Redefining Righteousness

We might call it the “karaoke incident.” Back when karaoke machines were the hot new thing, James, a member of Martin Thielen’s congregation, purchased one and got hooked on karaoke. James was an active member of the church, serving as a deacon and adult Sunday School teacher and singing in the choir. One day James brought his karaoke machine to a church fellowship, everyone loved it and James became a minor celebrity in the community, singing at parties and other events.
He enjoyed karaoke so much that he began going to a local bar on Friday nights to sing. He didn’t drink, he just sang. Nonetheless, his very presence in a bar proved to be very problematic for some people.
A couple came to Thielen about James. They were regular attenders and generous givers, but Thielen knew them to be very judgmental people. He describes what happened after he closed his office door:
  The couple looked at him and said gravely, “Pastor, we have a problem in this church that you need to take care of.” James’s singing at the bar was, according to them, “sinful, a poor witness, and was hurting the reputation of the church.”
When Thielen asked what they wanted him to do about it, they replied, “We want you to remove James from the deacon board, take away his Sunday School class, and ban him from singing in the choir. In fact, we think he should be kicked out of the church altogether.”
Thielen tried to reason with them. He pointed out that James wasn’t drinking and reminded them that, while hanging out a bar may not seem like a Christian thing to do, “Jesus used to hang out with sinners, tax collectors and even prostitutes.” He concluded, “I’m not convinced that his singing at a bar is a sin.”
The couple was aghast. “Of course it’s a sin!” they insisted. “How could it not be?” This sort of back and forth went on for about a half hour.
Finally, realizing he couldn’t satisfy the couple, Thielen said, “Even if it is sinful, I’m not going to remove James from the deacon board, take away his Sunday School class, or ban him from the choir. And I’m sure not going to kick him out of the church. If I kicked out every sinner in this church, we wouldn’t have any deacons left, we wouldn’t have any Sunday School teachers left, and we wouldn’t have any choir members left. In fact, if we kicked out all the sinners in this church, we wouldn’t have any members left at all, including me.”
The couple was unmoved by this response and doubled down on their demand. “Pastor, if you don’t do this, we will leave the church.”
Thielen held his ground. “I hope you won’t leave. You are important to this church, and we don’t want to lose you. But I am not going to kick James out of the church for singing at a bar.”
Thielen says, “In the end we both kept our word. I didn’t kick James out, and they left the church.”        
    This couple displayed a toxic combination of self-righteous, spiritual pride and contempt for others. As Thielen reminded them, such self-righteousness is contrary to the way of Jesus. Confronted with such self-righteousness, Jesus tells a parable about a Pharisee and the tax collector. Very quickly we see that the two men have something in common, even though the Pharisee is respected as a man of great piety, a first-rate example of a faithful, obedient Jew while the tax-collector is reviled as a traitor to the Jewish people and a thief, an agent of a foreign power enriching himself at the expense of his neighbors. What they have in common is that they both recognize the importance of prayer and so they both go up to the Temple to pray.
    The Pharisee starts off well, giving thanks to God. It has been observed that “if the only prayer you ever say is thank you, it is enough.”  So, good start, but the prayer quickly goes off the rails. He begins to thank God for not being like “those people.”   He starts off with general examples: Thank you Lord I’m not like thieves or, perhaps better, lovers of money; then he moves on to rogues—those who are unjust , who mistreat or use others; next up, adulterers. Then he gets specific: looking across the room, he says, “and thank you especially that I’m not like this tax collector!” Now let’s be clear, everyone he’s named is guilty of sin: it is wrong to be greedy, to steal, to act unjustly, to use people, to be violent, to be unfaithful, to abuse or use women  for one’s own pleasure, to defraud people, to abuse one’s power and position for personal gain. And I have no doubt that the Pharisee is truthful about fasting twice a week and tithing all of his possessions, both of which go above and beyond the expected norms of good religious practice.
    The problem is that he’s trusting in his own good deeds instead of in God’s grace. He’s focused on himself instead of on God. This Pharisee is so good he really doesn’t need God; his accomplishments speak for themselves and declare how good and just and righteous and worthy he is.
