20th Sunday After Pentecost

Luke 18:9-14

Man, Jesus, why are you so mean to us right now? Luke has had some hard things to say to us all fall, and this one today is no exception, in fact this one may be the hardest yet for many of us.  But the Holy Spirit is funny y’all.  Because we planned this day, we picked today as the day to invite our special guests here to talk to us after church long before I did any lectionary planning.  But Holy Spirit, she knew what she was up to.  And honestly, I couldn’t have picked a better text in order to talk about power and privilege and discovering our role in unjust systems than if I had set out to do so.  I mean it’s almost too on the nose.

Our Gospel lesson starts out, “Jesus told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt”.  And in it two guys walk into the temple, and the Pharisee looks over and sees the tax collector and says, doesn’t even just think it, he literally says out loud to God “God, I thank you that I am not like those other people” especially that tax collector right there.  You can practically see him looking down his nose at the guy next to him.

Meanwhile, tax collector can’t even look up saying “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!'”

But here is the thing, these two guys, they really weren’t that different.  They are both participants in the exact same system of Roman oppression.  The Pharisees even though they were not directly employed by the Romans and held themselves publicly somewhat in opposition to them, were still an integral part of the Roman system.  They were the enforcers of the social order, of religious rules and regulations which kept people in line and eased the Roman burden of governance, and in return, they were given respect, power and relative freedom.   

The Pharisees, as educated elites still benefit deeply and personally from a half a dozen systemic layers of privilege within the world that the Greeks and then the Romans, allied closely with other traditional religious elites had created in ancient Palestine.

The only real difference between these two is that the tax collector knows where he stands.  He has to own it because he has benefited directly and publicly from Roman oppression in ways that can’t easily be hidden or ignored.

Meanwhile the Pharisee is over here bragging, to God, about his occasional fasting and the size of his offerings.  Given out of the money he collects from the tithes and offerings of starving peasants, gained by leaning on his generational preferred access to that which is considered holy.

The illusion of distance from the core oppressors doesn’t create justice for the poor or righteousness for the participants in an unjust system.  It simply creates comfortable delusion and obstacles to true righteousness.

And right here, right now, this hits hard and close to home.  It is easy, it is really easy to be like the Pharisees right now.  It’s really easy to look out at our world and think “Thank you God I am not like those other people.”  To look at people from the other pollical party, or people spouting racist, sexist, or homophobic rhetoric on TV and social media, or selfish billionaires directly trying to rob the poor and to think “Wow, I am so much better at this than those other people”

But we are dear people, in many ways, just like them.  Every one of us in this room benefits every day in dozens of ways, directly and indirectly from the historic and ongoing systems or racial and economic injustice in this country.  And as we will hear in our presentation a little later, our innocence, our naivete, on this subject, our supposed distance from the core oppressors is just an illusion.  Being trained not to see it doesn’t make it any less real or impactful to those it affects.  It is only when we begin to acknowledge our role in the system and the ways we benefit from it, that we can begin to heal the damage it causes.

And this is always and always will be a hard and uncomfortable thing.  It requires us to think deeply about our own pasts and upbringings, to challenge assumptions and prejudices we have long held, to engage in risky self-discovery and to set aside things we often hold dear.  But is also the only way that we and the world can begin to change.  And it is no less than what Jesus commands.

And here is another thing that is both hopeful and hard, Jesus tells us very clearly that the tax collector, the open sinner, the active oppressor goes home justified that day.  No one, no one, even the worst offenders, even the ones currently directly organizing and perpetrating violence against their brothers and sisters are outside of the circle of God’s concern.

This idea is one that is really, really important to begin to get our minds around, to begin to let seep into souls, to become the way we live, because it controls how we are called to think and react when the tide begins to turn, when hopefully this current period of polarization and violence against marginalized communities begins to subside.

Maybe a month ago, someone, I think maybe MaryLou, posted something on Facebook wondering how former members of the resistance could manage to live alongside former Nazi sympathizers after the end of WWII. 

And I gave it some thought and I did some research and the simplest answer is because the vast majority of the former sympathizers became like the tax collectors in the parable.  Because the German people came to know what they had done.   We all know and should always remember that the Nazi’s killed 6 million Jews across Europe, but they also killed 7 million ordinary Germans, mostly young men sent to die on the battlefield in the Nazi’s disastrous attempts at territorial expansion.  No one was left unaffected by these losses, everyone knew, everyone paid a terrible price, everyone faced consequences for their action or inaction in one way or another.

And when that realization struck, when the time for repentance had come, what they needed was mercy, not vengeance, violence and further shame.  What they needed was the love and space and guidance to find a better way forward.  And we may well need the same in this country when this era has seen its way through.  The gracious mercy of a forgiving Lord and Savior, not an avenging angel. 

And so the Lord sets before us today two great tasks. Can we first be brave and wise enough to do the work to open our own eyes, to see our role, to see who we truly are on this grand stage of freedom and oppression we call the American experiment?

And then, when the time comes, can we find it in our hearts to reconcile with those who take longer to see?  Amen.