The Dalai Lama and the Pharisee
The 22nd Sunday after Pentecost
October 24, 2010
St. James’ Episcopal Church, Pullman WA
Joel 3:23-32; Luke 18:9-14
I don’t usually pitch the upcoming issue of the Tower because it sells itself. But this month you’ll be reading about a preaching conference attended by Dianne Lowe and Dean Ritchie. Both Dean and Dianne have told me what a profound experience it was for them to participate in that conference, and Dianne has contributed an article reflecting on the process. I know something about that life-altering effect because I had the privilege attending a week long conference on preaching at The Virginia Seminary shortly after graduating from seminary some ten years ago. Coming from the rough and crumbling facilities at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, we were immediately struck by the beauty and grandeur of the campus in Alexandria.
At VTS, the smallest dorm room was a large suite with its own private bath; meals were served in an ante-bellum mansion built as a refectory for the gentlemen (and then ladies) who would be raised up there to preach God’s word. The graceful 19th century brick and wood chapel was another part of the simple grandeur of the place. Our course involved daily prayer in the chapel – including a sermon from the excellent preachers — Barbara Brown Taylor, Linda Clader, David Schlafer — who had come to help us that week grow into our craft. One memorable event for me was the closing Eucharist – when I, newly ordained a deacon, was invited to administer the bread. So newly ordained, it hadn’t occurred to me to travel with vestments. I rummaged through the sacristy to find an alb. But Virginia is the bastion of the southern church, where choir dress of black cassock and long white surplice is the norm, even at the Eucharist. Only the dean, Martha Horne, possessed an alb – and it was her alb I wore when I served at the altar that day.
Among those present at the conference were senior students from seminaries throughout the country, including students from seminaries in dioceses that do not ordain women or recognize the ordained ministry of women. The year before there had been a scene, when the students from Nashota House had risen up as one and marched out of the chapel rather than receive bread from the hand of a woman. Throughout the week I had been in classes with some of the Nashota seniors, had sat at meals with them, prayed with them. One of them had given me insight into the use of the Anglican prayer beads I had just that week purchased from the National Cathedral. So when it came time for the bread to be administered at the altar rail, the men from Nashota House lined up in front of my station, and made sure I was the one who placed the Body of Christ into their hands.
Friday afternoon that chapel, built around the same time that Episcopalians first came to Pullman, the chapel that heard the incredible sermons of those wonderful preachers, that nurtured and formed at least half the ordained clergy in this country, was gutted by flame. There’s nothing left but the external walls. The ancient wood went up in a flash.
Earlier that same day, across the country, the office of the Bishop of the Diocese of Northern California, was severely damaged by a fire that utterly destroyed the adjacent River City Food Bank in Sacramento. The River City Food Bank has been serving around 36,000 people a year providing food and basic services. The food bank has been quickly located to a temporary space; Goodwill Industries and local banks and businesses have donated funds to restore the 8,000 pounds of food that was on hand for distribution.
The chapel at Virginia Seminary will be rebuilt; Bishop Beisner and his staff will find a new place to work; the Food Bank will be restored. The time will come when the anguish of the flames are forgotten. The promise of another day is clear to us in God’s Word.
I will repay you for the years that the swarming locust has eaten , says the Lord in the words of the prophet Joel. We know next to nothing about when Joel lived, our nearest guess is that he lived sometime during the Persian period, in the centuries after the rebuilding of the restored city following the great exile in Babylon. By the 4th century BCE, invasions, drought, locusts, these were the sort of thing that the people had come to expect in the land of Judah. Fire, destruction, calamity. The promise was there for the people who heard Joel in his own time, and the promise continued to be heard in the centuries to come. On the Day of Pentecost, fifty days after the Resurrection, we hear in the Acts of the Apostles what Peter has to say about the amazing events unfolding before them. The tongues of fire. The prophetic speech understood by everyone from every language, people and nation. The good news of the day of the Lord. The disrupting and disruptive witness of the life and ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus, turning the whole world upside down. And when Peter stands to speak, it is the prophet Joel that provides the words of God’s promise: 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 will show portents in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and columns of smoke.
