It took so long to get the fire lit,
even though the wind blew
as though the Holy Spirit fanned
the flames of Pentecost herself.
The children in their costumes came
and went without judgement, candy-sweet.
When the tinder finally caught, I sought
bric-à-brac of twigs from across the neighbour’s yard
to keep it fed. Consider, I thought,
the fires of heaven, and us poor fuel,
damp and easily consumed,
yet within each the spark of holiness.
There’s a deep irony to this parable, that whenever we read it, we are tempted, aren’t we, to mutter, “Thank God I’m not like that Pharisee!” (Luke 18:9-14)
Jesus told this parable to those who trusted in themselves, instead, it is implied, in the deep and abiding mercies of God. There is a tragedy in the telling of this parable, which is that the Pharisee, who does everything right, everything good and well, cannot be satisfied without comparing himself to the tax collector, without finding someone else to scapegoat, someone to be better than.
Jesus told this parable to those who trusted in themselves, and regarded others with contempt.
In the modern psychological mode, we might see the Pharisee as an overgrown child, still cowering in fear before a strict parent, unable to trust that love will prevail, casting anyone and everyone else in front of him to shield himself from judgement: I’m a good child! He’s the bad one! He did it! We might even feel sorry for him. Which makes us even less likely to want to be like him. And so the spiral continues.
The irony of this parable and its type-casting of the Pharisee deepens when we consider biblical historical scholarship that suggests that Jesus might himself have been closer to the Pharisees than we often assume. Now, this is something of a mystery, because the historical record itself is sparse regarding Pharisees, but the story goes something like this (and here I’m drawing on opinions from Amy-Jill Levine, Jewish New Testament scholar [i], and Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, who has written a series of researched blog posts on the subject [ii]; but don’t blame them if I’ve made any errors below):
In the first century, there were several distinct groups within Judaism that we know something about. One was the Sadducees: we see them in the Gospels. We know that they are associated with the Temple, and that they don’t believe in resurrection. They are the ones who ask Jesus the question about the man whose widow marries seven brothers in succession, hoping to trip him with the technicality of who will possess her in the afterlife. Jesus artfully escapes that snare by setting the widow free (Luke 20:27-40).
Another was the Essenes: the ascetic band who lived in the caves of Qumran and gave us the Dead Sea Scrolls. You may have heard speculation that John the Baptizer was one of those.
Apparently, the Essenes called the Pharisees “seekers after smooth things”, because they did not live in the caves but, as Jesus describes elsewhere, liked to wear long robes and swirl them around the marketplace (Luke 20:45-46; Matthew 23:1-12). The definition of the word Pharisee is itself murky, but one strong contender is that to be a Pharisee means to be an interpreter. An interpreter of what? An interpreter of the Law. As such, the Pharisees are often considered the ancestors of the rabbis who continued the Jewish traditions after the destruction of the Temple, reinterpreting and continuing the ancient traditions into a new and devastated landscape.
Who were the Pharisees in relation to Jesus? They argued points of the Law with him, and he argued back. They were Saul of Tarsus, later Paul, who boasted in his Pharisaism (Acts 26:5; Philippians 3:5). They were Gamaliel, Saul’s teacher, who argued on behalf of Peter and the apostles before the Sanhedrin (Acts 5:34-39). They were Simon, who invited Jesus to dinner (and whose invitation Jesus accepted; Luke 7:36), and Nicodemus, who came to Jesus at night (John 3), and who helped Joseph to bury him in a new tomb after his shameful and false execution (John 19:38-42).
So, was Jesus one of them? Does it matter? Well, only if we consider that the parable he is telling is not about comparing one group to another: Pharisees bad, tax collectors good; Pharisees proud, tax collectors humble; Pharisees fraudulent, tax collectors true. That would be a good parable, in that it turns communal wisdom on its head and shocks its listeners into a new understanding; but it wouldn’t really ring true, and it would only reinforce the tendency I think Jesus is aiming to subvert.
