For My Fellow Pharisees

Jesus told this parable to certain people who had convinced themselves that they were righteous and who looked on everyone else with disgust: 

“Two people went up to the temple to pray. One was a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.  The Pharisee stood and prayed about himself with these words, ‘God, I thank you that I’m not like everyone else—crooks, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector.  I fast twice a week. I give a tenth of everything I receive.’ But the tax collector stood at a distance. He wouldn’t even lift his eyes to look toward heaven. Rather, he struck his chest and said, ‘God, show mercy to me, a sinner.’  

 I tell you, this person went down to his home justified rather than the Pharisee. All who lift themselves up will be brought low, and those who make themselves low will be lifted up.”   

-Luke 18:9-14

This upcoming week we are going to celebrate some big days in the Christian calendar. On Friday, we will remember the day that God hung on a cross, when God suffered, and when God died. Two days later, we will sing songs of resurrection, songs of new life, and songs of triumph. Mixed within these narratives are stories of people who got it all wrong. The disciples thought Jesus was going to be a triumphant messiah, leading Israel into an era of political power. The Jewish leaders thought Jesus was a heretic, and that killing him would end his dangerous and subversive message of mercy. The Roman leaders thought Jesus was an unimportant nuisance, and why did it matter if an innocent man was crucified?

Lots of people who knew Jesus got it wrong, not just a little wrong, they missed the mark by a mile. Even after Jesus was resurrected, his earliest followers thought he would return any day. “He’s coming soon!” and “Be ready for Christ’s return, it could happen at any time!” are messages scattered throughout the New Testament. In the beginning, Christians thought and lived their lives as if Jesus would be back any day, ready to bring about a new order to creation.

I think we forget that this was the message of the early Christian church. We either forget, or we pretend it doesn’t matter that the primary belief of most of the first Christians, that Jesus was returning imminently, simply ended up being not true.

We don’t want to think about the first Christians being wrong because that inevitably leads to the next question…what if we’re wrong, too?

When it comes to our belief systems, there is a lot of room for error. Any Christian who tells you that their theology is 100% correct, is 100% wrong. Since the beginning of time, we have all been muddling our way through this complex Divine-Human relationship. We have all been getting it at least a little wrong. Abraham got it wrong when he believed he needed Hagar, not Sarah, to fulfill God’s promises. David got it wrong so many times it's hard to pick just one. Peter got it wrong on land and on sea. Mary got it wrong over something as silly as wine at a wedding…..do you see where I am going with this? We are humans and limited and flawed and we see dimly with eyes that are broken by sin. Yet God kept reaching. God kept using all of those imperfect people to speak words of truth.

The first time I went to seminary, I was terrified of learning the wrong things. I was literally afraid that I would be taught to believe something that would somehow move me further away from God. I had to think the right things about salvation, grace, creation, and sin or else I would not be in the group of God’s favored right thinking Christians. I seriously believed that thinking the wrong thing about God, having the wrong theology, would push me away from heaven.

Then I became a doctor. I watched people die. I held their hands as they took their last breath. I saw brave warriors fight addiction. I heard women weep because they knew they were about to give birth to another child that they could not afford to raise. My heart broke as young girls told me stories about years of abuse and rape. I met a thirteen year-old girl who was incarcerated because she had figured out how to pimp out all the younger girls in her neighborhood. I watched an eleven year old boy whose body was ravaged by cancer tell his family, “You need to pray now, something is happening,” just seconds before he took his last breath.

A lot of doctors lose their faith. It is easy to think that God cannot exist when you are surrounded by nothing but suffering and death. People think that doctors lose their faith because they are intoxicated by their own power over life and death. If anything, the opposite is true. Our powerlessness to save lives leads to hopelessness and doubt that a good God could ever exist. Doctors live in the vortex of every theodicy question ever raised.

