At the Heart of the Matter

Please Click Here For Sermon Video

Luke 18:9-14

Recently, I saw a meme posted on Facebook which simply read, “Saying Jesus died for me is manipulative.”  The meme also included one of the comments in response to it which read, “To say he rose from the dead is gaslighting.”  That meme pushed a button with me but not because of the antichristian overtones.  Disagreement with or denial of the Christian doctrine of Penal Substitution (in a courtroom drama, Jesus, the innocent one, took humanity’s deserved penalty of death and damnation unto himself and died once and for all earning us an acquittal and enabling reconciliation with God) or, if you don’t like the courtroom imagery, just plain Substitutionary Atonement will do (Jesus’s death was in Humanity’s place for more reason than just moral infractions for which we deserve to be punished),…disagreement and denial of those biblical metaphors which attempt to explain Jesus’ death is nothing new nor is denying his resurrection.  That wasn’t what pushed the button.  I wear big boy pull-up pants these days and I can handle it when someone disagrees with my Jesus-centered understanding of reality.  

What pushed my button was just how loosely if not inappropriately terms which can be classified as “Therapy Speak” get thrown around these days.  Manipulation and gaslighting are terms that come to us from the world of psychotherapy and are particularly associated with the behaviours of narcissistic personality disorder.  We all know how roughly 10 years ago narcissistic personality disorder and the behaviours associated with it (so also the kindred diagnoses of sociopathy and psychopathy) hit the world stage with an unbelievably huge impact as people were trying to come to grips with the behaviour of a certain world leader.  Still today, we can rest assured that whenever certain political figures open their mouths we’re being manipulated and gaslighted.  Regardless, the aftermath of that sort of armchair psychologizing working its way through the news media and social media is that two people can’t have a disagreement anymore without somebody getting offended and somebody getting called a narcissist and somebody getting accused of manipulation and gaslighting just because their narratives differ around the same body of facts (whatever a fact is anymore).  When we accuse somebody of manipulation or gaslighting when that is not the case and we’re just having a disagreement, it only serves to shut down the conversation.  We need to leave the Therapy Speak to the therapists and hope to God they know what they’re doing with them.  Unfortunately, the world of therapy has its vogue pop-culture too.

In thinking about a possible response to the meme I could, in Pharisaical manner, very easily with a high degree of certainty at least as far as I am concerned look down my nose and accuse the meme and the sharers thereof of manipulating and gaslighting me for trying to convince me that my spiritual experience is a figment of my imagination that I use to get people to do what I want them to do.  I could say they have offended me and traumatized me because I have since been having ruminating thoughts because of the meme. After all, I’m writing a sermon about it.  No. I won’t play Pharisee and look down my nose and act all offended that somehow my rights have been violated by someone who sees things differently from me.  I also won’t mask  some sort of condescending, self-righteous rage at “people like them” behind a passive aggressive question in the comment section such as, “Doesn’t it bother you that you’re going to Hell?”  No, I won’t respond like that.  To me and many like me, Jesus’ resurrection and New Life in him by the gift of the Holy Spirit are as real and felt as are death and shame and guilt and suffering.  I can’t fault someone for not having the experiences that I have had in life.

Actually, I’m going to agree with the meme and the person who posted it as far as I can without denying the Truth of the substitutionary nature of Jesus’ death.  I know the person who posted it and I care greatly for that person.  I know where this person is coming from and it’s important to note that this posting came about in the wake of the murder of Charlie Kirk when American Christian Nationalists and people on the left were having a bit of a tit for tat to put it mildly.  I have some empathy for this person and this person’s views.  I will agree that a certain element of the Christian church truly has been manipulative with Jesus’ death, trying to coerce conversions out of people by guilting and shaming them with the big club of Jesus dying for them.  That big club becomes a battle axe when a person is further told that they aren’t a real believer in Jesus unless they are (and these days the list is) anti-immigrant, anti-Trans, anti-science, anti-climate change, anti-higher education, anti-abortion, anti-vax, pro-US, pro-Israel, and pro-Trump.  That arm of Christianity needs to see through its own delusion and realize they are causing “little ones” who belong to Christ to fall away.  As far as the meme goes, I will agree that Jesus’ death has been and continues to be used  by some to manipulate people, but I won’t throw the baby out with the bathwater and say that Jesus’ death was not in some wonderful way for me, for humanity…actually for the whole creation.

