The Just Judge and the Mafia Lawyer in the Cathedral

The judge was a good family man and the senior warden of his local Episcopal church. One evening, after a difficult week, he came into the Cathedral to pray.  He had just made a judgment in a case involving terrible child abuse. He had also dealt with the worst kind of corruption in a mafia trial. He sighed as he took off his elegant wool coat and hung it over a pew, “Thank you, God, for my beautiful wife and my sweet children. Thank you that my life is not a mess like the lives of those people who come into my courtroom every day, especially that mafia boss.” He pulled the Book of Common Prayer from the pew rack and turned to the section for Evening Prayer. “Thank you, God, for this oasis of sanity in a chaotic world,” he thought, as he knelt down, surrounded by the comforting stories portrayed in the 19^th-century stained glass windows. The judge turned right to the Opening Sentences in the Prayer Book. Except during Lent, he always skipped the confession of sin. He had learned long ago that we really shouldn’t dwell so much on sinfulness. It’s depressing. Besides, Episcopalians are all about God’s love, not about sinfulness and depravity. That kind of talk is for Baptists and Presbyterians. “Thank you, God, that I belong to a civilized church that speaks of love and beauty, a church where we can use our minds and drink sherry at vestry meetings and find God on a yacht or skiing in the Alps,” he prayed with real gratitude.

          After a few minutes, the judge finished up with the final prayers, his mind drifting:
“Most holy God, the source of all good desires, all right judgments (yes, that’s what I try to do, too!) and all just works (like the weekend I just spent building a house with Habitat), Give to us, your servants, that peace which the world cannot give (that’s for sure!), so that our minds may be fixed on the doing of your will and …we  may live in peace and quietness (ahh, peace and quietness!)….”

Just then, he noticed an odor of strong cologne and heard some shuffling in the corner of a back pew. Glancing over his shoulder, the judge noticed a big man in a fur coat, wearing lots of rings on his fingers. Oh no--it was the lawyer for the mafia boss from court, that slimy, sniveling excuse for a lawyer who defends all kinds of scum and contributes to the cesspool that our society has become. The law is an honorable profession, but this man had become rich off of his trickery. This crook would do anything to earn a buck. The judge stared, transfixed by this lawyer’s audacity. How dare he come into the House of God, into this sanctuary of all that is good and holy, into this refuge that the judge had helped to build with his generous gift to the Bishop’s Fund.

The lawyer knelt on the ground over by the door, carelessly letting his coat slip into the dust beside him and scraping his fancy shoes on the cold marble floor. He didn’t seem to see the judge up in the front pew. He didn’t even raise his head to look at the beautiful stained glass or to admire the glimmers of silver and candlelight . “O God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” he cried aloud, as if he didn’t care who heard him. “Oh God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” he begged, his voice raw and his lips torn open. And then, as quickly as he had entered, he struggled to his feet and stumbled out of the Cathedral.

The judge couldn’t help himself: “If you want forgiveness, you’re going to have to turn your life around,” he thought smugly. “You’re going to have to quit working for the Mob and give away some of that fur coat money to a good cause, at least.  I’ll have to see some fruit in this guy’s life before I believe that he has really changed. ”

As the judge was grumbling to himself, he noticed the Lamb from the front stained-glass window turn his crowned head toward the nave and speak, as if to a congregation: “I tell you, this mafia lawyer went down to his home justified, rather than the judge; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

Can you feel the judge’s pain and incomprehension at the words of the Lamb? Does it help to hear this parable in a more contemporary setting? Perhaps a little? For Jesus listeners, Pharisees were the good guys—fine, morally upright and pious. They were religious folk, just like this judge, and just like us. Luke’s Pharisee does everything right, as far as piety goes. He fasts twice a week, although the Law only requires that he fast once a year. He gives a tenth of all of his income to the Temple, although the Law only requires that he tithe on certain kinds of income. Even this prayer that he says--this prayer that sounds rather self-centered to our ears—it is similar to real prescribed rabbinic and pharisaic prayers of gratitude that were said regularly in ancient times. It is certainly no better or worse than some of the collects in our Prayer Book. And the tax collector in Jesus’ parable is as much of a traitor to society as a corrupt mafia lawyer. Tax collectors were collaborators with the hated Roman occupation, and they often charged more tax than necessary in order to keep the profits for themselves, even resorting to violence to collect the money that they were owed.

