don't eat alone

Though the history of our Thanksgiving holiday is complicated and layered, observing a Sunday of Thanks feels worthy in any season. Here is my sermon this week. May we all find reasons for gratitude in the midst of everything.

___________________________

I ran into my friends Becky and Dave while I was grocery shopping yesterday. Becky is a CE minister and Dave is a pastor. We talked about a lot of things, but we ended up talking about church as well. For reasons I don’t now remember, at one point Dave said, “I just heard something the other day that really hit me: ‘Every tradition was new once.’”

He’s right. Just like nothing lasts forever, nothing has gone on forever either. Even long-lasting traditions change from year to year, sometimes in ways people don’t even notice. At the heart of any tradition lies a memory that people want to keep fresh and meaningful. When traditions lose meaning is when the story gets lost and what mostly remains is the repetition. A good tradition carries more than the idea that “we’ve always done it that way.”

What the word really means is a handing over or a handing down of experience and beliefs, and though we think of it in terms of generations, the real action happens much more in the present tense, in how we treat each other every day.

The young church at Philippi was not old enough to have many traditions. The Christian faith was not that old, either. Part of the reason Paul’s letters end up as scripture is because they were some of the earliest writings of the whole enterprise. They were still figuring things out, still making things up, without much to go on other than the oral tradition of the stories of Jesus and the face to face, heart to heart relational contact that brought people together.

Paul wrote this letter to the Philippian church not quite thirty years after Jesus walked the earth, and he was in prison at the time that he wrote it. Paul founded the church, which was located in Macedonia, part of what we now call Greece, and many historians consider it the first church in Europe, which speaks to why Paul felt so attached to them. Key to the church beginning was the conversion of a woman named Lydia, who was described as “a seller of purple.” She was a leader in that first church.

Once again we see that traditions get lost when we forget to tell the story.

Paul was in prison when he wrote the letter. What we are reading is the last page, the closing words, meant to wrap up what he had been saying to them and give them a word of encouragement and exhortation. So, from prison, he said,

“Be joyful in God at all times! Again I say, be joyful! Let your gentleness show in your treatment of all people. God is near. Don’t be anxious about anything; rather, bring up all of your requests to God in your prayers and petitions, along with giving thanks. Then the peace of God that exceeds all understanding will keep your hearts and minds safe in Christ Jesus.”

Joy, gentleness, trust, thanks, and peace are all interwoven together, and in the middle of it all he says, “God is near.” God is in the middle of it all, even though he was in a prison cell and the little church was trying to survive in a city that didn’t understand them.

This week, a folk singer named Todd Snider died suddenly. He was overtaken by a case of pneumonia. He was fifty-nine. Todd was an engaging, irreverent, and magnetic guy who had lots of friends, so his death hit the folk music community hard. A couple of days after his death, another singer named Will Kimbrough posted a song on his Facebook page as he tried to express his sorrow and the chorus said,

I will not get over you. I will live in disbelief
but if I know one thing that’s true
I have more gratitude than grief

I was just beginning to think about this sermon when I listened to the song, and it struck me that the last line kind of put our passage to music: I have more gratitude that grief. Will isn’t saying his thanks replaces his sorrow, just that it is what he choosing most to feel.

Paul wasn’t saying act like nothing is wrong. He was saying, in the middle of it all—where God is with us—choose to find ways to be thankful, to be gentle, to be trusting, to be joyful. Have more gratitude than grief.

Kimbrough’s song reminded me of another written by an artist named Glen Phillips who wrote a song for his daughters called “Grief and Praise.” The chorus says,

though all that you love will be taken some day
by the angel of death or the servants of change
in a floodwater tide without rancor or rage
sing loud while you’re able in grief and in praise

The best traditions—the things we repeat—are not things we hold onto for dear life because of we are afraid of losing something. When it comes to this life, we are going to lose everything. Those kinds of traditions foster fear and anxiety, even when they mean well.