So, how would I respond to the meme if were to ever be able to get beyond the trauma of being called a manipulative gaslighter?  I would ask questions that sound a lot like those condescending “rhetorical questions” that people ask and then say you don’t have to answer.  I would start with “What if it’s true that Jesus died for us?”  What if it’s true that there is something so utterly wrong within the human condition that only God can heal it by becoming human, dying, and being raised from the dead?  

Seriously, what is wrong with humanity?  We suffer alienation from one another and from God.  We hide in shame.  We so often do violence to one another even if it is just a little lying to cover our asses.  We all have nasty little secrets we don’t want anybody to know (but isn’t great when we can trust another person enough to get that shit off our chests and then find ourselves still loved and accepted?). We’re all narcissistic to varying extents.  We’re all addicted to something.  We all do selfish stuff that hurts the weak and vulnerable and especially the people we love.  And, do I even need to mention the things we should have done but didn’t for lack of courage or fear of embarrassment.  This disease of the human mind is so profound and extensive that the whole creation suffers because of us.  As remarkable as we human beings are, we become a deadly virus everywhere we go.

What if the only way for a loving God to heal humanity of this disease is to become one of us as Jesus of Nazareth and thereby infuse God’s very life to humanity and not just humans but even literal physical matter not just the something nebulous called “spiritual” stuff.  And, not just infuse himself and his life into us, but he took human being, including this disease, into Godself, let it run its course in him, and then died with it, and that’s not the end.  Jesus rose from death, healed of the disease, with a new life to share and we discover it in following Jesus in his way of life marked by unconditional love, forgiveness, compassion, hospitality, generosity, and dying to self (which is antithetical to the pursuit of self-fulfillment, self-aggrandizement).  In following him that seed of new life, the Holy Spirit, begins to grow.  What if it is true?

I look at the world around me these days through the lens of this parable.  I see what appears to be just about everybody, myself included, self-righteously pointing the finger at everybody else while claiming to be right and thanking the god they’ve created in their own image that they ain’t like “those people”.  I really don’t see anybody hiding in the corner, sick to death of the way they are and the way they have hurt and taken advantage of others be they friend, family, or foe.  To be frank, we are all at heart tax collectors running around thinking everybody owes us something when in fact we each are the biggest debtors of all…broken, hurting, hiding.

This tax collector for some reason realizes that the cure for his diseased mind, soul, and body is that only God can do something about it.  It’s very interesting what he asks of God…and here comes a Greek lesson.  This tax collector’s prayer is mistranslated in every translation.  In the Greek text, he is not asking for mercy.  The word for mercy, eleos, is not there.  It would be fitting if it was.  That word is from the same word family as the words for olive and olive oil, which they used for a healing balm.  If that word was there, a beautiful translation of the prayer would be, “God, be a healing balm for me, a sinner.”  But that’s not what he is asking.

The word that is there is hilasterion, which means a sacrifice of expiation.  In the world of sacrifices, there were two kinds that the ancient world did to make things right with God, propitiation and expiation.  The driving thought pattern was: “I’m a sinner.  If I come into God’s holy presence, I will deservedly die.”  Propitiation, which the Israelites did not practice, was sacrificing an animal in your place to get God’s favour.  Expiation was a person transferring their sin to an animal usually by touching it.  The animal was then sacrificed, putting the sin to death.  This is similar to a poultice drawing infection from a wound.

This prayer is audacious.  It literally reads, “God, be yourself the sacrifice of expiation for me, a sinner.”  The tax collector realizes the extent of his sin is so great that a simple animal sacrifice of expiation won’t do it.  A human sacrifice would be evil and no cure at all.  He can’t fix it with his own death.  Everybody dies and we will all face God.  His sins, our sins, are so great his only hope for the healing of his diseased mind and being reconciled to God and to those whom he has hurt is for God himself to become the sacrifice of expiation for him.  

It may sound like ridiculous metaphysics, but that is why Jesus, God the Son, in love died on the cross for each of us.  There is healing for humanity in Jesus in the Holy Spirit-filled New Life he has to give.  It is time we check our self-righteous pride at the door and come to grips with how great a debtor we each are.  Jesus paid that debt.  Maybe we ought to give him a chance.  Amen. 

