Voices

Old Testament: Joel 2:28-32
New Testament: Luke 18:9-14

We need each other. In particular, we need each other’s voices. And sometimes, the voices we need are the ones we’d least expect.

There is a old story, retold by Jonathan Sacks, in which a rabbi’s disciple approaches him with a question.

“Do you think,” the disciple asks, “that God created everything for a purpose?”

“I do,” replies the rabbi.

“Well,” asks the disciple, “Why did God create atheists?”

It’s a good question. It’s one I ask when I hear some of those in the “New Atheist” movement, like Sam Harris, who wrote, “Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings.”[1]

Or take the magician/comedian Penn Jillette, whose “This I Believe” essay for NPR begins: “I believe that there is no God.” He goes on to, apparently, ridicule the idea of faith, claiming: “You can’t prove there isn’t an elephant inside the trunk of my car. You sure? How about now? Maybe he was just hiding before. Check again. Did I mention that my personal heartfelt definition of the word ‘elephant’ includes mystery, order, goodness, love, and a spare tire?”[2]

After reading a certain number of these obnoxious quotes, I begin to think, “Thank you, God, that I am not like these atheists!”

But back to the disciple’s question: why did God create atheists? The rabbi takes a moment to think carefully before answering the young man. “Sometimes we who believe, believe too much. We see the cruelty, the suffering, the injustice in the world and we say: ‘This is the will of God.’ We accept what we should not accept. That is when God sends us atheists to remind us that what passes for religion is not always religion. Sometimes what we accept in the name of God is what we should be fighting against in the name of God.”[3]

And so, with that in mind, I try to listen more closely to the rest of Jillette’s essay.

“Believing there’s no God,” he says, “Means I can’t really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That’s good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around. …

“Believing there’s no God means the suffering I’ve seen in my family, and indeed all the suffering in the world, isn’t caused by an omniscient, omnipotent force that isn’t bothered to help or is just testing us, but rather something we all may be able to help others with in the future.”

These are powerful correctives to ways in which the Christian faith has been misused and misunderstood. We believe in forgiveness, but that isn’t a free pass to be thoughtless. We believe God will ease suffering, but that doesn’t let us off the hook from working to relieve suffering ourselves.

We need each other. And we need each other’s voices.

This is something you might not expect from the parable we read this morning. There are two voices in that story: One who says, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people.” And another who says, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” It would be easy to dismiss the first voice – the voice of the Pharisee, who sounds like a self-righteous jerk. But as we have seen over the past several weeks, Jesus’ parables are not easy to interpret. Jesus didn’t need parables to tell people what not to do; instead, he used them to uncover the complexities of life in this world and life in the world to come. On the surface, this story looks like a clear-cut comparison between a haughty religious person and a humble, repentant sinner. But let’s dig a little deeper.

What is it, exactly, that rubs us the wrong way about this Pharisee? He certainly thinks highly of himself: “I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.” And perhaps if that were all he’d said, we could be okay with him.

But instead, he prefaces these remarks by contrasting himself with others: “I am not like other people – thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax-collector!” I don’t particularly like what he says, but how many of us have said something similar? We even have a common expression – “There but for the grace of God go I” – that says, essentially, the same thing: “Thank you, God, for not putting me in the same circumstances as this person.” If we walk away from this parable thinking, “God, thank you that I am not like this Pharisee,” then we will have totally missed the point.

If I’m going to try and elevate the Pharisee (at least somewhat) in your sight, then I also need to take the tax collector down a peg or two. “Be merciful to me, a sinner,” he says. This tax collector is humble. He has an accurate view of himself. Oftentimes, tax collectors would overcharge people, keeping the extra for themselves. They were seen as traitors who were willing to sell out their neighbors in order to collect taxes for Rome. And so, this tax collector confesses his sin. But notice what he does not say.

In the next chapter of Luke’s Gospel, Jesus meets a tax collector named Zacchaeus who seems to be an exception to the rule – he’s honest. “If I’ve cheated anyone of anything,” he says, “I pay four times the damage.”

