Humble/Brag

The scriptures referred to are Jeremiah 14:7-10, 19-22 and Luke 18:9-14.

It's usually easy for me to find pop culture references to use in my sermons. And it's a breeze to find current issues or historical persons or events to illustrate aspects of the main topic of the lectionary texts. But this Sunday I'm having problems. Because our passage from Jeremiah and our gospel passage are about two things that are rarely seen in history or depicted in movies, TV or books. They are repentance and humility.

No one likes to admit that they were wrong. No one wants to admit there is something wrong with them. We are the heroes of the movies that are playing out in our heads and the hero is always right. If he doesn't succeed, it is because of some external force opposing him, not because of some flaw within him. We love to see a person triumph over adversity, be it disability or nature or enemies. We don't like to see a hero have doubts about himself. Doubting himself is the only thing we tolerate him being wrong about. We want him to realize he was right after all and regain his confidence in himself. We don't want him to say: I was wrong. I was bad. I am sorry for what I did.

In our passage from Jeremiah, the people of Judah are finally confessing their sins because of a famine, a plague and an invasion. They have been listening to false prophets who have been telling them that all will be well. Only when they could not deny that things were bad did they turn to God. But this passage is not specific about what they did wrong. Elsewhere in Jeremiah we are told what their sins were: not loving God above all and not loving their neighbors as themselves. They indulged in idolatry and injustice. (Jeremiah 7:9) Jeremiah is told to go to the palace of the king of Judah and proclaim, “This is what the Lord says: Do what is just and right. Rescue from the hand of the oppressor the one who was robbed. Do no wrong or violence to the alien, the fatherless or the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place.” (Jeremiah 22:3)

Furthermore, the people did not free their slaves as they promised! “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: I made a covenant with your forefathers when I brought them out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. I said, 'Every seventh year each of you must free any fellow Hebrew who has sold himself to you. After he has served you six years, you must let him go free.' Your fathers, however, did not listen to me or pay attention to me. Recently you repented and did what is right in my sight: Each of you proclaimed freedom to his countrymen. You even made a covenant before me in the house that bears my Name. But now you have turned around and profaned my name; each of you has taken back the male and female slaves you had set free to go where they wished. You have forced them to become your slaves again.” (Jeremiah 34:13-16) This doesn't seem to be the periodic freeing of debt slaves, however, for when the sixth year was up would be different for each slave. What scholars think happened was that during the siege by the Babylonians, King Zedekiah got the people to free their slaves so that they could be drafted into the army. But when they weren't needed to fight anymore, they were returned to slavery. This dirty trick outraged God.

Eventually the Babylonians conquered Judah and took the Jews they deemed valuable—the upper class, the educated and the skilled—into exile. While they were there, the Jews realized that they should have followed God's law. And they no longer had a temple where they could make sacrifices for their sins. The Babylonians had destroyed that temple. They realized that, as it says in the book of Proverbs, “To do what is right and just is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice.” (Proverbs 21:3) It is in Babylon that they compiled the documents we know as the Old Testament and made the study of them and following them the main focus of Judaism. They even included the history of their failures and the prophets who had warned them about their apostasy and injustices.

After 70 years the Babylonians were in turn conquered by the Persians and the Jews were allowed to return to their homeland. They rebuilt the temple. Later, under Roman rule, King Herod built the temple into a larger, more grand and beautiful place. And that's where Jesus sets his parable of the two men who come to pray. One is a Pharisee, an inheritor of that tradition where study of the Torah and following the regulations the rabbis deduced from it should be, according to them, the primary expression of Judaism. The other man is a tax collector, a Jew working for the Romans by collecting taxes for the empire that is oppressing his countrymen. In Jesus' day, the Pharisee would be seen as righteous and the tax collector as a traitor and a terrible sinner. You can almost hear Jesus' audience booing and hissing the taxman.

But then Jesus reveals what each man prays. The Pharisee says, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all of my income.” Let's look at the last part of what he prays first. In Jesus' day, fasting was only required on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when Jews are to confess their sins and repent. But Pharisees were also known to fast on Mondays and Thursdays. And he gave a tithe of everything, not just the tenth of his produce required in Deuteronomy 14:22. The tithe supported the Levites who assisted in the temple and had no allotment of territory when the land was settled. (Numbers 18:21) So credit where credit is due. The Pharisee was super-religious. And if we assume that he is in fact not a thief or unjust (a better translation than “rogue”) or an adulterer or a tax collector, that is also good.

But that's not Jesus' point. Luke tells us that he was speaking to those who trusted in themselves that they are righteous and who despised others. The problem wasn't the Pharisee's good works; it was his attitude. The Greek word translated “contempt” literally means to “count as nothing.” This Pharisee saw people who were not as good as he as a waste of space. He did not love his neighbor as much as he loved himself. And he should have known that he was violating that commandment. (Leviticus 19:17-18)

And yet he trusted that his own righteousness justified him before God. Think about that for a minute. The Pharisee may very well be good but God is perfect. William Barclay says, “...the question is not, 'Am I as good as my fellow-men?' The question is “Am I as good as God?'” Compared to God, the Pharisee is not nearly as good as he thinks he is. He can always improve, especially in the “love your neighbor” department.