Just Come

 Please Click Here For Sermon Video 

Luke 18:9-14

I’m sure many of you have horror stories of when you were a child and had a chest cold and sore throat and it was likely your grandmother who whipped up a mess of boiled potatoes mushed up with mustard and onions and a few other stinky goodies; an old family recipe.  She then smeared it all over your chest and throat and it smelled so bad that you didn’t want to breathe, but it worked.  I was lucky.  My mom just rubbed Mentholatum all over me.  

Since the onset of pharmaceutical solutions to colds, aches, and infections we don’t see too many people going the route of treating such things with a stinky poultice. A poultice is a form of treatment where you apply a cooked up paste of stinky goodies to an infected area to absorb the infection into itself and relieve the inflammation in the area.  There are all kinds of recipes for poultices and as many of them work as don’t.  Regardless, the idea is that they will draw out the infection in the affected area and relieve the pain of inflammation. 

There is a theological term for this process of drawing out infection and relieving inflammation.  The term is expiation.  If you must know, it comes from the Latin word expiatio.  Piatio means devout, pious, or simply clean.  Ex means “Out of”.  The dirtiness or disease is taken “out of” thus leaving the person clean. Theologically speaking, expiation refers to removing the disease of sin and its ill-effects from a person leaving the person clean or devout or pious.  

In the Old Testament some of the sacrifices they had were for the purpose of expiation, for drawing out the feelings of shame and guilt that people felt when they realized they had sinned against God and against others and they realized the hurt they caused and needed the relationship with God and others restored.  These sacrifices were for unintentional transgressing.  God gave no means of expiation for intentional transgressing.  You had to find some way to live with the shame and guilt of intentionally wronging another and making reparations.  The expiating poultice for intentional hurting comes with Jesus and his death and the work of the Holy Spirit.  I also won’t mention that the penalty in most cases for an intentional sin was usually death.

Just a little bit about how this sacrifice stuff worked.  Humanity is sick with a disease of the mind in that we are self-willed rather than God-willed to the extent that we will intentionally and unintentionally hurt others and ourselves especially the people we love and vulnerable people.  It is so twisted that even when we think we are doing good it can be bad and bad can be good.  The only way out of sin is death.  When you discover you’ve hurt another unintentionally or intentionally depending on the severity of the hurt it does not feel good and you may wish you were dead.  

To be free of the shame and guilt incurred with hurting God, others, and self, one must die either literally or “to self” in humility and following God’s way to relationship reparation.  Life must pass through death to be cleansed and freed of this disease called sin and its harmful effects of shame and guilt and a whole myriad of others bad feelings.  With sacrifices of expiation, people offered them not to appease an angry God.  That’s propitiation.  But rather so that the life of an animal to whom they had transferred their sin could pass through death for them and reunite a person with God. 

How does life pass through death?  Leviticus 17:11 and 14 tell us that the life of the animal is in the blood.  When the priest sacrificed an animal and took its blood for ritual use, that was in essence life that had passed through death.  The priests then did interesting things with the blood of the sacrificed animal to expiate the guilt and shame that an Israelite incurred.

In ancient Israel they had three sacrifices or offerings for expiation.  The first two were simply the sin offering and guilt offering that they did when they knew they had sinned and wanted forgiveness.  They had also to make reparations with those they had sinned against.  The sacrifice was to heal things with God by getting the bad stuff out.  For the sin offering they would take an animal to a priest.  They would lay their hand on it.  The priest would then slaughter it and take some of the blood and sprinkle it on the ground before the curtain outside the room where the Ark of the Covenant was kept and where God was supposed to be.  What was happening with the laying on of the hand was that they were symbolically transferring their sinful self’s mired in shame and guilt to the animal, who then was put to death in their place in order to put all that bad stuff to death.  The priest then took the blood and symbolically presented that person’s life that had passed through death and was thus clean to God and God forgave and fellowship with God was restored.  They did the same thing for the guilt offering but with that one the priest would also put some blood on the person’s earlobe.  Applying this blood, this life that had passed through death, to the person’s earlobe was meant to heal the ear so that the person could hear the commandments of God better and keep it.

