Sermon 2: "Not the Righteous, But Sinners"
Text: Mark 2:13-21

Last Sunday I talked about two basic ways of understanding the church and our faith. In the traditional model, people thought of God as up in heaven (A), looking down on us mortals, often angry about our sins, and threatening the punishment of hell (B) if we don’t repent and shape up. The pastor (C) is held up as a godly man (people much prefer a male authority figure in this model). The pastor expounds on the Word of God (D), which clearly spells out what’s right and what’s wrong and how to be good and acceptable to God.

This model reminds me of the story of Aunt Millie, who was a staunch member of an old Baptist church down South, and thought the preacher was getting too soft on sin. "Preacher Bob," she said, "The people in this church are followin’ the ways of the world. You got to preach against sin and straighten ’em out."

So the next Sunday, Pastor Bob got up in the pulpit, and he preached against the evils of loose morality, of lusts of the flesh, and of fornication. "Amen! Preach it, brother," shouted Aunt Millie. Then he lit into the sins of indulging the flesh with liquor, tobacco, and gambling. "Amen! Preach it, brother," cried out Aunt Millie again. And then Pastor Bob spoke out against the sins that tear down the church from within, like hypocrisy and gossiping and back-biting. "Now wait just a consarned minute, Preacher!" Aunt Millie shouted out. "Now you done quit preachin’ and commenced to meddlin’!"

That’s one of the problems with this way of trying to be the church and earning God’s favor. If sinfulness evokes God’s anger and maybe eternal punishment, and righteousness invokes God’s favor, then it’s a no-brainer which side you want to be on. Our egos swing into action emphasizing our goodness, and polishing up our halos (E) when we’re around other people--especially church people, and most especially the pastor. That gritty human side gets hidden away in a private black box (F), so that we don’t see our own flaws. We just project them onto others: "Preach it to those people, Pastor."

I said this model of understanding the church is traditional. This tradition is old. Jesus dealt with it even before there was a church. He made comments about the people who upheld this way of understanding their religion like this: "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and all kinds of filth. So you also on the outside look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness" (Matthew 23:27-28, NRSV). He could have been talking about Aunt Millie, and many other Christians as well.

Now of course, religious understanding changed after Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. The church realized that the cross (G) brings all of our human goodness to shame, and that in the cross there is a grace that redeems us from sin. So for many churches, at least the theology that was preached was salvation by faith, not salvation by works. But then many churches became as rigid and self righteous about their salvation and morality and social stands as the Pharisees were about the religious laws people had to follow in order to be considered righteous. After Jesus, the verbal theology changed, but the old model, the old paradigm, stayed pretty much intact.

But Jesus didn’t come to make some adjustments in our theology. Jesus came to unite God and humanity. Jesus came to break down the barriers that our human sins of pride, fear and greed erect between ourselves and our brothers and sisters and between ourselves and God. Jesus came to transform our hearts, souls, minds and bodies into carriers of God’s Spirit. He came to let divine love and compassion, justice and joy, grace and gratitude flow through this world, to bring us together into a radically new reality, the realm of God.

God’s Spirit can work in this old paradigm, but its built-in barriers, rigidity and separation provide a very constraining vehicle for God’s Spirit to move and grow in our lives and in our world. Listen again to what Jesus said to the Pharisees. "No one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but one puts new wine into fresh wineskins."

We should have known that God was preparing us for a whole new way to be in relationship with God when the Son of God was born into the world as the child of an unwed couple who couldn’t find decent shelter because they were registering to be taxed by their oppressors. His birth was announced only to unsavory shepherds and to mysterious Gentile foreigners. God was trying to show us that the Divine Spirit is not safely ensconced in a heavenly realm of purity while we mortals muck around in the mire of real life. God is also fully present in the dark, lonely, dangerous places.

And when Jesus was grown, what did he do? Shave his head, flee the immorality of the world and live a life of austerity in the desert where he would be untainted by all human sin? No! He repeatedly got into trouble with the scribes and Pharisees for eating and drinking with sinners like Levi, and calling them into his circle of followers. He violated the laws that separated the righteous from the sinners by touching lepers, healing on the sabbath, sitting and talking with women, treating Samaritans like children of God, and bending down and washing his disciples’ feet.

And then when his passionate, persistent attack on all these barriers finally led to his sentencing, torture, and crucifixion, he willingly took all of that sinful pride and spite on himself, and as they drove the nails into his flesh, he cried out, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

Is this not new wine that demands new wine skins to hold it?! Can the Church of Jesus Christ still hold onto an image of God as distant and judging, with the fear of hell as its main motivator for religion? Can it use overt displays of righteousness to judge others or ourselves? We in this church and other churches like ours have said No. But what we have done is to modify this traditional model to be more palatable. We have put a smile on God and made Him, or Her, into a loving, friendly God in heaven. The pastor doesn’t have to be a strong male authority figure, just a real nice guy, or a super-capable woman, who somehow manages to be all things to all people. The Bible is the authoritative Word of God, except all those parts we don’t personally agree with. Talk of sin is offensive and old-fashioned, so we just accept ourselves and everyone where they are. The only people we can’t tolerate is intolerant people! What we have done, I’m afraid--myself included--is try putting greatly watered-down new wine into old wineskins with some new patches on them. From today’s Scripture reading, I don’t get the feeling that Jesus is real impressed with our work. It is very comfortable. But it has no power to save us or the world from our own lostness and destruction. Therefore it has no ultimate value.

