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.