Luke 18:9-14 "When Gratitude Goes Bad" Scott Hoezee

Probably most of us feel this way at least once every single day. Perhaps we feel this way several times a day. It's not even a conscious decision but rather a certain confluence of emotions that wells up in our minds and hearts almost unbidden. Sometimes this complex of emotion feels like relief, other times it feels like good luck, but in general it is always mixed with some measure of gratitude and thanks. You look around you in life and see so very many situations that are quite different from your situation, and you're relieved and grateful that it is so. Or you see something that you realize could have happened to you, and you feel happy that it didn't.

And so you watch the news in the evening and see video footage from the Texas Panhandle region where a series of tornadoes reduced whole communities to debris-strewn disaster areas. Inside the silence of your mind, you think to yourself, "I'm sure glad I don't live there." Maybe you even whisper, in prayer-like fashion, "Thank God I don't live there!" Or you read in the newspaper stories about suicide bombings that have become so routine in some Middle Eastern communities and marketplaces and, again, you can't help but say, "I'm sure glad that doesn't happen here." You pass by a bad car accident at an intersection through which you travel every day. Maybe on this particular day you had been slightly delayed when an annoying coworker needed your help for something. It made you late but now you realize that maybe by being late it was not you who was in the intersection when that drunk driver careened through the red light. It's not that you don't feel sorry for the actual accident victims, and yet you are just so grateful that it wasn't you. You are almost tempted to thank God that it was somebody else and not you.

But even beyond extraordinary circumstances like these, sometimes we can feel this way about our lot in life generally and overall. True, sometimes on a Sunday morning it is not the easiest thing in the world to drag yourself out of bed so as to get over here to church by 10am. Still, you're glad you do come. Driving here on a given week, you pass by the houses of neighbors who, although they may get to sleep in on Sundays, also live hopeless lives with no real certainty that there is a God anywhere who cares. You pass by nursing homes and hospitals that house debilitated people unable to go to church or anywhere else for that matter. Meanwhile, whether your route to church goes this way or not, not far from this place people lie on cardboard sheets in alleys off Division Avenue, still drunk from last night's binge. Young men lie facedown in their own vomit in innercity crack houses even as the homeless wake up in a ward of other homeless folks in a shelter.

Compared to all that, and insofar as we become aware of some of that, surely there are times when we drive to church and quietly think, "I thank God I am not like other people. I am thank God I have faith, that I have a church to go to and the desire to attend. I thank God I have honest work to do and health in my body to do it. I am grateful not to be addicted to drugs or booze and that my children and I have a roof over our heads. I pray to God and know that God loves me. I give my offerings here at church and volunteer my time in various programs, too. I am so thankful I am not like other people who are lost, lonely, dishonest, and without the hope I have in my heart. I'm so glad to be a Christian."

Sound familiar? Having just read Luke 18 it should. And lest you think I am exaggerating, think for just another moment about even the songs we sing sometimes. "I am so glad that Jesus loves me, Jesus loves me, Jesus loves me!" "How vast the benefits divine which we in Christ possess!" "Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine!" Now, of course, these are all songs of praise and thanksgiving. Rightly so, we believe. On Thanksgiving Day recently I reminded you that especially in our Reformed tradition, gratitude is the keynote of sanctified living. We pray to God out of gratitude. The Catechism calls prayer "the chief part of the gratitude we owe to God." We follow the commandments and try to live our lives inside the moral boundary lines God has sketched as tokens of our larger thanksgiving to God for the gift of grace that comes through Jesus Christ.

So what is, or what should be, the difference between all that and the Pharisee's prayer in Luke 18? Suppose you read this prayer, or one just like it, but in a context in which someone other than a Pharisee was praying. In the Bible, as Robert Capon has said, we learn from our earliest Sunday School days forward that the Pharisees are the bad guys, the heavies. If the New Testament were like some hiss-and-boo melodrama from the Old West, the Pharisees would be the fellows in the black hats, twirling their moustaches and fingering the six-shooters on their hips. It doesn't much matter what a character like that says, we expect it to be ugly even before the man opens his mouth.