The arc of God’s promise, the Rev. Martin Luther King reminded us, is always towards justice. Towards restoring right relationship, the wholeness of God’s good creation. The years that the swarming locust has eaten will be restored. Women now serve along with men as deacons and priests and bishops in this church and in provinces throughout the Anglican Communion. Conservative Virginia Seminary years ago made provision in those luxury dorm-rooms for accommodating same-sex partners. Over the past several years, two bishops in the American church were elected, affirmed, and ordained even after avowing their committed relationship with a partner of the same sex. The General Convention last year voted to approve the drafting of public rites for the blessing of same-sex committed partnerships. The years that the locust has eaten. The chapel will rise. The Bishop and his staff will have room. The food bank will continue its ministry until that day comes when the hungry will be fed and the justice of God is made clear.
Jesus tells a story about two people who stand before the presence of God and offer their prayer. The one is scrupulous in every way. Has heard God’s call to perfection in prayer, in fasting, in giving to the poor, in obedience to the commandments of God. Thank God, prays the one, I am not a murderer, or an adulterer, or a thief, or — looking around at the other standing afar off or like that one. The other is a traitor. Utterly objectionable. In the context of Jesus’ time, the worst sort of betrayer of family, nation, of God. Contract tax collector for the occupying army of Rome. Responsible for driving into poverty his own people, with the arms of the emperor at his back. That one knows there is nothing to thank God for. But rather prays abjectly the sinner’s prayer, “Have mercy on me!” And Jesus says that is the one who went home justified, and not the one who prayed and fasted and gave to the poor and obeyed the commandments of God.
Now before you go getting any ideas, please don’t think that Jesus is inviting you and me to live a life of betrayal and greed, and then beg abjectly for forgiveness. And if Jesus wouldn’t run up and shush me for even suggesting such a thing, then the Apostle Paul would certainly yell out from his letter to the Romans, Me genoito! Heaven forfend!
No, the tax collector’s prayer is the prayer of the one who knows the need for God’s forgiveness. The Pharisee has gotten confused about the point of all those rules he follows. The rules that Jesus will summarize when he talks to the rich man about loving God with all your heart and mind and soul, and loving your neighbor as yourself.
When we hear the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector we need to move the characters into present day, lest we walk out thinking our own prayer is, thank God I’m not like that Pharisee. Let’s make the Pharisee the Dalai Lama. A man probably most of us here would describe as the epitome of holiness. And now let’s make the tax collector, um, Fred Phelps. Someone whose daily behavior causes agony and anguish for people around the country. Now imagine, if we can, the Dalai Lama offering prayer that he is not like Fred. And Fred Phelps begging God for forgiveness. Now we can see the offense in the story. Because we’re not ever going to walk out of here thanking God we’re not like the Dalai Lama. No matter what happens, we are likely to walk out of here thanking God we are not like the members of the Westboro Baptist Church. That is how very disturbing and radical this story is that Jesus tells. That is the sort of thing that made people angry enough to want him dead.
We have to hear the disturbing part of the story to hear the upheaval and the day of destruction and the sun turned to darkness and the moon to blood. We have to hear the disturbing part of this story to hear what Jesus has been repeating over and over again on that long walk to Jerusalem with his followers, where he has proclaimed the alarming and disturbing assertion that we are to call the creator of the universe, the Lord of Armies, the one who will turn the moon to blood and the sun to darkness – we are to offer our prayer to that God and we are to call him Abba, Papa, Father, Nurturing Parent.
And as we pray too our Papa, we are to pray without ceasing, we are never to give up, we are to batter the door with our unceasing demand for heavenly justice, on earth just like in heaven. For the bread we need for the day. For forgiveness –of ourselves and of one another. For protection from evil, for saving us from having our deepest faith put to the test. And we are to give thanks, to rejoice in God’s reconciling love that unites us all to the Creator of the universe, through Jesus the Christ, in the power of the Spirit that gives us grace to be witnesses to the world of that love.
