Hungry

Luke 18:9-14 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

The Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector

9 He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: 10 “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ 13 But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ 14 I tell you, this man 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.”

I used to run a community kitchen called The Table, where twice a week we’d invite anyone and everyone, and we really mean the anyone part, to come to our free dinner. We usually get somewhere between seventy and a hundred folks who come in from the cold, or the heat, or the rain, to grab a cup of percolated coffee with “whitener”, as they call it, and wait for a meal, served by gracious volunteers who have no idea what they’ve gotten themselves in to. We get shut-ins and homeless folks. Drunks and NA regulars and folks addicted to their pain pills. We get mechanics and train riders and retired steel workers complaining that the government stole their pension. 

We get obsessive compulsives, multiple personalities, conspiracy theorists and ex-marines with PTSD. We get atheists, and agnostics, Bible-thumping born-again Christians, and old-school Catholics who are still shocked that the mass is no longer said in Latin — let alone the thought that I am female, and, a pastor. 

Well, one night, after we’ve passed out the food and folks are happily diving in to their mashed potatoes and green beans, I see a woman sitting at a table with nothing in front of her. No coffee, no green beans, no salisbury steak. 

“Aren’t you hungry?” I ask her. 

“Oh, no,” she responds. “I have food in my refrigerator at home.” 

“But, it’s dinner time, and we have dinner here,” I say. “Don’t you want to eat?” 

“Oh, I just couldn’t. I don’t want to take food away from someone else,” she says. 

“That’s super kind,” I tell her, “But we have plenty enough for everyone. C’mon. We’re all here because we’re hungry for something. Some of us are hungry for food, some are hungry to serve, some of us just need to see a friendly face once in awhile, but we’re all here because we’re hungry for something.” 

And with that and a little more cajoling, she eventually smiled and accepted the plate of food, and then ate it like a voracious teenager and came up for more. 

See, we’re all hungry for something. We all need something. The question is, can we recognize it? The question is, can we see the hunger in ourselves? Can we come to realize that we’re not all that different from each other because we’re all sitting in the dark, hungering, aching to be fed? 

Our parable today starts with a Pharisee who is very happy to be exactly where he is. He fits right in in the Temple.  After all, he is so right. He has nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to confess.  He has even gone above and beyond the requirements of Torah.  This guy is an overachiever.  He gets an A+ in faith. An A+ in worship.  An A+ in being a follower of the law.  With his 4.0 GPA, this guy is the Valedictorian of the School of Faith.  

And maybe he has earned the right to gloat about it just a little bit.  He’s worked hard.  He’s earned his grades after all, and now he’s ready to receive the accolades and scholarships and letters of recommendation that come along with it.  

And here’s the thing.  We, in our contemporary interpretations of Christian Faith, often beat up on the Pharisees.  They are always the counter-example, the ones that Jesus condemns, and so, we easily place them in the “other” column, so unlike ourselves. We say, “Thank God we are not like these poor Pharisees!” “Thank God that we’re so much better than they. We aren’t the hypocrites who say one thing and do another!  We aren’t the ones who are closed-minded and achievement-oriented or people who abuse their power!”

Except.  Except. The Pharisees were the ones who were trying to open up the Jewish faith so that all could participate in Torah law.  From our post-Reformation perspective, we see the Law as a burden, but for most Jews, the Law was a gift from God, and it was the Pharisees who enabled the common people to keep those laws.  Compared to the Sadducees and the Essenes, they were the inclusive ones. They came up with the oral Torah — developing new interpretations for old laws so as to make the Torah more acceptable, more relevant, and more inclusive. They’re the ones running the Tables and stocking the food pantry shelves. They’re the ones with mission and outreach and connection on their minds. They tithe and donate and volunteer and bake and potluck and out-Presbyterian all of us.

But over and over again, Jesus criticizes the Pharisees.  Not for the actions themselves, but for how the Pharisees view themselves because of their actions.  Jesus criticizes the Pharisees because of their self-righteous insistence on building up walls, on making themselves so very separate from everyone else, for not being inclusive enough. The Pharisees have been inclusive only insofar as to say, “hey, you, join me up here, on this pedestal that I’ve erected for myself.”

The root of the word Pharisee comes from the Hebrew word, “parash” which means to “make distinct,” to “separate oneself.” The Pharisee’s very identity comes from being different from, walled up, divided from, all the Others. 

And don’t we do this all the time?  Whether we are conservative or liberal or somewhere in between, we tend to hang out with only like-minded people, separating ourselves from those who are different from us, those who, from our perspective, have it so “wrong.” 

So here is this supposedly inclusive member of the Jewish community who is building walls around himself.  He is building walls of separation - separating himself from that poor sap over there - and - by extension - from everyone else.

His prayer is one of wall-building.