The traditions that will feed us and foster growth and meaning are those that take our losses seriously and still keep going. Coming to the Communion Table is one of those because it is rooted in loss that knows death is real and love is stronger than death. So we sing loud while we’re able, in grief and in praise.

That what we call a Sunday of Thanks falls the week before Advent begins offers us a chance to expand our own traditions. I’m not thinking so much of the history of the American holiday of Thanksgiving, but of this being a day to focus on being grateful in the way Paul talked about it.

We, like many, name the Advent candles each week: peace, hope, joy, and love. I find myself thinking of this Sunday of Thanks as an early Advent Sunday. We may not have a candle, but gratitude is a good foundation to the other four because it calls us to open our hearts beyond our grief and pain. As we will sing in our closing hymn,

for the wonder that astounds us
for the truth that still confounds us
most of all that love has found us
thanks be to God.

Paul finishes his letter with this admonition, this version from the Message translation:

Summing it all up, friends, I’d say you’ll do best by filling your minds and meditating on things true, noble, reputable, authentic, compelling, gracious—the best, not the worst; the beautiful, not the ugly; things to praise, not things to curse.

We can’t control much of what happens, but we can choose how we see it, how we interpret it, how we contribute to it. That doesn’t mean we act like nothing bad is happening or there is nothing wrong. It does mean we choose our focus. We sing in both grief and praise. When we look at the whole of our lives, we have more gratitude than grief.

And we remember God is with us, and we are all together. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

This week I preached on a passage that never shows up in the lectionary cycle: the parable Jesus told right after his encounter with Zacchaeus. It is not an easy story to digest, but it felt worth talking about.

_______________________

If you were to pick up a poetry anthology for a high school or college class, one of the poems that would most likely be in it is a short poem by William Carlos Williams called “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Teachers and professors love to read it with students, one, because it is only sixteen words long, and two, because it sounds simple and enigmatic all at once. Listen to the poem:

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

You can rest assured that there are volumes written to explain what Williams was saying in these sixteen words, even though the whole thing sounds pretty straight forward because the words are so simple. I will leave you to chase the meaning down on your own time; I simply want to use the poem as an example of something that is not as apparent as it seems because that is what we are dealing with in our parable this morning. We are going to have to do some work to get to the heart of what Jesus was saying in our passage for today.

To do that, we need to remember where we are in the story of Jesus’ life as told to us by Luke. As Mark noted when he read the passage, Jesus told the parable right after Zacchaeus made his promises of repentance. He was still standing next to Jesus, waiting for him to come over for dinner. But we need to back up a little more.

A quick recap: Jesus and his disciples were on their way to the town of Jericho (a stop on their way for Jesus’ final visit to Jerusalem) when Jesus started talking about prayer and told the parable about the persistent widow and the judge who had to learn how to listen; then he told the parable about the Pharisee and the tax collector praying in the Temple, underlining that God listened to both of them; then a bunch of little children came to Jesus and the disciples scolded their parents, saying Jesus had more important people to see, but Jesus corrected them and said there no was no one more important that those little ones; then came the ruler who had a good question about how to have eternal life but wasn’t willing to live with Jesus’ answer to give away everything; then, on the outskirts of Jericho, came the blind man who called out to be healed and Jesus told him his trust in God had given him his sight; and then came Zacchaeus, who climbed a tree and ended up seeing the world in a whole new way.

And then Jesus told this story.

A wealthy and powerful man—who had inherited his wealth and power—was planning to travel to a distant land to declare himself ruler there. Before he left, he called ten men whom he had enslaved and gave each of them one mina, the equivalent of four months wages, and told them to “do some business” while he was gone. He was not offering them a chance to get out of their enslavement; he just wanted them to make more money for him. When he got to the other country, the people there rebelled, but he seized power anyway. When he came back, he called the servants in for a report on their efforts. The first had earned ten more mints–1000% return–and the king put him in charge of ten cities. The second made five minas–not too shabby–and was given authority over five cities. The third (and we only hear about three of the ten) said, “I knew you were the kind of person who takes stuff you didn’t earn for yourself and harvests things you didn’t plant, so I just kept your money safe. Here it is, just as you gave it to me.”

