Grace is Strange, Unfair, and Offensive

Jeremiah 31:31-34
Luke 18:9-14

A sermon for Harvest Festival

I want to talk to you today about grace, because harvests are about grace… because all of this is about grace… because anything we can be thankful for comes to us by grace. We say that grace is “unmerited love” or a “free gift”, which is a start but not enough. So then we do what Jesus did: We tell parables about grace. Grace is like the lost sheep. The shepherd leaves the other ninety-nine unattended, risking their safety, for the sake of the one. Grace is strange. Grace is like the son who returns home after leaving the family and squandering his inheritance. Grace is unfair. Grace is like the worker who works the last five minutes of the day and receives the same wages as the one who was hard at work 9-5. Grace is offensive. Grace is for the tax collector, who knows he’s a sinner, and the Pharisee, who thinks he is righteous. Grace is: Strange, Unfair, and Offensive.

            Yet, grace is how God interacts with us. Jeremiah gives us a new covenant centered on grace. Jeremiah tells us that this promise—unlike the ones made with Abraham and Moses, which depended so much on how the tribes of Israel would respond—no! This new covenant is written on the hearts of the people; that they will be God’s people, God will be there God—that’s that! Grace is God saying, “You are mine, like it or not.” Grace does not revel in freedom and liberty but takes it from us, nanner-nanner boo-boo.

            And there’s the problem! We like freedom and liberty, but grace takes them away from us. Why?

I want to turn for a moment to a story from Luke’s Gospel of the Pharisee and the tax collector (or the publican, as some of you have heard him called) (18:9-14). It’s not the most well-known of parables so I’ll briefly run through it. Jesus tells us about a man, a Pharisee, who prays in a certain way. He says, “God I thank you that I am not like others are, greedy, unjust, adulterers—and I thank you especially that I am not like this tax collector.” Then Jesus tells us about that tax collector to whom the Pharisee is referring, who prays a different way. He says, “O God, be merciful to me a sinner.” That’s the parable. Jesus explains it like this. He says, “I tell you, this man (the tax collector) went to his house justified rather than the other: for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

            I want to talk about the new covenant through the lens of that parable for two reasons: 1. It shows us what grace really is, and 2. It should remind us why we have a harvest festival in the first place. It is by the grace of God that we gather today; not our own merits, not our hard work, not because we deserve it.

            I want to use this parable from Luke’s Gospel because it makes clear how strange, unfair, and offensive grace is; it lays bare the ramifications of the new covenant that Jeremiah brings us.

In order to dig underneath this question of grace we have to start by forgetting all the prejudicial opinions we have of Pharisees. This Pharisee is a good guy—not a crook, the kind of guy you would want your daughter to bring home; he is a family man. He is a person who makes an honest living, who works hard for it, who has never stolen from anyone. He is a good friend, a kind neighbor. But, more than that, he is not only good; he was religious. Not a hypocrite, he follows the Torah. He puts his ten percent in the offering. He is at church every Saturday—he is Jewish after all. He is nothing like this tax collector; this tool of the Roman government. This man who defrauded people of their livings, skimming off the top, who made his living off the back of the working poor. Worst of all, this tax collector was a traitor, because he was one of the people—he spoke their language, knew their customs, this is why he was so valuable to the Romans. He knew where people were hiding, knew exactly how to get out of them every last penny they owed, and then he would take a little more for himself.

            The Pharisee was good and religious; the tax collector stole and lied and betrayed his people. Yet, Jesus says that the Pharisee is not only in trouble, but he is actually much worse off than the tax-collector with his fingers in your pockets. What gives?

This parable is strange, unfair, and offensive. It is all these things because we, like the Pharisee, spend most of our formative years disciplining ourselves to live a good life. We see ourselves as the hero in our own story and through hard work and guile we believe that we will leave behind the weight of our misfortunes to find the life we deserve. Our typical orientation is toward the American Dream, but this is not how grace works. The Pharisee’s religious devotion does not change the fact that he is playing that great human game of comparison, becoming a man worthy of something—respect, adoration, prestige. He is only following the rules. He’s only doing exactly what his parents taught him: Raising a family right, doing good work, giving away his time and money. I dare say that today we would point at him on the street and say, “There, there goes a Christian man.” He is, after all, only doing as he was taught. He doesn’t even expect anything in exchange for it. He’s not asking God for karmic justice; he’s not asking for more good things to come. The Pharisee is simply thankful for all that he has been given.