The third sacrifice and the most important happened on Yom Kippur or the Day of Atonement which was the national day of very solemn repentance.  On Yom Kippur the High Priest sacrificed three animals: a bull and two rams.  The High Priest slaughtered the bull as a sin offering on behalf of himself and the priests who represented the people to God and God to the people.  But in this case, he sprinkled the blood on the priests and then he actually took the blood further into the Holy of Holies and sprinkled it on the Ark itself.  They believed that the lid of the Ark was the throne of God here on earth and was called the mercy seat.  They also believed God was seated there unseen, shrouded in a cloud of smoke that was created by a big incense burn that represented the prayers of the people.  Thus, this sprinkling of blood from the same animal on both God and the priests actually united them in this life that had passed through death.  Then in representation of all the people, the High Priest took one of the rams, placed his hands on it and slaughtered it as a sin offering on behalf of the people.  He took this life that had passed through death and also sprinkled some of that blood on the Ark thus uniting the people with God in this life that had passed through death.  He then also sprinkled this blood all over the temple and its furniture to cleanse it of the stain of sin incurred by contact with humans.  All this sprinkling of blood symbolized the work of the Holy Spirit who unites us to God and cleanses us of guilt and shame and unions us to God and one another with life that has passed through death, the life of Jesus. 

The High Priest then took the second goat and whispered the sins of the people into its ear making the goat bear the sins of the people.  This goat, thus laden with the sins of the people, was then led out into the wilderness where it and the sins it bore would be destroyed by the beasties out in the wilderness.  This goat took away, bore away, carried away the sins of the people into death and there they perished forever along with the goat.  So also, Jesus, God the Son became human and in so doing took the Sin of humanity upon himself by becoming one of us and he removed Sin from us by his death on the cross.  When God raised him, he became the life of humanity that passed through death and who by the gift of the Holy Spirit to indwell us unites us to God himself.  Jesus is humanity’s expiation of sin, once and for all.  Jesus gives us this new humanity, this new human life by the gift of the Holy Spirit who lives in us each and bonds us together as a new humanity.  We need to come to him for the healing. 

I haven’t said anything about our passage yet so just allow me a couple of more minutes.  This Pharisee was a devout, Law-abiding man and indeed more than a bit pompous.  Because of his efforts to abide by the Law of Moses he feels he has the right to stand before God, toot his horn, and look down on “sinners”.  “Sinner” was a derogatory term, as offensive as some of the racial slurs that get thrown around today.  We find him looking with condemnation on this tax collector who is standing far off in the temple quite afflicted by the brutal fact that he had hurt a lot people in so many ways.  He is so full of shame and guilt that he wishes he was dead.  When somebody beats their own breast they are symbolically driving a knife into their heart.  

Tax collectors were Jews who collected taxes for the Romans and were considered to be traitors.  They always inflated the amount of tax owed so the could skim off the top to the detriment of many poor people.  They would also have poor Israelites beaten and imprisoned for not paying up.  They got very wealthy and were very hated.  They were indeed “sinners”.

The tax collector is standing far of, staring at the ground, beating his breast, and desperately praying, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”  He is so full of shame and guilt over what he has intentionally done to God’s people to get rich.  He is sick to death with himself and he has got no way to get the shame and guilt out of his system because the expiation sacrifices were only for unintentional sins.  I don’t know if you’ve ever been sick of yourself for the shit you’ve done (sorry to use that word but it’s fitting) and felt the helplessness of there being no way to make right for what you’ve done. I’ve been there.  All you can do is hope God can heal things.  This broken man certainly was there.

The tax collector’s prayer is interesting.  In our translation it seems he’s begging for mercy, or forgiveness from a judge.  But, the word in Greek isn’t the word they would have used for mercy.  It is the word they used for a sacrifice of expiation.  Literally, he is prayerfully begging, “God, be the sacrifice of expiation for me, a sinner.”  And…that is what God himself did in, through, and as Jesus by his death and resurrection and has applied it to us with the gift of his very self.

If you have ever been or are mired in the shame and guilt of the shit you have done intentionally or unintentionally, there is healing for that.  Come as you are into the midst of the people of God where dwells God in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit and start crying, start letting it out.  God will come to you and bear it away.  God will let you know you are His beloved child, beloved and forgiven.  And we the people of God won’t judge you.  We will hold you just as you are in the arms of the unconditional love of our Father in heaven to reinforce the love he has for you.  Just come.  Amen.  

