This sermon was preached at Whittier UMC on Sunday, October 27th, based on Psalm 84 and Luke 18:9-14. You can listen to it by clicking below.
Would you pray with me?
God of the temples, God of the churches, God of all places where worship happens, thank you for bringing us to this time and this place. Be with us here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
I don’t usually preach on the psalms, mostly because I think they speak for themselves. They’re the songbook of the Bible, a hymnal compiled over generations, full of praise and prayer and lament and petition, all joy and sadness and confidence and doubt combined. If I were to interpret most psalms for you, I’d just be telling you how it is with my soul at that moment. If my soul is in synch with the Holy Spirit, psalms of pure praise will seem right to me. If my soul is troubled, I’ll find solace in psalms of lament, which hold space for my worries but almost always bring me back to a space of worship. The psalms give us a wide range of human emotion and on any given day, I might fall anywhere on that range.
But I feel good preaching about Psalm 84, because it is a psalm of comfort to me. “How lovely is your dwelling place, O LORD of hosts! My soul longs, indeed it faints for the courts of the LORD; my heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God.”
Church has always been home for me. I’ve done homework sitting on church pews waiting for children’s choir to being. I’ve done homework sitting in the choir room waiting for adult choir to being. I’ve done homework in breaks during bell choir practice, to be honest. I’ve napped at church, eaten at church, fellowshipped, laughed, loved, enjoyed life at church. Church for much of my life felt safe to me, the place that I longed to be. If I could be anything in this life, I’d want to be the swallow who can make a nest for herself and her young at the altars of God. If you were to tell me to go home, I’d come to the church. For truly, better is one day in God’s courts than thousands anywhere else.
Of course, this psalm paints a fairly ideal picture of what it’s like to be in the house of God. I was reminded of this in a pretty direct way when a bird got into the church on Thursday. Do I know if it was a sparrow or a swallow trying to find a place to nest? No, no I certainly do not, because I was not focused on identifying the bird, I was focused on trying to get it back out of the church. I shut every door I could see and tried to shoo it out the side door, but it flew back into the fellowship hall. I was signed up for a grant-writing webinar and so I log into that, set my microphone on mute, and listened as I was told about how to search for grants while chasing the bird around with a broom. Finally, it found its own way out the back door and I could relax. Or rather, I relaxed after I inspected everywhere it had flown for bird poop.
Not necessarily the peaceful, pleasant image Psalm 84 gives us. And besides, I’m afraid of birds. They’re fine at a distance, but those beaks are frightening. They’re basically tiny dinosaurs and I don’t think they’re forgiven us mammals for surviving that asteroid impact.
But the incident with the bird caused me to reflect on life in the church. We think of it as being peaceful, pleasant, and worship-filled, but sometimes it’s chaotic and confusing and involves… things we don’t want to deal with. Both things are true. Sometimes the church embodies Psalm 84 and sometimes the church is messy.
No one knows this better than our lay leaders, those who have helped carry the church year after year. I get the sense, from the meetings we’ve had over the past few months, that our lay leadership keeps coming back because they too have found a home in the church. They know what it’s like to build a nest here, next to the altar of the LORD, and want to keep it safe. They know the peace and joy that can come with serving the church, but they also know that it’s not just peace and joy. Getting a new pastor in the church can feel very much like dealing with a trapped bird in the fellowship hall.
If you’re currently in church leadership, can you raise your hand?
Can we give each other a round of applause?
I’m sure you all know what kind of behind the scenes work goes into church leadership. It’s not just showing up to meetings, it’s also reaching out to people when there’s something going on in their life, it’s researching sound equipment, talking to community organizations, going on trips to pick up or deliver food, cooking and cleaning. It’s thinking deeply about who we are and who we want to be. It’s answering difficult questions with integrity and hope. It’s ministry, as I heard in our meeting on Sunday.
Now, we voted at charge conference last Sunday to change our leadership structure. Instead of all the committees that we’re used to, we’re down to one church council that does the work of all the committees. The meetings will be announced the week before they happen and open to anyone who wants to attend and give input. We’ll continue to honor the input of those who have been leaders in the past by allowing our Stewards to vote in any meeting they attend.
But more than that, I hope that this change in structure will allow more of you to participate in the ministry and work of the church. The church council may be smaller, but they won’t be able to do the work of the church alone. We’ll be reaching out to get people involved in helping in worship, helping us brainstorm new programs and new ways to participate, helping us to visit those who need visiting, and helping with all the million little things that go into helping a church grow.
Because we believe in a God of reversal, a God who welcomes in the humble along with the righteous. Jesus shows us this in our parable this morning. It’s not just the person who’s already in God’s service, who already goes above and beyond, who goes home justified. It’s also the person who knows where they come up short and how much help they need who really gets what it’s like to work with God.
That might not be how you’ve always heard this parable. We’re used to hearing about the boastful Pharisee who is hateful to the poor little tax collector and how it was the tax collector and not the Pharisee who went home justified, right with God. But that interpretation hangs on the Greek word para, which gets translated as “rather than” in verse 14. “I tell you this man went down to his home justified rather than the other.” But para can be translated in several different ways. It’s like the preposition “by” in English. You can be by a river or go by a lake, but a book is also by an author. Same with para. Para can mean instead of or it can mean “alongside of.” So the tax collector and the Pharisee are both justified in the eyes of the God. They go together in serving God.
If we think about the parable this way, as Jesus highlighting that both the Pharisee and the tax collector are justified in God’s sight. We have people who are doing Pharisee-level of work, going above and beyond. But I imagine that we have more than a few people who feel like the tax collector among us. “God, you don’t want to use me.” “God, you know what my life is like.” “God, you know I don’t have anything to give.”
I think we all feel a little small in the face of all that God can do in the world. We don’t feel like we’re worthy to be a part of it. We think that we’re better of letting other people, better people do God’s work, instead of us.
And this parable doesn’t tell us that the tax collector went home, gave away most of what he owned, and dedicated himself to serving the Lord. We don’t really get to see what it means for the tax collector to go home justified. The parable only tells us that if we think we’re better than someone else in the eyes of God, we’re not in the right, but if we have humility, we’re closer to where God wants us to be.
I say all this not to give you ten steps on how to be humble. Humility is a fruit of the Spirit, as far as I’m concerned. God grows humility in us as we grow closer to God, so it’s not something that we can really figure out on our own. I say all this because if there’s someone here today who thinks that doing stuff in church is not for them, that singing or reading or serving isn’t something that they’re equipped to do, if there’s someone who feels like that, let me be the first to tell you that God works best through people like you. I think that many of us can testify that it’s just when our strength fails that God’s strength begins working. So if you’re feeling like the tax collector today, if you find yourself Sunday after Sunday thinking that you’re not enough to do God’s work, let me tell you that it’s okay. None of us are. But God uses us anyway. Grace abounds.
I would never in my life have expected that it would be part of my real-life job to shoo a bird out of a church fellowship hall. Honestly, there were years of my life where I wouldn’t have expected that standing up here would be part of my real-life job either. But I love being in the house of the Lord. Church is my home. I’d rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than be anywhere else in the world, even if that means dealing with some… birds from time to time. Because the Spirit of God is moving here. God has been and is doing things at this church. Our lay leadership attests to that. And who knows? Maybe each one of you will be able to attest to it in your own way in the days to come.
Amen.
All text and pictures (unless otherwise attributed) © Jo Schonewolf, 2019. You can read all our sermons by clicking here.