Not Like Them -- Reformation Sunday

Luke 18:9-14

October 27, 2019

            “There but for the grace of God go I.”

            I find myself using this expression a lot. I say it to myself when I see someone selling The Contributor on a street corner in Nashville, or when I see a person on the side of the road with a duffle bag and holding up a sign asking for food or money or anything that can be spared.

            “There but for the grace of God go I.”

            The first time I ever heard that phrase was when I was about 11 or 12 years old. It was my first trip to California, and my mom and I had gone out for a family wedding. During our visit, my mother, my aunts, my cousins and I were eating pie in a pie shop when a woman came in would now be considered morbidly obese. She was noticed. Every person I was sitting at table with that day understood the painful and constant struggle with weight. I was only in 8^th grade, but I was well on my way to understanding that struggle as well. I think that the empathy felt by my family members was real and sincere. But as we sat there, eating our desserts, shaking our heads with sadness and sympathy for her plight, one of my aunts said,

“There but for the grace of God go I.”

I have to be honest, I liked that expression the minute I heard it. I thought those words expressed care and concern for the recipient of the sentiment, while also reminding the person saying it that there were people far worse off. It seemed like the perfect way to put myself into the proverbial shoes of another. Whenever I see someone in a bad way, I think,

“That could be me, but it’s not. There but for the grace of God go I.”

I would probably continue to use this expression, had I not referred to some biblical commentators who pointed out that saying those familiar words is just a nicer sounding way of expressing what the Pharisee expresses in his prayer.

“Thank you God that I am not a sinner like that tax collector over there.”

What would you think if I were to stand in the pulpit and call us to prayer saying,

“Dear God, thank you. Thank you that we are not like the losers outside of these doors. Thank you that we are not like the people who don’t go to church at all or sleep in on Sundays, or read the paper or stare at their phones more than they read your holy Word. Thank you that we know how important it is to be here. Thank you that we know how right it is to be in your house rather than at brunch somewhere.” Thank you, God that we are not like them.”

If I prayed that prayer, you would be appalled, and well you should. But think about what I could get away with if I stood here and prayed, “There, but for the grace of God go I.”

You see the problem with this kind of prayer, however I might express it, is that I pray not out of humility but out of self-righteousness. That is what Jesus is getting at in this parable that he tells, isn’t he? He tells it in response to people who exalt themselves and look at others with contempt. Right from the start then, we know that do not want to be like the Pharisee. We hear how his words ring with false piety.

“Thank you God that I am not like bad people all around me. Thank you that I am not a thief or a cheat. Look at me, God. I am so good. I do all the right things. I keep the Law; in fact I go above and beyond what I am required to do to keep the Law. Yay me!”

No, we want to be like the tax collector who beats his chest and simply prays,

“God, I am a sinner. I am a sinner and I know it. Have mercy on me. I am a sinner.”

Forget the Pharisee. The truth is, I know I am so much more like the tax collector. I know I am a sinner and I am not afraid to admit it. I know that I need to turn to God for grace and mercy. I am definitely not self-righteous like that Pharisee. I know I could be like the Pharisee, but thankfully I’m not! There but for the grace of God go I.

Oh. No.

Preacher and scholar David Lose, describes this parable as being so clear and to the point that we miss the trap that it sets for us. None of us want to be like the self-righteous Pharisee, proclaiming his goodness and his faithfulness. We want to be like the tax collector; willing to admit our sinfulness, asking only that God have mercy on us. As Jesus says, the exalted will be humbled and the humbled will be exalted. I want to be one of the humbled that gets exalted in the great reversal emphasized again and again in Luke’s gospel.

But here is the reality that we often miss. It is just as easy to be self-righteous in our sinfulness as it is in our goodness.

I am a sinner and I know it! But thank you, God, that I am not like them, those other sinners who don’t know it. They are so smug and self-righteous. But I am not like them. There but for the grace of God go I.

Kind of puts a different slant on it, doesn’t it? Either person we choose to identify with – the Pharisee or the tax collector – means that we can fall into the trap of self-righteousness. We are just so grateful that we are not like them.

But I think in trying to be or trying to not be like either one of these characters is actually us missing the point.  Maybe the real point of this parable is that it isn’t about the Pharisee or the tax collector. It’s not about them, and it isn’t about us. It isn’t about us at all. That’s where we run into trouble. We think that it is about us, but it’s not. It’s not about us being good or about us being sinful. The real subject of this parable is God. It is about what God does, how God acts in the world, the mercy God shows to all of God’s children, the exalting or the humbling at God’s hand. It is about God.

Isn’t that at the heart of the Reformation? Today is Reformation Sunday; the day when denominations still willing to claim Martin Luther and John Calvin and so many others as our spiritual ancestors remember how we as Reformed Christians came to be.

What do we know about Martin Luther? While traveling he was caught in a terrible storm, and he promised God that if he survived he would dedicate his life to God. He did and he did. Luther became a monk. He was called upon to teach and to preach, to preside over the sacraments. Yet he felt so completely unworthy that he tortured himself over his salvation. There was nothing he could do to earn it. He could never be good enough to merit salvation or justification by God. He was conflicted, to say the least, and he began to see the Church with new eyes. He traveled to Rome, the great holy city, and there he saw firsthand how the indulgences that the church sold exploited the poor and the powerless. Buying an indulgence meant that you brought a loved one a few more steps out of purgatory and a little closer to eternal life in heaven. It was when Luther began to study the book of Romans that he realized it was not about him. It was not about what he could or could not do. It was not about his own self-righteousness. It was about God.

John Calvin, although he came to his own conversion and covenant with God differently from Luther, also realized that every aspect of our lives should give honor to God. God was the subject of every aspect of our lives. God was the author of every part of our lives. We had no choice but to put God first. When he answered the call to go to Geneva and lead the people there that was Calvin’s intent. Geneva would be a truly reformed city. It would be the city that understood that everything is about God. The first time Calvin tried this it didn’t go so well. He was run out of the city on a rail. But the second time went much better than the first. I guess it may have taken the people of Geneva a while to understand that it wasn’t about them either.

I’m not making the claim that these two men or any of the other reformers, and there were many, were perfect. In spite of their best intentions, they still fell into the trap of thinking it was about them. I suspect they still prayed the prayer of the Pharisee: thank you God that we are not like them. But what the reformers recognized was that it was not just individuals who forgot that the subject was God, the Church had forgotten that as well. The Church had forgotten that, and it is still forgetting; just like the Pharisee, just like us.

While we talk about the Reformation as an historical event, it seems to me that what being a church in the reformed tradition really means is that we understand that we are never done with reforming or being reformed. That is our motto, “Reformed, always reforming.” We are never done with the need for reformation, because it is just so easy to make everything about us. But it isn’t about us. It is about God.

It is about God: a Creator who pulled and pulls good out of bad, life out of chaos. It is about God; not just some far off being who watches us from a detached position somewhere out there. It is about God who loves, who became incarnate, who became one of us to make manifest that Love. The Love of God had flesh and bone, eyes, hand and heart. It is about God who is still with us, showing up in unlikely places and in unlikely people, blowing new life into what we think is dead. It is about God who is in every act of kindness, mercy, grace, forgiveness. It is about God who calls us to be the body of Christ in the world; to be the hands and feet and heart in a world that is so broken because we keep forgetting it isn’t about us. It is about God. It is about God. It is about God. May we be truly humbled in our knowledge of that glorious, wonderful, amazing good news! It is about God.

Let all of God’s children say, “Alleluia!” Amen.