Preacher: Jenn Hosler

Scripture: Luke 18:9-14

Our tagline as a congregation is “Seeking justice, wholeness, and community through the gospel of Jesus.”  We can unpack that a little. Justice – we want to work for social justice in our city, our country, and our world. Wholeness – this comes from the biblical word for peace, shalom, which can mean wholeness, fullness, and right relationship. Called to be peacemakers, we seek the wholeness of all people. Community – more than just gathering on Sundays, as Anabaptist Christians, we believe cultivating community is the goal of church, a community that gathers, holds each other accountable, shares, and discerns together. 

Seeking justice, wholeness, and community. All of this is not in a vacuum or something secular; what we are seeking to build and do together is framed through the gospel of Jesus. 

What is the gospel, the good news, of Jesus? We’ve been working for several months through the gospel of Luke, the recording of Jesus’ life, ministry, miracles, death, and resurrection.  We see lots of liberation in Luke, God’s great reversals where the first will be last and the last will be first, the rich will be cast down, and the poor will be lifted up. In Luke, we see the gospel defined as good news for the poor, freedom for the prisoner, recovery of sight to the blind, liberation for the oppressed. 

We see Jesus use those words in Luke 4:18-19, when he reads from the scroll and gives a mini sermon in the synagogue of Nazareth. We can work through many other places, such as Mary’s Magnificat song or Jesus’ parables, that support this reading. The inbreaking of God into the world transforms the social order.

We’d be remiss, though, if we described the work of Jesus solely as transforming the social order. Like our tagline, Jesus’ preaching and teaching on justice and liberation is not in a vacuum but framed as part of God the Creator’s healing work in our world. In Luke, Jesus isn’t just calling us to do social justice but to do so as part of God’s story. The good news of the gospel involves healing the world, turning the social order upside down, freeing the oppressed, building new economies. The good news also includes calling people to repentance, seeking greater love for God and neighbor, embodying transparency and authentic faith, and practicing mercy and forgiveness. 

We see Jesus calling people in to beloved community, to repentance and transformation. In Luke 5, Jesus is walking and sees a tax collector named Levi, sitting at a kiosk for collecting taxes. Jesus says, “Follow me,” and Levi leaves everything and follows Jesus. Luke writes that Levi throws “a great banquet for Jesus in his home” and “a large number of tax collectors and others [sit] down to eat with him.” The religious leaders grumble and say, “Why do you eat with tax collectors and sinners?” Jesus answers, “Healthy people don’t need a doctor, but sick people do. I didn’t come to call righteous people but sinners to change their hearts and lives.”

For churches that value both God’s inner transformations and God’s outward liberating power outward into the world, it can be a balancing act to adequately touch on both of these crucial threads. I imagine we sometimes veer to emphasizing God’s liberating power. Particularly in an age of White Christian nationalism and American empire, in an era of rising authoritarianism and even fascism, I think it is reasonable and prudent to lean into God’s liberating work for the poor and the prisoner and the oppressed. 

We need this message, particularly considering the false gospels that get a lot of airtime. We do need to skill up in terms of organizing and tools for resistance, while also girding ourselves with a holistic gospel that truly must be good news for the poor. At the same time, I think we must skill up in terms of spiritual practices and the inward transformation of our hearts, since God’s revolution is catalyzed and sustained by the Holy Spirit’s work within us. Liberation is transformation at multiple levels; the transformations we see Jesus calling us to in Scripture include inward humility and a need for God’s work in our hearts. 

Our text today is in Luke 18:9-14. Jesus is on the road, having left the northern Galilee region some time ago. He has been teaching, preaching, and healing on the journey to Jerusalem. I imagine some of Jesus’ recorded teachings are stops along the way, while others may be sayings from the walking journey itself. Our text is a parable, which Luke says that Jesus tells “to certain people who had convinced themselves that they were righteous and who looked on everyone else with disgust” (v. 6). Oof. We see where this is going and who it is aimed at. 

In this parable, the temple in Jerusalem is our stage, and our spotlight is on two specific people who have come to pray: a Pharisee and a tax collector. In Jesus’ day, the Pharisee, as a Jewish religious leader and “righteous” person, would have been seen as the “good guy” and the tax collector would have been seen as the “bad guy.” In Jesus’ community, tax collectors were Jews who collected taxes on behalf of Rome, the occupying and oppressing power, and they often shook people down for taxes plus extra money to line their own pockets. So, we have a Pharisee and a tax collector.

The Pharisee stands up, apart from everyone else (which is a curious thing to do in a temple that was likely full of people). He prays “about himself” with the following words: “God, I thank you that I’m not like everyone else—crooks, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week. I give a tenth of everything I receive.”  The Pharisee recounts the things he is doing right, some of the religious practices that observant Jews and Jewish leaders in that era should be doing. 

Meanwhile, the Tax Collector stands “far off” – at a distance or apart from everyone else. The phrasing is different than with the Pharisee, and it seems like it is the “bad” version of “standing far off.” Either the tax collector doesn’t feel worthy of being at the center of it all or he isn’t permitted to be with everyone else, due to his social standing. This tax collector, Jesus says, “won’t even lift his eyes to look toward heaven.” Instead, eyes closed or eyes downcast, the tax collector beats his chest in mourning and says, “God, show mercy to me, a sinner.”