The ruler went ballistic. He took the mina and gave it to the one who had gotten the biggest return, saying, basically, that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer (the ruler’s words, not Jesus’), and then he called for the people who had rejected him in the other country to be rounded up and killed.

Hey, Happy Thanksgiving.

If you search online for sermons about this passage, you will find any number of them that move quickly to talk about how the enslaved men invested the money and were appropriately rewarded or punished, but much like the poem about the wheelbarrow, we need to be willing to dig deeper because that seemingly obvious interpretation doesn’t add up.

First, if we read the parable that way, it makes the ruler is a symbol for God. The problem with that is the ruler is a ruthless, greedy, and arrogant man. He even admits he takes what he didn’t earn and harvests what he didn’t plant. God is nothing like this man.

Second, even though the enslaved men are “rewarded” for their return on investment, nothing really changes. They are still enslaved. This is not a story about how God rewards a strong work ethic, or that poor people are poor because they did it to themselves. Remember, one of the key threads that runs through Luke’s gospel is that God is unequivocally on the side of the poor. Jesus said that over and over. His message didn’t change here.

What, then, do we make of this parable?

To answer that question, let’s turn to the one in the story who is considered a failure, the one who simply returned what he had been given and basically said to the unethical ruler, “I know how you do things and how you treat people, how you have built an empire by taking advantage of others, and, even though I am fearful of you, I chose not to play your game. Here’s your money back.”

I wonder how Zacchaeus felt as he stood there, having just broken his ties with a system where he had inherited power and wealth and made more at the expense of others, but was now choosing to set himself apart by sharing rather than stealing. The way Jesus ended the story makes it seem, in a way, as though the servant’s integrity didn’t have much impact beyond his own actions, but he did what he could do, which is what Zacchaeus did also, once he realized the damage he had been doing. If we do the math, Zacchaeus must have come close to impoverishing himself by giving away half of his wealth to the poor and then repaying his debts four times over.

The very next thing that happens in Luke’s gospel is Jesus gave instructions about getting the colt so he could ride into the city on what we call Palm Sunday as one who was responding to an unjust ruler and an unjust system by saying, “I choose not to play your game.” Within a week, the Roman government had executed him.

Two thousand years later, here we sit, counted as among those who trust the story still matters, even when it feels like we are caught in the whirlwind of greed and violence, and we stand in the lineage of person after person down all the generations who did what they could do as they heard God’s call on their lives, who found their way to say, “I choose not to play your game.”

William Carlos Williams said so much depended on the red wheelbarrow; Jesus said so much depends on us and our willingness to take a stand and to do what we can. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

This week’s sermon continues working through the end of Luke’s gospel, as the lectionary year draws to a close, finding Zacchaeus by the shore of the Great Salt Lake.

______________________

On our recent whirlwind trip to Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho, Ginger and I were reading about the Great Salt Lake and I learned a term I had not heard before: “terminal lake,” which sounded like another way to say Dead Sea.

Both the Great Salt Lake and the Dead Sea are terminal lakes because they have rivers that feed them, but they have no outlets other than evaporation and percolation (meaning the water sinks into the soil in the floor of the lake. There are about three dozen terminal lakes in the world, according to Wikipedia, and they are all salt water because of all the sediment that has been deposited there. Rich, in a way, because of the minerals there, but dead because they are unable to share their wealth.

Ginger and I looked at each other and said, “Well, that’s going to make it in a sermon.” And here it is.

The city of Jericho, where our story takes place, was about eight miles from the Dead Sea and about eighteen miles from Jerusalem, which is where Jesus was headed. A crowd was following him. On the outskirts of the city, Jesus had encountered a blind man who had called out to him for mercy as he walked by. Jesus asked him what he wanted and the man said, “I want to see again.”

