Thieves, Rogues, Adulterers
Sunday, October 28th, 2007
Twenty-second after Pentecost
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Luke 18:9-14
Theme: Humbling ourselves before God

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.”

Let’s do something a little out of the ordinary this morning. Let’s stand up for the Pharisees for just a few minutes. Not THIS SPECIFIC guy, he’s pretty much already been shown to be a less than honorable member of the sect, but for the majority of the men who belonged to it.

As a rule, if you spent any time in Sunday school or Bible Studies in the course of your life, you have a set understanding of the Pharisees – as well as the Sadducees, but that’s another SLIGHTLY different topic. In short, they were a self-righteous, hypocritical, power-hungry, two-faced group of men who turned Jesus over to the Romans to be killed. They were constantly trying to trap Jesus with trick questions and they didn’t ‘get’ the Gospel because they were expecting a politico-military messiah instead of the REAL messiah.

Pharisees are not at the top of our list of people we can trust and admire.

So, does anyone here know a real-live, honest-to-goodness, robe-wearing, tassel twirling, prayer-shawl dressing, Pharisee who fits the bill from what we’ve learned in Sunday school?

If anyone knows a Jewish Rabbi, that’s about as close as we can get to the Pharisaic sect. They are no longer in existence AS SUCH, but their legacy does live on in the modern-day office of Rabbi within the Hebrew faith.

Let’s get another perspective, from someone who DID know them in their day.

The Jewish historian Josephus says of the Pharisees that they were known for their excellence in the interpretation of scripture, their modest lifestyle, strong faith, and prayerful practice. They refused to swear allegiance to Caesar; they believed in the immortality of the soul and divine judgment after death, and they were widely respected. In short, they were models of serious religious folk, with a habituated faith that permeated every aspect of their lives. That means they lived out their faith day in and day out.

That makes me a little bit nervous. That description would be one that …I wouldn’t mind hearing about myself.

So why was Jesus so down on them? What was it about their ‘habituated faith’ that rubbed Jesus wrong?

We can begin with their name. Pharisee means ‘separated one’ – and it was this separation – from both the general population – the gentiles, as WELL as other Jews – that went against the core of Jesus’ gospel.

As we are studying on Wednesday nights in Matthew – in The Sermon on the Mount Jesus speaks about being salt – how it is supposed to flavor the food … it has to maintain it’s saltiness – that is primary – but it also has to be IN the food, not kept separate from it. We cannot have an impact on the world unless we are right there next to people as we struggle together with what life throws us.

Yesterday I attended the funeral of a 19 year old young man in our community whose parents and brother were struggling mightily to try and come to terms with the fact that their son and brother was taken from them at much too early an age. The service was held at Warsaw Baptist, and while the grief was palpable, it was also VERY clear that the family was NOT alone. The sanctuary was completely full. People were standing against the back wall, as well as in the balcony. Unfortunately, many of us have experienced similar services – when a family suffers an untimely loss, the community of which they are a part rallies around them and supports them. It is just that community that we are called to and to which the Pharisees were averse. Their zeal for purity was commendable, but it was expressed in a way that defeated the purpose OF that same purity. They missed the whole point of righteousness, and made it an end in itself.

That is why this man, THIS Pharisee, is held up by Jesus as an example of what NOT to be when you approach God. Jesus was talking to his disciples, not a group of Pharisees. They would have, for the most part, held Pharisees in the same esteem as Josephus.

And they would have thought of the tax collector in the same way as the rest of the population – that is, as someone to be UNfavorably compared to a maggot.

We’ve heard the explanations before. Tax Collectors, or, to be more precise, Toll-collectors, worked as agents of the CHIEF Tax Collector, under contract with the Roman Authorities to collect indirect taxes, such as tolls, tariffs, and customs. They would pre-pay the Roman Administrators the taxes, and then recover THEIR costs plus “additional fees” through any means necessary, up to and including extortion.

Notice, Jesus doesn’t contradict either man’s self-assessment. For that matter, the tax collector doesn’t try to contradict the Pharisee’s assessment of HIM. He freely ADMITS he’s a terrible sinner.

What creates the ‘huh??!!’ moment in this parable is Jesus’ conclusions – his condemnation of the Pharisee and praise for the other man. What we need to pay attention to is what their purpose is in praying – in coming before God.

