The Parables of Jesus: Starting With the Man in the Mirror
Gettysburg Presbyterian Church
Rev. Lou Nyiri
Luke 18:10 - 14
October 25, 2009

Have you ever had one of these days:  You awake to sunshine and blue sky; look in the closet or dresser to find your favorite shirt is clean; traffic is flowing like a river; and co-workers laugh at all your jokes…you get rave reviews from office mates…you work so efficiently that you finish up early; and as you put on your coat to go home you find in the pocket a $20 bill folded up in the corner; and when you return home you prepare a culinary masterpiece and find that over dinner conversation your family or roommates are blessed by our presence. 

Have you ever had a day like that?

On days like these – when everything seems to be going right – when you step outside your door in the morning and “everything comes up roses” as the saying goes – on days when everything you touch “turns to gold” – it’s easy to drift off to sleep convinced that we are truly blessed, that we are fine, upstanding human beings, and as such we are worthy of praise.
On days like those – it’s easy to understand where the Pharisee lives.

On the other hand, have you ever had a day like this:  you wake up to gloom and end it ends with doom?  You spill coffee or OJ on our favorite shirt; the car refuses to start immediately and stalls several times on the way to work; and when you finally make it to work every one of your co-workers looks disdainfully at you and rejects every idea you come up with…all day long.  Traffic moves slower on the commute home than it did on the way there.  You get home so late that dinner comes out of a pizza box you had to pick up off the road because you forgot you set it on the roof of the car when you unlocked the door and drove off into traffic with it still sitting there.  At home you feel like you’re breathing stagnate air from the tension of conversations gone unspoken for too long. 

Have you ever had a day like that?

On days like these – when nothing goes right – when you step outside your door in the morning and it feels like that storm cloud is hovering above your head and follows you all day long AND you forgot your umbrella – on days when you can’t seem to “catch a break” – it’s easy to go to bed convinced that we are truly cursed, wretched and worthless human beings – worthy of well...at the very least nothing…at the very worst exactly what we’re getting.
On days like those – it’s easy to understand where the Tax Collector lives.

Thankfully for most of us, our days fall somewhere between these two extremes – for a steady diet of either one or the other would succeed in making us either insufferably arrogant or severely depressed.
Though if we are honest, then we will admit that each of us has a little Pharisee and a little Tax Collector living inside our heads….and that each competes to become the dominant voice in our lives on an almost daily basis – regardless of our life circumstances.

Each of has a person or persons by which when we compare ourselves to we feel better than - we are thankful that we’re not that person – that’s when the Pharisee is whispering in our ear.
Each of us also has someone that when we compare ourselves to this person, we feel inferior – we wish that we could be more like this person – maybe not in all areas of life though at least in some areas – when we compare ourselves to this person we feel…less than perfect… – and that’s when the Tax Collector is whispering in our ear.

The question becomes then, not which will we listen to, rather – how will we choose to live life in between these two competing voices?
In one ear we hear, “We’re better than everyone else” and in the other we hear, “Don’t even try because you can’t compare – you can’t live up to anyone else.”
How do we live in the middle – between those two voices?

Martin Buber – the Jewish theologian and mystic – speaks of it terms of living life between two coat pockets. 
Buber claims that the contents contained within these two pockets are the aspects by which we discern our place in this world.

And that is where we live our lives – in the middle – making choices about which of these two realities we will choose to focus our lives around.

We live between these two competing views: 

And that is the tension of life…as we discover where we fit in.

You know what I’ve learned in my 40 years of living, is that life is about choice!
On the days when everything goes right and even on the days when everything goes wrong…we choose our response.

Victor Frankl discovered this during his time spent in Hitler’s concentration camps.
Frankl, who lost loved ones at the hands of Hitler’s Nazi Germany, watched as some persevered in spite of the atrocities done to them while others gave up and died.
He watched as some made it and some did not.

Frankl recalls the story of an elderly man who was told by the guards that he would be released on a specific day and be reunited with his wife and children.
This man lived each day with purpose as he looked forward to and counted down the days until his release.
Finally, the day arrived and this man presented himself at the gate, hair combed; face shaven, his best clothes on and bags packed ready to leave.