Jesus replied, “See again! Your faith has healed you,” and he kept moving. Luke says he was moving through the city, trying to manage the crowds, when Zacchaeus entered the picture. He also wanted to see Jesus. Luke gives us a few specific details about him: he was the chief tax collector, he was personally wealthy, and he was short—short enough to not be able to see Jesus through the crowd. In human terms, we might say Zacchaeus was the human equivalent of a terminal lake. He had made a life out of taking in and not giving out. Still, he wanted to see Jesus.

He must have been relatively young, or at least in good shape, because, when he couldn’t get through the crowd, he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree so he could see Jesus when he passed by.

Unlike the blind man, Zacchaeus didn’t call out; he just hung there, watching. Jesus is the one who called to him: “Zacchaeus, come down because I need to stay in your home today.” It is the only time in the gospels that Jesus asked for hospitality from someone, and the request appeared to make Zacchaeus not only see Jesus but also see himself differently.

Zacchaeus climbed down and Jesus welcomed him joyfully, unlike the crowd gathered around them who might have been victims of Zacchaeus’ tax collecting. They were quite sure he did not deserve to have Jesus in his house. Based on his response to both Jesus and the crowd, Zacchaeus then seemed to see the people around him in ways he had not before, even as they complained about him.

He told Jesus he was going to give half of his property to poor people and then he was going to repay those he had defrauded four times what he stolen from them. He wasn’t making up random amounts. He was following instructions from the Torah about how to repent and reconcile. He was no longer a terminal lake. He was a river of love.

Jesus said, “Today this household has been rescued. I came to look for and rescue those who were lost.”

But Zacchaeus wasn’t the only rich man who came to Jesus on this part of the journey. Just before Jesus healed the blind man, someone referred to as a ruler came to Jesus and asked what he had to do to get to heaven. Jesus quoted the Ten Commandments back to him—the rules they had both grown up with. The man was quick to say he had done all of those things. Then Jesus said, “Then there’s only one thing left to do: Sell everything you own and give it away to the poor. You will have riches in heaven. Then come, follow me.” Luke says,

This was the last thing the official expected to hear. He was very rich and became terribly sad. He was holding on tight to a lot of things and not about to let them go.

He couldn’t stop being a terminal lake.

What, then, is the difference between the two men? Commentators say what both shared in common was that they were relatively young and their positions and wealth were inherited. They also both came looking for Jesus seeking some sense of wholeness. They both knew their lives were not what they needed to be. And both of them heard that what it took to be rescued from themselves, what it took to be reconciled to God, to make things right with God and with the people around them was not to cling to their financial security as though it would save them, but to give it away so everyone had enough.

A good storyteller builds to a big finish, and Luke is a pretty good story teller.

After Jesus encounter with Zacchaeus, he told one more parable (which we will talk about next week) and then he gave instructions to his disciples about getting the donkey he would ride into Jerusalem for what we know as Palm Sunday. We are nearing the climax of the story, and Luke sets that up by telling Jesus’ parable about the persistent widow and the judge who had to learn how to listen; then he told the parable about the Pharisee and the tax collector praying in the Temple, underlining that God listened to both of them; then a bunch of little children came to Jesus and the disciples scolded their parents, saying Jesus had more important people to see, but Jesus corrected them and said there no was no one more important that those little ones; then came the ruler who had a good question but wasn’t willing to live with the answer; then came the blind man who called out to be healed and Jesus told him his trust in God had given him his sight; and then came Zacchaeus, who climbed a tree and ended up seeing the world in a whole new way.

At the heart of all of these stories is a theme that runs through the whole gospel: God created us to take care of each other. Our piety is not enough, if we keep a death grip on our possessions. Just like the Great Salt Lake, we cannot survive if all we do is collect and we never share. If we need more examples, just pick up a newspaper, and we can see those consumed with holding their grip on wealth and power, and we can see how deadly it is.