Because the Pharisee in the parable, and the ones listening, were righteous. They did, by and large, pray regularly, tithe willingly, fast rigorously, keep the Law. And the tax collectors were too often downright cheats and collaborators.
The point of the parable is not to elevate one group of people and condemn another, but to undermine the very bases for comparison that society uses to stratify human beings made in the image of God.
Jesus told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and regarded others with contempt. It’s the contempt that he is condemning in this parable, not the righteousness. Because he was willing, always and everywhere, to reach beyond his own and embrace the lost, the lonely, the unloveable. He literally broke the mould.
When the Pharisee says, “Thank God I’m not like him,” he’s really saying, “God, that one’s really not your best work.” Excuse me? That person, made in the image of the living and loving and liberating God is a reject? I don’t think so! And when we read the parable and think, “Well, thank God I’m not a Pharisee!” don’t we risk making the same mistake? And if there’s just a hint of a chance that Jesus was also a Pharisee, might that make us more careful of it?
Stereotyping is dangerous. It is deadly. Painting Jesus as just another rabble-rousing Jew at Passover, casting him as a Zealot, led those in authority to crucify him. You know how dangerous and deadly stereotyping can be. You know how deadly stereotyping can be, and you know how the solidarity of the Gospel undermines it.
When we pause to see each person as God’s image in human form; when we live out our baptismal promises to seek and serve Christ in all persons, we undermine the stereotyping that leads to contempt, to dehumanizing, to death. When we cast ourselves on the mercy of God, we are saved.
Because this is the truth of the Gospel: that none of us is saved not by our own righteousness, not by belonging to the right group, or the right church, or the right practices. We can do everything right, and still die. We can do everything right, and still, we die.
But Jesus is one of us. He has been there with us and for us. This is the truth of the Gospel, that Jesus lives for us, loves us, and will be with us to the end of the age, Emmanuel, God with us, God one of us. So look up, take heart, and live.
[i] Podcast: The Bible for Normal People, by Pete Enns and Jared Byas. Episode 278: Amy-Jill Levine – Who Are the Pharisees Actually?
[ii] Jesus and the Jews (Part 1) https://www.lifeisasacredtext.com/pharisees/, Jesus and Beit Hillel (Part 2!) https://www.lifeisasacredtext.com/jesus2/, Wrapping Up Jesus (Part 3) https://www.lifeisasacredtext.com/jesus3/
Persistence, in and of itself, is not a virtue. One may persist in doing good; another may persist in doing evil. We do not know, from this parable, whether the widow’s lawsuit was just or extortionary; we know that the judge didn’t care. We know, too, that God does care: that God so loves each piece and person of this world as to give God’s life to us, and for us. We see, throughout the Bible, throughout the holy scriptures and the story of our salvation how persistent God is in mercy, in justice, in love.
So we might consider that what we persist in is at least as important, much more so, than how insistent our persistence is.
In fact, we might consider that the theme of the parable and the other readings we hear today is less about the holy grind itself, and more about what it is we are hoping to achieve by persisting in prayer, being faithful to our bible study, refusing to lose heart when justice does seem delayed, or far away, or out of reach.
Because that is the itchy grain of sand that lies beneath this pearl of a parable, isn’t it? Jesus, for once, tells his disciples exactly what it means, and he tells them, he tells us that God will not delay long in administering justice to and for those who cry out for it, that God will be swift to come to their aid. And we see all around us people crying out for justice, for aid, for peace, for dignity, for humanity. And we wonder how long it will really take for justice to be done, for peace on the earth, goodwill to all who are made in the image of the living, loving God.
And some may wander away, looking for justice elsewhere, even inventing their own story, even if it is but a shadow of the joyful justice of the kingdom of heaven.
There was an image going around the internet a couple of weeks ago of a man in a crowded arena, a man dressed in fine clothes and shouldering a cross. But the cross had training wheels on the bottom, so that it simply trailed along behind him. There is a difference between persistence and performance, persistence and pretence, persistence and parody. We cannot invent new ways of carrying the cross to make it easier to wait upon the justice and mercy of God.
