Wholeness and the Way of Humility

A Sermon

Luke 18:9-14

Jesus told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: "Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 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. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.' 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!' 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." (NRSV)

JESUS MAFA. The Pharisee and the Publican, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN.

Ancient monks who fled society for the desert may not sound like good guides for not to being judgmental.  Add to that the fact they spent a most of their time reflecting on their sins, fasting, and doing uncomfortable things like sleeping on the bare ground, and the image we might have is of an austere, puritanical person, ready to point out our smallest waverings. 

Over the past year, though, I’ve been reading the teachings and stories of those desert monks, and I have to say, that they’ve lovingly called me out over the distance of the centuries for my own judgmental ways.  The Desert Fathers and Mothers, the Abbas and Ammas of the 3rd and 4th Centuries, have some helpful advice for those of us living in a gotcha world, ready to jump on the latest cancel culture bandwagon.  And at the center of their teaching is the parable of the pharisee and the publican.

Certain times and places throughout Christian history have had their favorite passages of scripture.  The Lutherans  of the reformation loved Galatians, the Evangelicals of the 80s waved poster board signs of John 3:16, and the ancient desert monastics of the early centuries of Christianity lived by Luke’s parable of the pharisee and the tax collector.  

What this story did for the monks was instill in them a sense of humility and mercy. It taught them that what is important in God’s eyes is not our own sense of personal righteousness, but a surrender to God’s goodness and love. What the tax collector knew and the monks sought to learn, was that they were in deep need of God’s grace and that gift was not something they could earn or accomplish however much they fasted or how many hair shirts they wore. They meditated on their sins, not to be down on themselves, but to open up an empty vessel to be filled with God’s love.

The result in the lives of the Desert Fathers and Mothers was not shame, but a kind of freedom. Shame doesn’t do anyone good. If all we get to in recognizing our sins is that we’re rotten people, unworthy of any good thing, then we are still strangely stuck on the side of the Pharisee.  In shame, we believe like the Pharisee that righteousness is something we can achieve on our own rather than a relationship that we enter.

The wisdom of the tax collector, the wisdom the desert monastics learned from the parable, is that an acknowledgement of our failings, our shortcomings, is not about us. In admitting our emptiness we are inviting God’s great fulfillment in our lives. And the result is that we are much gentler with those who are also struggling, all the other people who are in desperate need of God’s mercy. 

This approach of gentleness rather than judgement is illustrated by some great stories passed down to us by the desert monastics:

In one, Abba Moses, who’d been a notorious highway robber before his conversion, was asked to join the trial of a monk who’d been accused of committing a sin. At first Abba Moses refused to go to the trial, but when the brothers insisted he picked up a leaky jug and filled it with water. All along the way the water spilled out behind him.  When he arrived at the trail, the brothers, puzzled by the stream of water tracing his path, asked him about it.  Abba Moses said, “My sins spill out behind me, and yet I do not see them.  How can I then judge someone else?”  They got his point and the trial was called off.

In another story, a monk who’d taken a vow of celibacy was accused of hiding a prostitute in his cell.  The brothers asked the Abba to come help them search.  When the Abba arrived he knew that the woman was hiding in a tall basket and so he sat on it.  After the brothers searched the cell and found nothing, the Abba said, “See you were wrong!”  When they left he told the woman to leave and asked the monk to repent and sin no more. 

These are strange stories, to be sure, but they have a lot of wisdom in them.  They’ve certainly come to my mind a good deal lately because the reality is that I can be pretty judgmental. I go about judging people for all sorts of things, frivolous and substantial. I even had to get off social media because I was constantly getting upset and outraged at the ideas and opinions of the people in my life. It helped, but I’m still more often than not prideful like the pharisee rather than humble like the tax collector. It’s been helpful too look back at the example of past Christians and see the promise of another way to live—one focused on healing relationships and living in reconciliation, rather than being constantly filled with the anger of condemnation. When we start recognizing our own need for God’s mercy more than judging our neighbors extraordinary things can begin to happen. 

The witness of the Baptist minister Will Campbell is a great example.  Campbell was a white southern minister from Mississippi during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. He fought long and hard for racial justice, often putting his life on the line. He was one of the four people who escorted the Little Rock nine during the integration of Central High and he was the only white person present for the founding of Martin Luther King’s Southern Leadership Conference. 

When he was once asked for a one sentence definition of Christianity, Campbell replied: “We’re all bastards but God loves us anyway.” It’s not a bad definition and Campbell clearly believed it. Like the desert monastics before him, he was convinced of everyone’s need for God’s mercy and it led him to reach out even to his enemies. Campbell, much to the dismay of many of his friends, became a kind of chaplain to the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan and made a pastoral visit to Martin Luther King’s assassin James Earl Ray, all the while directly and openly condemning their racism. He did all of this because he said that “Mr. Jesus died for bigots as well.” As the journalist Chris Hedges later put it, Campbell “refused to 'cancel' white racists out of his life. He refused to demonize them as less than human.”

Our world needs justice, but we’re not going to get it by living like the pharisee in Jesus’ parable, ready to point to our own goodness and everyone else’s faults. Instead, we can learn from the saints of the past, how to live in a different way. If our focus becomes restoring relationship, healing the wounds that keep us from wholeness, we’ll come to see that the first place of our work is in our own hearts and lives. We all need God’s mercy and when we fully know that for ourselves, then we’ll know that our neighbors, however bigoted or difficult or wrong, need it too. And while we shouldn’t give up on telling the truth about injustice or seeking to right its wrongs in our world, our humility might just help us win our neighbors and bring them into the circle of God’s grace. Will Campbell was so very right: whoever we are, whatever we’ve done, “God loves us anyway.” That’s a message of justice our world needs to hear. So, whenever I start to feel those judgmental thoughts rising, and the desire to condemn someone rather than something, I pray I’ll think first of my own faults and ask for God’s mercy. In the grace of that mercy, I hope I’ll be more gentle toward my neighbors and friends and even my enemies, recognizing that we all need to be made whole in God’s love and that wholeness is what true justice is all about. Amen.