Humble Recognition

Luke 18:9-14   

         One of my guilty pleasures is the musical show “Glee”.  Set in a high school in Lima, Ohio the show centers upon a high school glee club called “New Directions.”  Now as you can imagine, the kids in this singing group are less than cool.  They struggle with not fitting in with their peers because of their lack of social skills, diminished athletic ability, odd physical appearance or even just their choice of wardrobe.  However what makes these kids stand out is their musical talent.  But their musical gifts are not enough being thrown in the dumpster by a bunch of tough guys or avoid the occasional slushy thrown in their face. 

            Through an interesting turn of events, a couple of the cool kids, the football players and cheerleaders to be exact, decide to join the glee club for various reasons of their own.  The tensions within the club rise as the misfit diva is stuck singing next to the football player who threw him in the dumpster the day before.  Eventually the social structure of the fictional McKinley High School is turned on its head when the cheerleader are seen talking to the goth chick and the star quarterback becomes best friends with the schools only openly gay student, but it took this crew of kids much work to get to this point. 

            We all remember what it was like in high school.  For many of us high school was a happy time filled with parties, dances and sports games.  For some of us it was a mixed bag, there were good times and there were struggles but all in all it was ok.  But for a few of us high school may have been quite painful.  Maybe it was because the coursework was too hard, maybe things at home weren’t going so well or maybe it was because of a lack of fitting in.  For some, for reasons outside of their control they are not able to traverse the in and outs of the high school social hierarchy as smoothly as some of their peers.  And unfortunately there are a few children who are bullied mercilessly just because they are different.  Perhaps it’s the color of their skin, or their weight, or their appearance or even their sexual orientation as we’ve recently witnessed.  For all kids, adolescence is a painful, awkward and frustrating time what with changing voices, bodies and hormones abound.  But unfortunately there is a temptation to diminish this discomfort by putting other kids down in order to lift themselves up.  I know I did it.  Whenever I had trouble adjusting in high school, I would look for a kid who was weirder than myself and pick on him or her.  I would then lift myself up saying, “At least I’m not as strange as so and so.”  Somehow I was able to eek out some sense of feeling worthy by deeming someone else as less worthy than me. 

            I wish I could say that we outgrow this behavior when we grow older, but unfortunately many of us still struggle with the inclination to scapegoat others in order to lift ourselves up in our struggles.  When I worked at the homeless shelter, the phrase I kept hearing over and over again was, “I’m not like the other people here.  At least I don’t drink, do drugs, sleep around, etc. etc.”  At times folks would single out others, stating “At least I’m not like him, he’s been on the streets for years, I’ve only been homeless for a month.”  In the midst of the overwhelming sense of unworthiness that homelessness can bring, some will try to eek out a sense of feeling worthy by deeming someone as less worthy.

            We see the same dynamic in the gospel reading.  The Pharisee and the Tax Collector are praying at the temple.  Both are atoning for their sins and I am sure both are probably feeling unworthy.  We don’t know if it is a particular sin that brings them to the temple or if this is part of a required ritual.  The Pharisee standing by himself begins his prayer by putting down the tax collector, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people:  thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even a tax collector.  I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of my income” (Luke 18:11) The Pharisee is trying to prove his worthiness to God by pointing the unworthiness of others.  Whereas the tax collector feeling so unworthy that he cannot look up to heaven only asks for God’s forgiveness, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” (Luke 18:13)  These men are the same in their struggle with their deep sense of unworthiness, their shame that burdens them yet they seek to be redeemed of their shame through different means.  The Pharisee looks up at heaven while pointing down to the tax collector arrogantly thinking that he will gain worthiness from God as a result of his own actions.  The tax collector on the other hand is humiliated before God and others, recognizing his brokenness through his chest beating.  And yet both of these men are equally worthy in the eyes of God.

            Let me unpack this a bit, theologians have long grappled with the definitions of sin and redemption.  Is sin something we do, or is it who we are.  Reformed theologian Calvin believes that all of humankind is complete and utterly depraved as a result of the original sin committed by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eve.  The doctrine of original sin is the theological view that the sin of is imputed on all humanity. As Calvin puts it “[Adam] cosigned his race to ruin by his rebellion when he perverted the whole order of nature.”  Calvin understood scripture to teach that the entire person is subject to sin leaving no one immune to Adams original sin.  This doctrine is most referred to as total depravity: the idea that a human being cannot not sin.  In other words we are doomed to sin.[i]  In other words we are not perfect, we will mess up.  All of us – no exceptions.

            Personally I have come to believe that the manifestation of the stain of original sin is the overwhelming sense of unworthiness that is the burden of shame that many of us are forced to carry in our psyche since we were children.  Since childhood we have been bombarded with messages that we are not good enough.  How many of us as children have had a stressed out adult wag their finger at us saying, “Shame on you.”  What they were trying to communicate was disappointment in our behavior and yet the words “shame on you” cuts to the quick makes us feel that it is us who are bad and not our just behavior.  Then there’s the politics of the playground, the classroom and eventually the workplace that place people in a competitive pecking order based on power and prestige.  Governments and unfortunately the church have used shame to try to control people in order to keep compliance and order.  Then we have advertising that tells us that we need to make our skin look younger, our wardrobe hipper and our homes more beautiful as if there isn’t beauty already in our wrinkles, clothing and homes we already have.  With all these voices telling us that we are not good enough is it any wonder that we are inclined to do anything we can to make ourselves feel worthy.

            One of the ways we have tried to ease the anxiety of our shame, our sense of unworthiness, is by seeking out another different from ourselves and making them unworthy.   Picking a scapegoat shifts the focus from ones own feelings of unworthiness and shifts the burden onto another.  This is dangerous as we’ve seen happen in our history, we only need to look at the destruction of the Holocaust to know what happens when a minority group is made the scapegoat.  Unfortunately as a culture we will avoid looking the systemic evil that causes such things as economic injustice, environmental destruction and world conflict by vilifying a small group of people as the source of all our problems.  If we could just get rid of them, we think, the problems would go away.  But then if they go away, will that make us the unworthy ones.

            However the good news is this, our worthiness is not up to us, we don’t have to save ourselves because God has done it for us.  We are justified, that is we are made in good standing with God through our faith alone.  By claiming our utter dependence upon God for our justification we are able to acknowledge our shortcomings and be assured that God will forgive us.  We have no need to diminish others in order to claim our worthiness because all of God’s creation has been deemed worthy by God.  As Jesus said at the end of the gospel reading, “For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”  In other words all things will be made equal.

            At the beginning of my sermon I talked about the show “Glee” where cheerleaders and goth chick, football players and the Broadway diva and everyone in between coalesced to become a show choir.  In the beginning, these kids did not get along with each other.  They competed against each other for the solos, they avoided each other in the halls and sometimes they threw slushies at each other.  However as they got to know each other as people rather than just as jocks or nerds, they were able to work together as a team and they grew to love each other in friendship.  They began to see the worthiness of themselves by seeing the worthiness of the other.  Let us go out into the world and do likewise.

May it be so.

Amen.

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[i] Robert Leach, “Luke 18:9-14” Feasting on the Word.  214.