First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

Luke 18

“What Kind of Sign do you Need?

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

October 28, 2007

            Simple parables make me really nervous.  This little parable seems so straightforward, plain.  And that’s what doesn’t sit well with me.

            Jesus turns to his disciples and gives them an example of two men praying.  The first is a Pharisee who lives a life of religious devotion, which is contrasted by his vanity.  He is a man who does the right things, but something is very wrong in his heart.  Praying out loud, giving thanks, that he is better than tax collector is a pretty big character flaw.  He is self-righteous and thus easy to hate.

            The second man is a tax collector, a traitor, a cheat and so on.  He is the epitome of what you don’t want your child to be; he is a great example of a bad man.  He is easy to hate as well.  Yet, his prayer is selfless, he won’t even raise his eyes before God.

            Jesus concludes the parable with a rather big claim: the first went home without God’s blessing, the second went home justified.  Humility it would appear is more important than religious observance.  The prophets summed this up when they said, to obey is better than sacrifice.

            Other than the idea that the tax collector is now a good guy, the parable is really, really straight forward.  Don’t think of grace as something you are owed, something you earn; approach God in humility and you will be justified: made right.  It’s a rather straightforward claim and that really makes me nervous.

            Add to this that this parable is a kind of hallmark of the Reformation; this little story is a kind of window into our tradition, why we fought the fight, who we are and who we are not and I am starting to get really nervous.  This is unsettling because, what you affirm at first in a parable is almost always what you reject upon reflection.  Parables are wily.

            The Reformers, like John Calvin, took this parable as an example of what they were trying to change in the church.  The reformers believed the church, read Roman Catholic, had put in place a series of obstacles, requirements, stages, steps, doctrines that kept people from grace.  They argued grace comes to us like it came to the publican, it just comes from humility.  No extra steps, no intercessors, no saints, or rites or rituals, just one soul standing in prayer saying I am not worthy, have mercy on me: that, they said, is justification.

            And the parable served them well in this.  They believed there should be no obstacles to the throne of God: you believe, you pray, you repent and you stand before God.  This was the doctrine of justification the reformers put forward.  And they railed against the indulgences and acts of penances the priests imposed, the saints whose name needed to be proclaimed.  They believed what the parable described was how a life of faith is truly to be lived, how we are supposed to be. 

            As is often the case with reform, there is some baby that goes out with the bath water.  What they couldn’t see then was that while the parable was certainly true, it was terribly hard to live; while grace was solely a gift of God that was given without trappings or merit, it was hard to receive it as such.  It turns out the acts of penance, the saints, the special services and rites while they had certainly corrupted and imposed upon the Christian faith strange practices, were, for the most part, attempts to help people cope with and to accept the grace of God as a gift for which they weren’t worthy.  Justification, it turns out, may come without merit, but it cannot be received without effort.

            Where we can really see this in our tradition is in the Puritans.  They believed quite passionately in the notion of a free grace given without merit as our justification, but they struggled to live it.  They didn’t know how to trust it.  How do I know I am justified for sure?  If I can’t earn it, how can I know for sure I am going to keep it, receive it in heaven and so on.  To stave off the challenge, the Puritans developed elaborate practices of looking for signs.

            A sign when put next to a recent event or a decision or a moment of risk was they only way they could know things for sure.  Natural phenomenon like a meteor shower or a strange occurrence like weather out of season was all signs to help them.  God gave them grace freely and also gave signs to help us know that was really the case.

            Tragedy often was taken of sign that a person was not justified; good fortune a sign of justification.  The irony of our parable starts to come up when we realize that the tax collector, while Jesus called him justified, would have been called upon by the Puritans to give them signs that this was so.  He would need to demonstrate and prove it.

One of my favorite examples of how infused they were with signs was a farmer who had just heard a sermon on the disciples following Christ.  Still thinking of this sermon his wife sent him out hunting, as there was no food.  Yet, as he was leaving his house their pig started to follow him.  Being a good Puritan this was a moment of pause: was God giving him a sign, a test really, that he was listening to the sermon or was the pig just wanting to go for a walk.  Taking the pig and having early luck on his hunt he was convinced the pig was God giving him a sign that he himself was following Christ.

            While I am pretty sure we have worked through the obsessive need for signs, trusting a free justification is still hard.  When we see a comet we are not quick to guess it is a sign but something fun to see.  Even though the pig is now just a pig, we still want evidence to feel assured the grace of God is real.

            I watched a great example of this unfold in my first parish.  We too had a Kirkin service there on Reformation Sunday replete with bagpipes.  In this congregation, because the anniversary of the church coincided with that time of year, I encouraged the session to let me invite all the former pastors each year. 

            Fortunately for me they didn’t all come at once.  Although it wasn’t planned this way each year a different pastor would respond to the invitation and come and preach.  It was a real lovely thing.

Each year though one of the pastors in particular wrote me the same note of regret.  He was the pastor of the church from 1968-1972 and it was not a smooth pastorate.  His name was Rev. Curtis and he was a Hungarian refugee who came to the states after the Soviets took over his country.  Such a dramatic turn of events would have been tough enough in terms of transition, but that was only the beginning. 