            What could Jesus possibly see wrong with that?

            Well, turns out that thankfulness that is only about me is not at all what faith is about. This we must listen for on this Harvest Festival. Today can be a day about giving thanks for all that God has given us in the form of food and money and resources and time, but that’s not really enough. Even our lives are not enough and may be demanded of us at any moment. Nothing is guaranteed. On the one hand, this is the reason to be thankful for what we have been given, but ultimately what God wants from us is not our thankfulness for life but our confession that we are dead. Jesus shows us that the Pharisee, as righteous as he appeared, was taking his stand on the wrong thing—he was staking his faith on his life works. His faith, humble though it was, was rooted in his life; not in his death, and we know this because his prayer gave away the comparisons he was making to justify himself. His testimony bears witness to a God who provides things, but God is not about promising us temporary things. This God who we know in Jesus Christ is not about giving us things but about resurrecting the dead. Grace is for death, where life meets eternity. The new covenant that Jeremiah preaches is about eternity. “You will be my people,” says the Lord, “I will be your God.” And the plans I have are much bigger than you. As Robert Farrar Capon says, “[Jesus] condemns the Pharisee because he takes his stand on a life God cannot use; he commends the [tax collector] because he rests his case on a death that God can use” (Capon, Kingdom, Grace, Judgment).

            Today, Harvest Festival, is a day like any other in the church, where we come to celebrate not the things we have been given, which can be taken away in an instant. We come not to be thankful for things alone, for security alone, for friends and family alone, for freedom alone. All those things are about taking a stand on a life God cannot use. Rather, we come together this Sunday, like every Sunday, to celebrate the resurrection of the dead. We confess we are dead; then, only then, can God do something with us. The tax collector understands that he is dead in sin, that there is no saving him, and no amount of good deeds or well-earned comforts will make it right. The Pharisee holds on with religious devotion to a life God cannot use.

            Today we are thankful for the harvest, however relatively successful or unsuccessful it has been for you, but, more importantly, we confess that if this harvest is ultimately beyond our control, then how much less can we save ourselves? How much more are we dependent on God’s grace to do something we cannot do on our own?

            This new covenant God makes with us through Jeremiah is a promise that we are chosen by God apart from what we deserve; it’s a promise of joy that, until we lay down our lives, we cannot know; it’s a promise of resurrection, which we cannot experience until we see that we are dead. Thankfulness is nice. Confession is better. Grace is best of all.

            And if you don’t believe it, take heart, because God is writing it on your heart, quite apart from what you want. Grace, it turns out, is not a choice. You will discover it’s there simply by letting go. Then, thankfulness will become our response to the realization that we are dead people walking, and dead people have no use of anything but resurrection. If we admit, like the tax collector, that we are dead—if we believe, as Jeremiah says, that the new covenant is written by God our on hearts and it is not our choices that matters but God’s choosing of us—then we can take that at-first terrifying step out into the world and discover a few things. First, it’s not terrifying at all. Second, our gratitude will be deeper, because we will not have any urge to count the beans that separate us from our neighbors. After all, the dead need not compare how dead they are! And third, we will find that grace is so strange, unfair, and offensive that by virtue of killing our freedom it will set us free.

            The good news—the best news—is that the resurrection of the dead matters both for the Pharisee and the tax collector, because the only requirements for the new covenant is that you are dead. And these two are most certainly dead. God’s new covenant through Jeremiah feels different because, more than what God promised through Abraham and Moses, this was a promise for dead people. So what do dead people do with a promise? They party with reckless abandon! They give it all away. They don’t care what the neighbors are thinking, because the neighbors are dead people who don’t know they’re dead. In short, grace-filled dead people do all the things that Jesus is forever harping on in the Gospels that don’t make sense. That’s grace! It’s strange, unfair, and offensive, because we don’t realize we are just dead people barely holding on. If you don’t think that’s a message befitting the harvest, then maybe you don’t get grace. Today is about what dead people do when they’re given life. It’s a day to celebrate, to be thankful, because there is no greater celebration than the dead being brought back to life. We’re dead, but we’re alive, and we have a promise that we will be forever. Let the celebration begin!