Joel 2:23-32, Psalm 65, 2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18, Luke 18:9-14
The Pharisee is a patriot and the publican is a traitor. The Pharisee desires the Kingdom of God, literally, politically, directly; by his rules and disciplines he keeps himself clean and qualified for the Holy Kingdom when God comes back. But the publican is against the Kingdom of God just by his job. He collaborates with the Romans and he deals in dirty money and legalized extortion. So, while we are prejudiced against the Pharisees, the publican would not have been your friend. Jesus sets this parable within the temple in Jerusalem, and the temple was the epicenter of the Kingdom of God. The prayers of Israel were launched upon the daily sacrifices—a lamb every morning and another every afternoon, to make atonement for Israel. As the shed blood covered the sins of Israel in God’s sight, the Levites could launch their prayers. They lit the incense, and their prayers rose up with the smoke. The Levites at the altar interceded for the nation, and whoever was attending could pray along, with their own personal vows, and supplications, and intercessions. Such as this Pharisee. He’s not interceding or supplicating, he’s lifting his hands in thanksgiving. He stands by himself so he won’t get touched by anyone unclean, but he’s not a bad guy. He knows he is righteous. He fasts twice as often as he has to, and he tithes more than he needs too. We’d like him as a member of Old First, even if we’re irritated by his seeming arrogance.
Also praying is the publican, but off in the back, and unwelcome. He’s a bad man and he knows it. He’s praying head down, and beating his breast. His prayer is literally this: “O God, let the atonement be to me, the sinner.” He knows he’s guilty, and that he has no right to talk to God, so he’s pleading to be included in the virtue of that sacrifice. He is pictured by the Lord Jesus as miserable and deservedly so, deplorable, someone all of us would judge and none of us would justify. But the Lord Jesus says that publican is the one who went home qualified to be in the Kingdom of God. Understand that it’s not because the publican earned his justification by his humility. It’s about what God is like and what God makes God’s kingdom like, already now, already now for the publican. The Kingdom of God is not what you keep yourself clean for, but what declares the unclean clean, the Kingdom of God is God’s power in the world to make the unrighteous righteous, out of sheer grace, especially those miserable deplorables who good religion says do not deserve it.
That’s why the Lord Jesus does not tell us that the publican went home and changed his life. We’d like him to, and maybe he should, but that would counter the point. That would suggest that the Kingdom of God has to be proven by us, made true by us, by our building it or extending it by our good work. But the Kingdom of God is proven only by our need of it. Your misery. Your remorse. It’s only when you recognize that it judges you that its mercy rides down on your misery. Let’s not be smug against the pharisee, nor make an antihero of the publican. Our culture values movie characters like the Joker. Our TV shows celebrate the bad guy as somehow the truer guy. That’s the easy out, and its own kind of self-righteousness. The point is how the Kingdom of God embraces us, and in its embrace we discover ourselves as always both—both pharisee and publican. You are always both. You are a sinner when you are a saint, and you’re a saint when you’re a sinner.
You know what it is to be proud and to exult. You know how to compare yourself to others and come off well, even if you do that only off by yourself. And you know also what it’s like to be miserable—mad at yourself for what you’ve said or done, remorseful for having hurt someone, ruining relationships, blowing it again. “Why do I keep making the same mistake, why do I keep falling into the same traps, stupid, stupid, stupid! Oh God, let this atonement cover me, a sinner.” How do you see yourself in the world? How do you present yourself to your own existence? Can the Kingdom of God save you as you are in the world right now, both pharisee and publican? “Can I please have some integrity, can I see myself as justified? Can I stop needing to justify myself and what I’ve done, and believe that even in my misery I have been justified by the Kingdom for the Kingdom? Yes, you can, and the doorway out of your misery is through thanksgiving, and the way to thanksgiving is through forgiving. Let’s see how this works. We take it from our epistle, St. Paul’s second letter to Timothy. Now, right off St. Paul sounds a bit boastful, like a Pharisee! “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. From now on there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give me on that day.” Well, St. Paul, good for you. Stand there with your hands raised up in thanksgiving! Of course he’s got prison chains on him while he writes this—so he’s allowed to sound like this. And he does not exalt himself by degrading others. He admits that other people did him wrong, that they deserted him, but he asks that it not be counted against them. He wants grace for them too. He forgives them, and he has to forgive them every morning again as he wakes up in his prison cell and is reminded of their desertion. He has to practice his forgiveness every day, and he has to do that in order also to practice his thanksgiving every day. And that’s what gets him out of his daily misery. The sober truth here is that your gratitude depends on being gracious. You won’t be thankful unless you’re forgiving others who do you wrong. There’s a ratio of how thankful you can be and how much you practice forgiveness, both extending it and accepting it. That’s a take home. You have a ratio in your life of your practice of thanksgiving and your practice of forgiveness, both given and received. Grace makes for gratitude and gratitude makes for grace. You can forgive others who have done you wrong, and are still unfair to you, and more, you can forgive yourself as well. You accept the forgiveness of others, especially of God, as the way out of remorse and also arrogance. The process goes from misery to mercy to forgiveness to thanksgiving, and back again, when you pray God’s favor on those who do you wrong and even on those who judge you for your doing wrong.
