A Thousand Spent Elsewhere

There is a fine and providential tweet over on the twitter this morning, one that my heart cries out, yea, faints to plunk down right here.

My Relationship With God Is Not Measured By My Attendance At Church #SundayThoughts #SundayMotivation pic.twitter.com/UYSlwGU64v

— 6lAcC ChYnA

Meanwhile, over in the temple—that wide, smooth court, that place where God promised to dwell—Jesus hangs about watching all the people coming and going with their blasé unconcern that is the common touchstone of our humanity. We wander around in a fog, sure that we know about a lot of things, using ourselves and our inclinations, our desires, our thoughts as the measure, the arbiter, the judge. What a very good, cosmic joke, for God to sit there, observing everybody without any of them noticing him.

Some people might like, at the point, to administer a dose of shame. “Wouldn’t you feel awful about what you’re doing, if God were here right now, looking at you, wouldn’t you feel sad?” And truly, there is a good and reasonable time for shame, as we shall see. But that is not the prevailing emotion.

So Jesus, watching all the passers by, tells a little story, and who knows, he may have seen it himself. To one degree or another, this is the accidental selfie of every human soul. There are those who “trust in themselves that they are righteous, and treat others with contempt,” and then there are the others who are so treated.

Two men, says Jesus, go up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. One good and the other bad. One reviled in his day, and the other acclaimed. One of them has to be Kanye West, but that probably sends us veering right off track. The Pharisee, standing by himself, thanked God that he wasn’t like that other one over there, like Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer, like that judge that is going to let that little boy be chemically castrated, like the climate change denier, like the people who voted for Mr. Trump, or didn’t vote for him…there’s always someone you can be thankful that you’re not. That’s the problem, whoever you look at, depending on how you adjust your lens, you can see your own goodness. Goodness, we all like to feel, must be black and white. It is binary, like gender was last week. But really, it’s fifty shades of taupe. It is a twitter hashtag of epic proportions—the longer you read it, or look at it, the more impossible it is to know anything about its truth.

But the Pharisee, thanking God, doesn’t look at it that closely. The clear unwavering light of the afternoon sun, falling on those smooth paving stones between him and the other man makes his own goodness bright, unquestionable. He fasts, he tithes, he is right.

The irony runs deeper even than knowing this about yourself when God is sitting over on the other side of the courtyard, discerning your thoughts from not that far, untangling the desires of your heart in one unconfused glance. You should have known, just from reading the daily office, that there is no one righteous, no not one. You didn’t need to wait for St. Paul, you could have learned it from the law and the prophets, all of them.

And there is the other man. He is stooped, overwrought, ashamed, unwilling to lift up his eyes to see anything but his own grief and ruin. He looks over his whole life and doesn’t see anything but injustice, extortion, the acutely bitter dregs of himself as he really is.

Because, honestly, the Pharisee isn’t wrong, is he? A tax collector is a tax collector. Lori Loughlin is Lori Loughlin. Amber Geiger is Amber Geiger. Although, as I hear so often—if you know better, you do better. If you just understand that you are, for example, made in God’s image, or understand that you just need to dig deep to discover the real you, you will behave in the right way, your natural goodness will shine forth like the noon day sun. That is the prevailing cultural wind. Perhaps the Tax Collector hasn’t discovered his true self, as the Pharisee clearly has. He should proclaim it for the wide world on his Insta, or blog about it as I like to do.

Somehow he didn’t get the message and so he only moaned for one thing, “Be merciful to me, a sinner.” Nothing more is said about him. Jesus doesn’t rush over to him to tell him not to be so hard on himself, doesn’t smooth his brow. He stays where he is, a holy God in his daily profaned temple. The two men turn around to go home. They can’t stay there always, not for a thousand years, not even as a door keeper. They have to go one by one down all those steps, down into the jostling rush of humanity as it gets super on the table.

But something did happen. The whole world was overturned in those two prayers. One of the men went away “justified.” Like Abraham dropping all his moon gods and packing all his stuff to go wait his whole life for a son. Like the little slave girl, lost to her family and her home, sending her leprous master off to find a true prophet. Like everyone who, like the swallow, makes a nest right by the altar, right there in the temple, refusing to leave, begging to be allowed to live there forever and not to be sent away.

“…rather than the other one,” says Jesus, the Pharisee, who did not humble himself, who was unwilling to beg, who was not crushed under the burden and shame of his own self, but who stood up, pulled his phone out of his robe, and scoffed at the dregs of twitter.

Our tweeter is right. Your relationship with God is not measured by your church attendance, nor the good things that you do, nor your correct opinions, nor your feelings about other people. Though if you are measuring yourself, it will be all of those things. You will tot them up and look around, overlooking an eternal, merciful God, sitting across the way, watching your tabulations. No, it’s not your church attendance. It’s your deep, unquenchable longing to stay there, in the presence of your Lord, to stoop in the bitterness of your spirit and cling on to God’s mercy forever.

Come on, man, go to church.