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It is hard to talk about sin.
We don’t want to offend people. We don’t want to turn off newcomers. We don’t want people to think that this is one of those churches, the churches that love to find things wrong with people. Churches can perversely be better than almost any other institution at identifying enemies, and then mistreating them. Churches can be home to legalists, to humorless scolds, to angry and judgmental people who are blind to their own self-righteousness. And that, we hope, is not us.
We want to be welcoming, and positive. We want to be warm, and hospitable. We are eager to proclaim God’s grace, God’s mercy. And this is good! We should do this. Worship should not be stern and judgmental and ... cranky. Each Sunday we gather to proclaim resurrection, for Sunday is the Day of Resurrection, the first day of the week, the day when all creation is re-created, the day when our wounded Savior encounters us in the garden and speaks our names, the day when the Stranger on the Emmaus road explains the prophets to us and is known in the breaking of the bread. This is all good. This is the Gospel, the Good News. We are called, we are commissioned, we are commanded to proclaim this Good News to the whole world.
But … sin. Sin hurts people. Sin damages relationships and communities, and even the earth and the oceans. We need to talk about sin.
This morning, Jesus helps us talk about sin by turning our attention to two people praying in the temple. One is a Pharisee, the other a tax collector. To hear what Jesus is saying, we need to understand who these two men are in their own place and time. Let’s begin with the tax collector.
The tax collector is a sinner. He is guilty of much wrongdoing. He defrauds his own people; he collaborates with the cruel empire; his whole life stands for everything that good, well-meaning people despise. He is a cheater, a thief, a traitor. He may have little choice in this, since he lives and works in a hereditary economy that typically forces children to take up the careers of their parents. Nevertheless, this tax collector mounts no resistance to any of this. He is guilty of terrible crimes. When he confesses his guilt in the temple, he is confessing real guilt. He is not being self-deprecating or unnecessarily modest. He messed up. Badly.
The Pharisee, in contrast, is a genuine good guy. He commands respect. He could be a warden in any of our churches today. He could be an upstanding vestry member, or a widely admired priest. He could be Michael Curry or Justin Welby. Prince Harry would hire him to preach at his wedding. He’s the person you encounter and think, “Now there goes a good person!” He tithes, of course, but he does so more thoroughly than ordinary tithers. He too is a sinner, for we are all sinners, but he is someone we like, or at least someone we look up to.
But Jesus surprises us: the awful tax collector and the upright Pharisee trade places. The rotten sinner is forgiven, and the holy man leaves the temple unjustified. It is an unexpected reversal of fortune. And it happens because of the tax collector’s genuine remorse, and the Pharisee’s failure to feel, let alone act on, any remorse at all.
To open up this parable even more, I want to talk about how we confess our sins in this room, which is our version of the temple in the parable. Each week, week in and week out, we confess our sins. Not my individual sins, or your individual sins, but our sins. We messed up. Badly. And we come here to confess those sins. Then, the priest stands and holds up her hand and proclaims that we are forgiven. We are truly forgiven, re-created as the creatures God saw on the sixth day of creation and proclaimed “very good.” No, even better: we were wonderfully created, and now we are yet more wonderfully restored, as we say in our Prayer Book. God’s forgiveness makes us better than we were before we were damaged and distorted by sin.
Confession of sin, then, is an occasion of grace. It is an opportunity to experience God’s grace, to be honest before God about what we have done, and to be changed, for the better, by God.
And so, I have some questions for the church. I want to ask: why, why, do we drop the Confession of Sins during (of all seasons!) Eastertide? If it is another occasion of grace, and a powerful one at that, why do we stop the practice during the most celebratory time of the year? And why, why do we find it so hard to talk about sin? A recovering alcoholic will tell you that admitting wrongdoing is a life-saving thing to do: in 12-step programs, admitting wrongdoing is pretty much the whole point of steps four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and ten. Said more simply, more basically: if I can be restored to wholeness, even made better than I was before, why do I resist admitting that I messed up? If it is you I harmed, I should rush to your side and admit it, and ask for your forgiveness.
It may be hard for us to do this for several reasons. Maybe we lack the faith that God or our neighbor will truly forgive us. Or maybe we think that what we did wrong should not be forgiven, because it was so awful. Or maybe we ourselves are reluctant to forgive. Or maybe we caused damage that seems impossible to repair, no matter how sorry we are. A few years ago, two days after Christmas, one of our Episcopal bishops was driving drunk and struck and killed a cyclist. If she is sorry, truly sorry, that is good, but it won’t bring that cyclist back to life and return him to his wife and children and community. (At least it won’t do that on this side of the veil.) So maybe we just don’t think that remorse and forgiveness are worth much, because they don’t fix everything.
But here is where our brother, the tax collector, can give us some guidance. His whole life is destructive. His whole career stands for injustice. He is at best a nuisance, and at worst a traitorous, even deadly enemy to his people. (Economic destruction sometimes can truly kill.) So his trip to the temple, then, will not fix everything, but it nonetheless is a massive, awesome occasion of grace. His remorse helps him carry a positively huge burden of shame into the temple, and set it down before God’s judgment seat. He stands far off, refuses to look up, and beats his breast, pleading for God’s mercy. And so it is to him, to this wretched person, that the Good News of resurrection is first proclaimed. It is proclaimed to him in the presence of those he has harmed, for it is God’s temple he enters, and God claims the people this tax collector harmed as God’s people. And this dreadful sinner, buckling under the weight of his shame, is the first to hear the Good News. His remorse, then, is an important part of the announcement of Resurrection to a sin-sick world. His remorse—and our remorse—plays a powerful part in the salvation of the whole world.
And so as your deacon it is my joyful duty to bid you, and bid myself, to stand before God and confess our sins against God and our neighbor. I do this joyfully, strange as that may sound, because I have confidence that here and now, today, in this house of God, we will be ever more wonderfully restored, starting with the worst sinner among us. And then, by God’s grace, we will be nourished at this Table and sent out to share this Good News with the whole world.
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Preached on the 20th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 25C), St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Burke, Virginia.
Joel 2:23-32
Psalm 65
2 Timothy 4:6-8. 16-18
Luke 18:9-14
Works consulted:
Luke Timothy Johnson, “The Gospel of Luke,” in Sacra Pagina, Daniel J. Harrington, ed.
John E. Thiel, Icons of Hope: The ‘Last Things’ in Catholic Imagination
Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel