Seven Words

OK so some of the stuff I write for seminary gets put to good use... I am back to blogging. Here is the text of my first sermon I ever wrote and preached at St. Dunstan's Episcopal here in Atlanta.

More in the coming days. I got a veritable treasure trove of stuff to put up here that I wrote this semester! Some of it not even that bad, either.

Seven Words--

“Let’s pray about it.” Four words we have heard a lot during these last few, seemingly apocalyptic, days of wildfires, drought and middle-east foreign policy insanity.
I recently read this item in a small North Georgia church’s newsletter; written by a person I know.
“The latest ‘Let’s pray about it’ activity has been centered around the drought we are suffering. As Marge and I catch shower water to keep our withering plants alive, I get weary thinking that not a day goes by that I don’t hear someone wanting to organize a prayer meeting to ask God for some rain. It seems to me that if that were the drill, then somebody’s prayer would have been a winner by now. Seems as if our chances of buying a winning lottery ticket are better than that.”
The writer continues:
“I find it difficult to accept a theology that tells me God is sitting up in heaven somewhere jerking strings to make us behave. What about the 300,000+ people in California who have lost their homes to a raging fire caused by, as the insurance companies would say, ‘an Act of God?’ What did they collectively do to incur God’s wrath? Not so, you say? Then why do we pray for safe travel, for rain, for money, for a new car, etc., etc.? If we don’t get a good answer, does that mean we need to clean up our act and ask again?
“I don’t have any answers, except to believe that I am slowly growing in my ability to find a quiet place, clear my mind of the present and allow myself the luxury of feeling the presence of God.”
When the rains dry up or when they fall in plenty we look for some kind of justification. “Was it something we did, through global warming or maybe in the way of the Old Testament, the sins of our Fathers and Mothers, that caused God to stop the rains?” We wonder. “Why are all of these bad things happening to us,” we ask. Or, on the other side, when good things happen, we try to take credit for them ourselves, or we count ourselves lucky that we are not one of them – one of the folks “less fortunate” than we.
When pray for and get rain, someone else does not get rain. We pray that the storms miss our home, yet they destroy someone else’s. We pray that we win the lottery, the contract, the college admission, yet we forget that someone else loses. Life, it seems, can be a zero sum game for many of us, and it can seem hopeless when we inhabit the losing side and overwhelmingly hopeful when we are winning.
How can we, as our writer tells us, “find a quiet place, clear our mind of the present and allow ourselves the luxury of feeling the presence of God.”
What levels us out as God’s children? Is it righteous acts- is it charity- is it what we think or who we are?
Jesus shows us today how prayer and honesty with God will bring us back to who we really are, and he even gives us a template of sorts with seven, simple words – “God, have mercy on me a sinner.” It’s a prayer many people have called “The Jesus Prayer.”
Prayer and meditation have been getting a lot of attention around my school this last two weeks, in part because we have another set of exams coming up this week and also because of a new professor at Emory named His Holiness Dalai Lama. During his time at Emory, Dalai Llama did a lecture that was open to the Tibetan Buddhist community, and in it he said over and over that we are all light and that the harmful things we do (sin) are all contrary to that true nature.
Maybe it is getting to our true nature – who we really are- that is at the heart of “allowing ourselves the luxury of feeling the presence of God.”
Three different times in the Gospel we get variations of this prayer- - A blind man sitting on the side of the road in Jericho intones – “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.” Ten lepers cry out, “Jesus, Master, take pity on us' and our publican prays from the back of the temple, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner."
Who are these people in our parable today- this Tax Collector and Pharisee?
I don’t think they are so different from us. One of them is at the very top of his game, the Pharisee. The other, perhaps, at the bottom of the pit, the tax collector. We sometimes feel as if they are different because they are from an ancient world but I think they live among us. I think at different times they are we.