So why does Jesus pick the tax collector over the Pharisee, the corrupt lawyer over the just judge, the sinner over the righteous one? Doesn’t God love them both? Doesn’t Jesus want us to come to church regularly and to live upright lives? Is it that Jesus wants  us to wallow in our sins? To go around beating our breasts and feeling unworthy all the time? Isn’t the Good News that God loves us? So why does Jesus praise the prayer of the groveling scumbag over our good and upright prayers?

This text from Luke is the text of the first sermon that I ever preached—here at St. Thomas in 2004, as an aspirant for Holy Orders. Nine years have gone by, and as I worked on these texts again for today’s sermon, I was disappointed to find that the pious judge wears the priest’s collar with ease. It might have been easier to speak with the freedom of the tax collector nine years ago. Language is a tricky thing. Our words can be precious tools for building relationship—with loved ones and with God--but they can also be walls to hide behind. I think the trouble is that the judge and the Pharisee are using their prayers, their words, their faith, to hide their hearts from God. They are hiding behind the form of the prayer, behind their good works, behind their gifts, even behind their gratitude. As Eugene Peterson says, we religious folk can be tempted to aim so effortlessly for “all the social benefits of being associated with God without having to deal with God.”[1] Looking devout, without actually being devout, is such a tempting path to tread. Actually dealing with God can be scary, and it always asks something of us.

 On the other hand, the tax collector and the corrupt lawyer, despite all of their sins, speak straight from their hearts to God’s heart, calling on God to be God, to deal with them directly, just as they are. They are both willing to deal with God, to be in relationship to God. They name themselves plainly as sinners, and they name God truthfully as merciful. Their prayer is simple and direct, without any words or any justifications to hide behind. Writer Anne Lamott recently wrote a book about prayer called, “Help, Thanks, Wow!” She says that these are really the only three prayers that we need to know. Think about it: All three of these prayers speak directly from our hearts to God’s. It is not the groveling of the tax collector that saves him; it is the openness and honesty with which he reveals his heart. It is not the virtue of the Pharisee that condemns him; it is his refusal to open himself up to the disorderly grace of God.

Rowan Williams writes that:

“If you think devotional practices, theological insights, even charitable actions give you some sort of a purchase on God, you are still playing games. God in Christ shows himself as the God whose compassion is without bounds, utterly identified with our pain and working to bring us out of death and bondage into life. It is only when false images of God, the world, and myself have been broken that I can be truly free. When I look on the world as something focusing on me, when I look on God as something functioning usefully in my philosophy, then I am imprisoned in myself and I cannot give or receive true compassionate love.”[2]

I’d like to think that, as the mafia lawyer stumbled back home, he was moved to change his life to reflect the mercy that he had received. But I would also like to think that the judge’s chattering heart was stilled by the voice of the Lamb that he heard. I’d like to think that, on his way home, he might have dipped his finger in the Baptismal font in the back of the Cathedral and wordlessly traced a cross over his heart. He might have remembered his death under the waters of baptism and the new life that pumped freedom through his veins. He might have felt, for just a moment, free from words, free from judgments, floating on a wave of mercy that he did not understand.

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[1] Eugene Peterson, Tell it Slant,  139.

[2] Rowan Williams, Ray of Darkness,  83-84.

The Nine and the One

         Before they were “lepers,” they were just human beings, people like you and me. Imagine with me their stories.

          Perhaps two of them were brothers, sons of a wealthy Jewish landowner. Having grown up with every advantage, with slaves to wait on them, and parents to dote on them, they now had beautiful wives to praise them at the city gates, and sons to continue their ancient lineage. They were taught how to buy their way out of adversity. They were thrown for a loop when the unclean spots first showed up on their skin, and they were numb with incomprehension when they both found themselves cast out into wilderness caves to die a shameful death. Misfortune came to other folks, but not to people like them! After Jesus pronounced them clean, their world made sense again. The sickness was but a small blip on the screen of their upwardly mobile life. Of course God would heal them. Hadn’t God always given them what they wanted? They were born to privilege, such was their destiny. “Let’s go make a sacrifice at the Temple to celebrate our healing,” they said to one another with relief, as they quickly slipped back into their comfy lives. “We have hundreds of lambs this year in our flocks. We can spare at least five for God.”