Some of you perhaps read the columns of David French – I do only occasionally, but one caught my eye this week. He pointed out that every real renewal of the Spirit begins with repentance. Our faithfulness to prayer and to the promises of God begins not with the condemnation of others – fake justice, rooted in self-righteousness and revenge – but in the quiet soul-searching that brings us alongside the Holy Spirit, praying right along with us in sighs too deep for words.
Paul tells Timothy, and Jesus tells his disciples, to remain faithful to the hope that God has set before us, believe in the promises that God has made to us, that God is good, and that God’s justice is worth waiting for.
I can always be wrong, but it seems to me that this parable, and Paul’s advice to Timothy, is less about being stubborn, right or wrong, and more about being persistent, resilient, faithful, steadfast – that’s a good biblical word, right? – steadfast in our pursuit of the justice and the mercy and the promises and the love of God. Because God is not slow to compassion, nor late in administering mercy, nor unmoved by the cries of God’s people, nor lacking in love. God forbid that we should make such accusations.
But we, we human people, made in the image of God, but as in a glass, darkly, we are a bit slow, to be honest, to grasp the full implications of the commandments to love God completely, and our neighbours, friends and enemies alike, as if they were ourselves. As if they mattered as much as us, deserved as much as us, hurt as much as us.
You’ve heard it said that prayer is not about changing God, but about changing us. That, I think, is what this parable and these teachings are about. God is not slow to love every piece and person of creation; so let’s pray persistently and consistently and robustly and resiliently until we are changed into God’s likeness, and enabled and equipped and encouraged to act in God’s image and will, and in solidarity with those crying out to God for the justice that is mercy.
That means, dare I say it, that what we do in here, praying together, reading the scriptures together, taking Communion, truly ingesting God’s grace together, is so that we might be changed in order to change the world. What we do here doesn’t stay here, but showing up faithfully here is what keeps us from losing heart, what keeps us from losing our way, what keeps us from wandering like lost sheep, bleating in the wilderness that is this world.
There’s a story by Graham Greene[1] that has always stayed with me, about a village where the doors remained open and the lights on, and the fire lit, even while it appeared empty. The story explained that one winter some years earlier, a stranger had come into the village, looking for shelter, but all of the houses were locked. The inhabitants were all at church, since it was Christmas. When they returned to the village and found the stranger frozen to death, they understood the difference between performative and transformative religion; religion that builds a nativity scene and religion that makes room at the inn.
What happens here is not performative, but practical. We are participating in the apostles’ fellowship and the prayers, we are participants in the saving grace of Jesus at the Table and on the Cross. We persist in this so that when we are let loose into the world, we know what Jesus looks like, we know the promises of God when we see them, and we are able to come alongside those who cry out for mercy, and pray and stay with them, that this world might be changed, and without further delay.
Amen.
[1] Graham Greene, “A Visit to Morin”, in Collected Stories (Viking Press, 1973)
A homily on the commemoration of Therese de Lisieux
Therese de Lisieux did not live a long life. Perhaps that’s why the impression I get of her spirituality is one of lightness; despite her knowledge of pain and grief, a joyful wisdom, a certain pureness of prayer.
I find it curious that the lection chosen to pair with Therese, the little flower, comes from the curious book of Judith. A part neither of the Jewish nor any more of the Christian canon, Judith is likely a novel, according to my commentary,[i] written about 100 years before Jesus was born, and now contained in our apocryphal, or deuterocanonical writings: useful for the broadening of our understanding of God and our relationship to God, but not used in our Church for the development of doctrine. This is important, for reasons I’ll come back to.
Judith, so the story goes, is a widow. Her husband has died of heatstroke while working in the fields. Judith is a model biblical widow. Beautiful, wealthy, and devout, she devotes herself to fasting and secludes herself on her roof, not in the community of a convent, but at least in the company of her maid (not to speak of the slaves left her by her husband). Hearing that her city was under siege from the evil empire, she summoned the leaders and they obeyed and came before her. Judith asked them,
“Who are you to set yourselves up in the place of God in human affairs? … You cannot plumb the depths of the human heart or understand the workings of the human mind; how do you expect to search out God, who made all these things, and find out the mind of God or comprehend the thought of God?” (Judith 8:12-14, paraphrased)
The rest of her story is written for you to discover in the books between the Testaments, if you don’t already know it. Remember, though, that we do not base doctrine nor direction nor direct action on the words of the apocrypha, and that this book was written as a novel, not an instruction manual; Judith’s story is violent, and we have had quite enough of violence. Enough of that.
