Every so often the Lectionary of assigned readings does me a real favor. Today is the last opportunity I will have to preach before our annual pledge ingathering next Sunday, and the gospel appointed for today hands me a gift by holding up a shining example of religious observance. In his parable, Jesus describes just the sort of fellow we need more of in our church, one whose conduct sets him above the greedy, unrighteous, and adulterous people that one finds everywhere nowadays. He fasts on the Sabbath, and, best of all, he gives ten percent of everything he makes to the temple. That is why Jesus compares him so favorably with that other fellow, the tax-collector who can only beat on his miserable chest and say—oh…hold on a sec…let me look at that again… ““this man went down to his home justified rather than the other”…
“all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”
What?!
What am I supposed to do with this story? How am I supposed to impress on all of you the importance of your religious obligations? How can I convince you of the delightful sense of satisfaction you will get from knowing you have met the Episcopal Church’s official “minimum standard of giving”—the tithe? Quite simply, this story won’t let me speak this way.
All this late summer and fall we have been following Luke’s account of the journey of Jesus to Jerusalem. Each step of that journey has taken us further and further away from a God who endorses conventional ideas of religion. Each step has led us deeper into the mystery of the presence of God in Christ, who upends our fixed ideas of what it means to be a good person, a religious person, a faithful person. We have heard Jesus say he has come to divide father against son and daughter against mother. He has berated the Pharisees for tending their livestock on the Sabbath but ignoring the afflicted people in their synagogues, and told them not to invite their friends and relatives to their banquets, but to instead the poor, the disabled, and the blind. He has illustrated his stories about a radical new kind of holiness with such characters as a dishonest steward who fraudulently makes friends with his master’s debtors and an unjust judge who grudgingly gives in to a widow’s persistent complaining.
And now, with one more stop to go before he comes to Jerusalem, he asks us to imagine that we are already there, already standing before the temple of the Lord. There we meet two other pilgrims. One stands proudly and gives thanks that he is unlike the faithless men and women that surround him on every side. Unlike that tax collector over there, he lives just the sort of pious life that everyone knows is pleasing to God, and what a privilege and a pleasure it is to be righteous. But the other cannot bring himself even to enter the inner courts of the temple, for he knows he is impure. He has regular dealings with unclean people, the Gentiles for whom he gathers tariffs and rents and levies. He is one who profits from the oppressive economic system that is slowly but surely reducing the subsistence farmers of Palestine to slavery, and destroying the material basis of Jewish independence. He knows this about himself and it tears him apart inside. But he has a family to support. If he did not do this work, another would be right in line to take his place. His family has lost its own land, and he never apprenticed to a trade, so what is he supposed to do, sell himself into slavery? He knows these rationalizations by heart, but somehow standing here, outside the dwelling place of the God of his ancestors all he can feel is his weakness and his guilt. All he can say is “O God, have mercy on me!”
When it comes to tithing g, I imagine many of us have rationalizations. I know I do. I wish I could say that I tithe—it seems to me improper that someone in my position would not. But with a wife and child and two Masters’ Degrees to pay off, and two older automobiles to maintain, and the cost of housing and food and medicine, and taxes, it’s difficult to see how we could manage it. I am committed to giving a proportion of my income, to knowing what that portion is, and increasing my giving every year. I know that it feels right to make that decision independently of our monthly budgeting and to spend that money first, so that God gets the cream off the top and not the crumbs that are left. I believe in the importance of supporting the church, and in the spiritual benefits of generous giving, and it troubles me that I don’t do more.
I can imagine that there will come a day, maybe not so far off, when we are able to tithe, and when I think about how it will feel I imagine being grateful, and peaceful, and confident, and content. And there is nothing wrong with accomplishing one’s goals and having good self-esteem. But Jesus is inviting us to experience something that goes beyond feeling good about ourselves, even the good feeling that comes from doing our religious duty. Jesus is offering us reconciliation with God. And he is telling us that God is willing to be reconciled with us even when we do not tithe, or fast. God is willing to meet us where we are, even when our lives are entangled in unjust economic systems and we are compromised by the choices we have made. Just as we must not deceive ourselves that we have settled the problem of sin and its effects in our lives simply because we have matched some external yardstick of piety, so we ought not to be satisfied with our excuses. We don’t have to pile gratuitous guilt upon our heads, but we need to remember that we remain in need of grace and forgiveness, and we never can presume to know where another person stands.
The Greek word that is translated “have mercy on me” in this passage is rare in the New Testament and is only ever applied to God. It has the connotation of accepting a sacrifice and so allowing atonement to be made for sins. The tax collector in Luke would have been barred from participating in the sacrifices for sins that took place in the temple, so he could not rely on the approved religious channels to restore him to God’s good favor. But there is a closely related Greek word that Paul, Luke’s mentor, uses in the Third Chapter of the Letter to the Romans when he writes that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith.” Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem to make the final sacrifice, the turn religious conventions on their head once and for all, and to make God’s reconciling love available to all who put their trust in him, regardless of their past conduct or their ability to give.
There is, in fact, no amount we can donate to the church that is worth the value of that gift. So we do what we can, and fall short, and recommit ourselves in gratitude and hope, praying for the justifying mercy that is faith in Jesus Christ Our Lord. We do not count the cost of following him, but run the race as best we can, propelled by the ecstasy of becoming God’s reconciling love for others. How we do this in a secular capitalist consumer economy is for each of us to work out as best we can. Traditional practices like tithing and fasting can actually be useful in this effort, giving us an alternate value system to measure ourselves against. But the ultimate value is God in Christ, whose justice turns all systems of measurement and economies of salvation upside down, leaving us nothing but faith, hope, and love.
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