Preached at the main service 23rd October 2013 (a healing eucharist) and based upon Luke 18:9-14
Pressure to be perfect is something which I feel permeates our society. Not just to strive for physical perfection but for every aspect of our lives to be picture perfect. I feel the pressure to not only look a certain way but to be a perfect homemaker, expert gardener, top chef, have interesting hobbies, go to the gym, see the newest films, read popular books, be up to date with current TV, current events and politics, listen to the right music, have the newest gadgets and the right things. It’s exhausting.
This obsession with achieving a picture or Instagram perfect life is all about what people see on the outside, it says nothing about who we are inside and what we really think and feel. It creates a separation, a disconnect, from our spiritual self, our lives become all about what’s on the surface, which is what’s going on in our gospel today.
On the surface of things the Pharisee is a good man, a holy man, an upstanding member of society. He’s middle class. He appears to be doing all the right things; praying, fasting and giving to charity, but there’s that disconnect. His contempt for the outcasts- thieves, rogues, adulterers and the tax-collectors- reveals that his is a superficial faith, concerned with how he appears to be. He thinks that he’s morally better, and if we’re looking at the surface of things we might be inclined to agree. “I’m holy” he says, “not like these people”.
Next to him we have a tax collector, a sinner, a self-confessed sinner, and that’s the big difference between the two men. The tax collector is honest about who he is, and he’s honest with God. He’s not interested in trying to make himself look better, or compare himself to others whose offences are worse. “God, be merciful to me a sinner”. He knows himself, what he is and never tries to hide that from God. His petition is honest and raw.
Jesus tells us that it’s this second man who finds favour with God, not the man who appears Holy. The tax-collector doesn’t try and present a sanitised view of himself to God, he brings everything that he is, including his brokenness and puts himself into God’s hands. This is something which is really important as we think about wholeness and healing today.
There’s a saying that I’ve heard- do you want your church to be a museum of saints or a hospital for sinners? I think most of us come to church not because we consider ourselves to be holy or righteous but because we know that we aren’t. We love God, we want to be the people he created us to be, but we keep getting it wrong- I know I do.
You start your day with the best of intentions- today will be a good day, today I won’t slip up. I won’t shout at the kids, I’ll be productive, I’ll be patient with my colleagues, I won’t be sarcastic, I’ll treat my spouse gently and I’ll do everything lovingly. It only takes one little perceived failure in this to make us think we’ve failed at it all. So we start again the next day- striving to be a more perfect version of ourselves.
But what if God doesn’t want us to be perfect? He created us a diverse and imperfect people. What if the most important thing for us to achieve a more whole relationship with God is for us to simply be honest with him?
There’s an initiative in the US called The Hearth which aims to help people build community and address suffering by sharing stories. It’s director, a man called Mark Yaconelli, says that we as Christians are reluctant to share our stories unless it’s something that’s behind us, something where we can identify where God was at work. The stuff we’re still grappling with, the things we haven’t figured out, the things we really need to confront now are the things which we don’t share and aren’t honest about. But we can’t hide our true selves from God, even the things we particularly don’t like or wish we could conceal.
We don’t know what happened to the tax collector after today’s gospel story, whether he went on sinning, but his honesty and his cry for mercy meant that he had a much more rounded and whole relationship with God than the Pharisee.
Healing in any relationship can only come when there’s honesty and acknowledgement of wrongdoing. Only then can there be true reconciliation. I’ve been reminded a lot in recent weeks for various reasons of the Truth and Reconciliation commission set up in South Africa after the abolition of apartheid and chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Hearings started in 1996 with a mandate of restorative justice, to bear witness to, record, and in some cases grant amnesty to the perpetrators of crimes relating to human rights violations under the former political regime, as well as attempting to repair and rehabilitate. This was about restoration, not reprimand. To repair a country almost destroyed by a system of division and hate.
This was in sharp contrast to the Nuremberg trials set up after the collapse of Nazism. There’s a lot of criticism of the commission, a lot of which is tied to our human ideas of what justice is. Our own justice system is based on ideas we perceive as biblical; crimes require judgement which results in punishment, but our interpretation is filtered through the legal and philosophical lens of both the time the biblical books were written and the times they were interpreted.
I can’t help but wonder if the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was one human construct which has got the closest to maybe how God does things, in line with Jesus’ teaching from today’s gospel.
Acknowledgement of the things we do that aren’t what God would want, and a call for mercy creates a bridge between ourselves and God. It opens us up to his reconciling ways. There’s no sign the tax collector turned from his way of life, but he did acknowledge it and that’s what God wants from us.
As theologian Jane Williams puts it: if God really is loving and teasing and forgiving, like he is in the stories Jesus tells, then we all have a chance. You have to want God, just God, offering the chance for God to see you as you really are and love you.
This is where healing begins; being fully ourselves before God, the good and the bad, and realising that we’re still loved in our imperfect state. This acknowledgment begins the healing of our relationship with ourselves, the healing of our relationship with God and the healing of our relationships with each other.
God doesn’t want perfection, he wants us to be the people he created us to be, aware of our imperfections, and most importantly aware of our need for him.
