Homily: The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost [October 30, 2022]

 

            For some reason which I fail entirely to understand, every few years I rewatch an old TV series from start to finish. After the presidential inauguration in 2017 I felt compelled to view again The Sopranos in its entirety; something about Tony Soprano and his family helped me understand the newly installed occupants of the White House. And just this year I decided to rewatch all five seasons of Breaking Bad, a series that presented the travails of Walter White, a terminally-ill high school chemistry teacher who starts cooking and distributing methamphetamine as a way to leave his family some money. While I didn’t note any presidential similarities this time, something about the anti-hero’s moral confusion seemed to encapsulate our current national moment.

            Both of those shows became famous because they featured protagonists whom some thought “lovable rogues”, but their surface attractiveness masked deeply flawed interior lives. That these characters could elicit both our admiration and our scorn told us something about the complications of our affections. As I find myself liking Tony Soprano or Walter White in spite of myself, I may need to rethink how I understand my own morality.

            I bring up my complicated response to these two disreputable TV malefactors because they help me understand my feelings about Zacchaeus, the guest star in our gospel for this morning [Luke 19: 1-10]. If you’ve been around the church for a while, you’ll know that Zacchaeus has long been a favorite of Sunday Schools. We routinely make kids sing songs and act out plays about the little guy up there in the branches. He’s a compelling figure: he’s short! He climbs a tree to see Jesus! Surely, we think, someone with whom the kids can identify.

            The problem with the way we use Zacchaeus, though, is that he is actually a lot more like Tony Soprano than he is like the Mayor of Munchkinland. Zacchaeus was short, it is true. But he was also the chief tax collector of Jericho, and you might know that the tax collectors of Jesus’s day were not like today’s IRS bureaucrats. First century Jewish Palestine was occupied by a Roman standing army, and the Romans taxed the population outrageously to feed and house them. Jewish tax collectors were recruited by the Romans to exact these taxes from the already strapped Israelites. As a result, tax collectors were seen more as mob bag men (like Mr. Soprano) than as cuddly little tree climbers. And for Zacchaeus to be the chief tax collector only exaggerated the problems.

            Which is not to say that Zacchaeus doesn’t become a hero. It is to say that he does undergo a transformative journey to get to a good place. You might even say he goes through something like a conversion experience.

            In order to get Zacchaeus to this new good place, both he and Jesus have to take some action. Clearly intrigued by Jesus and what he has heard about him, Zacchaeus climbs a sycamore tree in order to get a view of this mysterious figure. Just as Zacchaeus moves towards Jesus, so Jesus moves towards him, and says "Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today."  

            When Jesus accompanies Zacchaeus to his house, the crowd murmurs, "He has gone to be the guest of . . . a sinner." And they’re right. Zacchaeus is a sinner, if by “sinner” we mean one who publicly defies Jewish law. The people of Jericho are scandalized: they clearly had thought of Jesus as a healer and teacher who would do his good works for respectable people. But here he is accepting the hospitality of the town’s biggest gangster.

            No one is prepared for what happens next. Something about his encounter with Jesus changes Zacchaeus. Luke doesn’t tell us what it was—perhaps just being seen and acknowledged by Jesus, perhaps Jesus’s willingness to risk disgrace by entering his house—this moment with Jesus changes Zacchaeus dramatically, and he blurts out,

"Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much." 

            This certainly is a remarkable turnaround. It’s as if Al Capone had suddenly turned into Mackenzie Scott, going from gangster to philanthropist in a zero to sixty turnaround. The biblical standard of generosity is 10%. Nobody gives away 50. And the scriptures call only for one eye for one eye, not four for one. What is going on here?

            In the story of Zacchaeus and his conversion, Luke is telling us something about the nature of repentance. It is clear that this Jesus moment has made Zacchaeus renounce his former life, and he instantly vows to make amends by giving away his ill-gotten gains and paying oversized reparations to those he has injured. This, says Luke, is what true repentance looks like.

In our everyday parlance, we tend to think of repentance as akin to “feeling bad about” something. “Gosh, I repent hurting your feelings, drinking so much last night, investing in Enron.” For you and me today, repentance is regret. But it wasn’t that way for the Jews of Jesus’s day.

