Sermons Preached at Church of the Redeemer

Sermon preached at the Church of the Redeemer, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts

By the Reverend Dorsey McConnell, Rector

October 24^th, 2004

The Pharisee and the Tax Collector:

How to Win Like an Idiot

I will preach today on what it means to be justified before God, on stewardship, and on baseball.  I will do this by a strict reading of Luke 18:9-14, in around ten minutes.  And, in return, I expect you all to be generous at the offering.   

Christian stewardship is, simply put, the ongoing habit of making the most out of what God has given you, and doing so according to God’s priorities.  If God wanted to teach us how to do this, and were to go out and find role models for the task, surely he would pick people we would recognize as fit for the job.  God is all-powerful, and wants us to share in his power, so surely he would find a suitable person of power, an overachiever, for us to emulate.  He is all wise, and all knowing, and wants us to be wise, so surely he would find a sharpie, a genius, to show us the way to him.  He wants us to be good, so surely He would pick a moral star to be our guide, a clean machine, someone who automatically chooses the right and looks good while he is doing so.   

Meet the Pharisee, surely God’s choice to lead us to the good life: a moralist, a sage, a man so accomplished (in his own mind) that he has for years obeyed with ease the major demands of the law and is now working on the details; he treats the challenges of life as if they were an extra-credit question on an endless midterm exam.  Tradition, luck and money have played so consistently into his hands, that his visits to the Temple are marked by the same sort of entitlement, of familiarity with a favorable destiny, that one Yankees fan described as a seasonal ritual of visiting the stadium in the Bronx to collect the garlands due them from the gods. (Until this week).   

On the other hand there is the tax collector: surely not God’s model of stewardship.  A bit like the Sox, he has squandered his birthright, betrayed his people, and blown countless opportunities to reform himself.  His co-religionist the Pharisee looks on him and his peers as a rag-tag band of idiots between whose legs the ball has rolled so often, it seems part of the order of the universe.  No wonder that he cannot lift his eyes toward heaven and only sits in the corner uselessly beating his breast.  Surely this man is here as a warning, not a role model.   

If this is all true, then what does it mean when the tax collector wins—suddenly, mysteriously, against the odds of circumstance and history, when the idiot, not the star, is blessed by God?  What does it have to do with us?  With stewardship, with the challenge of making the most of what God has given us?  Are we in fact to emulate the idiots?  What does all this mean? 

Jesus says elsewhere, Where your heart is, there will your treasure be also.  If stewardship is a matter of making the most of what God has given us, then that work must begin not with our money, but with our hearts.  If our hearts are given to God, then our money will follow.  But you cannot give away what you do not possess.  And here is the tragic and beautiful secret of being human.  It is also the most important part of the sermon, so please listen carefully. 

You do not possess your own heart by nature; you receive it by grace. Yes, it is within you, but you cannot in any sense possess your heart until you find it; and you find your heart only by coming to the place where your own natural resources have run out, where you have not only experienced loss and failure and disappointment, but also have discovered the end of your own capacities to make sense or meaning out of those things.   That is the moment when you come to your knees before God, and the sorrow of it all wells up inside of you, until you can only say, Have mercy on me, Lord.  

That is the prayer that unlocks the storehouse of God.   It is there, from the well of tears poured forth in the Father’s lap, that you come into possession of God’s inheritance.  After a little, or (sometimes) a lot of time in that place, you discover the sorrow has a sweetness to it that comes from love, that the darkness has a light deep within it, that the corridors between your mind and your feeling are open, that your brain and your soul are feeding one another.  You begin to dream, not of being a different person, but of what God might do with you given all that you are and all that you are not, all that you have accomplished and all that you have lost.  In a word, you have come into your own heart, and are now ready (by God’s grace) to make the most of it.   

This is what Saint Paul has in mind when he observes that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope shall in no way disappoint us.  That is the hope of the tax collector who went to church every time as though he had on a T-shirt that said I still believe, while the Pharisee thought he never needed such a prayer.  And that hope is why the prayer of the tax collector, the Jesus prayer, (Jesus, Son of God, Savior, have mercy on me a sinner) is also called the prayer of the heart, and is prayed throughout the Christian world, is indeed for half the world’s Christians— for all those in the Eastern Orthodox communions-- second in importance only to the Lord’s prayer. 

Here then is the result of all this for our stewardship. If you give your heart, the rest will follow.  Sometime over the next two weeks you will have an encounter with a bag very much like this one. (Here the preacher holds up a canvas tote bag to be used to collect the pledges of the congregation.) I am asking you to see that what you put into it is from your heart, that you spend a little time between now and then praying the prayer of the tax collector, asking God to grant you possession of what is already inside you.   Pray it earnestly, then make your pledge.  Make it in earnest as though you were giving a part of yourself, giving your very heart.  If you do this, God will not only show you the amount you need to give, but will also use your gift as a doorway through which he may return to you grace upon grace: mercy and comfort, encouragement and strength, knowledge of who you really are and what you really can be doing with your life, in short all the gifts of a heart known and claimed and given away, in good measure, pressed down, overflowing, poured into your life, in Jesus name.  Amen.