The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost - The Rev. Lauren Byrd

 C O S T U M E S 

Jesus told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous. (Luke 18:9) 

The last time I stood here, we met up with a Pharisee and a Tax Collector, and here we are again. Fortunately, this morning also lands us less than a week away from Halloween, that bad-old feast that wants to suit us all up in ancient costumes. Not the Disney Princess kind, but the bone-rattling frightful kind: ghosts, witches, skeletons, the sort of characters who stagger in the dark.   

Nothing like a costume to get us thinking about who we are or want to be.  

Each of us is more than meets the eye. It’s why costumes, now and then, feel so expansive, like opening our hearts a little wider to another chance at being us.  

Every human being is more and less than meets the eye.   

Some of us, like the Pharisee, show up boasting with pride, while others, like the Tax Collector, show up in visible pain. And maybe part of what God asks of us this morning is to remember that how we see ourselves and other people matters. And to remember also that the deeper invitation always bends always toward compassion. 

Scholars often note that today’s parable is a kind of trap: a rhetorical trap set by Jesus to knock us all down in one fell swoop: down from the hope of pride and self-perfection, down and back to the good old earth of which we were made.  And it crosses my mind that’s what Halloween means to do, too.  

Leaning into the Feast of All Saints, Halloween means to remind us that we are mortal, made of humble stuff. Like dirt. And any hope of our ultimate exaltation is in God’s hands. 

Our dependence on God is what Jesus wanted his audience to come to terms with that day when he set his trap for us.  So, he told a story about two men. And very likely — if you’re like me — when you hear that story, you think, “Yep, I’m right on it. I get what he’s up to. Jesus wants me to know that prideful Pharisee is a lot worse off than that awful Tax Collector.”  

And you, see, by way of getting us to lean that way — distancing ourselves from the Pharisee who trusts in his self-justifying perfection — Jesus exposes our own pride, how we’d do anything to save face in the hope of landing on the “right” side of things. So, instead of actually caring about one man or the other, we find ourselves whispering to our neighbors, “Thank God we are not like that snooty old Pharisee.”  

And wham! We fall into the realization that we are that Pharisee, just like him, full of a pride we can’t possibly hold onto, trusting in ourselves alone. 

It’s hard to see our own faults. Which may explain why we can so easily name the faults of others. It’s a habit common to all people: the habit of defining ourselves — our souls and bodies — over and against the selves and souls and bodies of other people, as if saying, “Thank God we’re not like them,” says anything at all about who we are.   

This habit of deflection may be the Original Costume, the one Adam put on, shivering before God in his fig leaves, muttering, “The woman gave me fruit from the tree so I ate it,” just like the habit Eve tried out when she said, “The serpent tricked me, and I ate.” 

Not me: Her!  Not me: Him! 

It’s a profound deflection whose hopeless goal was to keep God in the dark. Our first parents trusted in themselves, forgetting to trust God alone.  

And how did God answer them? The same way God answers our own denials and deflections: He sent them out into the world to be fruitful and to make good use of his Creation.  

It’s worth remembering here that Luke is the only evangelist to trace the genealogy of Jesus all the way back to Adam. And the reason Luke wants us to remember that is that he wants us to mark what Judaism itself marks: that there is only one God who made all people.  

In God, there are no First Families. There is only God’s Family, shot through with sinners all: thieves, rogues, adulterers, prideful Pharisees, and mournful Tax Collectors. And in that fallen family, naming what someone else has done wrong can feel like a kind of self-protection or self-perfection, a way of targeting who’s bad in our midst, bad enough to make the rest of us look pretty good.  

St. Augustine of Hippo, preaching on this particular parable over sixteen centuries ago, put it this way, “Keeping his [own sins and] wounds secret, [the Pharisee has] the nerve to crow over the [sins and] wounds of others.” Augustine went on to suggest the Tax Collector was healed because “he wasn’t ashamed of sharing where he felt pain.” [1]  

We are wounded sinners. 

And very often, we run after the hope of blaming somebody else for what’s gone wrong around us or within us. And here that ancient villified Tax Collector has something to teach not only the Pharisee but also us.  And notably, he doesn’t say a word. Instead, his body language says it all: this man — head-down and beating his breast —  wrestles with the truth of his own life and his own pain, and does so before God, his Maker and his Redeemer.  

It may not look like it, but what this broken-hearted man does is creative and hopeful. Because it’s his own reality he confesses: the truth of bearing his own sins before God. Not someone else’s. 

And like him, by way of God’s forgiveness, we are given permission to stand up in our own sins, and from there, through the grace of God’s mercy, to try again to follow the commandments of God. 

Halloween, when you think about it, is after a similar awareness. Annually, it asks us to look on each other in unfamiliar costumes, to see each other, in a sense, as aliens, if you will, as frightful visitors come a-knocking at our front doors. And, again, how we look on each other makes a difference.  

We can look on each other through the lens of suspicion: “What do you want from me?” Or we can look on each other through the lens of charity: “Here, have a little candy.”  

Unfortunately, like trusting in ourselves alone, suspicion is a natural turn for us: it’s always easier to tear down than to build up. And as any repentant sinner can tell you, God partners with human suffering and human sinners in ways we can’t begin to imagine. 

It’s not contempt we need more of today, but compassion.  

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. AMEN.  

[1.] J. E. Rotelle, ed. The Works of St. Augustine: A Translation for the Twenty-First Century, Hyde Park, New York, New City Press, 1990 —.