Zacchaeus was changed because Jesus demanded hospitality. That sounds like a strong word, but Jesus said, “Come down at once because I need to stay in your home today.” He wasn’t asking, he was telling, the same way my mother insisted (well, demanded) us to sit down at dinner when it was ready. We did what she said because we knew she meant it. Jesus’ demand opened Zacchaeus’ heart to seeing his wealth as a way to build and heal relationships, to let things flow out of and through his life so he could thrive.

That same demand of hospitality applies to us, as well: either we share, or we die. We were created to be more than terminal lakes. May we open our lives like Zacchaeus did, not tighten our grips like the ruler. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

Here is my sermon for All Saints Sunday, based on Luke’s version of Jesus’ beatitudes and woes.

______________________________

Years ago, I was a member of a wonderful church in Dallas called Royal Lane Baptist Church. They, like many Baptist churches, had a tradition of a Wednesday night meal and prayer service. On most Wednesdays, we were offered a full meal, but one week the menu was different because our speaker for that night was a person who worked trying to respond to the world-wide disparity of the availability of food, so we had what they called a World Hunger Meal.

What that meant was when we got in line we were given a colored ticket that determined what and how much we got to eat. I forget the exact percentages, but the majority of folks got a small portion of rice and beans, and there was a pitcher of water on the table to share; the next group got rice, beans, and some sort of greens; the last group, which was only a handful of people, got rice, beans, greens, ham, cornbread, dessert, and ice tea.

One of the men in the church was quite vocal about his dissatisfaction at being in the majority. He complained from the time he got his tray until he sat down at his table, and then he continued ranting about how he didn’t need this kind of object lesson to know people were hungry.

About that time, one of the children in the church who had drawn the full meal, sat down next to him and was unaware of the man’s complaints, looked at his plate and said, “Wow! You didn’t get much food at all and I have a bunch. Have some of mine.”

The little boy didn’t have a frame of reference to understand world hunger, but he somehow knew how to recognize the need in front of his face, which is at the heart of Jesus’ words in our passage this morning.

Starting with that story is telling the punch line before the joke, in a way, so we need to back up a bit in Luke’s account.

We are reading this morning from early in Jesus’ ministry, not long after his baptism. There were some who pressed him about how his new gospel fit the mold of established religious norms. They wanted him to tell people that what mattered most was to keep the rules. Instead, Jesus gathered a group of disciples around him from different walks of life and social standing and talked about relationships as more important than regulations.

Luke says Jesus went up on a mountain to pray all night long and when he came down he gathered those we know as the twelve disciples and the first thing he said are the words we just finished reading. Many commentators draw connections between this passage of what we commonly call the Beatitudes, which are in Matthew’s gospel, and there are similarities, but the two accounts are not describing the same event. Matthew tells of Jesus preaching to a large crowd, and the sermon goes on for three chapters. Luke says Jesus was talking to his disciples, and the sermon is short, though a little longer than what we read.

It is also more direct. Where Matthew writes that Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirt,” Luke says, “Blessed are the poor”—and the word means those who actually don’t have enough to provide. The same with those who are hungry, those who are weeping, and those who feel marginalized and rejected by society because of who they are. Jesus’ words in Luke then take a turn the sermon in Matthew does not. Jesus turns to those who are rich, those who don’t have to worry about where their next meal is coming from, those who have enough and says, “You have it coming”—this is not going to end well for you.

But before we talk about what all that means for us, I want to read part of the sermon left out by our lectionary. These words follow immediately after what we read.

“But I say to you who are willing to hear: Love your enemies. Treat well those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who mistreat you. If someone slaps you on the cheek, offer the other one as well. If someone takes your coat, don’t withhold your shirt either. Give to everyone who asks and don’t demand your things back from those who take them. Treat people in the same way that you want them to treat you.