I think, though, that what saved my faith was realizing that I never had all the right answers in the first place and I never will. I accepted that I wasn’t going to get it all right. I embraced the God who dwells in mystery and chaos and is eternally unknowable. I learned the lessons of Job and heard God say, “Were you there, in the beginning, when the morning stars sang and the angels danced with joy?” The God of the Universe doesn’t need defending or explaining by anyone, least of all me.

I stopped being afraid of thinking the wrong things and decided to believe in a God who loves us anyways. I placed my faith in a God who suffers for us and with us and decided that everything, everything hinges on a cross and an empty tomb.

“But God demonstrated His love for us in this: while we were still sinners Christ died for us.” – Romans 5:8

That is where my life begins and ends. Everything else can sort itself out.

Human beings are by nature crusaders for a cause. For millennia we have fought and died for ideas. Freedom, power, faith, …the list goes on and on. It is easy to get caught up in a movement for or against something. We like to define ourselves by the things we support and the things we oppose. `

Are you pro-life or pro-choice?

Pro-Israel or Pro-Palestine?

Pro-welfare or pro-go-out-and-get-a-job?

Pro-LGBT rights or pro-traditional-marriage?

Pro-vaccine or pro-babies-getting-deadly-diseases?

It is easy to jump onto a cause that we believe in and let it define who we are. We find people who agree with us and they become our tribe of believers while those who disagree with us become our enemies. Us against them. Always, us against them. The real inconvenient truth is that Jesus said we have to love our enemies. The only way to love your enemy is to admit that you may be wrong and they may be right. Otherwise you are just patronizing your enemy and condescendingly offering them your friendship. You are not really loving them.

I have to remind myself of this over and over again. It is easy to feel moral justification for the stands we take against all the wrong we see in the world. It is easy to think that our theology has to be correct in order to gain God’s approval and therefore I am going to heaven and they are not because I think correctly about this and they do not.

That is when you might as well tattoo a big sign on your forehead that says, “I’m a Pharisee.”

I looked into the mirror of my heart recently and saw that sign. I saw my pride and the judgment I place on those who are different, mostly those who think differently than me.   I literally sat at the breakfast table in front of my kids and cried during our morning devotions when I realized, “I’m not the tax collector in this story. I’m the Pharisee.”  The truth is, those of use who preach "mercy over sacrifice" are often the most unmerciful of all, looking down on those we deem too judgmental and close minded and priding ourselves in our own inclusivity.

Hello, my name is Alethea, and I am a Pharisee.

I struggled for a long time with the irony of it all, with realizing that I was back where I started years ago- placing moral value on thinking the correct things.  Only this time,  I wasn't thinking "What if I'm wrong?"  I was thinking, "I'm glad I'm not wrong."  The big question is, once you realize your own pharisee-ness, how do you stop?  How does a pharisee become a tax collector?

Then I remembered the God of chaos. The God who hovered over the deep and spoke the world into existence. I stepped back into the place of uncertainty and realized that being unsure is not the same thing as lack of faith. We all miss the mark by a mile. We all have no idea what we are talking about. Even me with all my platitudes.

Lord have mercy on me, a sinner, who just keeps getting things wrong.

Abraham was wrong about a lot of things, but he still believed that God’s promises are true. Moses was wrong many times, but he still followed God’s call into the wilderness. Mary missed the point sometimes, but she still said, “Here I am.”

This is the week where we, the Church, get to be all on the same side.  This is the week when it doesn’t matter what side of “pro-“ you land on. This week, the Church gets to stand together as one and declare to the world, “Look at the cross! Look at the stone that was rolled away! Look and see what God’s love for you looks like!”   We get to all be truth speakers. This week, as we celebrate a cross and an empty tomb, there is grace for us all, even the Pharisee in me.  

For Living Stones- both big and small

“Do you want to go to Israel with me in the spring?”

I looked at my mom like she was crazy.  I couldn’t go to Israel in the spring.  We were getting ready to bring home Carter.  I had spent the last year walking in the direction of that little boy in China.  How could I plan to just go off on a trip to another country just ten months after we brought him home?  Besides, if I went anywhere it would be back to Brazil and the people of the Amazon.  My last trip there had changed my heart so much and I really wanted to be on this year’s boat with the Shenandoah nursing students.

