Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Standin' In the Need of Prayer


Text:  Luke 18:9-14
A Sermon by Jack Cabaness

Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost                                                         October 27, 2013

            There’s a story about a Sunday School teacher who taught the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax collector to her class, and then, without any apparent self-awareness or sense of irony, ended the class by saying, “All right, children.  Let’s say a prayer, and thank God that we’re not like that Pharisee.”[i]

            It is easier to hear this parable if we pretend that the Pharisee is not like us.  I must confess that I have my own tendency to sugarcoat this parable.  It’s much easier for me to listen to this parable if I imagine that the Pharisee is a real smug, holier-than-thou type,
who is always putting other people down and that the tax collector is basically a good and humble person who only got into the tax collecting business to pay for his wife’s medical bills and to send their oldest child to college.

            But if we want to experience the full impact of this story that Jesus told,
we need to take it straight up, without any sugar.  The truth is that the Pharisee really is a good man.  It’s the Pharisee who pays for his wife’s medical bills and the oldest child’s college tuition and who still faithfully tithes.  It’s the Pharisee who works two jobs to get all the bills paid, and who still fasts during the lunch breaks.

            And it is the tax collector who drives up to the Temple Mount in his stretch limousine, the floor of which is littered with mini bar bottles and other evidence of the previous night’s excessive carousing--all of it, of course, at tax payer expense.[ii]

            What makes this parable difficult to accept, what makes it truly shocking for Jesus to say that the tax collector went home justified but the Pharisee did not, is that the Pharisee really is every bit as good as he claims to be, and that the tax collector really is every bit as bad as he claims to be. 

            We sometimes imagine that the Pharisees were exceedingly legalistic, that for them justification was mostly a matter of good works.  We assume that there wasn’t much room for grace in their theology.  But biblical scholars like E. P. Sanders and others have helped us to understand that those stereotypes weren’t entirely accurate.[iii]

            The Pharisees were careful students of the scriptures.  They could quote chapter and verse out of Deuteronomy, when God is granting Israel the land of Canaan, particularly the part where the Lord says, “Do not say to yourselves, it is because of our righteousness that God is giving us the land to possess.”  (Deuteronomy 9:5ff)  The Pharisees understood themselves to be the chosen people, not because of any inherent goodness on their part, but because of God’s grace.  God had graced their lives so that they might be a blessing to the whole world.  They knew that.  They understood that.

            And so when this Pharisee goes up to the temple to pray, he goes there in a spirit of gratitude.  But at that precise moment, the stretch limousine pulls up to the Temple Mount and out stumbles the tax collector.  The tax collector was the ultimate traitor, someone of Jewish birth who collaborated with Rome to extort money from God’s people.  And the tax collector lived off the excess.

            The Pharisee’s mood darkens.  But then he remembers where he is.  He is standing in the Temple Mount, a powerful symbol of God’s enduring presence.
He may have even recalled a passage of scripture from the prophet Joel:

                        You will know that I am in the midst of Israel, and that I am the Lord                                     your God—no other exists; never again will my people be put to shame.                                      (Joel 2:27)

The Pharisee takes heart.  That tax collector standing over there, that collaborator with Rome, does not have the ultimate power to put God’s people to shame.  Even though the Pharisee has to work hard for everything he has, while the tax collector lives a life of leisure and ease, there is coming a day when there will be abundant rain and the threshing floor will be full and God’s people will never be put to shame by the likes of that tax collector.  (Joel 2:23-24, 27)

            And so the Pharisee prays, and in his prayer he gives thanks to God.  I imagine the Pharisee casting a sidelong glance at the tax collector and saying essentially, “There but for the grace of God go I.”  The Pharisee is thankful that he has not betrayed those closest to him, and he is especially thankful that, unlike the tax collector, he has not betrayed his entire people.

            I could be wrong in my portrayal of the Pharisee.  After all, the Gospel writer Luke introduced this parable by saying that “Jesus told this parable to certain people who had convinced themselves that they were righteous and who looked on everyone else with disgust.”  (Luke 18:9)  And when the Pharisee prays, he does only pray about himself.  Perhaps he really is smug, arrogant, and self-congratulatory, vainly trying to conceal his self-righteousness by addressing his prayer to God.  Maybe sometimes even when we say, “There but for the grace of God go I,” what we really mean is “Dear God, I thank you that I am not like other people.”