“Thank God I’m not like the others” = he builds a wall

“I tithe!” = a wall

“I fast!” = another wall

“I not only follow my superior interpretation of the Torah to the letter, but I go beyond it - fasting and tithing more than is called for” = and another wall is erected.

He has built a veritable fortress around himself. A fortress of “rightness.”  And no one is getting in.

“Thank God I’m not like those people,” he thinks.

Those people who have screwed up their lives.  Those people who have made poor choices.  Those people who are judgmental, or flailing around, or are swindlers, or who have too much credit card debt or who watch the wrong news channel and have those terrible political views.

He has built walls between himself and others, between himself and The Other.  And he throws the tax collector under the bus just to prove how very “other” he is. He needs this tax collector to be the sinner so that, in comparison, he is the one who has it right, who has it all together. For the Pharisee, the tax collector embodies the very essence of otherness.

Heaven forbid that the Pharisee see any similarities between himself and this corrupt, sinful tax collector.  His walls would come crumbling down.  And then, without his precious walls, without his protection from The Other, who would he be?  Just another sad sap, coming in front of God with all the shame and fear and honesty of a corrupt tax collector.

I don’t think this is simply a parable about how it’s good to go before God wearing hair shirts and whacking ourselves in the face with psalters and declaring how very wretched we are.  Because the truth is, neither the Pharisee nor the Tax Collector has the truth of who they really are.

They’re both in trouble if they stay where they are.  The tax collector is just as stuck as the Pharisee, both imprisoned in their closets by the view they have of themselves.  But the difference is, this poor sap of a tax collector knows that he’s got problems.  He knows he’s stuck in his closet of darkness, and knowing you’re stuck is the first step towards getting unstuck, the first step towards outgrowing that constricting space and stepping out into the light.

This tax collector knows that he’s hungry for something.
The Pharisee is denying his own hunger.

But God, being God, gives them both what they ask for.
The Pharisee gets a nice dose of self-righteousness. He asks nothing and gets nothing from God. 

The tax collector, asking for mercy and peace, gets forgiveness and redemption.

What makes the tax collector righteous in the sight of God?  It’s the opposite of the Pharisee’s self reliance.  He knows he’s not enough.  He knows he needs God - and he needs others. His prayer is one of confessing, and thereby tearing down those walls that separate himself from God - the Ultimate Other - and from others.

The tax collector is asking for redemption, for forgiveness.  He is asking to be re-born. Maybe even to go from “rightness” to “righteousness.” 

God makes him righteous - which, more accurately, or more clearly, means to be made upright.

The tax collector knows he’s been walking around with a bent back, hunched over and staring at the ground, limping a little.  

And it is the tax collector who has been made upright. Jesus tells us that he is the one who leaves the temple walking a little straighter, a little lighter, his gait a little smoother.  He is the one transformed and made new.

God wants to transform us.  To make us new. Not clean. Not right. Not smart. Or rich. Or all-together or valedictorians.  New.  

Not new like polished silver or new-car-smell or house in the new subdivision new.  

New like a newborn baby.  New like Levi, when they threw him on my chest, just seconds old.  Covered in blood and birth and squinting at the brightness of the light all around him.  New and able to stretch out his arms and shout with full lungs.  New and suddenly calm when he felt his mother’s breath and heard his mother’s voice. 

New because a whole world has been opened up that we never knew existed before.  New because we don’t want to be trapped in the dark closets of our own minds and narrow perspectives and walls and walls of expectation and perfection and demands.

We are the Pharisees, and at the same time, we are also the tax collectors.  We are called to die to our pharisaical sides and to our tax collecting sides. That death looks a lot like houses being torn down, the walls and the foundations that we have built for ourselves to separate us from each other crumbling to the ground, leaving us vulnerable, squinting into the sun, covered in the messy evidence of our rebirth.  

But also with the freedom to move around a little more, the room to grow and change, and the openness to connect with the Pharisees and tax collectors and conservatives and Democrats and Republicans and radio personalities that we never ever thought we could connect with. 

Oof.  That is so. Hard.

But that’s resurrection.  That’s being re-born.  It leaves us a little filthy, with the dirt from the grave still stuck under our fingernails and our eyes squinting at the shock of light that comes from stepping out of the grave and past the walls of separation that we have built for ourselves. That’s tearing down walls and dissolving those things that separate us from each other and from God.  

We’re all hungry for something. We are all hungry. That’s the great unifier. The great wall-destroyer. We are all hungry. Some are hungry for actual food, some are hungry for community, some need shelter and love and a new pair of shoes. Some of us are hungry to serve. Some of us are hungry to give. But we all have a need. None of us has it all right or all together or all perfect. 