Let me turn to the Psalm. It’s one of my favorites, Psalm 65. The Psalm imagines a great song of thanksgiving that rises from the depths of human experience and also from the earth itself, the landscape, the soil and the pastures and the hills. The praise of God arises from the roaring of the seas and in the clamor of the peoples, and all creation gives thanks to God for the gift of its existence.
This thanksgiving is not the instant messaging of why might you feel good today. It’s rather a long, slow, patient, persistent thanksgiving, night and day, year after year. It’s the slow thanksgiving that rises from the soil, when the farmer comes through with a plow and opens up the furrows to the air and to the sun and the rain, and the ground bears its life and gives its growth. The Psalm envisions the tracks of God’s wagon-wheels cutting through the surface of the soil, and in the cuts of the wagon-tracks the richness rises up. These wagon-tracks in the soil are an image of the prayers of repentance in verse 3. It is the cutting open of repentance and forgiveness that allows for the new life of thanksgiving rising up. The plowing is the repentance, and the harvest is the thanksgiving, and in between we open up our lives in prayer and good works. In fact, it’s out of our humble remorse that our works of love can rise up and grow. At the end of the parable the Lord Jesus says that all who exalt themselves will be humbled and those who humble themselves will be exalted. That is circular, and it’s both a judgement and a comfort. It means that your life is both humbled and exalted. Your life is broken in how you live it, but you are exalted in the love of God. Your good works and your actions for mercy and justice in the world may be humble in ordinary estimation and even hidden from recognition, but you are magnified in the Kingdom of God and you are exalted in the love of God.
Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7, Psalm 66:1-11, 2 Timothy 2:8-15, Luke 17:11-19
Leprosy was a long, slow death. It made these ten untouchable—cast out of their homes, dead to their families, dead to God’s people. They could not worship—they were dehumanized. Even to the enmity between Jews and Samaritans they were dead, suspended beyond the boundaries of life. Jesus restored them back to the world. They were healed, but by not standing there—first they had to go to their village priests. They had to obey his command, and in their obedience they were made clean. No doubt they scattered, each to his own village to get the ritual certification of being clean again. All ten of them were made well through their faith.
The nine did nothing wrong. They were doing what Jesus told them to. The Messiah had done his job for them, he had restored them to Israel, they could go back to their normal human lives, they could “build their houses and live in them, they could plant their gardens and eat the produce, they could take their wives and have their sons and daughters” again. They had “returned to normalcy.” The nine were not wrong, so what the one did was a surplus. Why he turned around was more than gratitude. He was praising God as he came back. He came right up to Jesus instead of keeping his distance as before. He acted already restored without first being certified. Jesus had no authority to certify him clean, but the authority to make him clean the tenth one recognized. He read the presence of God into Jesus—that back there with that man Jesus is where God came into his life. He saw by faith that in Jesus God had come to him. So he went back there to Jesus to thank him and praise God. I can imagine the nine not turning around for fear of interrupting their healing. The tenth one actually disobeyed what Jesus said, or at least he interrupted his obedience. For praise and thanksgiving. As if praise and thanksgiving are the point of obedience. As if he’s already been restored to his full humanity before his return to his old life in the village. As if returning to normalcy is not even the point, but returning in praise and thanksgiving is the point.