“If you love those who love you, why should you be commended? Even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, why should you be commended? Even criminals love those who love them. If you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, why should you be commended? Even criminals lend to criminals expecting to be paid back in full. No, love your enemies and be helpful and lend without the hope of getting anything back. Then your payment will be generous and you will be acting the way children of the Most High act, for God is gracious to the ungrateful and to those full of wickedness. Be compassionate just as God is compassionate.”

Be compassionate just as God is compassionate, which means to love others in a way that understands the equation will never even out. We talk a lot about God’s enduring love that never lets us go. It helps to remember as we read these verses that God never breaks even. God always loves us more than we love in return.

When we start keeping score, when we think love and compassion can be measured like a profit and loss statement, we not only miss the point, but we become part of the problem that causes the disparities in the world—in our country—that make us to things like that Wednesday night Hunger Meal.

It is heartbreaking to me that our passage for today seems so poignant. The lectionary cycle would have had us read this passage no matter what the headlines; that it falls on a day when forty million Americans are losing their access to food they need to live makes Jesus’ words even more essential for us to hear.

Earlier in the week, as the deadline drew closer, a small pub in Guilford put out word on social media that anyone who was losing benefits could come by and get a free meal. They are not a big corporate restaurant. They don’t have a large profit margin. They know they are not going to break even on this. And they are feeding people. Some of the other places in town followed suit, basically saying what that little boy at the church dinner said years ago: “Wow! You didn’t get much food at all and I have a bunch. Have some of mine.”

All Saints’ Sunday reminds us of the lineage of love in which we stand. It also invites us to recognize and affirm our common bond and union with all humanity of all economic standings, all ethnicities and races, from all times and places. We are joined together not because of what we have, or what we’ve done, but because we are all created in the image of God and worthy to be loved, which also means we are capable of great compassion because we were made to be agents of God’s grace and goodness to one another. The heart of what it means to be human is to be compassionate, not to keep score. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

My sermon on Jesus’ parable of the pharisee and the tax collector hinges on a re-translation by Amy-Jill Levine that opened up the story for me.

__________________________

In the early days of Saturday Night Live, one of the repeating characters was a priest named Father Guido Sarducci. He was not a priest of course, but he played one on TV. One of his ideas was what he called The Five Minute University. He said people spend a lot of money on college and then forget most of what they learned, so he could save anyone a lot of time and money by enrolling in his university that lasted only five minutes, graduation included.

The idea was that in five minutes you would learn what the average college graduate remembers five years after they get out of school. For Spanish, you would learn to say, “¿Como está usted?” which means, “How are you?”, and also the response, “Muy bien,” which means, “Very well.” Economics class boiled down to supply and demand: you buy something and then you sell it for more than you paid for it. Theology was simply, “God is everywhere because God likes you.”

I was actually in college the first time I heard Guido do his routine and, I have to say, it sounded pretty tempting. Sometimes it feels like it would be nice if more things could be distilled into sentences that were easy summaries that we didn’t have to think about again.

But that’s just not the way life goes.

Jesus’ approach to teaching was quite different that Father Sarducci because he didn’t offer a whole lot of easy summaries or catch phrases. Sometimes he listed things, like the Sermon on the Mount, or he said what he meant in a sentence or two, but there was always more for his followers to learn. Jesus taught in layers that require of us to keep digging, to keep looking, as our Congregational forbearers said, for more light to break forth.

To keep growing, we have to keep learning. Part of that, particularly when we come to scripture and theology, is to read and listen in a way that we can be caught by surprise, rather than living with expected summaries as though it were a course in the Five Minute University.

With that in mind, the sermon is going to feel a bit more like a Bible Study because we need to dig in a bit.

Last week, as we talked about the widow and the judge, we saw the way Jesus took characters that could be stereotyped and broke those images wide open so we could see something else. The same is true in today’s parable.

