DATE: Reformation Sunday — October 27th, 2013
SCRIPTURE:
Jeremiah 31:31-34; Luke 18:9-14
©Rev. Alison J. Buttrick Patton
Seabury Center
So why did the tax collector get off so easy; and why didn’t the Pharisee get even a little credit for being faithful, for doing the right thing? That’s the question we wrestled with in Bible study this week. After all, the Pharisee was, in fact, a devout Jew, the kind that always showed up, paid his dues, and served on all the committees. Doesn’t any of that count? The tax collector, on the other hand, earned his keep on the backs of Jewish peasants. A certain sum was owed to Rome, so the more the tax collector managed to extort, the more he could keep for himself. No one liked a tax collector. And yet, he’s the one who leaves the temple “justified.”
…Justified, which is one of those churchy words, code that we may need to unpack. In everyday conversation, we use it to connect actions and consequences. As in: “Yes, I may have lost my temper, but I was totally justified because that driver completely cut me off. She deserved the dirty look I gave her.” Or “I worked hard to earn this salary; it’s mine, so am justified in spending it however I see fit.”
Given our use of the word, you might expect the parable to have gone like this: The tax collector, standing far off, cried out to God, “Have mercy on me.” Then the skies opened up, there was a flash of light, a clap of thunder, and where the tax collector had been standing and praying, there remained nothing but a small pile of ash. As the disciples looked on in horror, Jesus explained: “Don’t you see? The tax collector’s bad behavior completely justified God’s response.”
Of course, that’s not how the story goes; as he so often does, Jesus turns our expectations on their head. The one who appeals for forgiveness is granted forgiveness, not because he has earned it, but because he has asked, and because God’s capacity to forgive, God’s grace is utterly beyond our reckoning, beyond reason, beyond amazing.
Grace is another one of those churchy words, one you may not often employ at work or in line at the grocery store. Gracious: Yes. Graceful: Sure. But Grace? As in: “Amazing grace, how sweat the sound that saved a wretch like me…” Perhaps not so much.
And yet maybe you have felt grace – Felt it warm on your face, in sunlight streaming through flame-colored leaves. Maybe you’ve been captivated, as I have, by a display of autumn light and color so exuberant that it draws you out of the gloom and restores your sense of wonder. Grace is suddenly remembering how to breathe.
It’s managing, by some strength not your own, to reach for the phone instead of that bottle in the cupboard; it’s hearing the person you most need to pick up the phone say, ‘Hello?’…
Grace is finding the courage to say, ‘I’m sorry,’ not really because you’re sure you mean it, but because you hope against hope that it might start the healing; it’s being surprised when the hurt really does begin to melt away…
It’s seeing a rainbow flag in a church, just when you’d stopped believing that anyone cared; just when you’d almost bought the line that you can’t be both gay and precious in God’s eyes.
Grace is God’s way of stepping into the broken places, spanning the breach, getting us the rest of the way, doing in and with and between us, what we can’t manage on our own. It’s the rope bridge that gets us across the chasm of our grief or fear or division, across the chasm to freedom.
The Pharisee had forgotten all about grace – not that grace wasn’t working in his life; he just failed to see it, to give grace its due. Instead, he took all the credit for himself. “Look at me. I’m not like those sinners: I have managed just fine. Taken all the proper steps. Checked all the boxes under ‘how to be faithful.’ Reward, please.”
Only, that’s not how it works. We can’t buy forgiveness. That’s what the 16th century reformers said, what Martin Luther said, when he nailed his 95 Theses to the front doors of Castle Church of Wittenburg on October 31st, All Hallows’ Eve, 1517. Like the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable, the Church of sixteenth century Europe had gotten a bit too proud, perhaps too reliant on its rituals, more focused on checking boxes then on making room for God’s amazing but unpredictable grace. “We’ve got everything under control,” the priests said. “We’ll tell you what it means, which steps to take, and how many indulgences you need to buy in order to be forgiven.”
So the Great Reformation began as a protest movement, an appeal to the church to remember that we are saved, healed, made whole not by our own efforts, or by any priestly mandate, but by God’s grace, freely given. It started is an intra-church debate; Martin Luther never meant to launch a new church; he wanted nothing more than to re-form his beloved Catholic Church. But when the dust settled, the Protestant Church had been born; and the face of Christianity had been forever changed.