 

Temple Disposition

Luke 18:9-14

The other night at a potluck in one of our Cooperative sister churches we were discussing the perceptions people have of church.  One woman shared a story of a conversation she overheard between a mother and her child.  That particular church lets a daycare meet there one morning a week in their basement.  This woman happened to be coming in when the parents were picking up their children and as one mother was leaving with her child, the child pointed up the stairs to the sanctuary and said, “What’s up there, Mommy?  Let’s go see.”  The mother immediately responded, “No. You have to pay money to go up there.”

Talk about a misconception!  But it’s a misconception come by honestly.  How many times have we heard, “Churches only want your money?”  Regardless of what we teach about stewardship and giving, because churches pass a collection plate around during worship, it isn’t a stretch to see why some might think that you have to pay to come into the presence of God.

Another common misconception that used to be quite popular is the idea that you have to wear your Sunday best to come into the presence of God.  Whether it’s a suit and tie or a ladies hat, somehow this expectation gave the impression that you needed to clean yourself up, be presentable and a model of good citizenship, in order to come to church.

These misconceptions that you have to pay to come to church or get yourself cleaned up in order to go to church are based on a conditional understanding of God’s love.  Somehow, people have gotten the idea that the church teaches that you must do something before God will accept you: clean up your act, do good works, have faith, be morally upright, make a personal decision to accept Jesus as your Lord and Saviour.  When we look through the history (long past and recent) it isn’t difficult to see how the church has taught and perpetuated these misconceptions.  Through one side of our mouths we say the love and grace of God is free and unconditional (Jesus died for all), but through the other side of our mouths, or perhaps in the disapproving look down our noses, those who are ‘not like us’ somehow don’t qualify as part of the ‘all’ included in the ‘free and unconditional’.

The Pharisee in Jesus’ story has a similar misconception of God’s love and grace.  He believed himself to be righteous: he followed the law, he gave to the poor, he worshiped in the temple, he read and studied his bible. He did everything he was supposed to do and he did it properly and in good order.  We need to understand that this man was a good man.  And we have a lot in common with him.  He was faithful to his wife, he wore his Sunday best to church.  He was an honest businessman and didn’t take advantage of anyone. He didn’t bully others.  He was sincere and honest in his devotion to God and it showed in the way he lived his life.  According to his belief and his conduct, he had absolutely every right to be there in the temple – in the actual presence of God.

So, if he was such a good guy, why did Jesus say that it was the tax collector who went away justified (rightly related to God and others)?  That hardly seems fair, doesn’t it?  If this man wasn’t justified, then how could anyone else be?

The bottom line is that the Pharisee misunderstood the source of his righteousness.  He thought it was about him: what he believed and how he embodied his faith in the world.  Jesus is telling us through this story, that neither what we believe nor what we do makes us acceptable to God.   What justifies is God’s grace, and God’s work of removing sin from his presence.

Let me explain that further.  The Jews rightly believed they were God’s chosen people.  The very fact that God chose them, brought them into existence through Abraham, made an everlasting covenant with them, rescued them from slavery in Egypt, and gave them the law is the evidence that they were already righteous – already accepted by God, already in right relationship with him because God chose them.  The problem wasn’t that they weren’t righteous, because they were. The problem was that they were also sinful. And they couldn’t bring that sin into the presence of God. I realize that’s a hard concept to get our heads around – righteous and simultaneously sinful, but it is the reality of God’s people.

Which brings us to the tax collector in Jesus’ story.  How on earth does a guy like this inherently corrupt tax collector win out over the devoted obedience of the Pharisee?  We might quickly conclude that it was because he was humble, he recognized that he was sinful and in the presence of a holy God. And we might quickly conclude that the moral of the story rests in the benefits of humility before God.  But Jesus never makes it that easy for us.