Leaving Hungary he landed in a small mid-Western town without any Hungarians.  His wife had been detained by the Soviets and she bore the emotional scars of the experience.  She spent a fair amount of time convinced of conspiracies and traitors.  Add to this their teenage son was participating in the cultural revolution of the late 1960s by smoking pot . . . in the manse.  Any one of these would have made for a challenge, add them all up and he never had a chance.

When I came to the church it was more than twenty years since he left.  Yet, each year he wrote me the same guarded note.  Each year you could read into his words a lot of pain and guilt and the persistence of turmoil.  The letter always started with an apology for not being able to make it.  And then he would write, “I would like to come and visit the people who were my friends.”  Mentioning this to a shut in her face narrowed and I could see this was a sore topic for more folks than just the pastor.

Each year he wrote this letter to me.  And then in my last year there, the same letter came with a slight change to it.  Again, he said, “I’d like to come and see the people who were my friends” and then he wrote, “I would also like to come and see the people who didn’t like me and tell them I am sorry.  It was my fault.”

I read that letter over and over again, trying to make some sense of how a man could go- at this point- twenty-five years and just not feel peace.  It was a hard notion.  I was sad that he never came while I was there.  I wish he had come.  There would have been a few people who would have been cross with him still, maybe a few who never would forgive him, but had he come he would have found the church, and the church wouldn’t have withheld grace from him.  The grace he needed.

Reading over our parable today I thought of Rev. Curtis.  I thought of him not only because he was beating himself up like the tax collector, but I thought of him also because his life, his experience is the hidden tension of the parable.  If asked if he was justified before God, the pastor would have been quick to say he was I am sure of this.  Yet, that was not enough, he needed a sign.  He needed a sign that he was really forgiven. 

Knowing your are forgiven and believing this forgiveness is real seems to be two different things.  All we have to do is ask what sort of signs would have been demanded of the tax collector by others that he was truly repentant.  We like to affirm the idea that grace is free, but we also like have a fair amount of assurances before we hand it out, and, even though it seems strange, we want assurances before we accept it for ourselves.

Although we often refer to it as evidence or corroboration or facts, what we are really looking for are the signs of truth. 

Last week three of the men seeking the Republication nomination for president were asked about their faith.  Fred Thompson went first and said, he didn’t go to church, but if he were elected he would start praying.  Mitt Romney whose Mormonism is a rather persistent topic defused the question with a joke.  John McCain was the last one to speak and as is often the case he answered a question with an experience from Viet Nam. 

What he said was that a guard came to him while he was being tortured and was merciful. He was tied in a very painful way and the guard loosened his ropes.  The same guard came back later and tightened them so no one would know.  Later in the year the prisoners were given a rare moment outside at Christmas time.  McCain recounts the guard approached him and with foot made the sign of the cross in the dirt.  After erasing it, he walked away.

I think the point McCain was trying to make was that his faith, what he believed was important, but that someone gave him a sign that his faith was shared changed everything.  What he believed about God wasn’t about him.  It was about us; how we must live it out together.  He finished the story by saying this guard is the one person in his life he would like to meet again.

What Rev. Curtis needed was someone make the sign of the cross in the dirt, to loosen his ropes a bit.  For living twenty-five years feeling remorse is too much.  And I have all confidence that the irony of the parable is that the justification Jesus declares for the tax collector would have been poorly received.  People would have had a hard time believing the man was now a good guy; they would have wanted a lot of proof.

What kind of sign do you need?  Do you need to believe you are forgiven?  Do you need a sign that someone who wronged you is repentant?  Do you need a sign of assurance? 

It is true that no ritual or demand can create the peace that eluded Rev. Curtis, yet something is needed.  Why is it that forty years after Viet Nam that one act of kindness creates such assurance for McCain?  Why was this so important?  Why not say, I am believer in Jesus Christ, I am not worthy, but I have received grace?  That is true.  He needed something more.

What do you need?  What sort of sign do you need?  There seems to be a pretty big gulf between knowing we are forgiven and believing we are forgiven.  Here is the hard place I’ve reached in this, what if our forgiveness from God, while real and true, only becomes believable when others treat us as such.  What if the grace of God, while it may justify, only makes us whole when others offer us that grace as well.   

            I am pretty sure having a pig follow me will not convince me I am on the right path, but I am just as convinced that God’s grace will elude me unless I find it with my family, my friends, my church.  It is safe to say Rev. Curtis never wavered in terms of believing God loved him; but this couldn’t meet the need to see forgiveness. 

            I think it would be a false path for me to tell you to go out and look for signs.  We might end up with some bizarre ideas.  But it is right to say we need make signs for people to see.  We need to offer forgiveness without the demand of assurance; we need to accept without signs.  Don’t wait for the signs to forgive or to help or to care. 

            I don’t if Rev. Curtis is alive, but I do know the shut-in who harbored such anger is dead.  She died never forgiving.  That is a terrible sign. 

Bob Dylan said, what kind of sign do you need when it all comes tumblin’ in? What’s been lost can be found; what’s to come has already been. What kind of sign do you need?  While you are asking and wondering, make the sign of the cross for those around you: forgive, care, help without demand- even for those who don’t deserve it.  Amen.