But suppose it was in a different setting. Suppose it is your sweet little old grandmother praying over the turkey dinner on Thanksgiving. "Dear God, we are grateful that we are not like other families we know: people who don't know you enough to offer thanks to you, families that have fallen apart and so they never gather around the table anymore. We rejoice that we went to church this morning to do what all people should do: render thanks to you as the Giver of all good gifts." So this is Grandma now, not the Pharisee in the black ten-gallon hat. What, if anything, keeps her prayer from falling into the error of the Pharisee? Or does nothing keep it from that error? Is it the same mistake all over again? When and how does gratitude go bad, and what can we do to make sure it doesn't happen to us?

You see, to the original hearers of Jesus' parable in Luke 18, there was nothing startling--nothing even vaguely unsettling--until Jesus got to the end when he said it was the tax collector, not the Pharisee, who went home under the blanket of God's favor. Because up until that point, the Pharisee was simply being pious. Scholars suggest that the prayer that Jesus places onto the man's lips was not a caricature of a prayer but appears to have been a standard Jewish prayer of thanksgiving at that time. If the folks at the Temple back then had had a Psalter Hymnal-like worship book with liturgical forms and prayers in the back, then the prayer spoken by this Pharisee in the parable would likely have been included in the hymnal. To those who listened to Jesus' parable, this prayer was as familiar to them as "Now I lay me down to sleep" or "Our Father, who art in heaven" is familiar to most of us.

It is only right, fitting, and proper to give thanks to God. So if there is something awry here, it must be more in the attitude motivating the prayer than in the prayer proper, and just that is the key. The Pharisee was not so much grateful to God as he was grateful only when he compared himself to others. Because the moment we begin to stack up our lives against the lives of those around us, it doesn't take long before the focus becomes what we do, how we act, what we perform. The shape of our lives, and the myriad of activities in which we engage that gives our lives that shape, becomes the taking-off point in our assessment of life.

What we forget when that happens is, of course, nothing less than the grace of God in Christ Jesus. It's always a balancing act. Should you be grateful that you find prayer not only possible but deeply meaningful? Should you be glad that you have opportunity to engage in ministry projects that benefit the needy in our community? If you are able in your life to avoid committing crimes or cheating on your spouse, should you be thankful for the strength of character that prevents you from walking down certain sordid paths? Of course on all counts! But we must never forget that each of those things is a fruit of God's prior grace at work in us. Our virtues, our piety, our coming to church on Sunday mornings are not the roots of God's love of us but the fruits that grow out of the root of grace that made us Christians to begin with.

We routinely mix up roots and fruits. We turn the tree upside-down. The production of spiritual fruit in your life--the very kinds of things for which you may be thankful to God in comparision to other people who lack such fruitful lives--grow out of God's gracious love. They don't attract God's love, they flow from God's love. As C.S. Lewis says, the roof of a greenhouse shines brightly because the sun shines on it. The roof doesn't attract the sun by virtue of being bright to begin with, however! Or, in another Lewis analogy, suppose a six-year-old little girl says, "Daddy, may I have $5 to buy you a Christmas present?" Well, any decent father will give the child the money and, come Christmas morning, will exclaim loudly and gleefully over whatever baubble the child bought. But only a fool would say that by virtue of the gift, the father came out $5 ahead on the deal!

We do the things we do for God because he has slipped us the money in the first place. We shine with the light of spiritual virtues and grow juicy spiritual fruit on the boughs of our lives because the sunshine of God's grace shined on us to begin with, starting at that time when we were ourselves so sinful and tawdry that at first the light of God revealed only our slovenly lives and the muck of our sinfulness. While we were yet sinners God shined a light on us. If, as that light still shines on us today, if we now look a lot prettier than we did at first when grace found us prodigal children eating out of a pig's trough in a far country, then that, too, is singularly and solely the action of God's grace in our lives, not anything for which we can take much credit.

