Transformed

Transformed?

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

October 23, 2016

Scripture: Luke 18:9-14

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Let me ask you what I think is a really important question. What is the Christian life about? What is Christian faith about? Is it about believing in God? Yes, whatever “believing in” actually means. Is it about believing in Jesus? Again yes, whatever “believing in” actually means. Is it about doing what you need to do to make sure you get to heaven when you die? Well, maybe kinda sorta, but mostly not despite the fact that a great many Christians think that is precisely what it is about. Is it about living a moral life, doing what’s right and not doing what’s wrong? Yes, although of course a lot of people who aren’t Christians live perfectly moral lives and a lot of Christians live pretty immoral ones. All of those are legitimate questions about the Christian faith and Christian life, and those are to a greater or lesser extent legitimate answers to those question; but none of them gets to what I think the Christian faith and life properly understood are mostly about. They don’t get to the most profound understanding of Christian life and faith, to the most faithful understanding of Christian life and faith. To get at what Christian life and faith are really about, let’s take a look at that story we just heard from Luke about the Pharisee and the tax collector praying in the temple.

Luke sets up that little story by saying that Jesus told it “to some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else.” This little parable gives us two characters. They’re both praying in the temple in Jerusalem. The first character we’re introduced to is a Pharisee. The Pharisees were a prominent sect of Judaism in Jesus’ time. They stressed strict observance of the Torah law as what Jewish faith was about and as what God wants from God’s people. The Gospels don’t treat them kindly, but for the most part they weren’t bad people, no worse than most people anyway. They were practicing their faith as they sincerely believed it should be practiced. Yet this Pharisee pretty clearly isn’t practicing his faith in the proper spirit. He prays: “God, I thank you that I am not like all other men—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.”

Now, before I go on let me say this about this man giving a tenth of all he gets, presumably to the temple. That’s not where he goes wrong. You all might consider following his lead in that regard. Still, this guy pretty clearly gets the life of faith all wrong. He thinks he does what his faith requires, which is more or less OK. But he also thinks that his obeying the commandments of his faith, or at least some of them, makes him superior to other people. His thinking that leads him to condemn all other people as sinners, which he pretty clearly thinks he is not. Our Pharisee thinks he’s righteous. He doesn’t get it that he too is a sinner. At the very least he’s guilty of the sin of pride. He is, I think we can say, a self-righteous jerk.

Then there’s the tax collector. Now, In Jesus’ world a tax collector was nothing like one of our honest and honorable civil servants working for the IRS. Most Jewish people of the time hated tax collectors, and they had good reason to hate them. The tax collectors worked for the despised Roman occupiers. Roman taxes were the only governmental taxes there were, and the people who collected them were mostly Jews working for the Romans. That was bad enough, but the way these tax collectors supported themselves was by taking more money from the people, most of whom were dirt poor, than they actually owed to the Romans. They gouged people for as much as they could get out of them, and people hated them for it. Jesus gives us one of those hated tax collectors as the second character in his parable.

The tax collector prays very differently than the Pharisee. He can’t even look up to heaven but beats his breast, a sign of spiritual or emotional anguish. For his prayer he says “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” It’s a prayer of confession grounded in this man’s profound sense of his own sinfulness, his own unworthiness before God. Jesus ends the parable saying “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve always thought of the tax collector as the hero of this story, the one we’re supposed to be like. I’ve thought of the Pharisee as the villain of the piece, the one we’re not supposed to be like. I think that’s probably what Jesus intended. It turns his audience’s expectations upside down, which Jesus’ parables almost always do. But as I read and contemplated this parable this past week something occurred to me that I’d never thought of before. Jesus presents these two characters as diametrical opposites, one self-righteous and arrogant and one humble and contrite. Yet I think that these two characters have more in common than at first it appears that they do. What they have in common is that they are both in need of radical transformation. Let me explain.

Pretty clearly the Pharisee needs to be transformed. He needs to be transformed out of his self-righteousness and pride. That’s clear enough, but what about the tax collector? To see how he needs transformation let’s look at what this parable does not tell us about him. It doesn’t tell us that he knows that God has already forgiven him. Neither does it tell us that he was going to stop being a tax collector. It doesn’t tell us that he was going to practice his duties as a tax collector more honestly, that he would stop taking more from the poor tax payers than they could afford and line his own pockets with the excess he got from them over what he had to give the Romans. Jesus doesn’t tell us that the tax collector had any such intentions, so I think it’s safe to assume that he didn’t. But even if he had such thoughts as he prayed in the temple he still had to go out and follow through on them. He probably needed transformation in his thoughts, and he definitely needed transformation in his life and his work.

That’s what these two characters have in common. They both need to be transformed. They don’t need to be transformed in the same ways, but they both need to be transformed. One needs to be transformed out of arrogant self-righteousness. The Pharisee is arrogant, and the true spiritual virtue is humility. He’s self-righteous, thinking that his own actions get him right with God. The true spiritual virtue is recognition that none of us is truly righteous on our own, that if we are in right relationship with God it is only because God puts us in right relationship, not that we do. He thinks that only other people are sinners in need of God’s grace, when the truth is that in one way or another we are all sinners in need of God’s grace. The Pharisee doesn’t get it about God, sin, and grace. He needs transformation in his understanding of God, himself, and others.

It is perhaps less obvious how the tax collector needs transformation. Unlike the Pharisee he knows that he is a sinner. Unlike the Pharisee he isn’t self-righteous. He doesn’t think he’s better than other people. In all of these ways he is spiritually healthier than the Pharisee. But notice some other things about him. He prays for forgiveness, but apparently he doesn’t know that God has already forgiven him. In a way he’s too hard on himself. He’s not living into God’s grace because though he prays for mercy he doesn’t know the reality of God’s graceful mercy in his life. Beyond that, this little parable says nothing about what the tax collector does after he leaves the temple. Simply by virtue of his being a tax collector he surely needs transformation in his life, as we’ve already seen. He needs at least transformation in how he does his work, but perhaps there is no way he could adequately transform the work of being a tax collector. After all, no matter how he did that work he’d still be doing it for the Gentile occupiers and oppressors of his people. Perhaps the transformation he needs is to give up being a tax collector altogether and find some other more moral or ethical way of making a living. In any event Jesus’ audience certainly would have thought that this tax collector needed transformation not only in his knowledge of God’s grace but also in how he did his work and lived his life. Surely they were right about that.

So this little parable gives us not one character in need of transformation but two. It is primarily a story about people’s need for transformation. It is a story about everyone’s need for transformation, not just about its two characters’ need for transformation. It is a story about our need for transformation, about your need for transformation and about my need for transformation.

This is a story about what the life of faith is mostly about. To answer the question I started this sermon with, the Christian faith is mostly about transformation. It is about our need to be transformed in our thinking and in our living. It is about our need better to understand God, God’s grace, and how God’s grace calls us to live in response to it. The two characters in our parable didn’t need to be transformed in the same ways, and we all don’t need to be transformed in the same ways either. I have some ideas about how I need to be transformed. I share them with God and with appropriate people in my life. I don’t know how each of you needs to be transformed, although I’m pretty sure that you, like all people, do need to be transformed. I’m here to talk with any of you about that if you like. But today I’ll just leave you with some questions: Has your faith transformed you? Is it transforming you? Is my faith transforming me? Is our faith transforming us? May it be so. Amen.