          Perhaps another of the lepers was a very industrious woman, a real “woman of valor.” She was smart and worked hard. Before the leprosy struck, her home was spotless; her weaving was admired by the whole village; her children were handsome and well-behaved. She was the one who had heard from a passing beggar that Jesus was a powerful healer. She had gathered the other lepers and led them to the spot by the side of the road where she had heard that Jesus might pass by. After Jesus stopped and made her clean, she headed home quickly with long and purposeful strides. “And it’s a good thing I stopped to chat with that dirty old beggar,” she mused, “because now I really am healed. Whew, if I hadn’t gotten everyone together and grabbed Jesus’ attention, then I would still be sitting over there in that putrid cave, nursing my sores. What a close call.” She congratulated herself daily on her good thinking, and poured all of the energy from her newly healthy body back into her work.

          Perhaps another of the healed lepers had been a sickly child, pale and always wheezing. His only comfort had been the attention that he got from being sick: the fervent prayers of his father on his behalf; the worried and tender ministrations of his mother. Even before the leprosy, he was unable to work and sat outside the Temple begging every day. It was a lonely existence, but it was the only life that he knew. When the leprosy struck, he was not surprised. He knew how to deal with sickness; he expected an early death. And even better, after his banishment, he found that he enjoyed the companionship of the other lepers. For the first time in his life, he was not alone; others suffered with him. As they sat around the fire together at night, he could comfort the others with his words of wisdom about sickness. When Jesus healed him, he knew that he should be pleased, yet he was disappointed and even resentful. “What will I do now?” he fretted. “The others won’t need me anymore, and I don’t even have a trade. Maybe I can go off someplace where no one knows me and pretend that I’m still sick? Yes, that’s it. Nobody has to know …” After visiting the Temple, he quietly slipped away, unable to break away from a life of pain.

          And I can imagine two other lepers who were gamblers. They loved dice games and races and gave very little thought to God. They even used to bet on whose fingers would fall off first when they lived in the lepers’ cave. Even before the leprosy, they lived life moment to moment, easily moving on from village to village, drinking more wine than necessary and making pleasure and excitement their highest goals in life. For them, their leprosy was bad luck, and their cure was like winning ten denarii with just one roll of the dice. As they moved on to the next adventure, skin clean and lives restored, they nudged one another jovially in the ribs and said, “Wow, what a stroke of luck! Disaster averted for now! If only our luck will hold for awhile. Maybe we’ll strike it rich in the next town.” They never gave the strange rabbi on the road another thought.

          And then of course there must have been some obedient lepers. These three were all very religious: one was a scholar and one was a rabbi and the other was a woman known throughout her village for her piety. Before they got sick, they had worked hard to keep all of the laws and to avoid unclean people and doubting thoughts. The leprosy had been devastating to them. It was surely a punishment from the Holy One. They wracked their brains every day, as they shuffled down the road, trying to find the mistake that they had made, the law that they had broken, the tiny infraction or the evil thought that had brought down the righteous anger of God upon them. In their disease, they worked even harder to earn God’s forgiveness. They kept every dietary law that they could, even in their poverty. They said all of the prescribed prayers, over and over. They avoided unacceptable people like that heretical foreigner, the Samaritan leper, who insisted on hanging around with their group. They encouraged one another with the comfortingly familiar language of faith, giving one another gentle—and not so gentle—reminders when one of them seemed to be going astray. They weren’t so sure about this scruffy-looking Nazarene rabbi who was supposed to be able to do miracles, but when he offered them the conventional, accepted formula of going to the priests to be declared clean, they high-tailed it down the road, full of hope. They knew how to obey. They had confidence in the Law. They weren’t surprised when the priests in the Temple found their blemishes to have disappeared. Now they had a second chance to prove themselves. They would work even harder than ever to be faithful, obedient men and women. They would stay home, away from sinners and questionable characters. They would loudly condemn impiety. They weren’t going to let God’s anger strike them again, no siree.