The Greek word the gospels use for repentance is μετάνοια, a word which literally means “turning around”, and figuratively suggests “a transformative change of mind”. Μετάνοια means a lot more than what we would call “repentance”. It means entirely changing your thought, and as a result, changing your action. When Zacchaeus repents, he experiences μετάνοια. He doesn’t say, “Gee, I feel bad about my ill-gotten gains.” He says, “I’ll give away half of what I’ve got.” He doesn’t say, “Sorry if I’ve offended you.” He says, “Here is four times what I illegally took from you.” His encounter with Jesus has totally converted and transformed Zacchaeus, and he honors that change not only in language but in action.

What can we learn from this interaction between Jesus and the repentant chief tax collector? Here are two quick thoughts.

First, Zacchaeus’s repentance is one of action, not words. Perhaps it’s the influence of social media, but we 21^st century people seem to think that saying something is the same as doing something. “Of course I work against climate change. I tweeted about it just yesterday!” Not only do we confuse tweets and Facebook posts with doing something; we also spend a lot of our time saying things that we don’t then back up with action. I regularly receive emails from institutions (including universities and churches) that say, in their signature line, “We acknowledge that we occupy unceded Chumash, or other Native American, land.” I have yet to receive an email which adds, “therefore we’re giving it back.” True repentance needs action to be complete.

Thought two is tied up with what Jesus says at the end of our passage: 

Then Jesus said to him, "Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost."

We tend to think of sin as a personal matter, something we do in private. The nature of Zacchaeus’s sin was public. In his role as chief tax collector he had violated other people and the norms of his community. Over the centuries, the church has asked us to focus on our personal, private actions. But the Bible is more concerned with our social behavior. Zacchaeus may have had impure thoughts or eaten meat on Fridays, but that’s not why he’s a sinner. He’s a sinner because he defrauded and abused people. And in his repentance, his μετάνοια, his complete change of mind and behavior, he is restored through his reparations to his community. “He too is a son of Abraham.” He will remain in Jericho and work it out. His new life will be hard, but it will also be joyous.

Jesus concludes by saying, “For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost." This is true not only for Zacchaeus and the people of Jericho. It is true for you and me. Jesus has come to be the guest of us sinners, and the result is that salvation has come to his house. In the same way, Jesus has come to be our guest, and his presence within and among us at first will expose whatever we need to repent. Are our relationships, both personal and social, unjust? Are we behaving in our family or our community in ways that betray our deepest values? If so, we need not to feel bad but to repent, to change, to turn around and live new lives where we are. That’s never very easy to do, but it is the only way to personal and social wholeness.

“For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost." Jesus is not only talking about Zacchaeus here he’s talking about you and me. He has come today to be the guest of all us sinners. Our best response, as always, is not to feel bad about our pasts but instead to be open to the forgiven future he offers, and so to change, to turn around, to follow him, and always to give thanks that we have been seen, known, and loved. Amen.

 

 

Homily: The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost [October 23, 2022] St. James, Newport Beach

            One of my all-time favorite church jokes goes like this:

            A man of the type we used to call a “captain of industry” goes into an Episcopal church in Manhattan. Struck by the gothic majesty of the building, our powerful industrialist goes to the altar rail and sinks to his knees.

            “Use me, Lord!” he cries. “Hopefully in an executive capacity.”

            This joke always comes to mind when I hear Jesus’s parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, our gospel reading for today [Luke 18: 9-14]. For many years I worked for George Regas, the late, long-time former rector of All Saints, Pasadena, and the industrialist, like the Pharisee, is the kind of person about whom George would often say, “I know that man!” Both of these characters exhibit a presumption of self-importance which I often see in myself. The captain of industry is sure that God wants to use him in upper management. The Pharisee is pleased to let God know that he is not like other people. Neither of these men seems to suffer from a bad self-image.

