When God is Extra
Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
A religion professor and a corrupt, money hungry politician walk into a church….
This sounds like the start of a theology nerd joke. This week’s Gospel reading, found in Luke 18:1-8, sets us up the same way: “Two men went into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector” (v. 10). Who are we supposed to like in either of these scenes? Certainly one is boring and one is bad (in the case of the joke), or one is a self-righteous prig and the other a thief for Big Brother (in the case of the parable). I’m sure we suspect who we are supposed to look down on in the end of the parable - the Pharisee – but it is too close to home to look down on the religion professor! These poor Pharisees consistently get such a bad rap, much like religion professors to undergrad students. But, the Pharisees were the religious folks of their day who fought to make worship equally accessible to folks outside of Jerusalem and outside the royal priestly families. They were about righteous living and ongoing study of Scripture by the plebeians. Certainly we can resonate with this in 2022!
Then there is the tax collector, just one in a long line of Lukan characters who are unexpected. In the last few chapters of Luke alone we have a dumb sheep who wandered off, an inanimate coin that gets lost, a son who blew off his dad and wasted his inheritance on lousy living, poor diseased Lazarus, children, a doubly-outcast Samaritan leper, and the persistently nagging widow woman. We know the drill by now - in some way this most unexpected of persons, the man who colluded with the colonizers and screwed his neighbors out of money so he could live high on the hog, is the one Jesus lifts up.
Just like I’m not sure that Luke’s personification of Pharisees is spot on, I’m also not sure that interpreting this tax-collector as righteous is spot on. Nowhere in the parable does Jesus say, or Luke interpret, that the tax collector is justified because he is righteous in any way. He is, after all, a henchman of the empire. And what if the Pharisee was right in thanking God that he wasn’t like the tax collector - or like other folks who do not have the law written in their hearts or on their hands? Even a quick study of Scripture shows that the people of God are called to be things other than thieves, rogues, adulterers, and tax collectors. The Pharisee isn’t wrong about this any more than we would be wrong about giving thanks that we are not corrupt or broken in certain ways. We, all of us, are called to lives of holiness.
The problem with the Pharisee is exactly what Luke points out in the interpretative opening to the parable: he trusted in himself and looked with contempt on the tax collector. Self-trust and self-righteous judgment is the problem - not his righteous living. Today’s assigned Hebrew Scripture texts can broaden our vision on this parable - texts Luke’s readers would have been familiar with. Both Joel 2:23-32 and Psalm 65 lift up not the righteous person, even though they call for righteousness, but rather lift up God who is righteous and good and extra.
In Joel 2:32-23 we read not only of a promise that the Lord will bless the folks who have suffered from drought and devastation, but also that the Lord will do so abundantly. The Lord will not only repay them for their years of suffering, but will also give them enough to eat until they are satisfied. The Lord will not only be visibly present amongst them, but will also pour out the Spirit on all folk - young and old, slave and free, male and female - with miraculous, visible, wonders. The Lord will not only save Israel, but will save all who call on the Lord. There will be no doubt that the healing, the blessings, the forgiveness, and the recompense is coming from the Lord and not from Israel, be they faithful or not, because God is going to be extra.
Similarly, in Psalm 65 we have God portrayed as a God of ultimate abundance and grace in the face of unrighteousness, shame, and suffering. It is possible this Psalm was also a response to the ending of a drought, which makes it a good pairing with the Joel text. For an agrarian subsistence society, a drought is a bigger problem than not being allowed to have a campfire while recreationally camping (such as happens in my home state of Oregon during a drought and enrages all campers). People’s lives could be, and were, destroyed by drought.
You visit the earth and water it,
you greatly enrich it;
the river of God is full of water;
you provide the people with grain,
for so you have prepared it.
You water its furrows abundantly,
settling its ridges,
softening it with showers,
and blessing its growth.
You crown the year with your bounty.
The Psalmist praises God not only for this water following the drought at home, but also for being the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest seas. God is, again, extra.
So, what of this Pharisee and tax collector? Like the other Lukan stories where the outcast is made a positive example, we can also remind our folks that the Kingdom of God is about making the outsider an insider and that the voices of the unexpected can and do often speak Gospel truth. But, this story also reminds us, both our folks and the preacher in our pulpit, of another thing: we are justified not because of what we have done or earned, but because of the abundant grace of God.
It is easy, is it not, to pat ourselves on the back because we have broken through the progressive/conservative divide and unlike other churches we can preach about both Jesus and justice issues. It is easy, is it not, to thank God that we don’t vote like those other folks who seem to have conflated Christian faith and political control. It is easy, is it not, to give thanks that unlike folks who read the Bible literally or poorly or not at all, that we have seminary educations (or beyond) and know well the struggles and nuances of reading and interpreting our ancient sacred texts. Thank you Lord for not making me ignorant, or close minded, or like that church down the street.
As we preach this week, may the texts also work in us so that we might show up in our pulpits and classrooms reliant on God’s great abundance knowing that the God who is extra is who has called us to and sustained us in this work.