St.
Alban's Episcopal Church
Austin, Texas
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Austin, Texas
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From the Pulpit:
Henri Nouwen is my spiritual hero. I imagine you’ve heard me speak of him often because I turn to him again and again when my own spiritual cup needs filling. He was a Dutch Roman Catholic priest who spent much of his life teaching in such prestigious institutions as the Menninger Foundation and Yale and Harvard. He wrote prolifically and insatiably and it is our great fortune that he left us forty books, each of them tiny and accessible but rich in grace and wisdom. The Women of Spirit have been discussing one of my favorites, The Life of the Beloved, and I know it has been very meaningful for them. I promise you, if you haven’t read Nouwen, give him a try, and your spirit will be the richer for it. So why would I start by telling you about my spiritual hero in conjunction with the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector and during this six week period when we are focusing so intently on the spiritual discipline of stewardship as we prepare to give to the Capital Campaign and Annual Pledge Drive? Well, as I was studying and meditating on today’s scriptures I also came across a book of Nouwen’s that I hadn’t read before. It is called The Inner Voice of Love, and it consists of entries from the secret journal he kept during a lengthy period of severe depression. This person whom I have looked up to as being more in touch with God than just about anybody in the world suffered for six months such complete spiritual darkness that he could not find God at all, but in his crying out to God in his anguish he came to know God and to trust in his belovedness in ways he never could have had he not gone through his depression. Now Jesus told this parable to a group of people who were feeling mighty proud of themselves. It’s clear that the story, if they understood it, was going to put a dent in their self-esteem, but I don’t think that is the only reason he tells it. They’re going to identify with the Pharisee for sure, at least at first, because the Pharisee was the good guy. It’s as clear at the beginning as the old movie westerns where we tell the good guy from the bad guy by who’s wearing a white hat and who has a black one. Pharisees, despite the bad rap they get in a lot of Jesus’ parables, were the really good guys. They were devout and they tithed and they obeyed the laws. In short, they witnessed to their faith with their lives. The only problem was, -- and we probably know some people like this and maybe we have been the people like this -- they could tend, like this Pharisee, to believe that they were better than other people.This Pharisee is looking around and looking down his nose at people who don’t worship God as well as he does. When we consider the tax collector we have to begin by getting the nice folks at the IRS out of our minds. Sure, we don’t just love paying our taxes, but tax collectors in Jesus’ time were really terrible crooks. They were Jews who had sold out to the Romans. They were doing the Romans’ dirty work and getting rich themselves by gouging their fellow Jews. The tax collector was the equivalent of a slum landlord or maybe somebody who gets rich on kiddie porn. He really is a bad guy. He does not say the first word about giving up his line of work, but as he stands there praying he’s not comparing himself to anybody else. He’s looking into the black abyss that is his heart, and he knows that he needs the mercy of God. He knows that only God can save him, and that is why he goes home justified while the Pharisee simply goes home satisfied that God is impressed with his accomplishments, which God is not. One day last week as I was making the bed and watching the Today Show I learned about a weird website, and it’s not one that I recommended to you in the Almanac. It is called Post Secret and was begun as an art installation online in 2005. The deal is that people make an artistic post card that reveals a secret they have never told anyone, and some of these post cards are then displayed online for a week. I was curious, so I went online and was struck by how desperately sad most of these secrets were. Well, there’s a logic to that, isn’t there? We feel free and are glad to share the brighter parts of our lives. It broke my heart to imagine people holding tight to the shame and grief and guiltiness of their lives. And I’ll bet each and every one of us has at least one secret we’ve never told, something that we would just die if everybody in this church knew about it. For many of us it might be something fairly trivial. Just something that is inconsistent with what we want people to know about us, but for some of us it might be pretty big. Now I’m not advocating that anybody write it on a post card and send it to the website, and I’m not inviting anybody to turn to your neighbor and spill the beans. I’m just telling you something you already know, and that is that we are all broken. We are each and every one of us flawed, and God knows that deepest and darkest secret of our hearts, but all in the world we need to receive God’s grace and forgiveness is to know that only God can give it to us, only God can save us from the hell of our own making, and God can only do it if we ask him to. God can only do it if we acknowledge our darkness and our need, our powerlessness to save ourselves, no matter how many degrees we have, no matter how much we earn or how much we give, no matter how shiny our reputation or how perfect our church attendance record. Only God can heal our deepest wounds. I said that I didn’t think the only reason Jesus told this parable was to upset some self-confident people. I think it was more than that. I think it was to invite them into relationship with God, to give them a gift that they didn’t know how to receive, and I think that is the gift for us as well. It is an invitation not only to justification in God’s eyes but into belovedness as well, into the knowledge that the most sordid, seamy secret that we harbor in our heart of hearts cannot keep God from loving us. Of course God does not condone our sinfulness, just as that tax collector, if he truly opened himself to receiving the mercy he prays for, won’t be able to go back to his lying and cheating ways. If we accept our belovedness in God’s eyes, if we can learn to look in the mirror and acknowledge that God loves us for who we are and not for what we do, if we can take it the radically good news that Jesus was offering these Pharisees, how can we not be better human beings? How can we not be more patient and loving and kind and generous? How can we not look forward to the transformation of our lives with anticipation and excitement even though we cannot imagine what it is that God has in store for us? The scary part is that it means letting go. It means letting go of our list of accomplishments. I am not my degrees or my bank account or my home or the best tomato basil soup you will ever taste or my fine grown children or the best sermons that I can preach. I am a person who is flawed, but loved by God anyways, and I know that only God can save me. I cannot do it by myself no matter how I try. It was God who saved Henri Nouwen from the hell of his depression. Hear what he says: Your love, insofar as it is from God, is permanent. You can claim the permanence of your love as a gift from God. And you can give that permanent love to others. When others stop loving you, you do not have to stop loving them. On a human level, changes might be necessary, but on the level of the divine, you can remain faithful to your love. One day you will be free to give gratuitous love, a love that does not ask for anything in return. One day also you will be free to receive gratuitous love…The great paradox of love is that precisely when you have claimed yourself as God’s beloved child,…you begin to grow into freedom to give gratuitously. Amen.
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05/16/2008 | ||||||
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The
Rev. Margaret Waters