    The parable indicates this by noting that the Pharisee stands by himself. Tom Long observes that the Pharisee’s physical location embodies his sense of “self-sufficiency.”      
    In our modern “culture of accomplishment,” this is an all-too-common attitude. Dan Clendenin summarizes well the many ways we try to justify ourselves, to prove our goodness or worth: We'll invoke almost anything to justify ourselves — intelligence , alma mater , money , sports, politics , and work . A common form of self-justification invokes your zip code, a transparent insinuation that net worth equals self-worth. 
    Let me highlight two problems with such attempts at self-justification. First, it is simply dishonest. Every one of us has faults. Every one of us makes mistakes. None of us has cornered the market on the truth—indeed, it may be more accurate to say, as Thomas Merton observed, “we are all more or less wrong, that we are all at fault, all limited and obstructed by our mixed motives, our self-deception, our greed, [and] our self-righteousness.”] And, of course, as Paul pointedly tells us in Romans, all of us are sinners. None of us are truly righteous. 
    The second problem is that the flip side to such self-justifying pride, is contempt for others. Those who are not like us, not as good as us, are beneath us. One has to wonder, given his sense of moral superiority, how does this Pharisee treat others? Does he treat them with dignity and grace, with compassion and love? Or do his actions betray the same contempt we hear in his words? 
    Tom Long suggests that here we encounter the real problem with the Pharisee’s prayer. It’s not just that its self-righteous, but even more that it misses the point of righteousness. Judaism and Christianity share a central goal of increasing love of God and neighbor. As Long observes, “The purpose of the law, the purpose of holy and righteous living, the purpose of …worship, the purpose of prayer is to shape God’s people into those who ever more deeply love God and neighbor.” But these rituals and practices, which are meant to promote love, can become ends in and of themselves, evidence of our supposed righteousness, and can therefore turn us away from God and neighbor, replacing love with self-aggrandizement and contempt. “Sadly,” Long continues, “what often gets dropped out is that the whole life of faith is lived in grateful response to what God has done. God sounds the first words of love and justice; all human righteousness is but an echo…. When we lose sight of God’s initiative in acting mercifully and savingly toward us, we begin to assume that our goodness is self-generated, and our righteousness becomes a way of one-upping our neighbors.”  
Perhaps all of this—self-righteousness, self-justificatioin and contempt for others—helps explain why it has become increasingly common to hear some Christians—particularly Evangelicals of a conservative political orientation—condemning empathy as a sin that leads us away from moral purity. This would appear to be a product of a combination of self-justification of their political opinions combined with contempt for gay, lesbian and transgender folks and immigrants.  But Jesus ate with, associated with, welcomed and healed lepers, sinners, tax collectors, prostitutes and Gentiles. He enacted love and was condemned by the good religious folks for a lack of moral purity. Empathy for the socially outcast, the vulnerable and the sinful must surely have lay at the root of his scandalous compassion. Can we love our neighbors if we cannot relate to them, cannot see our common humanity with all its attendant frailty and beauty, cannot recognize the image of God in our fellow humans and the corresponding inestimable worth of each person? I don’t think we can.  So, it seems to me that to condemn empathy is to condemn Jesus and his way of radical, community building love.     
In response to God’s love for us, we are called to love our neighbors, and Jesus expands the definition of neighbors to include those who are very different from us, even our opponents and outright enemies—after all, Paul tells us, “while we were yet God’s enemies, Christ died for us.” Again, I am reminded of another observation by Thomas Merton: the true saint does not see the sin of others, she sees only her own sin and God’s grace. And having received that grace, the saint wants everyone else to also know the joy of receiving it.
Merton discovered this truth by the grace of God on a street corner in Louisville. By his own later admission, as a young monk he had been contemptuous of those outside the cloister, viewing himself and his fellow monks as spiritually superior. He was, he said, “the stereotype of the world-denying contemplative—the man who spurned New York, spat on Chicago, and tromped on Louisville.” But on March 18, 1958, in town on monastery business, he stood at a major intersection in the city’s busy downtown shopping district, surrounded by crowds of everyday people, he had a revelation, an almost mystical sense of connection: “I was suddenly overcome with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, or spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream.”  Merton’s self-righteousness, was melted away by the grace of God who showed him that “We all need one another, we all complete one another, God’s will is found in mutual interdependence….every[one] is, to the Christian, in some sense a brother.    