The Pharisee is not so much interested in what God might think of him, he seems to be more stuck on what HE thinks of HIMSELF. Have you ever heard a prayer like that? Where the person praying is praying more to be heard … more to make a point … than they are truly speaking to and listening for God’s response? The Pharisee is more concerned with his own accomplishments than in drawing closer to God … and here’s the rub: his accomplishments WERE worthy of recognition and admiration – he fasted, yes, he tithed, yes. But he forgot the WHY of his disciplines.

The tax collector ALLOWED himself to be lumped together with thieves, rogues and adulterers by the Pharisee not because he was having a low self-esteem day, but because he recognized, either through his own self examination or by the words of some poor overtaxed soul who may have unloaded on him earlier in the day after having been relieved of his earnings for the week in the name of the Roman Proconsul, that he was, indeed no better than a common criminal – both in the eyes of his countrymen and more importantly in the eyes of God.

So what does this mean for us here at Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton on October 28th, 2007?

Let me revisit a question I asked earlier: does anyone here know a real-live, honest-to-goodness, robe-wearing, tassel twirling, prayer-shawl dressing, Pharisee who fits the bill from what we’ve learned in Sunday school?

Let’s rephrase the question: have we ever found ourselves congratulating ourselves for something we’ve done that was good, and helpful, and commendable, something that others saw us do and which we KNOW will make us ‘look good’? And have we ever felt that self-congratulation turn into a sense of self-righteousness when we are confronted by someone or a situation between people that makes the gap between us seem very, very wide?

Last week, while visiting someone in the hospital, there was a necessary wait through which we had to sit. The room was shared, and the person in the other bed switched the television station to one of those ‘family in crisis’ shows – you know, the ones where a family is brought onstage to be the very public fodder for audience and an example of the theme of that particular program. They are the kinds of shows that appeal to our lowest common denominator, our fascination with watching people’s lives unravel before our very eyes. And in the process, we begin to feel like OUR lives, OUR choices, OUR messes, are so much LESS than theirs that we MUST have it more together than THEY do. I’ll admit, there IS a certain fascination with discovering the depth of human depravity, the total lack of empathy that can be achieved when someone is completely focused on themselves, and the surprisingly small space there is between the studio audience and their reaction and what I imagine the spectators at the Roman Coliseum would turn into during a gladiator fight.

We really are not that far apart from each other.

And that is what it comes down to.

None of us, for better or worse, have done ANYTHIING to deserve God’s grace more than any one else.

“…all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

We can never forget that it’s not about what we’ve done, but it’s about what HE’S done in the person of Jesus Christ, that allows us to approach God at all.

Let’s pray.

Then One of Them …
Sunday, October 14th, 2007
Twentieth after Pentecost
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Luke 17:11-19
Theme: How do WE express our gratitude towards God?

11On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. 12As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him. Keeping their distance, 13they called out, saying, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” 14When he saw them, he said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went, they were made clean. 15Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. 16He prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. 17Then Jesus asked, “Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? 18Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” 19Then he said to him, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has
made you well.”

Imagine being afflicted with any one of a number of skin conditions or diseases that were all, for lack of more exact knowledge, called ‘leprosy’ in first century Palestine.

Imagine that because of that, we are forced out of the city, town or village we’ve grown up in, away from our family and friends and into an existence that is marginal at best, devastating by any measure, and one that will quickly lead us to wish for a quick death rather than endure years of isolation and pain, loneliness and struggles just to get enough food to survive on, or find shelter, or even clothes to wear, as ours fall apart due to exposure.

We are only allowed to associate with others who have been condemned to the same fate as us, who are suffering from similar illnesses, who have likewise been exiled from their communities. And we realize that in our suffering, there is a common bond that transcends any and all previous barriers we’re used to placing between us and the people who surround us. Those come-here’s, those city slickers, those rednecks, those foreigners, those people who don’t think, act, speak, or worship God just like we do are suddenly the only people with whom we ARE allowed to speak or hang out with. And however odd it may seem at first, we end up forming some kind of sad, twisted, community; a mismatched, shabby, ragged, dirty, hardscrabble band of men and women who spend our nights huddled together for warmth and our days the prescribed distance away from the “blessed ones” – the ones whom God has NOT seen fit to condemn to this horrible existence, the ones who take EVERYTHING ENTIRELY for granted … little realizing how quickly and drastically their comfortable existence could change – just a passing comment from a family friend asking “what’s that spot on your arm?” could be enough to get the ball of THEIR doom rolling just like ours was that would land THEM out HERE with the REST of us.