You understand what I’m saying: we have some distressing and frankly dangerous texts in our Bible, but we have, too, the words of Jesus: the commandment to love our enemies; and the actions of Jesus, disarming his disciples in the Garden, saying, “Nor more of this!” Enough of that. (Luke 22:51) Let’s be really clear about that: about Jesus, for us the Word of God, as the context of our Evening Prayer.
Therese did not aspire to as dramatic a life as Judith’s. But Therese wrote that while her heart occasionally aspired to the flight of an eagle, that heart was contained within a little bird, never destined to fly so high, yet sheltering under the same sky, the same Divine Sun, the Star of Love, so that it should never be afraid. She knew that she would not live a long life. But she knew, too, that she could live a deep life, and a full life, if she stayed close to Jesus. She wrote, as if for us,
I understood it was Love alone that made the Church’s members act, that if Love ever became extinct, apostles would not preach the Gospel and martyrs would not shed their blood. I understood that LOVE COMPRISED ALL VOCATIONS, THAT LOVE WAS EVERYTHING, THAT IT EMBRACED ALL TIMES AND PLACES…. IN A WORD, THAT IT WAS ETERNAL![ii]
Therese did aspire to find out the mind of God, to plumb not only the depths of the human heart, contained in her convent sisters, but the heart and mind of Jesus, her love.
Over and again, in so many words, Therese describes herself as a very little soul [who can] offer God only very little things. Yet neither does she underestimate the value of a life – her life – devoted to the love of God and prayer for God’s world.
Here perhaps is where Therese and Judith coincide after all: Judith in fasting, ashes and sackcloth on her rooftop, and Therese in the cloister.
Therese wrote,
For me, prayer is an aspiration of the heart, it is a simple glance directed to heaven, it is a cry of gratitude and love in the midst of trial as well as joy; finally, it is something great, supernatural, which expands my soul and unites me to Jesus.[iii]
Both women, through prayer, aspired to expand their souls to unite themselves to God.
We live, my friends, in troubled and troublesome times. Perhaps we feel besieged. Perhaps we feel breathless, as Therese in the convent infirmary. Perhaps we aspire to the eagle’s flight, yet find ourselves earthbound.
Perhaps the message of these two women, and their sister, the widow at the Temple gates; perhaps their message tonight is to remain in prayer, to be steadfast in faith, to remember that the faithfulness of God will not leave us bereft, despite the sufferings of the world and ourselves within it. Our vocation is to strengthen community wherever we find it, to direct love wherever it is most needed. If we are faithful to that call, we will please Jesus.
And, the salvation of the world is not in our hands, but the promise of prayer is. And while the peace of God passes our understanding, it is at hand. It is found in the smallest act of love, a little flower growing between the cracks of a fractured and fractious world, persistent in its beauty, brave in its striving, and unstoppable in its reach toward the sun.
[i] The New Interpreter’s Bible: A Commentary in Twelve Volumes, Volume III (Abingdon Press, 1999), 1075
[ii] Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux (the Little Flower), by St. Therese of Lisieux [The Authorized English Translation of Therese’s Original Unaltered Manuscripts], Kindle Edition, 213.
[iii] Ibid., 260
Jamais Cascio introduced the framework of BANI in 2018; I’ve been learning about it in the past couple of years, but he writes that
I first developed BANI in mid 2018. Before the pandemic. Before the attempted insurrection in the United States, and just before the election of Bolsonaro in Brazil. Well before the invasion of Ukraine. Before you could make deepfake videos on your phone. Before world leaders finally admitted that massive wildfires and heatwaves and floods and storms that had become commonplace were driven by global warming. Before all of that, yet we could still see chaos everywhere.