And that's the point. This Pharisee is trusting in his own righteousness. While he is ostensibly thanking God, he is really looking for a pat on the back for how very good he is. He is not only contemptuous towards others; he is full of himself. Though an expert in the scriptures, he obviously is forgetting what it says about the proud. Proverbs says, “The Lord abhors the arrogant person; rest assured that they will not go unpunished.” (Proverbs 16:5) And “When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom.” (Proverbs 11:2)

The tax collector, on the other hand, is humble. He knows that he falls short of God's standard of goodness. Jesus says, “But 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!'” Actually the Greek says, “God, be merciful to me, the sinner!” In other words, unlike the Pharisee, who saw himself as morally superior to everyone around him, the tax collector saw that, compared to everyone else gathered in the temple to pray, he was the real sinner. He knew he was not the person God intended him to be. And he regretted it.

Recognition that you have messed up is the first and necessary step to correcting things and doing better. If you refuse to see what you've done wrong or are doing wrong, you can't progress. And we've all seen people who keep making the same mistakes over and over again and not learning their lesson. They keep digging and and digging and the pit in which they are trapped just gets deeper and deeper.

That's why Jesus says it is the tax collector who goes home justified. God recognizes the man's desire to change. The Pharisee, who thinks he's already better than everyone else, has no motive to change or grow spiritually. The tax collector, who knows he is not better than others, is motivated to do better. God is not so much concerned with where a person has been morally and spiritually as with the direction in which that person is going now. As God says in Ezekiel, “When a righteous person turns back from his righteousness and practices wrongdoing, he will die for it; because of the wrongdoing he has done he will die. When a wicked person turns from the wickedness he has committed and does what is right and just, he will preserve his life.” (Ezekiel 18:26-27) What you did in the past is not as important to God as what you are doing now and will continue to do.

Some sharks, like great white sharks, whale sharks, makos and hammerheads, have to keep moving to live. If they stop moving forward, they will suffocate and die. If we want to keep alive spiritually, we cannot rest on our laurels as the Pharisee does. And if we are going in the wrong direction, as the tax collector realizes he is doing, we must turn back (the literal meaning of the Hebrew word for “repent”) and start moving towards God.

I find it interesting that in the very next chapter of Luke we get the story of Zacchaeus, the chief tax collector in Jericho. We are told he is both wealthy and short. To see Jesus, who is surrounded by crowds, Zacchaeus has to climb a tree. Jesus sees him up there and says, “Zacchaeus, come down quickly, because I must stay at your house today.” Zacchaeus climbs down and welcomes Jesus joyfully. But the crowd is not so gleeful. They complain that Jesus is going to stay with a sinner.

Zacchaeus stops and says, “Look, Lord, half of my possessions I now give to the poor, and if I have cheated anyone of anything, I am paying back four times as much.” Jesus says to him, “Today salvation has come to this household, for he too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” (Luke 19:1-10)

If the tax collector in the parable doesn't behave like the tax collector Jesus actually meets, then his prayer for mercy means little. God has no use for empty words. Let's face it, if every person who ever got in trouble, and prayed that they'd go to church every Sunday if God would save them, actually did so, this place would be filled to the rafters. As it says in 1 John, “Dear children, let us not love with words or speech, but with actions and in truth.” (1 John 3:18) As somebody once observed, “When all is said and done, there's a lot more said than done.” We need to reverse that state of affairs.

Speaking of reversals, in 1938, aviator Douglas Corrigan made a flight from Long Beach, California all the way to New York City. He was supposed to return to Long Beach but went to Ireland instead. He blamed it on a navigational error, which, if true, was a doozy. But he had been a mechanic on Charles Lindbergh's plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, and had talked of doing something similar. Though he always denied it, many think he actually did it for the publicity. If so, his legacy is not what he thought it would be. He was elected an honorary member of the Liars Club of America, which he rejected, and he will be known forever by the nickname “Wrong Way” Corrigan in jokes, cartoons, and comedies like Gilligan's Island and the Three Stooges.

Don't be a spiritual “Wrong Way” Corrigan. If you're going in the wrong direction, turn around. If you need directions, ask. Because as God says in Ezekiel, “Repent and turn away from all your wickedness; then it will not be an obstacle leading to iniquity. Throw away all your sins you have committed and fashion yourselves a new heart and a new spirit! Why should you die, O house of Israel? For I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the sovereign Lord. Repent and live!” (Ezekiel 18:30-32)

How much does God not want anyone to die and be separated from him forever? Enough to send his Son to us to die in our place and give us his eternal life. So do not listen to those who think you count as nothing. God thinks you are important enough to die for. And don't think you have peaked morally or spiritually, or that you are stuck in sin and can't get any better. You can. The first step is to admit your faults. The second step is to ask for God's help. He will give it. Then pick up your cross daily and follow Jesus. He came to seek and to save the lost. Which, if we are honest and humble about it, is all of us.