The difference between the Pharisee and the tax collector is actually quite small. The only difference between the two is that the tax collector knows that he’s hungry. He knows he’s in need. He knows that, to use Calvin’s phrase, he’s “totally depraved.” And he knows to whom he needs to go to get fed. That’s it. That’s the only difference, really. 

The Pharisee wants to put up all these walls of difference between himself and the tax collector, but in doing that he’s just walled himself in, he’s shut himself in the dark closet of his own self-righteousness, and there he will stay, alone, until he realizes his own hunger and puts a chink in those walls and lets a little bit of the light in. 

Once we see that we’re hungry, the way to community and acceptance and love and redemption and righteousness is lit up for us. Once we realize we’re hungry, we know where to turn to get fed. Once we know where the light is coming from, we can step in to it.

Stay hungry, stay thirsty, stay open, and the walls will come falling down, and we will see ourselves in the other. There is so much light. We just have to let it in.

May we squint at all the light that God is sending into our world.

Thanks be to God. 

Please Please Please?

The Parable of the Widow and the Unjust Judge

18 Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. 2 He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. 3 In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent.’ 4 For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, 5 yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’”[b] 6 And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. 7 And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? 8 I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

My kids have this scheme. It’s a process of steps they take in order to get something they want. This is used especially in the cases where they know we will likely say “no” to the request. Step one: They ask for something they want. Dan or I respond, “No,” usually with some kind of explanation as to why we are responding in such a way. “No, you can’t have ice cream tonight because you didn’t eat your broccoli.” “No, you can’t have screen time right now because it’s too close to bedtime.” “No, I’m not going to buy you that expensive toy; you can buy it when you’ve saved up enough money.” So they try again, using step two; this time using “please.” 

When we persist in saying no, they persist in saying please.They move on to step three, which is just repeating the request over an over again until we finally relent and give them what they want. But this rarely happens. Usually, we spend the next twenty minutes repeating ourselves until we are proverbially blue in the face, answering their repeated questions of “Why?” “Why?” “Why?” with the same exact answer that we gave them the first time. Then they move on to step four, which is to try asking the other parent.

It’s a brilliant scheme really. Because, of course, to our kids, this “No” is unacceptable. They want something. They think their lives would be better with that something. So they nag and ask and ask and nag, just in the off chance that one of us will relent and give them the thing they want. I guess this has worked for them in the past, because they keep doing it. But I don’t recall one instance where this scheme actually worked. We are charged with knowing what’s best for them, and we do our best to figure that out, and that means, sometimes, we have to say “no.” 

But is Jesus on their side? Does Jesus condone their persistent pleading? Our hero for our parable today is a woman who doesn’t give up, who nags and nags, who persists until she gets what she wants. Does God want us to pray like spoiled three year olds who didn’t get their lollipop? Well. Yes. and No. 

If we take a moment to think about it, we are as powerless as that three year old — we really are like children before God, our “Father”; we are as helpless as a widow before an unjust judge. According to Walter Bruggemann, “In a patriarchal society widows are sure to be victimized because they have no male advocate…The widow is resourceless.” This woman has nothing except her voice to cry out for her justice. She’s a widow, with no financial or social resources, she’s a woman, alone in a patriarchal society. Nevertheless, she persisted.

The disciples are about to enter Jerusalem as powerless and as vulnerable as the widow. Things are going to happen that they can’t control and that they have prayed against. They are going to see their worst fears realized. 

And we, too, are as powerless and vulnerable as these disciples, as this widow.

At least, don’t we feel like this, if we’re paying attention? When politicians are corrupt and wars persist and cancer is pervasive? When children die? When the earth is spoiled? Don’t we want to just shake God and say, “Fix it! Please! We need you to fix it!”

We pray and we pray and we pray, and sometimes it doesn’t turn out the way we want. 

Because prayer isn’t a transaction. Prayer isn’t a listing of things we want for Christmas that then Santa will grant us. Prayer isn’t a vending machine where you put your quarters in and out comes the winning lottery ticket. 

So we turn it off. We stop praying. We give up. We stop asking and we stop begging and we offer God nothing more than radio silence.

And yet Jesus instructs us to “pray always”. And then, “to not lose heart”. 

Be like the persistent widow, Jesus says. The one who keeps showing up. Who keeps nagging and begging and pleading amidst a pointless pursuit. This unjust judge isn’t going to budge, but still she shows up, she presents herself and her case with passion and conviction. She is courageous. Relentless. Tenacious. 

Jesus is telling us that “Prayer is a courageous act. Prayer is an act of resistance against discouragement and defeat” (Brueggemann).  According to Brueggeman, “In a patriarchal society such exploitation of a widow would have been business as usual, and she would have expected nothing other than that. But she does!” … “She breaks the silence of conformity.” And this takes immense courage. She nags. She keeps going. She has the stamina and the stubborn endurance to keep demanding what she wants until she gets it. 

