: justified. Paul uses the same language to say that Gentiles can be members of God’s people by trusting what the Spirit has done, despite not being entirely obedient to all of the laws of the Old Testament.

Paul says we are justified by faith. Luke records a tax collector being justified by humility.  

If you were to ask me whether that was enough, enough to be a church member or something like that, I would struggle to say that this is enough to go on. What the tax collector says is hardly a doctrinal statement. It falls short of the other statements about what is required for salvation in other passages. But this tax collector is one of those people like the centurion or the woman who anoints Jesus’ feet or the good Samaritan that really are outsiders to the community, on the margins of religion, people that we might be tempted to say they don’t make the cut of what faith looks like, and yet God sees something different.

Who is that for you? Who do we exclude that God might include?

One time, I was asked to speak at another church for a conference in Sudbury. The theme of the conference was “Living in Exile,” and it explored how we live in a secularized culture. Pastors from the evangelical ministerial came, but also a number of catholic priests. I remember one pastor seeing the priests show up in their collars, come up to me, and say, “Interesting that Catholics would come to this. Perhaps we can witness to them what the Bible says.”

I remember at the beginning of my talk, I had a number of Bible verses I wanted to talk about, and for fun, I said, “Hey, let’s do an old-fashioned Bible drill.” Have you all done one of these? You hold your Bible up, the leader calls out a passage, and you try to find it before anyone else. Well, guess who won those Bible drills? Father Jim beat all the Protestant pastors in the room. Badly. I remember on another occasion, one pastor admitted to me, sheepishly, “I don’t think Catholics are Christians, but I think Father Jim is born again.”

It is funny how we can have our paradigms turned upside down with little experiences like that. Again, who is it for you? How have we seen and made a judgment that might not be how God sees things?

There is an old parable that goes like this:

In heaven, one day, the angel Gabriel was given a gift to deliver to whomever he chose. The person who received this gift would know that fully that God was with them. Gabriel dutifully went out into all the land to find one deserving of such a precious gift. He looked at all the kings and tried to find the one that upheld justice like no other. He looked at all the priests and monks to find one whose piety was beyond the rest, and yet, each came up short. Frustrated, he returned to heaven and cried out to God’s Spirit, “Lead me to the one you choose as deserving!” and so the wind of God blew Gabriel far, far away into a distant land, and the wind of God led him to a house where he found a man weeping bitterly in prayer to an idol. Gabriel was indignant, “God, there must have been some mistake!” The parable ends with the voice of God answering, “O, Gabriel, do you not know that I see the human heart? And O, Gabriel, after all this time, have you still not seen what my heart is like?”

I remember coming across that parable and being deeply moved by it. I looked down the page to see who wrote it. I was surprised to find that it was not a Christian parable. It is actually a Muslim one. It is a well-known parable in Sufi Islam.

When I was a chaplain at Thorneloe University, I made a point of getting to know the other chaplains, one of whom was a Muslim chaplain. He drove a taxi as his day job, but he volunteered his time to encourage the students at the university. He was someone that always had a beaming smile.

I remember having coffee with him, and before I did that, I went over in my head various ways I might give a reason why Christianity is true and Islam is not. I remember being a bit braggy in our conversation, describing all the good things I did in my ministry (you know, to be a good witness). He nodded along. In the course of the conversation, I remember asking him, What does your religion mean to you? He replied, “Spencer, I wake up in the morning with joy in my heart because God is merciful to me, even though I don’t deserve it. I try to trust this every day, and so, I try my best to show that grace to everyone around me.” I remember stopping and pausing, a bit stunned. I was not expecting that answer.

One theologian once said that the kingdom of God is like an uncle who gives you a coin. Every time you think you have God in the palm of your hand, the Spirit reserves the right to pull off a magic trick and surprise you.

I think Jesus taught me a thing or two that day about what sharing the Gospel means or, better yet, what it doesn’t. My prayer was and very much still is that all will know Jesus as their lord and saviour, but I have also learned the hard way that how God is working around me is not always the way I assume it to be.

Sometimes, when I think I am the one God is using to show other people grace, I end up realizing God is using someone else to teach me a thing or two about grace.

While experiences like that can disrupt us, perhaps confuse us, but hopefully humble us, I find myself deeply comforted by the fact that daily, I am surprised by how much more gracious God is.  But with that comes the realization that so often I have missed this because I have treated God’s grace as limited.

It reminds me that at the centre of our faith is the story of how when Jesus came preaching the kingdom of God, turning people’s expectations about God upside down, and God’s own people, the leaders of biblical religion, and even Jesus’ own disciples refused to see it, and while we might be quick to shake our heads at those disciples, we are so often no different.

Jesus was betrayed and crucified, treated as a blasphemer and a rebel, executed on a cross, dying as one, as Paul says, “under the curse of the law,” dying outside the bounds of religion.

We know mercy because Jesus bore our sins.  

We are saved because Jesus counted himself forsaken.

We are included because Jesus was excluded.

Despite all the ways we can take our faith and still make it about us, about how we are better, about how we are safe, about how we are deserving, and others don’t measure up, God does not give up on us. God sees our hearts, all that we are, and all that we have done, and in this, God chooses to love us with his very body and blood. God says his kingdom is for you.

The question is whether we will daily choose to see it.