Creekside Church Sermon of October 25, 1998 "Muddle & Mercy " Luke 18:9-14	Rev. David Bibbee
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A certain city had a decades old tradition of honoring one of its own with the prestigious "Citizen of the Year Award". This award was given to the person who embodied the ideals of integrity, industriousness, commitment and caring, and embodied a community spirit which contributed to the city's betterment.

After a litany of accomplishments and accolades was read, the award was presented to John J. Hastings. In response, John said, "I am deeply grateful for this honor. My involvement in the life of this city and its people has been called special, but what I do is not exceptional because I believe it is what is expected of every Christian. It is my deep belief in God and following the path God has established that inspires what I do and who I am.

I've been a member of First Church all my life. I've been a Sunday school teacher and a Bible study leader for years. I have chaired our church board for several terms, led Stewardship campaigns, and am a Stephen Minister. I was fortunate to have been raised in a home that taught the importance of loving and serving God. I back my beliefs with my billfold and give ten percent to the church off the top. I've served on mission projects from Annapolis to Anaheim and have been used to bring others to faith in the Lord. I feel blessed to have been a blessing.

That is why on the way here tonight, I stopped to pray in the First Church sanctuary, grateful for my upbringing, my accomplishments, and the satisfaction of knowing I have been an example to others."

Now on his way down the church steps, John hurried past a rough looking man tentatively making his way to the entrance. Things had not exactly gone Bob's way, and his way certainly wasn't the way to go. He was a veteran-a veteran of four failed marriages and dubious business ventures that included an adult bookstore, a drug dealership that earned him five years in the penitentiary, and his current, and most respectable venture comparatively speaking...a tattoo parlor. Over the sordid years Bob had contributed to the delinquency of a small army of minors. He had honored every dark impulse, and lived according to the seven deadly sins.

If John was the citizen of the year, Bob deserved the distinction "Poor Excuse for a Human Being." He didn't ask himself where his life was headed. He didn't care...until one day a memory long buried in the brain surfaced...the memory of his grandmother taking him to church as a boy, and how good and right it felt back then, and how empty, miserable and meaningless his life felt now. Bob was then flooded with this strange need to somehow atone for the mess he had made of his and other's lives, though not sure how.

Bob walked to the church down the street. He hadn't been in a church for over forty years. He sat in the shadows in the back pew, head held low, nervously rubbing his hands. He didn't know how to pray. He didn't know the right words. What came out was tears and the words, "I'm sorry...I need help."

Let me ask you a question. Who would you rather have in church, John or Bob? I know your answer because I know mine. If you set the rules, if you could choose the folks to fill the pews on Sunday morning, who would it be? The one who loves the church, knows his Bible, teaches Sunday school, and gives ten percent, or Bob? Mr. Citizen, of course. But what if I said that of the two who walked into First Church, Bob came closer to God? You would be offended, and closer to understanding why Jesus was killed for the stories he told.

A Pharisee and tax collector went to the temple to pray. The Pharisee was a good, good man. He loved God with all his heart. He did precisely what he was supposed to do. He kept the commandments. Dotted every i, crossed every t. He practiced what he believed. He stood confidently and prayed, "Thank you God that I am not like the low lifes. I do what is required and more." What a guy. The tax collector on the other hand was anything but good. He was a Jew working for the hated Romans to collect excessive taxes and pad his pocket at the expense of his neighbors. He was despised.

The Pharisee's house was in order. He didn't need anything. But the taxman knew his need. He didn't just call himself "A" sinner. In the Greek it translates "The" sinner. Someone said he didn't compare himself to the gutter like the Pharisee, but to the sky, knowing how far from God he had gone. Jesus said the Pharisee prayed with himself, but the taxman fell to the floor for mercy. "And I tell you," Jesus said, "this man went back home justified, and not the other."

Does anyone find this strange? God drew near the ethically bankrupt one, not the ethically sound. It's easy not to hear this parable because we focus on the two characters and do a quick inventory. We want to do right, but not act stuck-up. We want to be appropriately humble, and know our need of mercy. But this treatment doesn't take the parable far enough. It is not finally about two men at prayer, and how we are like or unlike them.