Then one day we hear of this man who has reportedly been traveling around the countryside healing the sick – for real! Making the lame walk, the blind see, casting out demons, even raising people from the dead! And he’s coming up the road. He’s on his way to Jerusalem, and he’s accompanied by his disciples.

And there he comes! There he is! JESUS!! MASTER!! HAVE MERCY ON US!!

“What did he say? Did you hear him? Go and show yourselves to the priest? Is that what he said? Show ourselves … to the same priest who declared us unclean and cast us out of town??”

One has to wonder what went through their minds when they heard what Jesus told them to do.

There are a couple of things that come to mind when looking at the text. Just like in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, there’s no transitional commentary on the part of Luke. No ‘grumbling among themselves, they still decided to do what Jesus said’. It goes directly from what Jesus told them to do to: ‘And as they went …’ the commentaries I studied each wrapped that question up very neatly: ‘They were obedient in faith that they would be healed, so they ALL alike obeyed.” Each scholar focused on the fact that the healing of all ten lepers occurred AS they engaged in the act of obedience, AS they walked down the road to see the priest to show themselves to him.

I don’t presume to be a Scholar. Yes, I passed Greek, and I have the books to use as a reference, but I go TO the books. That is what they are THERE for; to be used, to be consulted. I don’t know enough about the form and style of Luke’s writing to say definitively that he is telling us, “There’s something between the lines here. Pay attention.” But I can’t help but wonder.

Part of me would like to think that Jesus spoke to them with such authority and with such compassion that what little faith they might have had left in them blossomed into the kind of wonder-filled faith that took it for granted that, even as they began to take the first step in the direction that Jesus sent them, they WOULD be healed.

Another part of me wonders if the thought that first went through their minds was a world-weary “Let me check my agenda for the day, what else do I have going on … OH … NOTHING … what have I got to lose?!” And that first step got taken anyway.

But I stopped in the middle of that sentence. The rest of the sentence that began “And as they went,” is a simple statement of fact: “they were made clean.”

This is where the one story becomes two. Up to this point, the story has been one of healing. Jesus encounters ten lepers, they ask him for mercy – for God’s mercy to be shown through him – and he does just that – Jesus brings mercy into their lives in a way that they could hardly have conceived even in their wildest dreams: complete and total healing from their physical affliction.

Here the story turns, right in the middle of the paragraph.

15Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. 16He prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him.

The other nine kept walking. I’m sure they realized that they were healed, surely they would have felt their strength return, the feeling come back – surely they would have realized they weren’t shuffling along any more, dragging their legs and numb feet along the ground. Surely they would have noticed that they weren’t itching any more, the sores they had endured for so long had vanished, and they could close their lips and swallow with no parched feeling in their mouths.

And Jesus had TOLD them to go show themselves to the priest. So that is what they DID.

What ingrates! What gall! How RUDE!!!

Can you blame them?

After all, here was the reality that they had given up hope of ever once again attaining – of being reintegrated into their society. Of once again being surrounded by family and friends, of going back to their jobs and positions in their village, town, or cities. Of going back to the relationships they had been forced to leave behind.

Of going back to how things had been before.

But this one man was different. Yes, he was different in terms of his response to realizing he had been healed – that is obvious. He stopped heading to the priest’s place with the other nine and turned and came back to Jesus – and he didn’t just sedately walk back. He came praising God in a loud voice. And when he GOT back to Jesus, he didn’t just walk up to him and hold out his hand and say ‘hey, thanks man!’

No, he threw himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him.

And here Luke throws the wrench into the works of the Hebrew mindset.

“And he was a Samaritan.”

Luke does that quite a bit in his Gospel. Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke’s Gospel. He champions the role of the outcast, and their receptivity to the Gospel, more than any of the other Gospels. There is a prophetic element that we would do well to heed in the reading of those passages.

