Sermons from the Pulpit

Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on Reformation Sunday, October 28, 2001, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.

Sirach 35:12-21; Joel 2:23-32; Luke18:9-14

The prayer of the humble pierces the clouds, and it will not rest until it reaches its goal; it will not desist until the Most High responds.
    -Sirach 35:21

     Short sermon today. Tune in early or you'll miss it.

     God let our prayers be like that! Let us be heard in heaven when we pray. Whenever I pray, whatever I pray about, that prayer is underneath it. Please God, let there be a point to my praying, let it not be a waste of my breath and my hope.

     Last Sunday and today we're getting advice about that. A week ago it was the parable of the widow who was so relentless in demanding justice that even a mean and unfair judge would break down and pay attention to her, and this was to let us know that if we are similarly persistent, surely a loving and righteous God will hear us. Today it's the Pharisee and the tax collector, and the news is that God screens out pride but listens to the humble heart.

     So: persistence and humility, those are the things we need in our prayers. Are we all comfortable with that? I bet we're not.

     Persistence is actually the easier of the two. You just have to learn to keep at it regardless of anything, regardless especially of how you feel about it. We have this very Protestant notion that when you pray it has to be with a certain attitude of trust and confidence and open-hearted sincerity, and if God catches you just going through the motions or just doing it because you can't think of anything else to do, that's going to turn God right off. Which is nonsense. You can't be persistent about anything if you have to be in the right frame of mind to do it. We're talking discipline, will, even force of habit here. Once you get that through your head, persistence is at least possible.

     Ah, but humility - that's harder, isn't it? How many of us, when Jim read that parable, how many of us said to ourselves something along the lines of: "Thank God I'm not like that Pharisee!" And there went our humility, right up in smoke. The New Testament is so full of odious Pharisees, I doubt that there has ever been a Christian who never thanked God for not being one of them, and thereby became this very Pharisee.

     The prayer of the righteous rises to God like sweet incense, it says somewhere in Scripture - or if it doesn't say that, it should - but the prayer of the self-righteous is, according to Isaiah 65, "a smoke in God's nose." I'd do anything not to be a smoke in God's nose.

     The problem is, we are living in a time when self-esteem is considered to be an essential part of good mental health. We are supposed to think highly of ourselves. It's said, in fact, that not enough people are sufficiently pleased with themselves, indeed there is a lot of self-hatred around, and that's what causes people to make these invidious comparisons and put others down as this Pharisee put that tax collector down: If you can make someone else look worse than you look to yourself, that helps you to feel less bad about yourself. So this poor Pharisee is just a victim of low self-esteem, trying to build up his fragile ego.

     We're all familiar with this kind of reasoning. But suppose for the sake of argument that it's right on target. So what? It might still be true that putting other people down is a sin, regardless of why we do it. And it might also be true that low self-esteem is not the same thing as humility. And therefore low self-esteem might be a toxic menace, whereas humility might be essential to one's spiritual health and it might be the very foundation of prayer.

     There is a famous old prayer by a famous old rabbi. He said:

     One must utter three praises every day:

     Praised be the Lord that He did not make me a heathen, for all the heathen are as nothing before him.
Praised be the Lord, that He did not make me a woman, for woman is not under obligation to fulfill the Law.
Praised be the Lord that He did not make me an uneducated man, for the uneducated man is not cautious to avoid sins.

     I am quite sure this was a very heartfelt prayer, offered in a genuine spirit of confidence in and gratitude to God. But we've already observed that the correct attitude in prayer isn't necessary, so we shouldn't be surprised if it isn't enough. Consider the ancient Jewish folk tale:

     Once upon a time there was a rabbi who was at the point of death, so the whole town proclaimed a day of fasting and prayer to God for him to live. Everyone gathered in the synagogue for penance and prayer, except for the town drunkard who went to the village tavern for some schnapps. Another man saw him and rebuked him, saying, "Don't you know this is a fast day and you're not allowed to drink? Everybody's at the synagogue praying for the rabbi!" So the drunkard went to the synagogue too, and he said this prayer: "Dear God! Please restore our rabbi to good health so that I can have a drink!" And the rabbi recovered! It was a miracle. And the recovered rabbi said, "May God preserve our village drunkard until he is a hundred and twenty years old! His prayer was heard by God when all of yours were not. He put his whole heart and soul into his prayer!"

     And, we might add, he managed to leave the hearts and souls of his neighbors for those neighbors and their God to deal with, and he made no assumptions about their relative worthiness vis-à-vis his own. Not bad for a town drunk. Perhaps we can hope one day to pray as well as a tax collector or a drunk.

     Amen