The widow outlasts the judge, not in quiet humility, but with the audacity of almost violence. In verse 5, where the judge is worried that she may wear him out by continually coming, the word for “wear out” is hoopōpiazō, literally to “beat black and blue, to smite so as to cause bruises and livid spots” like a boxer in a boxing ring. The Greek literally means something like “to give the guy a black eye.” 

Can you picture the little old woman giving the judge the ol’ 1, 2? It’s meant to be comical, but it’s also mean to show us how much she has at stake in this situation. She needs this justice, and she’s going to demand it until she gets it. 

And God wants us to pray like that. God can handle our passion, our rage, and our disbelief. God can handle the puny right hook of an elderly woman. 

And so we pray. And so, somehow, it makes a difference. Even if they are the selfish prayers of a ten year old boy or the frantic stress of a forty year old woman, they are attempts at connection, pleas for relationship. To pray means that we are still invested in this world, we still want things, life still has meaning for us because we long for more. And if we can get to those prayers, then we can get to the prayers that are what are really in our best interest, prayers for justice. 

These are no passive prayers. There’s no way to pray that doesn’t change things, because in the process, you are changed. To pray is to be affected by the world.

And this is hard, hard stuff, because if we pray with the passion of the persistent widow or the ten year old boy, we are all in, we are fully invested, it’s life or death, we have to have the thing that we’re asking for, and if we don’t get it, we will be crushed. Can we pray for justice like a little boy who wants a new baseball glove or a second scoop of ice cream, or for his parents to stay together? Can we have that kind of passion, or are we a step removed, an arm’s length away, a safe distance where we won’t be hurt if the prayer doesn’t come true?

What if we nagged God for justice with as much at stake as a widow who has nothing left, who has it all riding on this one decision, who is nothing without this one judge’s determination.

This is a terrifying move, because God just might say no.

No. You won’t be healed. No. The divorce will go through. No, the medical bills are still here. And there’s so much at stake with these big things — like war, climate change, corruption, poverty, overdoses, and hunger — that if I pray for them as if my whole life is on the line, I might be crushed. God might say, “No.”

I want to hide, scroll past, sleep through and switch stations, but that is me literally unplugging, disconnecting from the things that God is connected to. 

“Keep praying,” Jesus says to these disciples on their way to Jerusalem. “You’re going to see hard things soon, but don’t give up, don’t lose heart. Keep showing up with your whole self.” Don’t disconnect yourself from the things that God is connected to. And God desperately wants to be connected to you. To me. To all of us. 

Because that’s the real persistent one in this story. God isn’t a magic genie who provides us with our three wishes; God isn’t there just to grant us what we want and then go back into his lamp. God pursues us. God wants a relationship with us. God wears us down so that we can finally accept God’s answers to our prayers, even if that answer is No, or maybe, or just silence. Nadia Bolz-Weber says, “Maybe prayer isn’t the way in which we manipulate God, but simply the posture in which we finally become worn down by God’s persistence - God’s persistence in loving us.”  “To pray is to connect ourselves to the persistent longing of God,” she says. 

God isn’t some magic eight ball that passively answers our prayers with a “Yes,” “No,” or an “Ask Again Later.” No matter what the answer is to our prayers, God wants us to keep going, to keep asking, because it’s about the relationship, not about the end result.

“And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off?”

I want my kids to keep coming back to me. I want them to keep asking for things. I want to stay connected to my kids and to their deepest desires. Sometimes that means we have to say “No” a thousand times because they, like us, get distracted. They get distracted from what they really want, which is love and security and comfort and acceptance, and for the briefest moment they believe that the newest Pokemon card, the upgraded Minecraft game, or the triple fudge sundae is going to do it for them. 

But will we hesitate to give them the desire that is behind those desires? Will we hesitate to give them love, security, comfort, or acceptance that they’re aching for? Absolutely not, when it’s in our power to do so. So I want them to keep coming back to me so that I can help show them where their true desires are — not in this new nerf gun or Chipotle for the third time this week — but for Justice, for Jesus, for the God who doesn’t hesitate to give us the good things we need. 

Keep asking, Jesus says. You’ll come to the heart of what you truly need in the asking. You’ll come to the heart of what you truly desire by asking for all those things you think you need. Sometimes you’ll get it right. Sometimes God will grant you those desires of your heart because that is what your heart truly needs. Sometimes the answer is “no,” and honestly, I don’t understand why. So I’m going to keep asking why? and how come? and please? again and again because I know that God is persistently listening to my pleas, even when I don’t get what I want, what I truly believe my heart needs. 

I don’t know how God answers prayer. I just know that God wants us to pray. Pray like the six year old who needs ten more minutes before bed. Pray like the woman alone in the world who needs justice from an unjust judge. Pray with your whole heart like your life is on the line. Pray like that.

Thanks be to God.