No, this and many of Jesus' other parables isn't about us, it's about God. It tells us that God is not obliged to deal with people according to our standards for distinguishing the righteous from the rejects. God can't do much for people who think they have it all together. Jesus said God is partial to the meek, the humble, the poor in spirit for they know they don't have it within themselves to save themselves. Jesus came for the sick and far off. He said that God is a good shepherd who leaves the 99 sheep in order to find the one that is lost. He said there is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who hollered, "Help!" than those who don't need it.

I wish it wasn't so, but we seem to learn more from the painful periods of life than any other. Several weeks ago I was enveloped by the dark cloud of depression. I felt as low as I could go. My confidence was gone. I felt worthless. Everything I had done seemed pointless. Prospects for a better tomorrow seemed hopeless. Then one day while I was with my spiritual director, Sister Patricia, I said, "I can't keep up the fa‡ade that I am in control of things." "Wonderful!" she said. I went on, "I'm just as broke as all the people who come to me for help." "Stop right there," she said. "Did you hear yourself?"

"I'm just as broken as everyone else." "Congratulations!" she said. "You are now a member of the human race...a part of broken humanity, and maybe now you can hear what God has tried to tell you all along and you haven't fully believed. God loves you, loves you at your best and worst. God loves you in your messiness and in your brokenness when you can't handle life by yourself."

This marked the start of a continuing turn for me. I think you can make that turn, too. We've done nothing to deserve God's love, but we get it anyway. Phillip Yancey said, "God isn't in the business of dispensing wages or rewards. God dispenses gifts." We call that gift, grace. It costs us nothing. It costs God everything. It cost his son, but God did it to bring us back into a relationship with him for which we were made. Like the father who didn't give up hope for the return of his prodigal playboy son, and threw a party when he came home, God lovingly awaits our return.

Who is God according to this and Jesus' other parables? A God whose love is broader than the measure of our minds. A God whose grace is so great that there is nothing we can do to make God love us more. No rigorous spiritual exercises, no good works, wonderful though they may be. Who is this God? A God who, like the tax collector discovered, holds such grace for us that there is nothing we can do to make God love us less. Nothing you have thought, said, or done...nothing will change God's love for you.

The biggest obstacle is we ourselves. God loves us. How easy to say, and how hard to deeply believe. We want to love him and be loved by him, but we're not sure...so we hide, or resist, or butter God up by showing only the pleasing, polished parts of ourselves.

Love Unknown is a novel about an Anglican priest who made a mess of his life. Bartle divorced his wife and had an affair with a young woman. Everything he tried ended in failure. The only tie he retained with the church was his annual Christmas confession. Sitting in the back of an old church on Christmas Eve, he heard the priest read from the Psalms, "I will walk in my house with a perfect heart; I hate the sins of unfaithfulness; there shalt no such cleave unto me." Bartle thought of how he had been unfaithful to every important thing in his life, above all, God.

He hated confession, but believed his life would fall apart if he didn't. "What's the point? Keeping God's law is an impossible perfection." But then another verse came to him. "My strength is made perfect in weakness," which then inspired Bartle to pray:

"Lord God, my priesthood is a gift, which like all your other gifts, I have wasted and squandered and spoilt. I know nothing of you. My attempts to follow you have all failed, and again and again and again. But even now, as I promise to do better, I know that I have nothing to look forward to but failure and more failure.

But it is to you that I come, dear Physician of life. I no longer dare to ask to be perfect, even as you are perfect. I dare only to kneel in your presence in all my muddle and impurity and doubt and offer these things to you.

Muddle, impurity and doubt is all I have to offer you, O Holy child of Bethlehem. O friend of sinners, O helpless child, this is my offering to you."

And when Bartle came out of the church into the dark evening, he felt the world transfigured.

Two men went to the temple to pray-a righteous, live by the book Pharisee, and a tax collector. One was confident, the other contrite. On any given Sunday, they are here. On any given Sunday there are more tax collectors, Bartles and Bobs here than Citizens of the Year. And if you are poor in spirit, unsure, broken, and brought low, I've got good news for you. "A broken and contrite heart God will not despise." He dispenses a gift called grace. When from deep in the muddle and mire you pray, "God, be merciful,"...He will. Know that he will.

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