We might say, to paraphrase the comic strip character, Pogo, “we have met the Pharisee, and he is us.
In fact, if Jesus had been born in Gainesville, as Clarence Jordan offers in his Cotton Patch Gospel, the parable we read today might have gone something like this:
“Two men went to church one Sunday morning. One was a deacon, and the other a mortgage banker. Times had been hard around the city, and he had recently foreclosed on the houses of four church members’ houses.
The deacon sat in the front row and the mortgage banker sat in the back of the huge sanctuary that morning. The Deacon prayed to himself, “Dear Lord, I am soooo thankful for my life, that I am a good man who pays his mortgage, that I have not lost my home. Thank you Lord. Thank you for my good job, my great house and my three beautiful children. Thank you for this church I come to three times a week. I pray for forgiveness for that man back there who took away my friends’ homes.”
Our mortgage banker, sitting in the back, doesn’t even feel as if he can pray, “This has been a hard week. I had to take four houses away from people. My children hate me, my wife won’t speak to me and I hate my job. Dear Lord, have mercy on me – I can’t seem to do anything right.”
We know these two men, don’t we, and at various times in our lives “they are us.”
Who were these men in Jesus day, though?
The community hated tax collectors in Jesus’ day. They would profit from other people’s misfortune and oppression by pre-paying the taxes owed by their neighbors to the Romans, and then collect back from people what was owed and skim off the top everything that was left over. They would “hold the paper” on the debt owed to the government or the bank.
Pharisees were self-important jerks, sometimes, but they sort of get a bad rap; from Luke, especially. Some scholars believed that they were Christianity’s main “competition” and that perhaps these folks are usually cast as villains.
In their day, though, they were the pillars of the community.
They did the daily office, gave their money to the poor, went to church every chance they got, served on all the committees and ran the place. If they sat among us today, we would look to them as examples.
The “publican “ or the “tax collector” or “mortgage banker” might be pretty repugnant to us as well, though, perhaps because of the choices they had made in life or because of a collection they had made from our bank account.
Don’t we encounter people that we might call “repugnant.” How many times do we see people and catch ourselves thanking God we are “not like them?”
I know I catch myself looking out the window of my house or car sometimes thinking “Thank you, Lord I am not him” or “Thank you God, my day is not as bad as hers.”
How many of us have driven down the highway in any given rush hour, have seen the broken down car in the heat of the day, or the wreck, and thought- “At least I am not him.”
Jesus shows us that even when we believe we are at the bottom of the heap or when we are at the top, we are blessed by God.
Jesus offers that simple prayer that can draw us closer to God and, most importantly, closer to one another; “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” This prayer comes from an outcast, the hated character in our parable. From a notorious sinner we don’t get excuses like “Well, God, next week I will collect the taxes honestly, so hear my prayer,” or, “Thanks, God, for the profit I made tax collecting the last month. I’ll give some away, so forgive me.” We get seven humble words. He realizes who he is (lost and separated from God), and he speaks the truth to God saying when he says “God be merciful to me a sinner.”
The Pharisee is all of us when we are at our best. When we have made the sale, survived the recession, made the “A” on the exam, or beaten the traffic home. From a notoriously righteous person we hear words that use earthly evidence of success as signs of God’s favor. We see someone comparing himself their self to others to justify their self before God by saying, “Thanks be to God I am not like other men.”
When we are at the bottom financially, emotionally, physically, or spiritually even, we can have what my friends in recovery call “a moment of clarity” and remember, as our tax collector does, that God still just might love us in spite of it all, and we can say, “God be merciful to me a sinner.”
When we are at the top sometimes we can forget that our success comes at the expense of others. That our successes, like our failures, can be opportunities to search the fabric of reality for evidence of God’s grace and not just a time of personal triumph or loss. Our accomplishment and piety does not make us loved any more or less than those less fortunate than we.
What would it be like if, when we walked out of the doors of our temple, we remembered always, first and foremost, that we are, as Tricia says in her blessing, born blessed?

What would it be like if we remembered, as we breathed in and out during the day, that God’s grace is enough to get us through the day?
Our friends who know Latin know that Sin, after all, means separation. Prayer is, Jesus offers us, the ultimate opportunity to remove that separation, no matter how desperate or difficult our present circumstances.
Our own Jesus prayers can take many forms. Sometimes they might sound like, “God help me, I am broke! Have mercy on me, a sinner.”
We are all equally loved by God, mortgage banker and deacon alike, rich man and poor.
Or, we might pray, “God thank you for this rain, this check that came in the mail, my health…”
We are all constantly loved, even in times of darkness, even though we separate ourselves from what Basil the Great called “The mad love of God.”
“God please help me because everything I do and say is wrong, it seems.”
We place ourselves at the bottom, away from God, wallowing in our erroneous comparisons with other people or our self-pity.
Or, our Jesus prayer might say, “God, please find me because I am lost.”
We place ourselves at the top, reveling in our latest victory or our good fortune, forgetting that we are there on the mountaintop by the grace of God.
“God help me to see you in the good times and the bad…” we might pray…
By our own doing, we divide ourselves into tribes, families, exclusive communities of faith, groupings that separate us from God and one another.
Maybe we pray this Jesus prayer, “God help us remember you are with us always no matter who we are or what we do or where we go.”
We are, in spite of what we come to believe about ourselves, as our Tibetan brother might have said last week, the light of God.
God be merciful to me, a sinner, Jesus teaches us to pray.
Seven simple words.