            But if I listen only to the parable that Jesus told without the benefit of Luke’s introduction, I hear the prayer of a faithful and frustrated man who resents the way that his people have been treated.  I hear the prayer of a man who did almost everything right.  Almost.  What he did wrong was that he presumed to know the limits of God’s grace.  He presumed that he was more entitled, somehow more deserving of God’s grace, than the tax collector.  When the Pharisee casts a sidelong glance at the tax collector and says essentially, “There but for the grace of God go I,” he is saying more than he can possibly know. 

            Many people attribute the saying “There but for the grace of God go I”
to the English Puritan John Bradford.  He was imprisoned in the Tower of London during the reign of Mary Tudor, a.k.a. “Bloody Mary.”  It was a time when many Protestants were being put to death.  John would watch as other prisoners were taken to their death, and he would exclaim, “There but for the grace of God goes John Bradford.”

            But for John Bradford, it was only a matter of timing.  When he said, “There but for the grace of God goes John Bradford,” he was not trying to imply that somehow his life was more graced than someone else’s.  He was simply saying that by the grace of God, he, John Bradford, had another day to live.  But eventually came that morning when John Bradford himself was taken out of his cell in the Tower of London to the place of public execution where he would be burned at the stake.[iv]

            If we say, “There but for the grace of God go I,” because we are pondering the mysteries of life, that’s one thing.  When I was in college I had a friend who flew on Pam Am Flight #103 the day before the tragic crash over Lockerbie, Scotland.  “There but for the grace of God go I.”  Even then, I don’t think we want to take that famous saying too literally.  Do we really mean to imply that those who lost their lives in a plane crash were outside the reach of God’s grace, or would we rather affirm with the Apostle Paul that in life and in death we belong to God?  (Romans 14:8)

            And if we are ever tempted to say “There but for the grace of God go I” because somehow we think that we are better than someone else or somehow more deserving of God’s grace than someone else, then we especially need to be careful.  In that case, we haven’t understood what grace means.  Because the moment that we think that we are entitled to grace, then it is no longer grace!

            Our chancel choir sang as their anthem last week the old gospel hymn “Standin’ in the Need of Prayer.”
                        It’s me, it’s me, it’s me, O Lord, standin’ in the need of prayer.
                        Not my brother, not my sister, but it’s me, O Lord,
                        standin’ in the need of prayer.
            Notice that there is no comparison with the brother or the sister.  The singer does not sing out, “Dear God, I might mess up sometimes, but I’m so thankful that I’m not like my brother.”  That’s not the spirit of the song!!

            The second verse is much like the first:
                        It’s me, it’s me, it’s me, O Lord, standin’ in the need of prayer.
                        Not the preacher, not the deacon, but it’s me, O Lord,
                        standin’ in the need of prayer.

            Now, this particular preacher, I’ll tell you, is standing in the need of prayer.  But please don’t presume that I am somehow more in need of prayer than you are, and I won’t presume that about you, either.

            The proper prayer, the proper song, is simply:

                        It’s Me, it’s Me, it’s Me, O Lord, standin’ in the need of prayer.

            All glory and praise be to our God.  Amen.

The Rev. Dr. Jack Cabaness, Pastor
Westminster Presbyterian Church
Westminster, Colorado



Notes:

[i] Fred Craddock, Luke in the Interpretation Commentary Series (Louisville:  John Knox Press, 1990), 211.

[ii] I’m in debt to the late Robert Farrar Capon for the creative anachronisms.  See Robert Farrar Capon, The Parables of Grace (Grand Rapids:  Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1988, 1996), 179.

[iii] E. P. Sanders makes this argument in his books such as Jesus and Judaism and Paul and Palestinian Judaism.

[iv] Bartlett’s Book of Quotations credits John Bradford with the saying “There but for the grace of God go I.”  I’ve gleaned other facts about Bradford’s life slowly over the years, but I must confess that I also relied on Wikipedia to check my memory.  “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.”