They foreshadow the rejection of Jesus Christ on the part of the majority of the Hebrew people, and the eager acceptance of the Gospel on the part of the gentile people in the rest of the world.

That may give us a hint of why the nine didn’t come back to thank Jesus. His question to his disciples speaks to the reaction he knew he would be receiving once he arrived in Jerusalem. Loosely put, he asks: “Correct me if I’m wrong, but … weren’t there ten of them? Where are the other nine? Couldn’t THEY have taken the time to come back and thank God for what they have been blessed with, or is this foreigner the only one who GETS IT??”

You see, the other nine had something to go back to … or so they thought. They had position. They had standing. They were part of the chosen people. They could regain that place in the world, and go back to feeling good about themselves. What had once been done out of a dutiful sense of humble gratitude among the Jewish people – the worship of God and the special relationship that entailed –had become, with the passing of time, a privilege to be assumed as inherent through the simple act of being born into the right family.

The Samaritan knew that, even though he was healed, he would still be viewed as a heretic and unclean by the priest by virtue of the fact that he had not been healed from his Samaritan heritage, and would still neither gain nor desire a place in Hebrew society. He recognized what truly mattered in the event of his healing. He had encountered God in the person of Jesus Christ, and that had changed him.

“Your faith has made you well.”

“Made well” seems a little odd for Jesus to be stating the obvious. “Yes, I healed you. Your faith made you well.” But here’s the thing about what Jesus is saying. When he says that, it’s the same word he used in his encounter with Zacchaeus that is translated as “to save”, when Jesus says that salvation has come to Zacchaeus and his house – “for the Son of man has come to seek out and to save the lost.” (19:10)

So … what does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton, on the fourteenth of October, 2007?

As we were reading the passage, as we were going through the story, who do we most identify with? Whose plight resonates with us most deeply?

Do we identify with those who, temporarily, it turns out, were suffering from their affliction, but were restored to their health and back into the society in which they returned to their place of privilege and importance in the world as it was, or does the revelation of the salvation of the Samaritan leper touch us more?

Do we understand our place in the world to BE that of outcasts, marginalized members of a society that would rather attempt to establish it’s OWN hierarchies of importance, with service, self-giving and love being somewhat FAR from the top of that list, and a sense of gratitude to God for the grace and mercy that we are so unworthy to receive being near if not AT the bottom?

How ready are we to recognize that what Jesus Christ has done for us is so radically new that it can do nothing OTHER than redefine who we are in the world, as servants, as slaves, as people who for the rest of our lives will strive to find ways to express our gratitude to God for what God has done – in the person of Jesus and through the presence of the Holy Spirit – both in each of us and through others FOR us, and THROUGH US for others. How long has it been since we ran back to Jesus, praising and thanking God in a loud voice, and fall at his feet?

Let’s pray.

Call to Mind
Sunday, October 7th, 2007
Nineteenth after Pentecost
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Lamentations 3:19-26
Theme: Remember God’s Faithfulness

19The thought of my affliction and my homelessness is wormwood and gall! 20My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed down within me. 21But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: 22The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; 23they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. 24“The Lord is my portion,” says my soul, “therefore I will hope in him.” 25The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him. 26It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.

Did you wonder if the floor was going to be there this morning when you got out of bed and put your foot down?

Did you wonder if the sun was going to be in the sky when you looked outside?

Did you consider for a moment the possibility that there might not be any air when you opened your mouth and yawned after starting to wake up?

When you came in and sat down this morning, did you pause to think of the possibility that the pew would collapse under you when you sat down?

The thing is, there are things we so take for granted that we don’t even think about them. Things that are so much a part of our background, of our environment, of our regular surroundings, that the thought doesn’t even register that they could be NOT THERE in the next moment.

I remember once when I was about 13 or 14, a fairly good-sized tremor hit Santiago, I think it was probably a 5.5 temblor on the Richter scale. Not enough to do a lot of damage, but enough to definitely rattle some windows and shake some furniture. I THINK we were sitting at the dining room table when it hit. There was an initial rumbling, something that could have been a low flying plane or a big truck going down our street, but then a second wave of sound came, and things started to rattle, not just on the table, but the HOUSE. Before I knew it I was out of my chair and halfway to the front door. To this day, I still feel ashamed that I wasn’t thinking about helping the other members of my family to get to either the doorway between the dining and living rooms or beyond that to the front door. I was ONLY thinking about MAKING IT there myself.