Once again, the story is brief. Two men came into the Temple to pray. One was a Pharisee. I want to stop there for a moment and ask what image comes to mind when you hear the word Pharisee. My guess is it is not very positive. Across Christian history, we have often painted them as arrogant and even dishonest. We even added the word to our language to mean someone who is self-righteous and hypocritical.

Theologian Amy-Jill Levine, who is a Jewish New Testament scholar, reminds us that to most of Jesus’ audience, the Pharisees were respected teachers “who walked the walk and talked the talk.” The apostle Paul was a Pharisee and saw it as a mark of distinction. They were not priests, so the man in our parable was not on his home turf in the Temple. He, like the tax collector, had come to pray as part of his faith commitment.

The tax collector was a Jewish man who worked for the Roman government, which meant he was not necessarily the most popular man in town. People often thought of tax collectors as dishonest, and he might have been, but this man was in the Temple praying for forgiveness. The conventional reading of this parable would have us hear it much like the painting on the front of our order of service, where the Pharisee appears rich and well-dressed and the tax collector looks poor, worn, and left out. Amy-Jill Levine says that’s not the case. He lived in the center of society and probably did pretty well for himself.

This is not a story of a rich person and a poor person.

Instead of comparing and contrasting the men to get meaning from the parable, Levine invites us to read the prayers of the two men at face value: the Pharisee is offering a prayer of gratitude, and the tax collector is offering a prayer of repentance. She says people in Jesus’ day would have had a hard time thinking that the tax collector’s prayer would have been answered, that he would have been justified. They would have expected it, as far as the parable goes, but they would not have liked it.

Then she went on to say that part of the problem we have with the parable, as modern readers, is that our translations play to the stereotypes that have been handed down. For her, it all swings on one key preposition in the sentence in today’s passage, “I tell you, this person went home justified alongside of the Pharisee.”

If you were to open our pew Bible and turn to Luke 18, the sentence would read, “I tell you, this person went home justified rather than the Pharisee,” as if Jesus were making a point about the religious teacher.

Here’s the thing: Both translations are accurate because the Greek word—para—can mean both things. It comes into English in words like parallel, paradox, parable, even Paraclete, which is one of the names for the Holy Spirit. We are used to it meaning alongside, or with. To understand why most Christian translators have chosen words that separate the two men would mean talking about church history for longer than you would want to stay this morning. For now, let’s stay with the text.

Last week, I said that in the parable of the widow and the judge Jesus was asking us to pray for justice, which meant looking at whoever we see and not seeing adversaries or enemies; but seeing people who hurt like we do; about listening to the voices God puts in our ears and answering them in love.

In this companion story, then, wouldn’t it make sense that Jesus was making connections rather than comparisons as a reminder that God’s love can heal all kinds of brokenness when we come willing to be healed. Whatever issues we might have with the Pharisee or the tax collector, God listened to both of them. As I have said before, faith and life are team sports.

Immediately following this parable, Luke says people were bringing their babies to Jesus to have them blessed and the disciples scolded the parents, telling them Jesus had more important people to see. Jesus intervened to welcome the little ones and say they were the ones who really understood how God was at work in the world. That is followed by a visit from a rich young man who what it took to find peace with God, but prefaces his question about what he had to do to be right with God by saying he kept all the rules, much like the Pharisee in our parable. Jesus told him to give away all of his wealth to those in need—to see himself as alongside of everyone.

The young man couldn’t do it. Can we?

Life is hard and stressful and sad, which makes it tempting to reduce those with whom we struggle to convenient labels, to decide we know who they are and what they think, and then write them off, making our Five Minute University Theology class sound like, “Jesus loves you but I’m his favorite.”

Life is also beautiful and surprising and complicated, which means we are called to drop the labels and look at the people, to tell stories rather than sling slogans, to do the wonderful and messy work of living alongside of each other so that everyone gets to know what love feels like.

May we have the courage to find translations the create greater room for God’s love to envelop us all. Amen.

Peace,
Milton