When we compare ourselves to others, that is exactly what we are doing: comparing ourselves instead of focusing on God's grace. In truth, the only one to whom we should compare ourselves in life is no one less than Jesus himself. He is the model, the pioneer of the faith, the express image of God par excellence to whom we seek to gain conformity. And so when we compare ourselves to him, we will see things for which to be thankful. We will, hopefully anyway, see areas in our lives where we have improved, where we have become at least a little more Christ-like. We will be able, properly so, to be thankful for church, for our participation in ministry, for the things that make us different from other people. But so long as Jesus is the place where we began all such permutations and thoughts, maybe we will have a better chance not only to remember the grace that got us to where we are now but also how very far we have to go in displaying Jesus to the world.

In the past when we talked about the deadly sin of pride, we suggested that a spiritual antidiote to pride is to cease downward comparisons and engage instead in upward comparisons. Pride grows and festers so long as we are looking down the camel's nose at all the "little people" around us to whom we fancy ourselves as being so very superior. Pride begins to wither when the point of comparison becomes not this or that moral shipwreck whom we know but almighty God himself.

It's a little like that "big fish, little pond" scenario that many of us have experienced at one time or another. Let's say that at some point in his life, Chip Brewster was the smartest math whiz in his class and the fastest running back on the football team at Hardy High School in Rapid Brook, Nebraska. He was the best of the best and felt mighty good about himself as a result. What he didn't know is that he seemed to be a big fish only because the pond he was in was so small. So one day he graduated high school and went on to study at the Univeristy of Michigan. Suddenly Chip met up with math geniuses who were so much smarter than him it wasn't even funny. He tried out for the football team and didn't even make the cut, having been left in the dust by running backs from all over the United States. And the next thing you know, Chip Brewster felt like nothing and nobody. The pride of Rapid Brook, Nebraska, was just a face in the crowd in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

All things being equal, Chip still had a lot going for him and much for which to be grateful. Once he recovered from the shock of becoming a small fish in a big pond, one hopes he was able to move forward. But there's nothing like a proper comparison to the wider world to give a puffed-up chest of pride a hard blow to the solar plexus.

So also for us: if we keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of our faith, we will never lack for humility. This does not mean, however, that we go to the other extreme. There is a difference between humility and self-humiliation. Our Calvinist penchant for looking at the best we offer to God and then saying, "Ach ja, but all our works are as filthy rags" won't do either. Loving service lovingly offered to God is not a filthy rag anymore than your child's lumpy papier-mache Christmas tree ornament is loathsome in your eyes as a parent. The good things we have and do in life as a result of grace are not filthy rags, so don't say they are! But they are also not your entrance ticket to the kingdom of God. They are not the reason God looks on you with favor. They are little graces, gracelets, that stem from the big Grace that saved you to begin with. Be thankful for the whole salvific shebang but never lose sight of the fact that it is all a gift.

Why did the tax collector go home justified? Because if he had a sense of having been forgiven at all, then he knew it was a grace and a mercy. Have you ever noticed that in this parable, Jesus says nothing about the character of the tax collector? Jesus does not say he was a crooked tax collector. There is no hint here that this was a man who cheated on his wife, stole candy from babies, cooked the books, or drank too much. He is just a tax collector. But that very status in Jesus' day was enough to keep the man beat down in life. He could be as honest a fellow as any, a straight shooter and a regular attender at Temple worship services. But the tax collector had one advantage over the Pharisee: his status in life was so despised by most people that he was never tempted to do anything but compare himself upward. If it is true in this parable that the Pharisee glanced across the Temple to look down on the tax collector, it is probably also true that the tax collector glanced over to the Pharisee and looked up to him as a kind of role model. The tax collector wanted to be that pious, that close to God. His situation forced humility on him, but it turns out to be a good thing. It helped him ask God for the right thing in the right way even as it helped him be properly grateful for any forgiveness he did receive.

Those who exalt themselves by comparing themselves to others will be brought low, Jesus says. But those who humble themselves by comparing their lives to the shining holiness of God will be exalted. And maybe this is because when we compare ourselves to only other people, we no longer have much to shoot for. We won't in the end be exalted because we weren't aiming high enough in the first place. But when we compare ourselves to our God in Christ, we are aiming as high as you can get. If in the end the humble get exalted, perhaps that will be a natural outgrowth of the fact that the humble, by looking up to God, were heading in the right direction all along. Amen.