Sermon 195 Feb 25, 2024 Lk 18:9-14, Phil 3:5-9 Dt 6:4-18 Publican & Pharisee - Prayer from the heart

As preached by Brother Luke

Holy Wisdom Church


In the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit!

Lent is an old English word for Spring. So it marks the season for spring cleaning. Some of us may relish this time and others may want to flee it. The church in the English speaking world has coopted the term Lent and applied it to the period of preparation for our entry into the mystery of the Passion of Christ. How might we use this period to its fullest benefit? The church gives us a valuable starting point by placing before us, as Great Lent approaches, the parable of the Publican and the Pharisee.

The story presents a rather stark contract between the two characters: humility vs self-righteousness. But what if we back up a bit from this particular moment in the temple and ponder what might have led these two individuals to go to the temple to pray at this time. There is no indication that this was connected to any particular celebration or high holy day.  So, what might we imagine was going on in the lives of these two people?

We might assume that the pharisee had his own personal rule of prayer and that it included specific times set aside for prayer in the temple. So he may have gone to the Temple not just to fulfill an obligation but rather to engage in part of his regular practice of prayer. It was his routine. This would be expected behavior since he was a pharisee. This would also tend to show that he was a person who valued his prayer life and believed that by pursuing it he was doing God's will and living life in a way that pleased God. Probably not unlike many of us.

Now the publican's life was quite different and we have no way of knowing what kind of prayer life he may have had.  Instead, we have an image of a man who pursued a vocation that included serving the interests of a foreign occupier by collecting taxes on their behalf. It was expected that he would use his position to collect money for himself; a practice understood, but despised, by his fellow Jews, and seen as quite illegal by us today. My guess is that few of us would identify with the tax collector: aiding a hostile foreign power and using our position to "feather our nest" as the saying goes. Even if we translate these activities into something closer to home, such as: compromising our principles in order to keep our jobs and finding ways to varnish the truth to avoid paying our taxes, we most likely will not see ourselves in those roles either. And yet, the parable is telling us the tax collector was the righteous one in the end. How is that possible?

Prayer from the heart.

Whether our prayer is regular or spasmodic, it needs to be from the heart, not just from the head. And the heart needs to be open to God's urgings. Sometimes an open heart is created by prayer that softens an otherwise hard heart. Sometimes it may emerge from a crisis that finally challenges our assumptions about life and how we are living it. There needs to be an opening, that "narrow door," through which God can enter to help us find our way back to that better, or true, self we are all created to be.  We can't know, but we can surmise, that the publican had to be experiencing some kind of personal crisis of conscience that led him to the temple that day to pray for forgiveness. The pharisee, on the other hand, was still very secure in his view that he was doing God's will. But the scene in the temple that Christ creates, is showing us that our inner disposition informs our prayer. The publican had reached the place where his prayer, his desire for forgiveness, and consequently, for help in changing his life, was connecting with God's urgings. The pharisee, however, still secure in his image of his righteousness, was unable to see how far his prayer was from God's intensions. Did our tax collector change his life? We don't know, but we do know that Jesus was zeroing in on who this tax collector really was and not just on what he was doing. He was calling him, and us, to align our life to the true self God created us to be.

So, we enter this period of self examination, striving to soften our hearts and thereby to open ourselves to God's designs for us. To do this to the best of our ability, we need to live at all times mindful of God's love for us and strive to share that love with our neighbor and all creation.

Glory be to Jesus Christ!