BANI, if you haven’t come across it, stands for Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible. It addresses the unpredictability of our current historical climate. Ironically, as a framework, it appears to predict the increasing (galloping?) elements of BANI that we recognize all too well.
How does BANI translate into prayer? I have no idea of Cascio’s spirituality. But he does say this:
BANI is not a magic wand to reveal solutions. Arguably, most of the kinds of system breaks that BANI encompasses don’t actually have solutions, at least not in the conventional sense. We can look for responses and, better yet, adaptations.
So when I’m asked about what can be done to withstand the chaos of a BANI world, I go to human elements and behaviors like resilience, empathy, improvisation, and intuition. The chaos of BANI doesn’t come from changes in a geophysical system or some such, it comes from a human inability to fully understand what to do when pattern-seeking and familiar explanations no longer work.
For people of faith, there is one reliable place to turn when human understanding no longer works. Hence this prayer:
Dear God,
This world is anxious. Your church is anxious. We are worried and distracted by many things.[1] But let us cast all of our anxiety on you, because you care for us.[2] May we be anxious only for the coming of your reign, for your will to be done on earth as in heaven.
This world is nonlinear, as are you: omnipresent, omni-chronological, without beginning or end. Help us to remember that as labyrinthine as this life gets, we cannot be lost as our origin and end are in you.
This world is brittle, and so are we. When we are shattered, let us dedicate each and every fragment to you, for in you is our hope of resurrection.
This world is incomprehensible, but then so is your peace, passing our understanding.[3] May we find our rest, our wisdom, our peace in you.
Amen.
[1] Luke 10:41
[2] 1 Peter 5:7
[3] Philippians 4:7
Now, I don’t want to give away too much in spoilers, but these two parables are not, as it were, the end of the story. There is more to come – a truly revealing third parable. But we don’t hear that one today, and by next Sunday, strangely, we’ll have moved on to another.
In the meantime, in the shepherd’s hut and the woman’s home, all is celebration. One of the beautiful things about this pair of parables is the way in which neither person can contain their joy – they won’t even try to keep it to themselves. Instead, they throw open their homes, and their hearts, and they invite their friends and neighbours to rejoice with them. So is the joy in heaven in the presence of the angels, when one who was lost returns, is found by the grace of God.
Spoiler alert: back here in our world, this perfect picture will not last beyond the next parable. The reason Jesus started this set of stories was because of the grumbling of certain jealous and joyless people who resented the relationship Jesus had with those of whom they did not approve. Jealousy is perhaps the quickest and surest way to puncture joy, let out its air, so that it droops and flops. Not so in heaven, in the presence of the angels of God. But we are a little earthier than angels, aren’t we?
I notice that the woman and the shepherd are not afraid that someone will say, “Well, what’s the big deal?” or, “She should have kept a closer eye on it in the first place,” or, “Nice for some to have a hundred sheep.” They are not afraid of envy, jealousy, ridicule, or worse. They are all innocence as they share the good news that they have.
This zero-sum game that we play with one another, its maths doesn’t add up in the divine economy. There is no hint in these parables that the shepherd doesn’t love the ninety-nine other sheep, or that the woman sees no value in the other nine coins – what sense would that make? Instead of rejecting anyone, these stories tell us that for God, ninety percent is not enough. God loves everyone whom God has made, no exceptions, as we so often tell one another. Meatloaf may have sung, “Two out of three ain’t bad,” but for God, even ninety-nine percent is not a good enough grade. For the joy of the community – sheep, shepherd, friends, neighbours, tax collectors, sinners, scribes, Pharisees to be complete, there can be no exceptions.
One of the characteristics of a parable is that its meaning of the parable is determined by the experience of the hearer as well as the intentions of the teller. It is mutable. So I imagine that this particular pair of parables hits a little differently, somewhat tenderly, today, when the community is missing some of its members, has lost some of its sheep, misplaced some of its valued and invaluable assets.