There’s another surplus. Jesus gave him something extra. The last thing that the Lord Jesus says to him is “Get up and go on your way.” A better translation is “Rise up and get going.” The word that Jesus uses here is the same as the word for resurrection. That’s no coincidence in Luke. And that’s the surplus—the power of the resurrection, beyond the power of cleansing and restoration. If the nine got normalcy, the tenth got something new, something not normal, that new humanity that is a favorite theme of Luke, that new humanity that the Lord Jesus was bringing into the old world by the power of his resurrection. The tenth one was saved into the people of the resurrection, the new humanity.
What does it mean to be a human being? Build houses and plant gardens and take spouses and have children. The normal things, things all good, and what God wants for us, but to be a part of the new humanity is to know when to turn from all of that and return to God in praise and thanksgiving. To be a part of this new humanity is why you are saved. When your faith has saved you, that does mean cleansing, it does mean restoration to the world, but it also means orientation to God. It’s by your turning to God in praise and thanksgiving that you get the even greater fullness of the world. You are saved not to escape from the world, but to get you going in the world while God is renewing it. All ten had faith. All ten believed the command of Jesus and acted on it. But faith is more than just believing that God’s word is true. Faith is also vision. Faith sees more than observation can. Faith can hear the word of God in the voice of a human being. Faith can see the hand of God in ordinary things. And faith can see God’s renewal in the midst of all the breakdown and decay.
You here today are living like the lepers in between, in between the boundaries of life and death. You are on the way to death, although you are not cut off, nor you are dehumanized, though many people are. You live in tension. You live in disconnect. Maybe even in exile, like the Jews in Babylon, to whom Jeremiah wrote his letter.
Rabbi Bachman once pointed out to me that for the 5780 years of Jewish history, they’ve lived in exile for more years than in the Promised Land. So to, the Christians in the Roman Empire were treated as strangers and aliens even in their native lands. So you have to have hope for the future, but can you give thanks in the present tension, and praise God in the disconnect? Your praise and thanksgiving take faith, your faith to see what can’t be seen.
Praise and thanksgiving should be natural. If we take our cue from song birds and wildflowers with their extravagance of sound and color and the unnecessary complexity of stars and planets, then praise of God should be natural. But human beings are creatures with this extra moral sense, and your moral sense tells you that something is wrong with the normalcy of the world, and that existence means pain and suffering, and that leads you to question whether God is worthy of your thanks or even if there is a God to praise. Or we don’t question God, and we blame our creaturely misery on human sin, then how shall we praise God when we don’t feel at home in the world, how shall we give thanks when we’re in exile within the only world we know? So the first sober truth about praise and thanksgiving is that our experience of the world can argue convincingly against it. The second sober truth about praise and thanksgiving is that it takes faith just to do it. It takes faith to praise God against the arguments of experience and to thank God against the evidence of futility. It takes faith to live within the new humanity, not disconnected from the old but alive within the old, to recognize the goodness of God even in your failures and your failing body, to report the faithfulness of God even as you approach your death. It takes faith for praise and thanksgiving.
The third sober truth about praise and thanksgiving is that these are not optional, but a kind of obedience. We don’t just offer them as a result of our good times. Rather they are necessary, especially so for the bad times. To practice thanksgiving is to practice your faith. That’s a take home for today. If you want to live by your faith, then practice thanksgiving. Thanksgiving to God is the way to express your faith and the way to rehearse your faith and the way to maintain your faith.
Your praise and thanksgiving serve to save you. Your praise saves your soul, your thanksgiving saves your mind and your peace of mind, your thanksgiving saves your self-respect, your praise saves your voice and your music, your thanksgiving saves your spirit to rise up and get moving again. Your praise and thanksgiving are what save you for the new humanity and also keep you in it.
