Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost

Meister Eckhart, one of the church's great mystics, famously wrote that if you only had a single prayer to pray, "Thank you" would suffice.
This week, we continue with the general theme of prayer with the righteous Pharisee as an exemplar of how not to pray and the sinful "publican," or tax collector, the one an exemplar of how to pray.  As usual, the unexpected is central to this parable, but this is not one of Jesus' many Kingdom parables; rather, it is a parable relating directly to God.
      Jesus famously told his disciples what to pray with the gift of the Our Father; however, he didn't answer the question directly when asked by his disciples how to pray.  Today’s gospel is all about mercy.
     The Pharisee's prayer was more horizontal than vertical; his prayer was self-congratulatory for not being like his sinful neighbors. His prayer was from an island of self-righteousness.
 
O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity --
greedy, dishonest, adulterous -- or even like this tax collector.
I fast twice a week, and I pay tithes on my whole income.
 
His gratitude springs from "not being like the rest of humanity," it begins in separation, focusing on his side-view of a sinner.  And the tax collector was a sinner.  Let's not make him into some noble hero.  Tax collectors were famous sellouts in Jesus' time.  They were Jews who profited from their association with the Romans and were allowed to keep whatever they could collect above required from their fellow Jews and had the power to have non-compliant Jews arrested.  As with most people invested in such power, the power was abused, and these folks were famously despised. 
            The Pharisees were a group of religious scholars who were trying to bring the average person hope by helping one live a righteous life through putting the Law into practice.  The Pharisee's pride grew from being socially, educationally, and religiously set apart from the people he was called to lead.  There is a lesson in it for me as a priest and anyone with temporal authority within the Church.  I can imagine such pride was incremental and crept in as he appropriated each compliment and praise received from the people he helped, growing like a wildfire until it consumed him in the deception that what they adored was him rather than God's gift to him.  The tax collector had no such delusions.
     The tax collector's prayer was vertical; off at a distance and prostrated, he couldn't even see or hear the Pharisee.  The tax collector's sins were too painful for him to list.  He simply prays, "Have mercy on me, a sinner!" Scripture says he went away justified; God forgave his sins not because he was righteous but because he prayed from his poverty of spirit.  The Pharisee prayed from what he considered his great possessions: his righteousness. Like the widow only putting in a mite for the Temple collection, she gives all she has.  She isn't donating a small portion of her wealth; Jesus observes in that parable that "she gave from her poverty."  We must pray from our poverty because this is our state in relation to God.  We have nothing to stand on but clay feet, but it is the same clay God formed; it is human clay, and it is the source of true humility and genuine gratitude because God has redeemed it in Christ.  
     When we pray from our poverty, we tap into the riches that God has given us.  Time and time again, God's grace seeks out the humble, the lowly, and the dispossessed.  Throughout salvation history, God visits the least regarded and comes to visit and give great comfort.  There is something in the nature of God that desires such intimacy as that of a mother caring for her sick child. We don't need to be great and notorious sinners to attract God's love; it is there before we ask. God is in love with humanity, and the less we stand human before God, the more distorted our understanding of the image of God within us.

          The Oscar Wilde quotation, "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars," comes to mind. Our prayer is always a cry for mercy when we begin with being grateful for having the vision of the stars from the gutter.