A Fourth Church Sermon by Calum I. MacLeod

October 24, 2004 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Hands and Hearts

Calum I. MacLeod
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 65
Joel 2:23–32
Luke 18:9–14

“For all who exalt themselves will be humbled,
but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

Luke 8:14 (NRSV)

What life have you if you have not life together?
There is no life that is not in community,
and no community not lived in praise of God.

T. S. Eliot
Choruses from The Rock

I invite you to focus this morning on that which is above. You may be murmuring, “What does he mean? We do that every Sunday when we come to church and seek to understand our encounter with God, who, in some sense, metaphorically is above.” But no, this morning I mean it literally—that which is actually above us, our art installation for Stewardship season, the hearts and hands joined together hanging above the nave, which were alluded to earlier by the Culbertson family in their Minute for Mission.

On the inside back page of your bulletin is a little piece about the hearts and hands and something of what they mean. They look deceptively simple, our hearts and hands, but it is amazing the amount of work that went into this art installation above us—from the initial design concept by California liturgical artist Nancy Chinn, to the dozens and dozens of volunteers (some of whom I know are sitting in the congregation today) who came day after day to cut out the hearts and hands from foam, to the complex creation of a lattice from fishing line from which the hearts and hands would be hung, and then finally to that most delicate action of raising the installation together by ropes attached to the columns on the side of the church.

It also, I think, looks deceptively innocent, but I have to acknowledge that the hearts and hands installation was cause of some consternation at the time of its installation. This was mainly among brides and brides’ mothers, I have to say, who, walking into the sanctuary on the Friday afternoon for a little peek at the lovely church, nearly had a heart attack to see hearts and hands hanging just above their heads (this was before the art was finally raised to the level where it currently is). I had one particular bride who called me in great anguish on that Friday. I said, “Don’t worry; everything will be fine.” She said, “I don’t mind. It’s my husband. He’ll go apoplectic when he sees it.” So I called the groom, and happily I can report that I don’t think he even noticed the hearts and hands. I think he was so nervous about getting married.

What do you see I wonder? What do you see as you look up at the hearts and hands? The coming together of hopes and aspirations and gifts for this church and the community it serves, perhaps. The interlocking of individual parts to form a whole. I had a conversation with one of the bridesmaids at one of the weddings on the Saturday after the installation was raised. She said it looks like the earth. I asked her if that was because of the hands and hearts representing the different parts of humanity. She said no, that it was the colors—how the colors are bunched together, the blue like sea and then the earth colors. She said, “It reminds me of the globe.” I thought that was a beautiful interpretation, and we alluded to that in the psalms that we sang this morning: “All People That on Earth Do Dwell.”

I think there’s maybe a further way we can look at it, and there’s a lesson in our hearts and hands that I think might be illuminated by our text this morning, the scripture from Luke’s Gospel. It’s a simple story on the face of it, as it is so often with the parables that Jesus tells. Two people go up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee, the other a tax collector. Now when Jesus uses those two figures, we’re not necessarily to think about individuals but to see them as types. They stand as symbols for us and for those who would have heard the parable. The Pharisee is a paragon of virtue, a member of an exclusive part of the Jewish religious tradition at the time, charged with keeping the laws of the Torah. The Pharisee is the ultimate religious insider, the establishment figure. The tax collector, or the publican, as he was referred to in the King James version, which will be familiar to many of you—the tax collector is a symbol of corruption, of greed, of hopelessness, of one who sells out to the prevailing powers, the occupying Roman forces, the one who is a lackey in their collection of funds from the oppressed people. The tax collector is the outsider in religious terms.

Jesus says the Pharisee is standing by himself and this is what he prays: “I thank you, God, I’m not like other people.” And then he goes on to outline examples of that: not a thief, a rogue, an adulterer—indeed not. And then he follows that with even further self-justification of how he is different from others: he not only follows the law, but he goes beyond the strict cultic stipulations of the Torah in his fasting and tithing on everything. And the tax collector, oblivious of where he is, his head bowed, prays, “God, be merciful to me a sinner.”

“Now,” says Jesus, “it is the tax collector, the hopeless corrupt outsider, it is that one, rather than the Pharisee, who is justified, who is made righteous in God’s sight, who lives in right relationship with God.” Fred Craddock, a great preacher and writer, comments on this passage, speaks about how this would be such a shock for the listeners as they heard this story because it’s a total reversal of their expectations. Now those of us who have sat in these pews or in other pews in the past few months and have been listening to Luke’s Gospel as it unfolds may not be so surprised, because we’ll have learned that one of the themes of Luke’s Gospel, coming right from the start, is the irruption of the kingdom of God in the figure of Jesus that upsets, turns upside down, the world’s expectations. It is there at the start when Mary sings her song, the Magnificat, about how the proud will be brought low and those who are low will be exalted.