Your Greek lesson for the day: I think all of our translations say that the tax collector pleaded with God, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”  Many of the characters in the gospels call out and plead for Jesus to have mercy on them:  the ten lepers, the rich man in Hades, Bartimaeus the blind beggar, the man possessed by many demons.  It is a common cry on the lips of the poor, the outcast, the marginalized, the sick, and the diseased.  It is a plea for God’s favour and his benevolence.  But, in the Greek the word for mercy isn’t what this tax collector uses. The word that Jesus has the tax collector use here is the word that implies atonement, pardon for sin, and forgiveness.  It’s the word that is used for the mercy seat in the temple – the actual place where God sits. It’s the word that is used in Hebrews when we are told that Jesus became like us in order to be a merciful and faithful Great High Priest making atonement for the sins of the people (Heb. 2:17).  It is a word that is only associated with God and the work of atonement done by the high priest on behalf of the people. 

Now, I don’t want to give you a whole sermon on the atonement, because that would take a very long time – though we have just passed Yom Kippur…  But I will say this.  Atonement is the fancy theological word that we use to talk about the way God covers over our sin, bears it away, washes it clean, removes it from his presence and unites us to himself.  In the days of the sacrificial system, with which both Pharisee and Tax Collector would have been familiar, the high priest would go through an elaborate ritual of sacrificing a bull and a goat, and taking the blood – which represented the life of the animal passed through death – and sprinkling it around the temple and finally on the lid of the Ark of the Covenant, God’s throne on Earth.  This sprinkling of life that had passed through death cleansed the temple of iniquity, the stain od sin, and finally united God and his people.  There was a second goat, to which the priest would whisper the sins of the people and then the goat would bear them away off into the desert, thus removing them from the people and the presence of God.  This was a ritual that was practiced every year so that the righteous people of God could have their sin removed from them, and so truly know the presence and power of God in their lives.  Jesus death on the cross and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the church on Pentecost fulfilled the atonement (at-one-ment) foreshadowed by these sacrifices.

The tax collector wasn’t asking Jesus to show him favour. He wasn’t asking Jesus to heal him.  He made no promises of repentance, and he gave no indication that he was going to turn his life around.  What he did was plead for Jesus to be atonement for him – to bear his sin away, to remove it from his sight.  He was asking God to be the life that passes through death and Jesus would become just that.  When it comes to anything we think we must do to make ourselves right with God, Jesus has done it all.

This is what the Pharisee missed – his sin.  He was right about his righteousness, but he overlooked his sin. And that misconception, or failure, or oversight, or whatever you want to call it, caused him to set up barriers and lines between people with respect to their relationship with God – lines and barriers that God himself was about to destroy for good through Jesus’ death and resurrection and then the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost.

Winding down, if we to place ourselves into this parable what would be our prayer in the temple? As the parable stands, Jesus offers us two choices:  standing off looking down our noses at those who are different and thanking God we aren’t like them, or desperately pleading for God’s mercy.  But in these post-resurrection, and post-sending-of-the Spirit days, there is a third option.  Friends, the church, the people of God, has been equipped and empowered by the Holy Spirit to be a dwelling place for God on earth.  We are now the temple of God! So, what is our prayer if we are the temple?  It is the prayer of the one who sees the utter brokenness of the tax collector and who reaches out to him with the mercy of Jesus, praying, “Lord make us instruments of your peace, your grace and loving kindness”.  Our disposition is one of humility and compassion, not standing apart or far off but standing together as the temple of Christ, shaped and empowered by his spirit to reach out with compassion and mercy to the broken.

I’ll end this with a joke I heard the other day.  “How many Christians does it take to change a light bulb?”  “None, Jesus already changed the light bulb, we just need to turn it on.” 

**To give credit where credit is due, this was a collaborative effort between my wife Dana and me.** 

An Audacious Prayer

Text: Luke 18:9-14

Several years ago then Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited the US to make a speech at the UN.  While there, he made the audacious request to visit Ground Zero of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center to pay his respects.  This happened during the federal election season and so the request became fodder for immediate responses from both the Republican and Democrat presidential candidates.  Republican contender Rudy Giuliani, the mayor of New York on 9/11, said, "Under no circumstances…This is a man who has made threats against America and Israel, is harbouring Bin Laden's son and other al-Qaeda leaders, is shipping arms to Iraqi insurgents and is pursuing the development of nuclear weapons. Assisting Ahmadinejad in touring Ground Zero – hallowed ground for all Americans – is outrageous."  Another Republican candidate Mitt Romney said, "Ahmadinejad's shockingly audacious request should be met with a vehement no. It's inconceivable that any consideration would be given to the idea of entertaining the leader of a state sponsor of terror at Ground Zero. This would deeply offend the sensibilities of Americans from all corners of our nation. Instead of entertaining Ahmadinejad, we should be indicting him."