            In today’s gospel Jesus makes a clear comparison between two characters. We’ve already met the Pharisee. He is joined at prayer by a tax collector, a somewhat disreputable character who simply says, “God be merciful to me, a sinner.” Before I unravel the threads of this story, it’s important to understand what it meant to be a Pharisee or a tax collector in the world of Jesus and his companions.

            First, to the Pharisee. The Pharisees were the dominant strain of first century Judaism in Palestine. When presented the opportunity to follow Jesus, they declined. As a result, the New Testament is not exactly objective in the way it presents them:  the gospels almost always depict the Pharisees in cartoonishly evil terms. They are legalistic, self-important villains who skulk around trying to trip up and entrap Jesus. 

            That depiction is not even remotely fair. The Pharisees were simply a group of believers trying as best they could to apply their faith to the dilemmas of everyday life. They had the Jewish law, the torah, as their guide, and they were using it as best they could to answer their spiritual and ethical questions. They were the establishment, and they were doing their best to live their lives in the world with the religion they had. In other words, they were the first century’s Episcopalians. In the words of George Regas, “I know that man!”

            Second, to the tax collector: we shouldn’t think of this character as a contemporary IRS agent. First century Jewish Palestine was occupied by a Roman standing army, and the people there were taxed beyond belief to feed and support those forces. So-called “tax collectors” were distrusted because they were Jews who collaborated with the Roman enemy, acting more like mafia bagmen than government bureaucrats. They were seen as at best gangsters and as at worst traitors.

            We need to see these two men in their first century context, not as 21^st century stereotypes. The Pharisee prays in a conventional way. It was common in the scriptures for praying Jews to remind God of their faithfulness. If you’re not going to make your own case for God, who else will? The Psalms are shot through with the kind of self-congratulatory things the Pharisee says. Similarly, the tax collector in this story resembles the kind of outsider who may live a less than exemplary life but who is nevertheless drawn toward Israel’s God because of the depth of grace and forgiveness evident in the Hebrew scriptures.

            So that’s who these two people are. At the end of the story, Jesus says this about them:

“I tell you, this man [the tax collector] 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."

To me, Jesus’s parable turns on the word we translate, “justified”.  Today, we use the word “justified” to suggest something like “proved right”—like when you’re in an argument with your spouse and you say, “see, I was justified” in doing whatever fool thing you’re being called out on. That’s our common use of the word, but it differs a bit from the word Luke uses here.

That word is δεδικαιωμένος, a form of the verb δικαιω, and the sense of that verb is something like “to make right”. It’s a legal term, and one way to understand it would be our English word, “acquitted”. As is often the case in the Bible, Jesus is portraying a legal procedure here. Two men stand before the divine court pleading their cases. The Pharisee argues for his virtue by reciting a list of his moral achievements. The other simply acknowledges himself to be a sinner. They are making their cases. Only one of them, the tax collector, prevails. He has been “made right” with God.

What’s going on here is less about a verdict than it is about a relationship. Both the Pharisee and the tax collector stand before the altar in the temple because they know they are out of right relationship with God, and they are asking to be restored. The Pharisee thinks he can get that by reading God his résumé. The tax collector has no such illusions. He seeks to be restored to right relationship with God by acknowledging his need for mercy and forgiveness.

This story of two different men at prayer is not a story about who is right and who is wrong. It is a story about how we relate to God and each other. The Pharisee thinks that the system and its rules will save him. The tax collector knows that being right with God depends on first acknowledging one’s need. The Pharisee is arrogant because the system has told him that virtue somehow equals accomplishment. The tax collector is humble because he knows, from the outset, that he needs help. That’s why Jesus ends the parable with the saying, “all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted."

The humility Jesus describes here is neither false modesty nor low self-esteem. The humility of Jesus is a humility that begins in an honest assessment of our condition. It’s an acknowledgement that we are God’s creatures and can get into trouble when we forget that. Human systems—philosophies, cultures, even religions—can trick us into thinking that we are totally independent of God and each other. It’s easy to think that when everything is going your way. But sooner or later life teaches us that we are not in control, and in those moments we are thrown back on our need for God and each other. The tax collector knows that now. The Pharisee will know it one way or another pretty soon.