And then we come to the tenth leper: the hated foreigner, the Samaritan. He had crossed the border from Samaria to find work in the south. He did menial labor and lived on the margins of society with no safety net, no health insurance, no family support. He had an ugly accent, and his religion was a mockery of the true worship of the Holy One. Even the nine other lepers shunned him, giving him the scraps of the scraps that they received, forcing him to huddle furthest from the fire on cold nights. He had no one to talk to, no one to care for him. When Jesus pronounced him well, it was the first time since childhood that anyone had offered him kindness, the first time that any Jew had spoken to him without a snarl.  It’s no surprise, then, that he was bowled over by this cure, that he came running back to Jesus, and, without taking any of the credit or the blame, fell down at Jesus’ feet, a servant of the Lord who blessed him. “Praise almost seems to be inner health made audible,” writes C.S. Lewis.[1] Only the tenth leper, the pitiful outcast, was truly healthy; only he was saved. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you  … Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven.”

          In a little while, we, like the ten lepers, will shuffle forward and cry out to God. We are dying, and our souls are full of sores. We, who are like the nine and yet who want so badly to be like the one, we will stand all together before Jesus at this altar, all looking to be saved. We will speak together the healthy words of praise, the words that will unleash our tongues and tear open our hearts, the words of the great thanksgiving for the grace that God pours out in Christ upon us all:

Lift up your hearts.

We lift them up to the Lord.

 Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.

It is right to give God thanks and praise.

 It is right, and a good and joyful thing, always and everywhere to give thanks to you, Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.”

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[1] C.S. Lewis, “Reflections on the Psalms,” cited in John M. Buchanan, “Luke 17:11-19,” Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 4, 165.

"Ten Easy Steps to Increase Your Faith?"

         When I was a young wife and mother, worried about doing everything just right, I used to buy lots of women’s magazines. I would stand in the grocery store checkout line, comparing myself to my fellow moms, wondering why my son wasn’t potty-trained yet or why my husband worked all the time, and I would read the appealing magazine headlines: “10 Easy Steps to Make Your Husband Pay Attention to You,” or “How to Potty-Train your Toddler in 2 Weeks,” or “Recipes Guaranteed to Help Drop 10 Pounds Before Bathing-Suit Season.” My heart would swell with hope, and I would buy the magazine, relieved to be taking home the answers that would put an end to all of my insecurities and failings. Then, of course, I would eagerly begin reading the articles. There would be a wonderful description of the problem, a bit of reassurance that other people had the same issues, and then …(sigh) the same, boring, unappealing advice that I could have thought of myself without buying a magazine. To lose weight—don’t eat so much and exercise every day. To communicate with your husband—talk to him. And so on. It didn’t take me long to learn that, no matter how much the headlines on the front of the magazine spoke to my insecurities, the advice on the inside was not going to be very new and exciting. I had to learn that easy, effortless one-page answers to all of the difficulties inherent in our relationships do not exist.

          After listening to Jesus’ difficult imperatives about discipleship, the disciples in Luke’s Gospel were apparently just as concerned and insecure as we are about their own failure to live up to God’s expectations. “The last shall be first and the first shall be last;”  “Give away all your possessions;” “You cannot serve both God and Wealth,” we have heard Jesus say to the crowds over the past few weeks. Right before today’s Gospel lesson, there are more of Jesus’ difficult expectations for his followers, expectations that the lectionary leaves out: “Forgive your neighbor every time she asks forgiveness, no matter how many times she has hurt you,” Jesus tells the apostles in no uncertain terms. And “Don’t cause others to stumble in faith or you might as well throw yourself into the sea to drown,” he warns them.  Jesus seems to be making it perfectly clear that each member of the community is responsible, responsible before God, for maintaining right relationships: for sharing with one another, for forgiving one another, for supporting one another. Such a responsible role is daunting—for the apostles and for us. “What if we can’t do these things?” they wonder. “What if we fail? We need more faith than we have now, that’s for sure. How can I tell if I have enough faith to be a follower of Jesus?” They cry out in consternation to Jesus, “Add faith to us!”