The guards came to him and inquired what he was doing.
He told them that today was the day of his promised release. 
Today he was going to be reunited with his family.

The guards jeered and laughed at him. 
They spit on him and told him how idiotic he was for believing them.
Then they told him he would never be released from the prison which held him and even if he was it was too late to be reunited with his family – for they had been killed long ago.
The man walked back to his bed, curled up under the covers and did not leave the rest of the day.

The next morning word spread throughout the camp that this man had died in his sleep.

In the world of psychology, they would say that between stimulus and response (between what happens to us and how we respond to what happens to us) there is something that cannot be taken away from us – and that something is our CHOICE.
The man in Victor Frankl’s story chose to give up.
We choose everyday how we will live in this world.

Now, hopefully and thankfully, none of us will ever have to find out what it is like to live in something like Hitler’s Nazi German concentration camps…
Yet, all of us can take this lesson of choice with us into our daily lives…
Between what happens to us and how we respond there is something we all possess that cannot be taken away from us – and that something is our choice.

And as people of faith – we must never forget that our choice can and is influenced by the power of God’s Holy Spirit at work in our lives.
Our chosen response is not reliant on the circumstances happening around us.

Our response, as people of faith, stems not from how we relate to the world…
Rather, our response in this world, stems from how God relates to us in this world…
We have been given a great gift of grace and transformation and life-renewal through our relationship with God as revealed in and through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ.
And that relationship can change the way we see our place in this world.

Our circumstances do not define our lives…God’s love and Christ’s grace and the Holy Spirit’s sustaining presence…those are the influencing factors in our lives.
We have been given great power through the love of God to rise above – to transcend our humanness and become the people God calls us to be.
Through the power of God’s Holy Spirit at work in our lives, we can choose to make the right decisions…we can choose to become the people God has created us to be.

The reality of Jesus’ life was that the Pharisee and Tax Collector were set apart from each other in society – they were the two ends of life’s continuum – they were the extremes.
One believed he was more perfect when compared to any other…
One believed he was disinherited – on the fringe of society – on the outside looking in – when compared to another…
One had everything going for him…One had very little going for him.
They were set apart.

We have things which set us apart from the people around us too.
Maybe it’s what we do or what we own or who we know…
Maybe it’s how we view ourselves in this world…
Whatever it is each of us is faced daily with the choice of how we will respond in faith to the circumstances of life which surround us…
Each of us, in the words of Michael Jackson’s hit song Man in the Mirror gets to decide every day how the man (or woman) in the mirror will choose to be changed by God’s grace AND in turn how we will change the world through God’s grace.

The reality of our lives is – we’ve all got a Pharisee and a Tax Collector living inside our heads – we’ve got both ends of the spectrum competing for dominance.
One side says, “Hmph.  We’re pretty good.  We’ve got it better than that poor person down the street.  And by God, we’re glad for that.  We are pretty special.  We might even be God’s gift to the world.”
We’ve also got another side that says, “Uggh.  You know what; we’re not worthy.  In fact, left to our own devices we’d make the wrong choice every time.  But for the grace of God…”

All of us have a choice to make every day about which voice will we listen to.
And this choice directly influences how we live in the world.
Will we live like the Pharisee who sees only those people which stir up feelings of superiority because we are NOTHING like them.
Will we live like the Tax Collector who sees only those people that stir up feelings of inadequacy because we can NEVER be like them.
OR will we live somewhere in the middle – realizing that when Pharisaic Superiority or Tax Collector Inadequacy come to mind we will keep them in line by choosing to remember that we are children of God who have value and worth NOT in being compared to anyone else…rather our value and worth is a result of God’s direct action and love revealed most dramatically & emphatically in and through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ.
 
Will we be a Pharisee…Will we be a Tax Collector…or…Will we live somewhere in the middle remembering that we are children of God and in that knowledge will we then treat each other accordingly, as beloved Children of God?  Amen and Amen.

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