Regardless of your opinion of the former Iranian president, one cannot help but admit that, considering the relationship between the two nations and the rhetoric that was exchanged, President Ahmadinejad’s request to visit Ground Zero is pretty much off the scale when it comes to audacity.  For the sake of definition, audacity can mean daring to or willingness to challenge assumptions or conventions and it can also mean showing a complete lack of respect toward another person.  Ahmadinejad would have seen his request as audacious in the first respect.  Most others took it as the second.

Well, in comparison, this tax collector coming into the temple in Jerusalem to pray would have appeared to some as being audacious and the some to whom I refer are the self-righteous such as this Pharisee who thought of himself as being righteous and looked with contempt on others such as the tax collector whom he considered to be unrighteous even wicked.  Tax collectors back then were usually Jewish people appointed by the Romans to collect taxes for Caesar.  They were often quick to use extortion and always took a little extra for themselves. Most Jews in Jesus’ day looked upon tax collectors as traitorous scum who had rejected their Jewish birthright as one of God’s chosen people for the love of money and power.  The Pharisees in particular would have looked down upon tax collectors because they believed themselves to be the only people in Israel to be upholding the righteous requirements of the Law of Moses that came with their birthright as the chosen people of God.  In the eyes of the Pharisee, this tax collector’s presence in the temple would be akin to the audacity of President Ahmadinejad should he have gone to Ground Zero.

But, the presence of the tax collector in the temple is not where the gross audacity lay in this text.  Rather, it lies in his prayer, his request.  We have here that he prays, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”  It is translated this way because we no longer have the concept in the English language and in Western culture of what he actually prays.  He is not simply asking God to be merciful to him because he is a sinner. There is a word in the Greek language “eleeo” which means to have mercy, but that is not the verb he uses.  In fact, Luke uses that word exclusively for physical healing from diseases. Lepers and blind people come to Jesus asking for mercy and he heals them.  The tax collector is not asking for a pardon for conscious sake or for a healing and thus was not asking for mercy.

The tax collector uses a different verb which we wrongfully translate as mercy.  He uses the verb, “hilaskomai”, which in this sentence would mean “be for me the sacrifice that removes my sin so that you may show favour or deal graciously me”.  The mercy this tax collector asks for is that God himself be the sacrifice that atones for his sin so that God can show him grace.  That is one very audacious prayer. Asking, pleading with, begging God to be his sacrifice. That was unheard of and indeed would have been considered blasphemous especially from the mouth of a tax collector.  We don’t know why he would ask such a thing other than that his own sense of sinfulness, of shame, of having betrayed his birthright was so great that he knew there was nothing…no lamb, no goat, no bull…that he could bring as a sacrifice that could reconcile him to God due to the extent of his wickedness.

Yet, this prayer in all its audacity is the central message of the Christian faith as we have it in the Bible.  God the Son himself became the man Jesus of Nazareth by the love and will of God the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit and has indeed become the sacrifice that atones for all humanity’s sin so that the Trinity can be gracious with us.  The Triune God of grace has made it so that we can have unhindered access to his very self through union with Christ Jesus the Son in the Holy Spirit.  Jesus’ death on the cross was truly more than a mere political tragedy.  He was indeed bearing unto death humanity’s sin in his body so that sin and its stain of shame, guilt, and fear may be removed so that we can be clean in heart by the free gift God’s presence with us as the Holy Spirit who brings us together in reconciling human community.

Saying that Jesus’ death was a sacrifice is very unpopular these days, actually for the last two centuries.  Modernity in its arrogance dismissed this reality outright by thinking we are smart enough to know that sacrifice is not what its ideal of a loving and good god does.  Theologians and biblical scholars began to say that this stuff about sacrifice in the Bible was just ancient Israelite religion doing what most ancient religions did; sacrifice something to appease the gods so that they will grant one's request.  