          The disciples are looking for affirmation that will wipe away their self-doubts. I imagine that they are hoping for answers from Jesus that look like the headlines in those women’s magazines: “Ten Easy Steps to Strengthen Your Faith,” or “How to Do the Miracles that Will Impress Your Neighbor,” or “Recipes to Increase Love and Generosity.” We all dream of easy spiritual answers, quick fixes for our relationship with God and with our brothers and sisters in Christ, just as we long for quick fixes in our other relationships. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could learn how to manage our inner resources of faith and love as easily as we keep track of our bank accounts online? Wouldn’t it be nice if we could read an article about someone who did so much forgiving and supporting in August and September that he was able to take a little break from his Christian responsibility until Thanksgiving!  W.H. Auden writes, in much more poetic terms, that we long to know that “somewhere, over the high hill,/ Under the roots of the oak, in the depths of the sea,/ Is a womb or a tomb wherein [we] may halt to express some attainment…”[1] To rest, even for a moment, from shame and anxiety in a concrete sense of attainment, that’s what we long for, isn’t it?  A sense of attainment in our lives--a sense of attainment with God, in our faith--a sense of attainment in our relationships with each other, as a community--that’s what we want, and that’s what the apostles wanted as they cried out in our Gospel reading for more faith.

Jesus’ answer to them, like the articles in the magazines to which I turned with so much hope, must disappoint our longing for a sense of spiritual attainment. The first part of Jesus’ answer, the metaphor of the mustard seed, is more like a poem than a magazine article. It is a double-edged metaphor, and it cuts through our thinking like a sword, shattering the idea that faith is something that can be measured, counted or weighed at all. First, Jesus’ remark about the mustard seed destroys any sense of attainment that the apostles might have built up among themselves. The “you” in this phrase is a plural you. Jesus sighs, “All of y’all put together don’t even have faith that is the size of a grain of mustard seed!” Once the apostles are reeling from that cutting remark, Jesus lifts them back up again with the hugely exaggerated, cartoon-like image of the little mustard seed faith yanking up a huge tree by its complex root system and heaving it into the sea. In this metaphor, the concepts of big and little no longer make sense. There is no such thing as big faith and little faith. Clearly, faith has no size! God can work through anything, any size, any shape, even through a bunch of incompetent doubting apostles—and even through us.

        Jesus then follows with a difficult paradox in the strange little parable of the “worthless slaves.” Although we have tasks to accomplish in our relationships with each other and with God, when we are successful in our loving, in our giving, and in our forgiving, we have no excuse to get puffed up about it and gloat about our own piety. We don’t need to look for special rewards or to tell ourselves that God loves us better than God loves everyone else. God expects us to live mindfully and obediently in all of the everyday tasks of our lives. Martin Smith points out that “ministry,” comes from the Latin root for “small things,” like the word “miniscule,” for example.[2] To do “ministry,” is to take care of small matters, to practice faith in the small steps of our daily lives. The faith that Jesus commends to us involves faithfulness in small things—it is not a smooth or easy life of attainment, but a life of watchful obedience to the tasks that we have been given: tasks of forgiveness, sharing, and support for one another.

If one of the apostles were to have written a magazine article on the “life of faith” according to the spirit of our Gospel lesson, I’m afraid that the article might seem just as irritatingly obvious and as frustrating to our sense of attainment as those articles on parenting that I used to read. The headlines might scream, “Jesus Redeems Notorious Sinner,” but the story inside will be about a woman saving for months to buy expensive ointment and then washing Jesus’ feet with it. Or it will tell about a leper who walks back down a dirt road to thank Jesus for healing him. Or it will feature an Episcopalian who spends his free time tutoring needy children and building Habitat houses and going to endless Vestry meetings. Or parents trying to raise children who love God and neighbor. Or a politician who fights for justice for the poor in frustrating meeting after frustrating meeting. It will be about ordinary people and their ordinary lives, stumbling along and doing their best to stay alert to God’s presence in and around them. "Oh, I already knew all that," we would be tempted to shout as we threw down the magazine. What we always forget, though, is the sustenance of the God who loves us, of the God who is bigger than our duties and our everyday tasks, of the God who turns our understanding of attainment upside down. While we would never invite our slaves to sit down at the table with us, God invites everyone to feast at God's table. In Luke 12 Jesus says, “Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them.” Our sustenance is in the presence of our loving God. So forget attainment—Jesus just needs us to stay awake.

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[1] W. H. Auden, “For the Time Being--Advent”

[2] Martin L. Smith, Compass and Stars (New York: Seabury Books, 2007), 55.