October is the month when Episcopal congregations talk about stewardship, about what you and I give to advance the mission and ministry of the church. Over the course of my working life I’ve heard and given a lot of stewardship sermons, and many of them are what we might this morning call “Pharasaic”: they are a list of programs and accomplishments. They all add up to “Give to the church because it’s so fabulous!”

Jesus’s praise of the tax collector’s humility suggests that there is another reason that you and I give to support the church and what it does. We do so because we want to be “justified”, made right with God and each other. We do so because life teaches us, over the years, that we are not autonomous but dependent. We need God, and we need each other. We need a place like this where we can come together to acknowledge that need and, as best we can, support each other when life hits us upside the head with one of its many two by fours of suffering and loss. We need a place like this so we can witness to the world that, as we acknowledge our own pain and loss, we can respond in generosity and love when we see such suffering in others. 

As we hear this story in stewardship season, let us respond as those who would humble and not exalt ourselves. I am not saying that a generous pledge to St. James will put you in a right relation with God—only God and your own self-examination will do that. But I am saying that giving to support this place is one sign that you see life’s meaning in relation to something larger than yourself—you see it in relation to God and the community which tries in its own way to acknowledge and give thanks to God in its common life and in service to the world around it.

“Use me, Lord! Hopefully in an executive capacity.” “I know that man!” I do know that man, and I’m grateful that over time my life in the church has helped me bit by bit to become less like him. And that is one of the many, many reasons I give to support the church and what it does for me, for my family, for my community, and for the world. I invite you to join me in this generous and joyful work to support what God is up to. Amen.

Homily: The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost [October 9, 2022] St. Athanasius, Los Angeles

            I don’t like to think of myself as a hostile or passive-aggressive person, but perhaps I am. The older I get, the more annoyed I become when people seem to take basic courtesies for granted. Whether it’s holding a door open for someone or letting a car enter a congested lane of traffic, I am increasingly surprised at how few people pause to offer a word or gesture of thanks. Luckily for them, I have appointed myself the messenger of manners. “You’re welcome!” I often shout, usually in a sickly-sweet, cloying voice. I always feel better, but my sarcasm never seems to make much of a difference.

            This morning’s gospel reading [Luke 17: 11-19] shows Jesus’s response to this kind of social ingratitude, though (luckily for us) without the passive-aggressive hostility or sarcasm. Ten people suffering with leprosy encounter Jesus, and (knowing him to be a healer) they ask that he cure them. When he does so, only one turns back to him and offers thanks. Clearly a bit stunned by their ingratitude, Jesus asks, “Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?”

            It is not incidental to the point of this story that the one grateful healed person turns out not to be an Israelite but a Samaritan, an outsider. As in the other Lucan story of the Good Samaritan, the gospel seems to be telling us something about the universal nature of human goodness. It isn’t always the chosen people who do the right thing.

            But the identity of the one grateful person in the story is really a side-issue. The main point, I think, has to do with the whole question of giving thanks as central to our human relation to God. And to get at that—and with apologies to Gerti, your theologically educated warden-- I’d like to offer what I promise will be a brief but pithy little lesson in Hebrew.

            There are two words in Hebrew which may sound alike but which denote a world of theological difference. The first, todah ( תּוֹדָה) means “thanksgiving”. The second, torah ( תּוֹרָה) is more familiar to us. It means “law”. Jews often use torah to describe the first five books of the Bible, but that is because Judaism considers those books to be the law. Though todah and torah may sound similar, they describe two very different attitudes toward God, the holy, and life itself.

            Let’s begin with todah or thanksgiving. In the earliest days of Israel’s life—from the Exodus in around 1400 BC to the Exile in. 587 BC—giving thanks was the primary act of Hebrew worship. The great event of Israel’s common life—the Exodus—was an experience of deliverance from slavery and oppression into freedom. The worshipping life which grew out of that deliverance was one of giving thanks—of making an offering and sharing a meal with God and the community in celebration of and thanksgiving for both the corporate deliverance of the Exodus and whatever personal deliverance (a good harvest, healing, the birth of a child) had occurred in a person’s life. This todah way of relating to God was the primary characteristic of Israel’s life and worship for centuries, right up until the Babylonian exile and captivity of 587. Our Old Testament reading from Jeremiah this morning recalls that horribly disruptive period in Israel’s life.

