I ask you to consider what image of God you hold within yourself as you pray.
Do you even have an image for God? Might you feel a sense of space or ....
I imagine because I've tried to examine this for myself I imagine that we have a short-hand awareness that has been crafted within us throughout our lives for me the sound of the Lutheran liturgy that I grew up with mingles with images of rays of light descending through the clouds like the picture from my Sunday School pamphlet of Jesus being Baptized. These ideas merge with the power and mystery of the ocean and the promise and miracle of a rainbow. The warmth the tingling of energy when hands hover over another is added in not to mention images from the Bible some fierce / some tender and there is much much more that goes into my concept of One who is Other the One I call God.
Our prayers are only truly prayers if they reach beyond us The words that we speak to God are meant to bring us into a deeper relationship with God and in the drawing near we are transformed... sometimes slowly ever so slowly sometimes as suddenly as a thunderclap.
I want you to be holding that thought To Whom do I address my prayers? while we contemplate the Parable which we heard in today's Gospel.
Once again Jesus is telling us a story. In case you haven't noticed Jesus likes to stir things up- Jesus challenges our assumptions.
Now - if we take ourselves back in time if we are standing there among the twelve and the others listening wondering --- what are our assumptions?
We know where our sympathies lie when Jesus sets up the scenario: there was a Pharisee and a Tax Collector who went up to the temple to pray. Remember that you are hearing this for the first time.
We know that Pharisees are very particular about their rituals. We might call them pious recognizing that their rituals are about honouring God. Or if we are more casual about our relationship with God we might think that they are a bit fanatical.
Either way we know that they are respectable people.
Tax collectors on the other hand are not respectable... They are outsiders. Lots of them are cheats or bullies.
Did you notice that Jesus is saying some rather strange things. He says that the Pharisee stands and prays to himself.
The Pharisee prays to himself and as he does so the Pharisee say things that can only be described as boasting. He has a list of the bad things he doesn't do (we might note that he neglects to mention the ones he does do.) He names a couple of the mitzvot (goodly deeds) that he accomplishes in a week. If you know about such things his couple of mitzvot are not really that impressive!
Listening to the story I have to conclude that the man is not really praying so much as trying to justify himself.
On the other hand we hear that the tax collector stands at a distance (perhaps near the back) and even can't raise his head because of his shame
Have you ever had a hard time looking someone in the eye because you felt guilty? -
(how many of us can feel this burden of shame?)
The man strikes his chest identifies himself as a sinner and asks for God's mercy (God's forgiveness.)
oh-oh - maybe we can't really dislike this man as much as we thought we would when we thought of him only as the tax collector....
Jesus tells us that this bad guy tax collector went home justified. The Greek word could also mean acquited / forgiven but I want us to think of another image -
the type-printed page.
Most of the time when we type letters or papers we allow for the right margin to be jagged while the pages of books create a perfect rectangle of print...
when the type is adjusted so that each line reaches from the left margin to the right we say it is justified, don't we?
When we reach toward God through prayer - really desiring communion we trust that God is also reaching us and we find ourselves - justified. The gap has been bridged - we can touch God because we discover God touching us.
Now there is a Hebrew word that helps us understand why this Pharisee's prayer was not a true prayer. Kavanah is the mindset necessary for saying prayers and this word is generally translated as "concentration" or "intent." And the rabbis tell us that the minimum level of kavanah would be
1) an awareness that one is speaking to God as well
2) an intention to fulfill the obligation to pray.
Perhaps this man intended to fulfill his obligation to pray but he wasn't speaking to God, was he? Jesus pointed out that he was praying to himself. That is what it says in the Greek. To himself these things praying.
He may have thrown in a Thank you to God but mostly he was harping on the fact that he was not as bad as some of his neighbours.
If he really thought about it if he thought about the One to Whom his words were addressed -
you'd think he'd know that this is not the kind of conversation that God would enjoy.
If this Pharisee had indeed spoken a true berakhah praising God for God's gracious gifts he would have bent before God with awe he would have made an opening for relationship with God and would have realized that God desired the well-being of the tax collector (whom the Pharisee has dismissed as unworthy.)
You see, the silly thing is that we cling to our guilt we try to hold up our little good deeds hoping that the good will outweigh the bad and we can bluff our way into heaven.
But you can't bluff the Creator of the Universe God knows which cards you are holding in fact God probably had something to do with what you were dealt.
You can't bet against the One Who already knows the end of the cosmic Movie.
But you don't need to bluff and you don't really have to know the end of the story its enough to know that God wants you to win. In fact according to the way that most of us play the game of life.... God is a bit of a cheat slipping in a wild card called justification by faith
You won't win because you have done all the right things
you'll win because God wants you to you just have to be willing to be engaged willing to play the game according to God's rules.
We are faced with a double standard. God can 'cheat' but we can't we have to be completely honest.
So I say, okay, I have a wonderful imagination I am capable of great compassion but I am also fragile and flawed I carelessly hurt people that I love speaking before I think things all the way through. And even though intellectually I know what is going on, I hate rude behaviour over there even as I'm trying to back-pedal away from my own rudeness. Well, the list goes on and on.... these are just the ones that I am learning to bear right now... and
God knows all of this but God is waiting for me to own all of who I am within an awareness of God's presence God is waiting for me to acknowledge my need for mercy and healing.... because my acknowledgment is what makes room for God to act
Jesus told crazy stories and then he lived out a crazy, painful witness he accepted the call to die on the Cross... And while we might say but his death made no sense the way we might speak of any loved one.... paradoxically his death does in fact makes sense of all of our lives. In contemplating his life death and resurrection we discover God's deep desire to justify us Jesus fills in the lines of our story... Jesus makes it possible for us to reach toward God with confidence in God's mercy and compassion. Jesus helps us understand that God can bring us through death into abundant and eternal life.... and that that this eternal life begins here and now ... not later....
I wanted you to think about the One to Whom you address your prayers because our conversations are shaped by our understanding of those to whom we speak.
The Pharisee in Jesus' parable is someone we ought to understand... he was whistling in the dark trying to bluff his way into heaven. He spoke to himself because he could not imagine a compassionate, forgiving God. Can you? Amen.