     The Pharisee in Jesus’ parable has not yet had such an epiphany. His eyes are so swollen by pride  that he can see neither himself, nor his neighbors, nor God correctly. His self-sufficiency has left him with no sense of his indebtedness or need for God nor his connectedness to his neighbor. His pride has erected a barrier separating him not only from the tax collector but also from God, and so when he leaves the temple he is not justified, that is to say, he is not in right relationship with God. He has not received God’s grace; he has not received God’s forgiveness because he does not acknowledge his need for it. His righteousness is superficial, a self-satisfying illusion, that signifies nothing.
The tax collector, however, shows us true righteousness, true religion that is pleasing to God. He stands “far off” as he prays. The term is the same one used to describe the prodigal son: he is still “far off” when his compassionate father sees him and runs out to welcome him. It is also the same Greek word used in Ephesians to describe the change in Gentiles’ relationship to God: “But now in Christ Jesus you  who were once far off have brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace.”  So the tax collector’s physical location embodies his humility and his honesty. He knows himself to be a sinner and he confesses as much, with no excuses and no comparisons to others. It is a prayer of faith, for such a pray can only be made by one who knows his or her need and believes, though it is with a faith like a mustard seed, that God is compassionate, gracious and merciful and abounding in steadfast love. Thus, the tax collector’s prayer is accepted and he is justified. He is forgiven and he no doubt goes home with a sense of peace and joy.  
As Long observes, “The Pharisee stands “by himself,” apart from all others, in lonely isolation, outside of the loop of salvation.” But the tax collector, standing far off because he recognizes his own sin and need, finds himself drawn near, because his honesty and humility opens him up to receive God’s grace.     
For more than 600 years the Hapsburgs ruled much of Europe. In 1916 Emperor Franz-Josef I of Austria died. A procession of dignitaries and elegantly dressed royal mourners escorted the coffin which was draped in black and gold silk. A military band played somber funeral music as the torch-lit procession made its way down winding narrow stairs into the catacombs beneath the Capuchin Monastery in Vienna.
At the bottom of the stairs were great iron doors leading to the Hapsburg family crypt. Behind the door was the Cardinal-Archbishop of Vienna.
The Commanding officer rapped on the door and cried out. “Open!”
The Archbishop replied, “Who goes there?”
“We bear the remains of his Imperial and Apostolic Majesty, Franz-Josef I, by the grace of God Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, Defender of the Faith, Prince of Bohemia-Moravia, Grand-Duke of Lombardy . . . .” And so it went, through the entire list of his 37 titles.
At the end of this impressive litany, the Archbishop declared, “We know him not…. Who goes there?”
The officer spoke again, using the informal title, “We bear the remains of Emperor Franz-Josef I of the Hapsburg line.”
“We know him not,” the cardinal said again. “Who goes there?”
This time the officer replied, “We bear the body of Franz-Josef, our brother, a sinner like all of us.” At that the doors swung open and Franz-Josef was welcomed home.
 [Delmar Chilton, http://lectionarylab.com/2015/06/01/the-second-sunday-after-pentecost-for-year-b-june-7-2015/]
    If we want to be welcomed home into God’s kingdom; if we want to enter into new, right and better relationships with God and other people, then we must have the humility and the honesty of the tax collector. We must stop trying to justify ourselves and instead admit our sin, our shortcomings, and our need for God. We must set aside our contempt for those whom we disagree with and those whose words and deeds offend us. We must treat all people with the same dignity, compassion and love which God offers us. We must show others the same grace that we have received.
    Let us not give in to the temptation to self-righteousness. Let us not be shaped by this culture of self-justification. Instead, let us, with the help of God, bear witness, in our words, our attitudes and our actions to a more excellent way: Christ’s way of humility, honesty and grace, for this is the way of true righteousness, the way that is pleasing to God. Amen.