            When the Israelites returned from exile and rebuilt the Jerusalem temple, they made the move from todah(thanksgiving) worship to torah (law) worship. In the book of Nehemiah chapter 8, the priest Ezra reads the torah to the people and they commit to follow its teachings and abide by its rules. In the twenty-year period of the Babylonian exile, a significant shift has occurred: what was previouslyiii a living religion celebrating God’s ongoing presence among us by giving thanks changed to a more static observance, finding God at work most reliably now in the five books of a historic past which we can but remember. This is not to say that Jews did not still give thanks for personal and social blessings. But it is to say that gratitude was subtly replaced by obedience as the primary way one related to God, other people, and the world. Todah had become torah. Thanksgiving turned into law.

            Now this rendering is a bit simplistic, but it helps us understand what Jesus is up to in this morning’s gospel. When Jesus heals the ten, he tells them to “go and show yourselves to the priests”.  In terms of first century Jewish life, this command has the force of torah, of law, and the ten healed persons immediately proceed to follow orders. They’re on their way to the priest to become ritually clean and then to rejoin society. This is all conventional Jewish practice, totally in keeping with post-Exilic ritual standards.

            But one healed person turns back to give thanks. It’s not that he won’t go to the priest and get purified. It’s more that he remembers an earlier aspect of Jewish life that his fellows seem to have forgotten: he remembers that what has happened to him is not so much a cleansing as a deliverance. He has been delivered from the disease of leprosy and set free to live a more abundant life. His response to that deliverance is like that of earlier Israelites. He comes back and gives thanks. He has moved from law to thanksgiving, from torah to todah.

            In making that move, the one healed person encapsulates the entire Jesus experience. Jesus’s critique of first century Palestinian Judaism is a critique any of us might make of any religious system that claims to have a lock on holiness and purity. As an observant Jew himself, Jesus follows and honors torah, the law. But he realizes that the law is there properly not as the object of our worship but as a way into relationship with God, other people, and the world. To Jesus and his companions, just as for the earlier Israelites, the real point of following God is todah, giving thanks. When you put following the law first you can fall into the trap of thinking of yourself as self-sufficient. “Look at me: I’m doing everything right!” When you put giving thanks first, you realize something deeper—you realize that you are the recipient of a divine generosity that gives you not only what you have but even life itself. Following the law tends towards self-righteousness. Giving thanks tends towards compassion.

            In his praise of the one who returned to give thanks, Jesus is leading us not away from the law but to putting law in its proper context of thanksgiving. This teaching suggests two ideas—one social, one theological—which all of us might ponder in the days ahead.

            We are approaching elections at the state, city, and county levels next month. There seem to be two primary types of people in our political life: we might call them the “law-abiders” and the “empaths”. Some candidates argue for tough, legalistic solutions to our social problems. Others argue for compassionate actions that emphasize our solidarity with each other. When looking at these candidates and issues, we might ask ourselves the old evangelical question: WWJVF? Who would Jesus vote for? As Christians we are also citizens, and as citizens we need to be mindful that we’re all in this together. For us, thanksgiving will always take precedence over law.

            That’s the social thought. Here’s the theological one. It won’t have escaped you that “eucharist”, the liturgy we do together this morning, is the Greek word for “thanksgiving”.  As followers of Jesus, we identify ourselves first and foremost as those who give thanks. We come now, together, to gather around God’s table, and we do so not in celebration of our purity but in acknowledgment of our dependence. For our life, our purpose, and our fulfillment we rely not on ourselves but on God and each other. What sets us people of faith apart from our individualistic culture is that we are the people who know and acknowledge our need for each other and God. We are the people who realize, as a mentor of mine once said, that “we’re all on cosmic relief”. That’s why we work for justice and peace. And that’s why, this morning, as we do every Sunday, we now proceed, together in this Eucharist, to give thanks. Amen.