Fast-forward several months.  We were home with Carter and he is amazing and our life with him is blessed more than we ever expected.  I decided things were going well enough to do something completely extravagant and selfish and take advantage of this once in a lifetime opportunity to travel with my mother in the Holy Land.  I thought it would be a fun, relaxing chance to have quality time with my mom, the woman I admire most in the world.

Boy was I wrong.  This trip was fun but it was anything but relaxing.  I did not know that I was essentially tagging along on a trip planned by Lynne Hybels and Shauna Niequist for women much more important and accomplished than myself.  Women who are real writers and real bloggers and have ministries and fans and literally hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers.  I suppose it is a good thing I didn’t know, or I would have never gotten on the plane.

So there I was, on a bus traveling around Israel with amazing women learning about a land whose stories and problems are heartbreaking and unsolvable.  All day, every day, our fearless leader, Todd Deatherage from the Telos Group took us to meet people with unbelievable stories to tell.  Stories about displacement, conflict, hurt, loss, and grief.  Stories about forgiveness, friendship, hope, and reconciliation.  We met Israelis.  We met Palestinians.  We met Jews.  We met Muslims.  We met Christians.  Each person we met has lost something or someone in the wars that have ravaged their land over the years.

"We Refuse To Be Enemies" sign at entrance to the Tent of Nations

I began to feel small.  Tiny and cosmically inconsequential.  What do I, a mom and a  small town doctor, have to offer this issue?  I have no political clout.  I have no cultural influence.  My Instagram followers are mostly a bunch of Camdyn’s middle school friends.  I wondered why I was even on the trip in the first place.  Why wasn’t I getting on that boat in the Amazon?  At least there I would have a role that mattered and there would be a purpose to my presence.

Bethlehem where we met with the amazing Sami Awad

Here is the entry point of grace in this story: it just so happened that while I was waiting to board my plane for Israel, I read this scripture from the Lenten lectionary:

Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the scriptures:

‘The stone that the builders rejected
   

 has become the most important one;

this is what the Lord has done,
 

and it is amazing in our eyes’?”

Matthew 21:42

We like to call Jesus a carpenter, but the Greek word used to describe him, tekton, really translates as craftsman.  He built things.  Most of what was built during the first century was made from stone.  Walls made from ancient, well-hued stones that were expertly selected and put together by master craftsmen are still standing today.  I saw many of them on this trip.  I placed my hands on the remnants of the Temple, what some call the “Wailing Wall,” and thought about those stones.  Perfect. Strong.  Huge. Used for something Important.  Jesus himself would have chosen such stones for the cornerstone of the buildings he built.  He would have inspected them for cracks, looked closely for flaws, and cast aside the stones unfit for building.  He knew the value of symmetry and power.

Jesus also knew that he, himself, would be measured and would be declared unworthy by his own people.  Jesus, the craftsman, knew he would be the rejected stone.  The perfect stone would be cast aside and proclaimed weak, flawed,….unimportant.   Yet Jesus chose to become one of us, one of the broken and rejected stones.

Looking out to the Sea of Galilee from the ruins of the ancient synagogue in Capernaum

This verse went round and round in my head during our trip.  Over and over again it would come to mind.  I think God was showing me that in many ways peace has already arrived among the living stones of the Holy Land.  It’s like he was whispering to my heart,  “Look! Look at what I am doing here.  Grace is abundant in the land.”  I began to see that it’s the women who are slowly but surely changing things.  The women who are tired of fighting, tired of burying their children, and tired of waiting for someone else to find the path to peace.  The women are there building bridges, cooking jam, sharing their grief, bearing the burdens of their enemies, and speaking peace.  Step by step, Israeli and Palestinian women are marching together towards an end to the conflict.