The fourth truth about praise and thanksgiving is not a sober one, but a joyful one. This truth is that praise and thanksgiving give off love. They are an exercise in faithfulness, which is the ground of love. Thanksgiving generates generosity, the sign of love, and praise yields affirmation and encouragement, the works of love. Gratitude yields grace, the attitude of love. You practice your praise and thanksgiving, finally, in order to live within the love of God.
Lamentations 3:19-26, Psalm 137, 2 Timothy 1:1-14, Luke 17:5-10
What are the obligations that you have in your life? You have obligations to your spouse, to your children, obligations to your job, to your employer, obligations to your landlord, or to the bank that financed your apartment, or to the bank that holds your student loans, obligations to the Park Slope Food Coop, if you choose to shop there, obligations to your pets, if you choose to have pets, and obligations to the government in which you have no choice, and if you don’t pay your taxes you can end up in jail, unless you’re President. Do you see your obligations as burdens, as enforced inconveniences, as constrictions on your freedom, or do you see them as valuable, helpful, giving you guidance, helping you be moral? Take your friendships. If you want to maintain your friendships you respect the obligations of friendship.
Obligations are actions and relationships you get no credit for fulfilling. It’s rather the other way around: if you don’t fulfill them you get sanctioned or punished. For most of Christendom, belief in Christ was considered so obligatory that if you didn’t do it, God was only right to punish you in the flames of hell forever. Obligations can be better enforced by fear than by law!
In the Reformed tradition of Christianity we took a different slant. I refer you to the Westminster Shorter Catechism, that anchor of Presbyterians and early Congregationalists. Question # 1: What is the chief end of man? Answer: The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy God forever. In other words, just by virtue of your being human you are obliged to glorify God. And if you don’t do your human duty, you should be punished—and though they interpreted the flames of hell as only metaphorical, they still believed in eternal conscious punishment for unbelief. (Which I do not, as you may know, although I am not a universalist.) Do you regard your Christian faith as an obligation? Or as your choice which you are free to make or not? I doubt that anyone here was compelled to be here, that you would get punished if you were not here, or risk your employment, or be subject to the sanctions of your family’s expectations. Indeed, the resistance is more likely against your being here. Should you not get some credit for it, for giving up some of your precious leisure time for church? Do you have an obligation to praise God, or are you free to hang your harp up on the willow tree when you don’t feel like praising God?
Isn’t this what Jesus’ parable is getting at, in our Gospel lesson for today? Listen again: “We are worthless slaves, we have done only what we ought to have done.” I doubt if this was as off-putting back then as it is now. Back then self-esteem and personal fulfillment were not your obligations in any way, and slavery was not regarded as categorically wrong. But it’s off-putting now, and it would be a sober truth: That your belief in Jesus and his teaching is basically your human obligation, so why should you expect any credit for doing it? It’s what you were made for. Just as a tree is obliged to the sun, and a horse is obliged to run, and just as a seed is obliged to lose itself in the earth and break open and sprout, so are you designed to live by your faith and you are therefore obliged to it. Faith in God is the obligation of your existence. How does this sound to you, who love your freedom?
You get the sense of obligation in our other lessons. In the Lamentations there is with all that grief and sorrow also the recognition that they deserved it. They had transgressed against the covenant that God had made with them, that covenant with its obligations liturgical and ritual and moral and even economic. For their failure to keep their obligations, even by title, they were being taken off the Promised Land that God had given them precisely to be the garden of those obligations.
In the Second Letter of St. Paul to Timothy, his protégé, we get words of sympathy and great encouragement, but you can’t escape the undertone of “Buck up, big boy, stop feeling so sorry for yourself, it wasn’t meant to be a picnic, just do your job. Your mother and your grandmother stood fast against the odds, and their gift of faith to you is now your obligation.” And dearly beloved, if you think about it, isn’t every gift that you’ve received also in some part an obligation? So too with the Gospel lesson. You have been given the gift of faith, and now your faith is an obligation that you have. You think of your faith as something you freely chose, your choice to add meaning and fulfillment to your life, but the gospel says that it was your duty anyway, your faith is obligatory, you owe it to God, you are accountable for it. That which you have freely chosen is only not to be delinquent, not to have defaulted on your obligations, and what credit is that to you? You are only doing what you are supposed to do. And if that’s true that is a sober truth.
