First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
24 October 2004
On General Principles
A childhood friend of mine had a mother who yelled at her a lot. My mother yelled at me a lot too, but her yelling was usually attached to identifiable offenses, and I was invariably guilty of them. It was never clear to me what Tina had done to deserve what she got. When she'd ask, "What did I do?", her mother didn't always have an answer. She didn't need one. They fell into a little routine: Tina would say, "Why are you yelling at me?", and her mother would reply, "On general principles."
Sometimes Tina could actually prove her innocence. But it didn't matter. Her mother said that Tina had probably done lots of other things that had gone undetected. She should just apply the yell to something she'd gotten away with, and justice would be done. One day Tina asked her mother to yell at her for all her real and potential sins, past present and future, and get it over with. "If you're yelling at me on general principles," she said, "why not just give me one good yell—five, maybe six days long—and let me pro-rate it over the rest of my life?" Her mother was not amused by this proposal. Tina got yelled at for it.
Tina was a miserable teenager. But she doesn't blame her mother for it anymore. She knows a lot more now about what her mother went through back then to keep the family afloat, the stress and worry. Looking back, that yelling doesn't seem so bad to me either. You know the way that the house you grew up in seemed huge to you as a child, but seems a lot smaller when you see it as an adult? It's like that with the yelling too. Besides, we were kids in the 60's—completely off the wall when it came to authority figures. We gave our parents fits. It's a wonder all they did was yell.
There's not much point in the blame game anyway. We're in our late fifties now, and at this age an injured attitude is not very becoming. When we contemplate the rough texture of our own lives, Tina's mother doesn't look bad at all stacked up against the injuries we've caused by our own flailing around. Forgiving her mother for "back then" is a way to forgive ourselves for now.
A few years ago at Tina's suburban congregation, a small disgruntled band of parishioners presented themselves to the pastor and complained that the Confession of Sin in the weekly worship service was too depressing. He convened a big discussion about whether to keep the Confession in the service. That opened Pandora's box. A lot of people didn't like the Confession. What did they do, they demanded to know, that was so bad that they had to beg for mercy every week? They came to church to be uplifted, not to feel guilty.
And I suppose they had a point if you consider what the confession prayers printed in some Sunday bulletins direct us to confess. At my home church I once had to say I was sorry for causing famine in Ethiopia. On one Columbus Day weekend, we dutifully lumped ourselves in with the Conquistadors, praying: "Oh God, we are all oppressors. We have enslaved your people and raped your land."
You'd think Tina would have led the charge to get rid of the Confession, but she wound up vigorously defending it. Maybe because she grew up knowing that she was damned if she did and damned if she didn't, she has never chafed under the sinner label. She has never even minded being lumped in occasionally with the Conquistadors. Not that she thinks she's depraved or evil. She knows that her ordinary sins are not the moral equivalent of mass murder. But she also knows that, as one preacher put it, over the years she has "collected a lot of sewage in [her] heart."
She's wasted other people's time, and they've wasted hers. She's gossiped about them, and they've paid her back. She's lied, lusted, coveted and taken the Lord's name in vain. She still keeps a little stash of idols to prop her up in the day of trouble. She has hurt people, especially the ones she loves the most, and not just lightly, and not just once. She is far more self-preoccupied and far less grateful than is right for people like her who, although often, deeply and unfairly hurt, have also been incredibly blessed, have more than they need, and have escaped untold catastrophes.
She likes to think that if at some point in her life she is faced with life-or-death moral choices, say, like whether to hide Jews from the SS, she would choose the side of the angels. But she wouldn't be surprised if she protected herself and turned every last one of them all in. She understands what Mother Teresa meant when, informed by a pious devotee that she was a living saint, tartly replied that, be that as it may, there was still a Nazi sleeping in her soul. In the same way, Tina is not confident of her own virtue.
Because she is a Boomer, she feels vaguely responsible for everything. All the same, calling herself a sinner does not arise out of guilt. She thinks of her sinfulness more like a chronic condition—it's not a great thing to be afflicted with, it causes trouble when it flares up, but with treatment it's survivable. Being a sinner isn't anything singular or special about a person. It's just true. She's not sure why people find this hard to accept, and she wonders if ignoring or forgetting one's human condition could be a set-up for something worse than everyday run-of-the-mill sinning.
So she argued to her congregation that because people tend to forget who they are (willfully or otherwise), they need to be regularly and officially reminded and, occasionally, even made to admit big things they didn't personally do, but that someone else surely did—someone else who was a human beings just like them when all the wraps are removed. She did not want anyone to be deprived of a weekly opportunity to make a confession on general principles.
Well, that's Tina's story, as far as it goes. Now let's turn to the story Jesus told us today. It's about two men in the Temple. One is a high achiever. An extraordinarily good person who really lives his religion. He is praying, although what he says may strike us more like a report than a prayer. (God's role seems to be to applaud him when he's done.) He is grateful that he lives morally, and why shouldn't he be? It's not a bad way to live! But it turns out that he is also grateful that he lives in such a morally upright way that he is "not like others." Especially not like "this" tax collector, the other man in the Temple that day.