Why does Jesus tell this story, we may ask ourselves this morning. Well, it might be about prayer, because the two figures in the story are praying. And this particular story follows on from a parable that Jesus has just told about an unjust judge and a widow. About how the how the unjust judge finally gives a decision to the widow because she keeps nagging him, keeps going on at him. Jesus says, “How much more then will God care for you when you offer prayer?” And then it is followed with this story. So perhaps there’s something here about focus, about where our focus is when God hears and acts. The Pharisee is clearly focused not on God but on himself, not on God but on self. Do you remember that scene in Hamlet where Hamlet creeps up on Claudius, who is kneeling in prayer in the chapel, and as Hamlet thinks about killing Claudius, which he’s indecisive about, he rationalizes to himself why not to do it then: because Claudius is praying, and therefore, if he were killed, his soul would go to heaven. As Hamlet slinks off, Claudius gets up from his position, and says wearily,

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below,
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

That’s like the Pharisee: the words that were spoken were not heaven-focused, were not God-focused, but self-focused. The tax collector, however, exhibits humility, a lack of awareness of those who are around him because his focus is, instead, on God. So perhaps Jesus’ story is about prayer.

But perhaps there’s another level of meaning. Perhaps Jesus is speaking about what true religion is. I came across a lovely piece written by a Benedictine sister called Joan Chittister, who’s a very fine theologian. She was writing about her own faith journey. She says, “I learned that to be properly wicked it was not necessary to break the law—just to keep it to the letter.” That would have been the Pharisee, keeping the law to the letter.

William Sloane Coffin, great Protestant leader of the twentieth-century, who’s been spoken of from this pulpit a number of times, describes true religion as “that which strives to convert people from self-preoccupation to the wholehearted giving of oneself in love for God and for others.” Isn’t that an extraordinary description? For Coffin, that’s not just about Christianity—although it is true for Christianity—but also about Islam and Buddhism and Hinduism and Judaism in their fullest expressions of truth.

I came across a delightful sermon by Elam Davies, who was the pastor of this congregation for many years. It was a sermon delivered from this pulpit, and his subject was idolatry. He described three columns in which there was a descriptor of a kind of idolatry, the image of God, and what it made us do or say. He talked about

the idolatry
how it worships
who pray
of piousness
a God of lovelessness
“I thank you that I am not as others are.”

Isn’t that an extraordinary commentary on those words of the Pharisee? But I think there’s another place to go in the text this morning if we hold those two layers of meaning together and look at a phrase that kind of jumps out at us from the text in verse 11. Jesus says the Pharisee, “standing by himself,” is praying. The Pharisee is aloof, self-exalted, far away from the others in the temple, far from the great unwashed. The Pharisee identifies self over and against other, in opposition to the other—the thieves and the rogues, the adulterers and those who don’t fast. The sinner is different because the sinner has such a lack of focus on self that there is a total identification with his existential situation, with his relationship with God, who recognizes him as broken. William Barclay, the Scottish New Testament scholar, suggests that we can read the sinner’s prayer not only as “God be merciful to me, a sinner” but also as “God, be merciful to me, the sinner.”

Here is total identification with all those who know what it is to live in brokenness. Perhaps here the teaching on prayer and the understanding of true religion along with this tension can take us to a central understanding of our faith. I’m using some words from Peter Gomes, preacher at Harvard University, to describe this. In a sermon he preached, he says,

It took me a long time to realize that the Christian faith is not the triumph of the individual over evil or even the solitary accomplishment of good, but rather a community, a fellowship of explicitly shared hopes and experiences, frustrations and failures. How long it has taken me to realize that there is no such thing as a private Christian, no such thing as a personal faith in the sense of its belonging to me and no one else.

That, in itself, could be a commentary on the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector. The life of faith takes place in community, T. S. Eliot says that there is no life that is not in community. This is true not only in the context of religious faith but also in how that interacts with politics and economics and sociology. Too many throughout the world are the religious leaders who identify themselves and their cult over and against others. Too many are the financiers who stand aloof for greater personal gain regardless of the impact on the ordinary people. Too many are the politicians more interested in their own political survival than working together for the greater good. Too often we on the journey of faith fall into the trap of giving thanks that we are not like the others. But perhaps it is when we are at our best, at our most humble, and our focus is above—metaphorically and literally—that we are able to share in right relationship with God and each other, to know community where our hearts are, where love comes from, and which knows the love of God and Christ, and they are joined with our hands, which do the work of love. Hearts and hands in the community of justice, kindness, and humility—and all to the glory of Jesus Christ, whom to know is life abundant and whom to serve is perfect freedom. Amen.