We think of religion as something freely added on to life or not. But then you come to church, and you hear Jesus saying that you owe your life to God. And he compares you to a slave who is obliged to serve with no reward for your service except another job to do when you’re done with this one. You open yourself to this sober truth. You give it room within yourself. You let yourself get used to it. Even though, because of your enculturation, you can’t help but approach your religion as a consumer, and then the Lord Jesus pushes you off for being a consumer, you come right back at him. “I’m with you Jesus, I’m hanging on to you Jesus, I just need a little more faith to handle some of the things you say.” Especially when you find yourself a little angry or aggrieved or just tired.
You only asked him to increase your faith. And it’s like he made fun of you by saying you should have faith the size of a mustard seed. That’s confusing. Does he mean your faith is so infinitesimal to begin with that just to get it merely tiny would make you a regular superhero, or does he mean the opposite, to get your faith small, so that asking for more is a wrong request?
Then he suggests a miracle which is silly, because why would you command a tree to uproot itself and plant itself in the sea, which would kill the tree? Is the Lord Jesus teasing us here? Is he not teasing our desire for help, or even for spiritual power and success in being good? I think I get it, I’m a performer, I love to do well, I love when it I’m good, and I love approval of what I do. But the gospel says this to me: “Okay, you preached a good sermon—you were supposed to, what do you want, a medal? You want recognition? Go tend the sick, go visit some prisoners in jail.” How shall you regard this faith-in-Jesus obligation as life-giving and joy-returning and not just one more burden among all the other obligations you have anyway? Two things: first, it is that one great obligation that helps you measure all your other obligations and balance them. It is that one obligation that can free you from other obligations that the world will always put on you—the obligations expected by your family, the obligations expected by polite society, even the obligations demanded by your country. These obligations are now all relative, and for your choosing. So this one is the liberating obligation, the obligation that gives you greater freedom all around.
The second thing is that the burden of this one great obligation is not on you anyway, but on the Lord God who requires it of you. That is the greater gift. The value and strength of your commitment comes from the one whom you’ve committed to, not from you who commits. Like you’re a mediocre short-stop and God is a fabulous first-baseman, who snags your throw no matter how badly you threw it. No matter how well or poorly you’ve fulfilled your obligations, it’s the One to whom you are obliged who keeps your fulfillment for you. No need to be ashamed of your record.
That’s what St. Paul says in his advice to Timothy, which sounds like it could be have been said by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “But I am not ashamed, for I know the one in whom I have put my trust, and I am sure that he is able to guard until that day what I have entrusted to him.”
This is also taught us by that famous first answer from the Heidelberg Catechism, that older and more lovely anchor of the Reformed tradition: My only comfort in life and in death is that I am not my own, but I belong . . . to my faithful savior Jesus Christ. . . . Because I belong to him, Christ, by his Holy Spirit, makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now to live for him. This is love-talk. Lovers who belong each other regard their obligations to each other as the pleasures of their love. Their gifts are their obligations and their obligations are their gifts. So if you are obligated to love God, you do it because God loved you first.
Daniel James Meeter grew up in Manhattan, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Jersey, and Long Island. He was ordained to the Reformed Church ministry in 1980, and has served churches in Jersey, Michigan, and Ontario. He earned a Ph.D. from Drew University in 1989, and has published two technical books in theology as well as many articles. He is married to Rev. Melody Takken Meeter, the Director of Pastoral Care at the Lutheran Medical Center of Brooklyn. They have two married children.
The Old First Mission Statement:
Old First Reformed Church is a community of Jesus Christ in Brooklyn. We welcome persons of every ethnicity, race, and orientation to worship, serve, and love God, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. We embrace the following missions:
1. To offer God's word, prayer, the sacraments, and discipleship; 2. To offer outreach, education, fellowship, and music;
3. To offer sanctuary to anyone seeking spirituality and hope;
4. To offer hospitality to community groups and the arts; 5. To care for the gifts we have been given through our Reformed Church, including our historic sanctuary and building.