Let’s try imagine a new wineskin, the new way of understanding God (H) that I tried to depict last week. This one is harder to visualize, and harder to describe, which could be a clue that we’re getting closer to the Mystery that is God. In this understanding of reality, God is not sitting in judgment or even benignly looking down from a heavenly throne. God is intimately, immanently, involved with all of creation and with each creature. As Jesus said, God knows when the sparrow falls to the ground, and knows the number of the hairs on our head. Everything affects God, because God is in everything and everything is in God.

I believe that it was Jesus’ keen awareness of this that compelled him to work on bringing into the circle of God’s realm the people (I) who were regarded as outside God’s favor--women, Samaritans, the poor, the oppressed, the sick, and as we read today, sinners. God is as much with the sinner and affected by the sinner as God is with the holy, righteous folks. But there is a difference. The people who display their righteousness, whose egos identify with their halos (J), block God from going to work healing and redeeming and transforming the pride, selfishness, greed, and fears that are hidden in their black box (K--draw as closed). God never violates our human freedom. God will only change in us what we release for God to change.

In the old way of thinking, we try to get close to God through godliness. But instead of really being closer to God, we simply play God. In the new understanding of God, we can get very, very close to God through honesty, through opening our black box (L--draw open lid). It’s a paradox, but the more honestly, humbly human we are, the closer we can draw to God. God’s grace very naturally flows into our darkness, our doubts, our fears, our failures, our weakness, our brokenness, as long as we have the courage to get real and open our reality to God through the honesty of confession. Our prayer can be as simple as the cry of the tax collector in the temple: "God, have mercy on me a sinner." God hears those prayers and responds.

The key is to not get faked out by our own egos, which can put on a good show of outward righteousness. Most of us would get a score of at least 70% on following the 10 Commandments, as long as they’re interpreted fairly narrowly. 70%--that’s passing, isn’t it? Isn’t that good enough to get us into heaven?

But Jesus tried to show us that sin isn’t just a matter of overt behavior. Sin is a spiritual separation of ourselves from God, of ourselves from our true nature and purpose, of ourselves from the brothers and sisters we were put here to learn to love. And so Jesus said totally disconcerting things like, "You have heard that it was said...‘You shall not murder’....But I say to you that if you harbor anger with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment." And "You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart." And "You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." (Matthew 5, selections).

Now imagine hearing those new commandments from inside this old understanding of God and faith (point to first drawing). What’s your score on keeping these commandments as Jesus interprets them? Sometimes your godly pastor here has a hard time rating much more than a zero.

Some theologians have said, "Hrrummph, well, Jesus made these new commandments so impossibly hard that obviously he’s showing us that we can’t be saved by our works at all. So we must abandon all claim on our own righteousness and simply believe that we are saved by grace."

Listen again to what Jesus said. "No one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but one puts new wine into fresh wineskins." Jesus’ new wine bursts these old wineskins. So listen to Jesus’ new commandments from the perspective of his new wineskins. Jesus’ penetrating, challenging new commandments are not tests to condemn us. Their purpose is to help Aunt Millie and all of us look inside our hearts and souls and find the places that, despite our good behavior, are painfully and destructively separated from God, from our highest purpose, and from God’s call to love our neighbors as ourselves.

If we can get over our fears that God is going to condemn our humanness, and if we can instead trust God to touch us and grace us in our honest-to-God weakness, we will experience miracles. For example, let’s imagine that my boss has called my ideas ill-conceived and half-baked in front of the rest of my department. If I’m in this first model, I’ll tell myself, "I’m not mad. I said I’m not mad!! I can handle this (throwing a pencil onto the floor)!" The anger gets stuffed into the black box. But sometimes the black box springs leaks, or even violently explodes under the pressure.

But what if I move into the other paradigm. Okay, I guess I am pretty mad about what he said. How could he humiliate me like that? Who does he think he is--everybody knows I have good ideas! I want to kill the guy! No, that’s too good--first I want to see him suffer! Whew, I guess I am pretty mad. Why do I feel so hostile? He made me feel like a little kid, just like my father used to do--he made me feel totally ashamed of myself, and stupid and powerless and lonely, so lonely. Yeah! That’s why I want to kill him! But I’m not really stupid and powerless. I know God gave me gifts of creativity, and I do know my job pretty well. And I still have my friends, and they respect me. And I know God will never reject me, even if I totally messed up. So I guess I’ll be okay. But why did he say that to me? He acted like he was mad at me, or attacking me for something--like he was threatened. Maybe that’s it. Maybe my ideas threaten him. Maybe he needs to feel in control, or maybe he’s afraid I’m trying to take over his position as the leader in the department. He must be sensitive about that. Maybe I remind him of somebody who has tried to strip away his power, and made him feel stupid and powerless. God, I’m sorry if I open up old wounds for my boss. Help me to be more sensitive about the way I present my ideas, so that everyone can share in their development and feel responsible for them. Help me to see my boss as a human being, and him to see me as one too.

When I opened my black box to God, God was able to go to work in there, help me through my anger, and even bring me to the point of praying for him, and "loving my enemy" in the sense of wanting what is best for him.

God did not create us with all our human weaknesses only to condemn us for having them! Each and every human part of ourselves, from our sexual nature to our spiritual nature, can be used proudly or greedily or fearfully to separate us, or it can be opened to God to more deeply connect us.

And so Jesus told the scribes and Pharisees, who accused him of associating with sinners, "I have come to call not the righteous but sinners." That would be me. That would be Aunt Millie. That would have been even the Pharisees. That would be you too.

In this time of silence, can you search your heart, and find something that you are harboring that is separating you from another person, from God, and from our truest self? Can you honestly claim it, confess it, and open it to God’s amazing grace right now in this silence? If you can receive the Good News that God seeks not to condemn us but to transform us, each sin that we confess can bring us closer to God, to our true selves, and to each other.