Among the world’s living stones, the women of the Middle East are “the stones that the builders have rejected.”  If not rejected, they have been dismissed as unimportant and irrelevant by outside observers.   Women are many times the forgotten ones in the realm of international politics.  On a geo-political perspective, they are often powerless and their voices go unheard.  They live unseen behind veils and burkas and in hidden places like kitchens and gardens.

Making jam with women from the Parents Circle Families Forum

What I came to see on my trip is that of all the living stones in the Holy Land, these women have become the most important stones of all.  The Lord is using them to bring about a “peace that surpasses all understanding.”  They are Kingdom Builders.  Every act of forgiveness, every gesture of kindness, and every hand reached out in friendship is building God’s kingdom here on Earth. The women I met in Israel are strong and courageous.  They are fierce and tenacious.  When peace comes to their land, it will be because they have stood hand in hand, Israeli and Palestinian together, and spoken love against a fire-wall of hate.  While the rest of the world isn’t watching, the women of Israel and Palestine are indeed becoming living stones, building bridges between enemies.  This is the Lord’s doing and it is amazing!

My mom with Robi Damelin of The Parents Circle- you can read her incredible story here.

I’ve always loved this beautiful prayer that Lynne Hybels once wrote called "A Creed for Dangerous Women":

Dear God, please make us dangerous women.
May we be women who acknowledge our power to change, and grow,
and be radically alive for God.
May we be healers of wounds and righters of wrongs.
May we weep with those who weep and speak for those who cannot
speak for themselves.
May we cherish children, embrace the elderly, and empower the poor.
May we pray deeply and teach wisely.
May we be strong and gentle leaders.
May we sing songs of joy and talk down fear.
May we never hesitate to let passion push us, conviction compel us,
and righteous anger energize us.
May we strike fear into all that is unjust and evil in the world.
May we dismantle abusive systems and silence lies with truth.
May we shine like stars in a darkened generation.
May we overflow with goodness in the name of God and by the power of Jesus.
And in that name and by that power, may we change the world.
Dear God, please make us dangerous women. Amen.




These are the women I met in Israel.  They shine like stars and overflow with goodness.  They are the dangerous women that will change the world.

The Path to Peace Mosaic on the Gaza border wall

I left home for Israel facing equally unsolvable problems here in my small corner of the earth:
a heroin epidemic that is ravaging the people of my community…
babies born addicted to drugs….
children with unexplained bruises….
mothers with a complete lack of hope for their child's future….
grandparents, aunts, and uncles who are overwhelmed by the burden of raising children whose parents are in jail or lost to the abyss of addiction.

Every day I feel powerless to fix my patients’ real problems.  Many of them need so much more than what I have to offer and the scope of my ability to make things better for them seems like never enough.  So many times I ask God what can be done to fix things.  What can anyone do to make all this poverty and addiction better?  What can I do when I am just a small piece of a big messy puzzle?  But while I sat on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, I realized a beautiful, God-whispered thing-

Amazing grace is this- God reaches into the pile of rejected stones, the rubble of forgotten and unimportant ones and chooses us.  He holds us up to the light of His love and in spite of our flaws, our weaknesses, our smallness, He declares us perfect.  We are all chosen by Him to be Kingdom builders, to be one of his precious, beautiful, “living stones.”  God delights in his ability to use the broken ones, the forgotten ones, …the irrelevant ones.  This is what the Apostle Paul meant when he said that in our weakness, Christ is made perfect.  In my weakness, Christ is made perfect.

 I am just beginning to believe that it may be true, even of me.  In my weakness, in my smallness, and in my flaws, Christ is made perfect and Kingdom building can happen.  If God can use the women of Israel and Palestine to do amazing things, then certainly in ways unseen to me the Lord can use me- my smallness, my flaws, my imperfections, and even my weakness to build his Kingdom here in this place he has called me to labor.  A place mixed with so much beauty and sadness.

After this trip I have begun to think that maybe, God is making me a dangerous woman.

This is what the Lord is doing, and it is amazing to me.  

Sea of Galilee