So let’s also recognize this: There wasn’t much the ninety-nine sheep could do to bring back their friend, still less the silver coins to find their complete set. Instead, it is the shepherd, the Good Shepherd who seeks and finds. It is the woman – creative, resourceful, persistent, and divine, who sweeps and finds. It is the grace of God, the transformative love of Jesus, that makes the difference. The work of the community – sheep, coins, friends, neighbours, scribes, sinners, Pharisees, and all, is to be ready to celebrate, to share in the joy of heaven over the repentance and return of one miserable sinner, when and whenever it happens.
This might be a good time to mention that the third parable, the pinnacle of this set that Jesus tells those grumbling and jealous people, is the parable of the prodigal son. He tells it not only to describe the warm and eager and expansive embrace of the father welcoming his lost child home. He tells it to the elder brothers, the ones who refuse to celebrate, who shut themselves out of the feast, out of jealousy, and to their own loss.
Jealousy, as I said, is the thief of joy. It keeps the elder brother from the family reunion. It prevents the citizen from celebrating the rescue of the refugee, the wealthy from celebrating Jesus’ announcement of good news for the poor and the meek. It resents the love of God for its rival, and leads to the casting of golden calves to spite them all. It clouds the vision of the scribes so that they do not even recognize the Word of God when he is standing right in front of them, telling stories from heaven.
I heard, during the tumult and terror of this past week, someone speaking from the highest office in the land, saying that he “couldn’t care less” about bringing people back together. It sounded, I hope, as though what I heard was grief lashing out, as grief will. But these parables remind us that God, God literally could not care less than one hundred percent. It is who God is, to love without end, without giving up on any of us.
Love. It is love that turns away the wrath of God and the violence of humanity. Love converts sinners into saints, Saul into Paul, persecutors into preachers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the love of God for this world made manifest. It must have seemed impossible, but with God, nothing is impossible. Love celebrates each and every step towards the joy of heaven, the reign of God, the community of the beloved made whole; each sheep, each coin, each brother, each sleepless night spent searching for the way back home.
Jesus tells these parables to the scribes and the Pharisees, the tax collectors and sinners, the disciples, the curious, and the concerned. He invites them to leave their grumbling and their jealousy, to drop their superiority and their self-righteousness, their self-loathing and their doubt, and just come, come join the party.
“Rejoice with me,” he tells them, for such is the joy in heaven, in the presence of the angels, when you, when I, when the last, lost sheep, shows up at the feast that God has laid out, laid on for us.
Readings for Year C Proper 19 include Exodus 32:7-14, Psalm 51:1-11, 1 Timothy 1:12-17, Luke 15:1-10
As though created in mid-air
and surprised, the lamb fell
without foothold down the cliff
and into the stream where we,
speechless, sandwiches halfway
to open mouths watched it
pick up and shake itself back
to life , quiet waters clinging to wool,
green pastures calling, it ran on
as though pursued
by all the hounds of heaven.
Hatred shared is never hatred halved.
The blood of an enemy will not cure
anaemia of conscience.
Suffer the little children never meant
to sacrifice them.
The mortality of another will never lessen our own.
The immortality of another will never lessen our own.
A meditation on verses from Psalm 139
In which we breathe in solidarity with the breathless.
In which we groan in harmonic relationship with the suffering.
In which we dream in creative union with the author
of life’s manifesto:
decrying death,
deploring despotism,
denouncing the cynicism of despair,
and all of its minions and weapons.
In which we listen as though our survival depended upon it
for the cry of the most vulnerable,
the squeezed and the pushed, coerced and contained,
that they may deliver us from our contracted conscience.
Because this Labor Day, it will not do to put profit ahead of the prophets’ concern for the will of God, which to do justice, to love mercy, to prefer the lives of children to the capital that is generated by weapons of massive destruction, and the families of the children of God to the false narrative that we are born with unequal rights to dignity, respect, and the compassion of our neighbours …
We know that the whole creation has been groaning together as it suffers together the pains of labor, and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. (Romans 8:22)
over the water 