Jesus declares to his listeners, “It is the Tax Collector who leaves the Temple justified in God’s eyes, rather than the Pharisee. All who lift themselves up will be brought low, and those who make themselves low will be lifted up.” Like many other times in Luke, we see the great reversal – the first will be last, the low will be lifted up. 

We see Jesus using this story to interrogate the intentions of the religious person. Look at the Pharisee’s prayer – is it really a prayer to God? God is mentioned at the beginning, but there sure are a lot of first-person pronouns… “I, I, I.” Is the Pharisee asking God to commend him for his work? This has been referred to by one commentary as a “narcissistic soliloquy” (Cousar et al., p. 574). Jesus calls out this hypothetical Pharisee for justifying himself and looking at others with disgust. I think the Pharisee is also contrasted by his lack of need for God and his failure to acknowledgement of God’s work in his life. “God, I’m grateful for me, that I’m not like those terrible people, and I follow the rules.” It doesn’t really seem like the Pharisee needs God.

The Tax Collector, in contrast, has likely been breaking the Mosaic commandment against stealing by asking for money he was not legally entitled to collect. We don’t know what has happened in the Tax Collector’s life and how crooked he is. Yet his need for God, his humility before God, is evident. Jesus commends this tax collector as “justified” in God’s eyes because he has brought himself low, recognizing his need for God and God’s mercy. 

Giving mercy may be easier for some of us. Asking for and receiving God’s mercy might be harder. Perhaps we might quote Micah 6:8, emphasizing the first parts and mumbling a little on the end: “and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love mercy… and to walk humbly with God.” Do we recognize our need for God to walk with us on this liberating journey?

In this text, the Tax Collector refers to himself as a sinner. In the Luke 5 tax collector story of Levi that I quoted from earlier, Jesus says too that he has come to rescue sinners, not the righteous (or those who “think they are” righteous). If the Tax Collector here in Luke 18 is an example to emulate, should we also be using this language of “sinner”? For some, understanding ourselves as a “sinner” might make us uncomfortable. Sin and sinner language is not something that I have a lot of comfort with, especially because it has been so misused and abused. People have been clobbered and judged, filled with shame because of the ways that churches have spoken about “sin.”  

Yet we see that Jesus calls his followers to a particular ethic of love and mercy. That means that we, like the Tax Collector, are called to a self-awareness and mindfulness that orients ourselves to our need of God and God’s mercy. We’re called to a posture, an attitude, of humility and also repentance – of recognition when we fail to live of up to Jesus’ standards of love and mercy. The fruit of the Spirit—the hallmarks of Jesus-followers—are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control. When we miss the mark on these, the community of Jesus-followers is not to lambast each other as sinners but to call each other in, to accountability and growth, in love. There is a community piece. Also, as individuals, we can build in practices of self-awareness and mindfulness to cultivate humility before God. 

As a parent, I try to be intentional to model humility. I try to acknowledge when I make a mistake, when I speak too sharply or I make some other bad judgment call in terms of parenting. I take the time to talk about it with my child, I name it, I talk about my intentions, about my goals for how we treat one another, and I also say I am sorry and that I will try to do better. I ask for forgiveness. I’ve read about how modeling this both builds a strong relationship with children and also helps them understand that right behavior is not just rule following – it is about relationship, caring for others. 

Next week, we will start community conversations about our congregation: what we’re doing, what we want to be as a church, and what we need in order to embody and manifest our ideal community. I hope this will be the start of a process where we explore the potential for our community life together as a congregation. What are we building together, as a beloved community following Jesus, seeking justice, wholeness, and community through the gospel of Jesus? What do we seek to model with one another and within ourselves, as we seek to build a community marked by humility, grace, mercy, and transformation? What spiritual practices do we want to explore and cultivate or skill up with one another, drawing closer to God and nourishing ourselves by the power of the Spirit? I encourage you to start thinking about what your needs are, in terms of spiritual practices and spiritual growth, in terms of community. How can we grow as a congregation that seeks justice, wholeness, and community through the gospel of Jesus, the good news that transforms both our society and our hearts? What tools or practices or resources do we need along the way?

The Tax Collector’s prayer from today’s passage has become a very famous prayer, one that has been prayed for more than a thousand years, since the early 500s. It is a very common prayer in the Eastern Orthodox traditions of Christianity. In Luke, we read, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” It has been adapted, focusing on the name of Jesus, and the “Jesus Prayer” is recited as follows: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” It is repeated as a meditative prayer, for centering and orienting hearts, and to have a repetition to make it easier to “pray without ceasing.” This prayer is also referred to as a “prayer of the heart” that enables us to slow down, hear the voice of God, recognize our faults and failures, and seek God’s mercy and forgiveness. 

As I seek to live into growing our community’s spiritual practices, I am going to invite us to spent a few minutes in silent meditative prayer, praying this Jesus prayer, adapted from the Tax Collector.  “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.“

References

Cousar, C. B., Gaventa, McCann, & Newsome. (1994). Texts for preaching: A lectionary commentary, based on the NRSV. Year C. Westminster John Knox Press.