He was fine right up until he made that comparison. Now we discover that this man who thinks he knows himself is really just interested in himself (and he doesn't see the difference). And he is even more interested in stacking up well against others. In the middle of his prayer, he raises his eyes from his own life, where they belong, and casts them on someone else' life, where they don't. He has, as a commentary observed, "crossed the line from praying to peeking," he has shifted "from gratitude to elitism."
The tax collector is unquestionably a certified sleaze-ball. The Pharisee is not wrong about the man's character. He collaborates with the Romans and overcharges poor people to line his own pockets. He's not all cleaned up for church like you're supposed to be. He probably feels out of place in the Temple like some people feel out of place at First Church when they look at all us hearty, confident, cleaned-up people and wonder, "Am I the only one here whose life is a mess?" He doesn't even know how to put a good prayer together.
He's doesn't report anything to God, although given the profession he's in, he could have claimed that he's the worst sinner God ever put up with, not like all those other sinners whose misdeeds are small, unimaginative and unremarkable. No, he doesn't puff himself up with self-loathing as the Pharisee puffs himself up with self-esteem. He just is who he is. A sinner. While the other guy is filling the temple with overblown speech, he quietly repeats, "Lord, have mercy," to the rhythmic accompaniment of his fist beating his chest, a fitting gesture, as that same writer observed, for "a man at war with himself." Or maybe he was just trying to rouse his heart from a deep sleep.
Jesus says that God does not bless the Pharisee. That little piece of news would have stunned him. According to the rules he's playing by, if you know the Ten Commandments, give money to the poor, never disappoint your parents, and keep your distance from bad people, by God, God ought to bless you. But no, the tax collector gets the blessing. Goes home "justified"—on good terms with God.
Why would God bless such a man? Maybe God figured that a blessing would be wasted on the Pharisee, he was so good at blessing himself. Maybe God gives it to the one who isn't good at anything (except extortion), who hasn't got a prayer, who doesn't even know that he should have promised to try hard to be a better person from now on. God gives it to the one who will probably get up the next morning and overcharge his neighbors again, feed the tax lust of the Empire, and keep the change for himself. What the tax collector does know, however, is that God is God and he is not, that God has something no one else can offer, and that he really, really needs it.
Sisters and brothers, I am thrashing around up here talking about sin and sinners, but I am really trying to get at the nature of humility. I don't mean that stuff about putting ourselves down and never putting ourselves forward, or hiding our achievements and deflecting praise. I don't mean mealy-mouthed, Uriah Heepish obsequiousness. That kind of humility gives the real stuff a bad name. The real stuff is more like living close to the ground, like being earthy. That's where the word comes from—humus, earth. The humble person accepts her origins in dust, rejoices in the fact that she is a creature and not God, and lives accordingly.
Sure, she tries not to mess up, but every night she throws herself and her failings on the mercy of God, again. She's not discouraged, however, because her life is not organized around who she is or ought to be, but around who God is, the compassionate and merciful one. She's not trying to be her own improvement project. She knows that if she sets a goal of moral excellence, pride will be all too happy to help her achieve it, and that contempt for others will be close by her side when she does.
Ancient Christians thought that the sin of Adam and Eve was a really bad thing, but they also thought that it had a silver lining. It is grandly called "The Fall" in traditional Christian parlance, but some of our forebears actually thought of it more like a trip or a stumble, a mishap more than a catastrophe, something that did not separate us from God, but only bound us closer because it gained for us a Savior who was a human like us. Therefore they called that first sin a felix culpa, a happy fault.
Out of love for him and a sense of fittingness, the tradition could not resist claiming that Jesus was morally perfect, sinless, a human unlike us in that respect. He may well have been perfect; I'm not disputing it. But in the gospel stories we see him lined up with ordinary sinners to accept a baptism of repentance. And God, we read, loves him for it. This was one of the arguments Tina used to defend the weekly Confession: If Jesus showed up for a Confession of Sin, why shouldn't we? (She also tried to sway pe0ple with an old saying I told her about—namely, that pe0ple in heaven spend eternity rejoicing over their sins. Why? Because they finally understand where they would be without them.)
Tina lost the fight over the Confession. They did away with it except in Lent. Apparently it's OK to feel bad about yourself within certain well-defined parameters. She still makes her weekly Confession, though. She says it silently, during the sermon. She's tempted to feel guilty about that, but the truth is that it's often a better use of time.
Some of her best friends were on the other side of the fight, and things got a little heated between her and them at times. It hurt her that some of the most adamant among the "we-are-not-sinful-people" people avoided her at coffee hour for months after the vote was taken. She really didn't like being punished for no real crime, but she was philosophical about it and applied it to something she got away with.
© 2004, J Mary Luti