And not for the first time. Religious historian Phyllis Tickle has observed that the church experiences this kind of overhaul, what she calls a major yard sale, every 500 years!1 In the 1500s there was the Great Reformation; 500 years before that: The Great Schism (between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches); 500 years before that, the fall of the Roman Empire; and 500 years before that: the life of Jesus of Nazareth and the birth of the Christian church. Each of these seasons was accompanied by economic and cultural shifts that fundamentally changed the shape of the church – forming and re-forming it every few centuries.
And now? Five hundred years after the Reformation, Phyllis Tickle and others say we are smack dab in the middle of another such shift, or ‘hinge time’. She calls this one the Great Emergence. You’ve felt it, if you’ve been around for more than a few years – the change in the way that folks relate to church. We look around and wonder why numbers are down, why it’s so hard to get volunteers, why we can’t sustain the level of activity we used to enjoy. We are told that membership doesn’t matter to younger generations; that they don’t trust institutions (and perhaps that’s not surprising, when you count the institutional failures they have witnessed just in the last decade – from sexual misconduct by priests to hanging chads to the subprime mortgage crisis). The Church, far from being the center of civic life it once was, has taken up a new post at the margin of public life. We can no longer assume that “find a church” (or a synagogue) is on the to-do list for every family that moves to town.
The largest growing segment of our U.S. population is those who check ‘none of the above’ on surveys that ask for religious affiliation. Sometimes they get referred to as the ‘Nones’. But they more often call themselves ‘spiritual but not religious’ – they have faith, crave encounters with the holy – they just don’t think they’ll find those encounters in church. A few sobering statistics (some of you heard this is our small group discussion last week):
91% of 16-29 year olds think the church is anti-gay;
87% say the church is too judgmental;
85% say it’s hypocritical;
78% say it’s old fashioned;
75% say it’s too involved in conservative politics;
70% say it’s insensitive,
and a whole bunch of them say we are boring…
Here’s the good news: That’s not who we are in the United Church of Christ, or at Saugatuck Church; it’s not who we aspire to be. Still, those voices remind us that we’ve got work to do, if ever we want to connect with those who are not already here. We need to be about the holy work of re-forming the Church for this generation. Re-forming: which does not mean throwing everything out and starting from scratch. It means reclaiming our most ancient roots, taking the very stuff of our faith, like our stories about grace, and sharing them in ways that connect with new generations. It means remembering why we do what we do.
So we ask all over again, as we have asked every 500 years: What does it mean to follow Jesus? That’s what the disciples asked. Why Jesus told all those parables in the first place. “Following me looks like this,” he said, “and like this…” It looks like sharing our wealth with others – not so we can boast, but because we have come to the humble realization that all we have comes from God, that it is God who gives us breath and strength, intellect and ingenuity…What we gain, we gain by grace…
Following Jesus looks like trusting in God, even when we don’t know what’s ahead, because we are being led by grace.
And some days, following Jesus looks like beating our breasts and praying, “Have mercy on us!” Have mercy on us for being more concerned with our own checklists then with those who are hungry and right outside our door; have mercy on us for loving our routines more than we love You.
People of God: the church is indeed re-forming, taking on a new shape, right before our eyes. We can’t know where this is headed, but that’s ok. Martin Luther says, “Faith is permitting ourselves to be seized by the things we do not see.” To be seized: to put ourselves in God’s hands, to say, like the tax collector said: “We need you, God. We can’t do this without you.” And then to be swept up in the arms the One who loves us without fail.
I am not worried about the future of the church, because it’s in God’s hands. The church may not look exactly as it has before. But our grandchildren don’t look or act exactly as we do, either. They carry within them our DNA, but they live in the world in their own way, bring their own gifts and graces. So will this emerging church bear our finger prints, and something more: signs of grace, amazing grace.
Scripture Texts
Jeremiah 31:31-34
31The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 32It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. 33But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.
Luke 18:9-14
9He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: 10“Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. 12I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ 13But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ 14I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”