Our tax collector doesn’t seem to be willing to make the same promise. “Be merciful to me, a sinner,” he says. And don’t you get the sense, perhaps, that he’ll walk out of the Temple still a sinner? That he’ll go back to work on Monday and, more than likely, that he’ll add a few dollars to Mrs. Green’s tax bill?

And speaking of walking out of the Temple, let’s take another look at the last verse of our passage for today: “I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other,” it says. Except, maybe that’s not what it says. As you probably know, the New Testament wasn’t written in English. It was written in Koine Greek, and while I don’t often delve into translation issues in a sermon (because usually it feels like showing off), in this passage I think the translation of one word changes the whole image of what’s happening in that last verse.

“I tell you, this man went down to his home justified para the other.” The Greek preposition para is the word that most translations take to mean “instead of.” This paints a picture of the tax collector being justified instead of the Pharisee. But think about that for a second: isn’t there something strange about that? Is God’s justification a limited commodity? Is there not enough forgiveness for two people? The word para can, indeed, be used to compare two things; however, it is more commonly used to join two things. Think of English words that use para as a prefix: parallel lines run alongside one another; a paralegal works alongside lawyers.

With this in mind, the more straightforward reading of the verse would be: “I tell you, this man went down to his home justified alongside the other.”

How do you feel about that? Does it seem right to you? Does it seem fair? The haughty Pharisee and the unrepentant tax collector, walking out of the Temple, both justified in God’s eyes? I’ll be honest, it unsettles me.

You’ve heard me talk about Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish scholar of the New Testament, who argues that Jesus’ parables are meant to unsettle us. This story reminds her of the times she had to do group projects in middle school. There was always someone in the group who didn’t seem to be pulling his weight. And then, at the end of the project, everyone got the same grade, regardless of what he contributed. How fair is that? It’s not. By definition it’s not fair! And neither is the story of a corrupt tax collector and a self-involved Pharisee, both of whom receive God’s forgiveness after praying in the Temple.

Jesus’ story provokes us. It pushes us to think more deeply about that gut instinct. That rush to say, “It’s not fair.”

Levine explains what this parable helped her realize: “My sense of justice then was too narrow, my sense of generosity was too constrained, my sense of self-import too great. But that … person, whom we dismissed as lazy, as stupid, or as unable to contribute, may well have done what he could. … And what if he didn’t care at all? What if he depended on us, even thought we were fools for doing his work for him? What we do is still worthwhile. We can afford to be generous. … We all have something to contribute, even if what we give is the opportunity for someone else to provide us a benefit.”[4]

We need each other.

I wonder if Jesus was thinking of the prophet Joel when he told this story. The prophet who said that, in the end, God is not stingy with salvation but is extravagant: “I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female slaves, in those days, I will pour out my spirit.”

I wonder if that passage informed his decision to tell a story about complicated people who both receive justification from God. I wonder if that passage sprung to mind when the woman from outside Jesus’ community asked him for help, saying, “Lord, even the dogs eat the crumbs from the table!”

I wonder how this story might change us. Perhaps it can remind us to be more tolerant of the person at work whom we’d rather not deal with. Perhaps it can inspire us, not just to tolerate that person, but to actively look to them for what God is saying to us. Perhaps it can remind us that, when we argue, when our opinions differ, the one option we don’t have is to walk away from each other.

Because we need each other. We need rabbis and atheists; we need the proud, the humble, the arrogant; we need the wise and the foolish and all those in-between; we need the rich and the poor; we need the faithful and the faithless; we need the lovers and the broken-hearted.

And we meet each other at this table, where there is a place set for all those who love God and those who want to love God more.

So come: you who have much faith and you who have little,
you who have been here often, and you who have not been for a long time,
you who have tried to follow and you who have failed.
Come, not because I invite you: it is the Lord,
and it is God’s will that those who desire life should meet God here.[5]

Amen.

Preached November 1, 2015, by Rev. Joshua T. Andrzejewski

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[1] Sam Harris, The End of Faith (2004).

[2] Penn Jillett, “There is No God,” Nov. 21, 2005.

[3] Rabbi Jonathan Sacks Why God Created Atheists

[4] Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus (2014), p. 194.

[5] From the Iona community