Friedrich Schleiermacher, the father of what we call Classical Liberalism, replaced sacrifice with experience teaching that if all human beings were honest with themselves they would realize that they have a feeling naturally within themselves which he called “absolute dependence” and it is this feeling that proves that there is a God, but a God which we cannot possibly know. Then he goes onto say that if we just develop our basic goodness in prayer, contemplating this feeling of dependence, and living morally upright lives we will be pleasing to God and will wind up where God wants us to be.  In Schleiermacher’s system sin is simply being bad and we can overcome it by the act of our will and there is no such thing as evil.

Classical Liberalism and its secular brother called Progress ruled the day until WWI when good people entrenched themselves in the bloodiest war humanity has ever known and then came Hitler, the Nazi's, and the Holocaust; brutal proof that we humans are not basically good.  We are not righteous in ourselves as the Pharisees and Liberalism claimed. We humans can not simply pray and will our sin away.  Someone once said that the line between good and evil runs not between us and them, but right down the middle of each of us.  I agree but I would also argue that the extent of sin is that that line often seems to disappear in that the good we do can often have evil effects and so often we must use evil to accomplish good. When we are honest with ourselves what we find is not Schleiermacher’s feeling of “absolute dependence”.  Rather, we find that even at our best we are all capable of and have down some pretty horrendous things.  Even when we thought we were doing good and believed ourselves to be acting according to truth, we have hurt people gravely. The only way to cure humanity’s disease of sin is for God to carry out this tax collectors audacious request and take sin and death unto indeed into himself and and die with it.  We are powerless over sin and death and only a power greater than ourselves can deliver us. Thus the Trinity has done for his Creation.

Schleiermacher and Modernity made two grave errors.  First, they said God cannot be known.  The true Christian faith says that God can be known, that God has revealed himself as Trinity by becoming the man Jesus Christ and this self-revelation continues on by the presence of the Holy Spirit with us.  We know we have met the Holy Spirit when we find ourselves saying “I have been inexplicably changed and Jesus Christ did it”.  That transformation comes with the experience of knowing God has forgiven my sin and relieved my guilt, shame, and fear and now I must live accordingly.  As Paul said, "I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me (Gal. 2:20)." God can be known.  Look to and lean into Jesus and you will see.

Second, the sacrifices in the Old Testament were not simply something that ancient people did to get a god on their side.  The Old Testament sacrifices pointed forward to Jesus’ death and resurrection and the gift of the Holy Spirit.  In the Old Testament sin was dealt with by life passing through death and by being born away unto to death. Several places in the Old Testament it is written that the life of an animal is in its blood.  On the Day of Atonement they sacrificed to atone for sin.  First, they killed a bull and a goat and took their blood and sprinkled it all over the priesthood and the temple to cover over and cleanse away the stain of sin incurred in dealing with people.  Then they took a second goat and the priest laid his hand upon it and whispered the sins of the people into its ear.  It was then led away and set free as the scapegoat in the wilderness where it would be devoured.

Jesus Christ is the only human whose life has passed through death into resurrection and this new life is being sprinkled around all over creation in the gift of the Holy Spirit to Christian communities.  If you want me to say it graphically; since the Holy Spirit is with and in us Christians, Christian churches are to be a puddle of the blood of new life and new creation covering over the stain of sin which is hidden in everyone.  Furthermore, each of us, because the Holy Spirit has come to dwell in us, is a sprinkle of that same living blood. Our sins have been born away and devoured in death by Jesus Christ, our scapegoat.  There is nothing, no sin, no shame, no false pride, no guilt, no fear, that can separate us from our loving and good God because he has gotten his hands dirty and dealt with our sin and evil by taking it upon himself and dying with it that we might be free of it.  Sin and evil are very real and we are all part of it, but God has gotten his hands dirty and dealt with it once and for all.  Friends, hear this good news: This saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, that he himself bore our sins in his body on the cross.  All who are in Christ Jesus are new creation.  The old life is gone and a new life has begun. Friends, hear this good news you are forgiven.  This tax collector’s audacious prayer has been answered for each of us.  Rise up and live as the new creation that you are.  The old life only leads to death. Don’t turn your back on Jesus or dismiss him with modern arrogance for only in him can God be known.  The Triune God of grace has given us more than a feeling.  He has freely given us open access to himself so that we may truly live and learn to trust him.  Friends, come to Jesus and find your life that is hidden in God with him.  Amen.