The lasting impression that I came away with from that experience, as well as other occasional brushes with plate tectonics along the Pacific Rim’s ‘circle of fire’, was the fact that things don’t always remain as solid as they seem.

And yet, it didn’t take long to go back into the ‘normal’ mindset and mostly forget that the whole house was shaking to the point of creating a few minor cracks along some of the walls and ceilings. Though I never lived close enough to one for it to be an issue, I think the same process takes place with folks who live near a volcano that erupts and then quiets for a time.

After all, you don’t expect the ground you walk on, the walls that are so solid, the mountain that your house is built on, to suddenly shift under your feet. It just doesn’t seem possible.

The writer of Lamentations, traditionally held to be Jeremiah, though there is some question about that, is confronted with a similar – in HIS mind – impossibility. Jerusalem, the holy city, David’s city, has been ransacked and destroyed. The temple has been desecrated and destroyed, and tens of thousands of his fellow Israelites have been deported hundreds of miles away.

The Babylonians first attacked and laid siege to Jerusalem in 597 BC, but didn’t finally invade, capture and destroy the majority of the city (though not all of it) until ten years later. Still, the totality of the event was as much a blow to the psyche of the Israelites as any physical attack might have been.

As we studied in Habakkuk a few weeks ago on Wednesday nights, the attack from Babylon and the subsequent deportation of the Israelites was not exactly a surprise TO the people of Israel. All the signs were there for many months if not years before the actual events took place.

And just like Habakkuk did, the writer of Lamentations came to the same place in dealing with the reality he was facing. That in spite of the trauma and the unimaginable nature of the disaster he was staring in the face, a sense of God’s unfailing presence – and more – broke through.

One commentator, Robert B. Laurin, puts it this way:

“The author is really saying: I thought all hope was gone, but my problem was that I had a very narrow view of God; but my problem was that I had a very narrow view of God; I thought only of the judgment of God and of my sin; I forgot about the mercy of God and his forgiveness.” (The
Broadman Bible Commentary, Vol. VI, pg 216-217)

And what is it that is discovered in the process of going through that trauma? What is the nature of the mercy and forgiveness of God?

The Hebrew term that we read as “steadfast love” is hard to translate into a single word. It implies a combination of ideas; it is made up of love, faithfulness, kindness, loyalty, and strength. It is the basic idea that is used to describe the covenant relationship that exists between God and God’s people.

But it is, even at that, a one-sided description of the relationship. It is, simply put, a description of GOD’S side of the relationship—GOD’S feelings, GOD’S emotions, and GOD’S care for the relationship. NOT ours.

So we have this incredible example of God’s faithfulness – Jeremiah’s, or whoever’s – recognition that in spite of the fact that Jerusalem has been destroyed, and in some sense, justifiably so, in light of the fact that the people of Israel had so lost sight of who they were, or who they were SUPPOSED TO BE, that it was going to take an invasion and a period of exile to bring them back around to remembering who they were – THROUGH ALL THAT God remained faithful.

And it is that faithfulness that we … rely on, that we sing about, that we breath in without evening thinking, that we even take for granted when we don’t think about it … it’s that faithfulness that we work to emulate, that we strive to copy, that we seek to live out in our life as a community of faith.

And it is that faithfulness that we recognize and affirm in the life of those who seek to serve the family of faith.

Janice Collins has been presented and approved as a deacon, the Greek word is best translated as “a servant.” The original deacons at the church in Jerusalem were charged with caring for the widows of the church and with waiting tables. It is essentially no different a task here. Deacons serve as ministers to the community at large. They are servants of the church. Those qualities have been identified in Janice, and today we are recognizing and affirming her position, of leadership, yes, but of leadership by example.

Because we are all called to serve each other, when it boils right down to it. We are all tasked with the responsibility of being Christ’s presence not only to the community around us, but more immediately, more noticeably, more literally, to each other. Because it is in the way we conduct the relationships we have inside the church that we learn how to carry on the relationships we have OUTSIDE the church.

(Ordination)

(Solo) (Hannah)

(Communion)

(prayer)