Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

Sermons 

You know, sometimes translating a biblical text

involves a whole lot more than just

a search for the earliest manuscripts

and understanding the careful nuances of the original language.

Sometimes, even when you’ve done that,

a text needs additional "translating"

if it’s going to be understood by readers or hearers

in a different time and a different culture and a different world.

Let me give you a silly example at first,

but I think it will then shed some light on

why this particular parable may need additional "translation."

Do we have any "Star Trek" fans here?

Well, then, you may or may not know that for quite a number of years

there has been a project going on

to translate the New Testament into the Klingon language.

You know … Klingons … the warlike people,

with darkish, ridge-y faces,

who say things like "Today is a good day to die."

The kind of people who would really need the Bible,

if in fact they existed, which they don’t.

But an interesting problem has arisen,

which ultimately ended up splitting the Klingon-translators

into two warring camps. (Seems appropriate.)

The squabble was over

how literal they should be in making their translation.

For example, take something seemingly as simple as

a miracle involving five loaves of bread and two fish.

How do you translate that to make sense in a culture

where they don’t eat anything resembling what we know as bread or fish?

One group of translators, that we might call literalists,

insist that one has to make up new words, then,

to convey the meaning.

So they might translate such a story by writing that

Jesus fed the five thousand with five cakes of leavened grain-meal,

and two vertebrate sea-creatures.

The other group argues that that makes no sense at all.

The point of the story, they say,

is that Jesus fed all those people

with normal, everyday food … just an unusually large amount of it.

So they want to translate the story

not by describing loaves of bread and fish,

but by using traditional, common items of the Klingon diet:

Jesus fed the five thousand

with five serpent pies and two bloodworms.

Makes no sense to those of us who read English,

and who are accustomed to eating bread and fish ourselves.

But it would make a lot of sense to a Klingon …

if they existed.

So … back to the parable of the morning.

Do we have any tax-collectors here?

I didn’t think so.

Do we even know any?

Maybe someone who works in the county tax-office,

but that’s not really the same thing.

Well, then, do we have any Pharisees here?

Do we know any?

How does this parable make sense to us

when it deals with people in categories

that don’t exist in our own lives?

We translate.

We remember that Pharisees were the religious elite of the day,

scholarly, committed to following the law in their own lives.

And we remember that tax collectors were the scum of the earth,

looked down on by Jew and Roman alike,

for bettering their own situation at the expense of others.

We translate:

Two men went up to the Temple to pray,

one a seminary professor,

and the other, an illegal immigrant.

The professor, standing by himself, was praying thus:

"God, I thank you that I am learned and am not like other people:

Bible thumpers, TV evangelists who rob from their audiences,

or even this immigrant here.

I study your word in its original languages;

I even give a tithe of my income,

which, you know, Lord,

isn’t all that great here in academia."

But the illegal immigrant, standing far off,

would not even look up to heaven,

but was beating his breast and saying,

"God, be merciful to me, a sinner!"

I tell you, this man went down to his house justified

rather than the other.

Does the parable mean to suggest that all seminary professors

are pious-sounding hypocrites,

and all illegal immigrants are humble people of deep faith?

Of course not;

no more so than Jesus intended to imply

that all Pharisees for self-righteous hypocrites

or that all tax collectors were really simple believers

who felt guilty about how they earned their living.

Rather, the intent is to get our attention.

To confound our expectations.

To suggest that,

while being a person who lives by the rules isn’t a bad thing,

gloating about it is …

and while being an outsider isn’t necessarily a good thing,

those on the outside may in fact see God and their relationship to God

more clearly than those who live by the rules.

The outsider understands God’s grace,

and his or her own need for it,

in a way that all too often the rule-keepers do not.

Our ancestor in the faith Martin Luther

is an interesting object lesson in this regard.

Because he was a conscientious rule-keeper,

yet he was far from feeling good about it.

Luther was a monk for years …

lived his life in the cloister, taught theology,

fasted on the appropriate days,

did the hair-shirt kind of self-torment things,

and yet, was persuaded that nothing he did was good enough.

Today, we’d probably say, "Martin, take a Prozac

and get on with your life!"

But what Luther discovered in his misery

of keeping all the rules, but it never feeling like enough,

was that, in the end, God’s grace was the only thing that matters.

We can’t be "good enough," according to Luther,

but it doesn’t matter.

God’s grace is sufficient for all our failing and all our needs,

no matter how trivial or how spectacular.

At first that seems like good news;

it certainly did to Luther.

To realize that we do not have to earn the love of God

by remembering to do all the things on List A,

and never do any of the things on List B.

God’s love is a gift,

and all we have to do is to realize that we need it

so that we will accept it!

So far, so good.

Where we often hear bad news, though,

is that God offers forgiveness and love to everyone …

if this parable is to be believed,

without condition.

Wait, Jesus.

Exactly what do you mean that

"this man went down to his house justified."

Didn’t you at least tell him to start tithing?

Or to marry that woman he’s been calling his wife?

Or to start obeying the laws of the land?

You mean, he said, "God be merciful to me,"

and it was done?!

Just like that?!

Where is the justice in that?

How is that fair at all?

I’m never going to sing that hymn again

if it also means, "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,

that saved a wretch like him."!

The grace of God is a wonderful thing

when we think of it in relation to our own lives,

our own needs, our own failures.

It is an extremely uncomfortable thing

when we think of it in terms of

the lives of people we can’t agree with, don’t approve of,

don’t think deserve it.

There is at least a little Pharisee

alive and well inside most of us.

Do we really want God to show mercy to

a death-row prisoner who confesses and seeks forgiveness at the last minute?

…just for example.

We have only to listen to the debates about immigration in this country

to hear how little we are interested in grace,

and how much we harp on rules and law and our own obedience.

Granted, that is not only a theological question,

but it makes our overall suspicion of grace when it is offered to other people

very clear.

The apostle Paul does a delicate dance around the question of

first, a warning that we should not come "unworthily" to the Lord’s table;

and second, the realization that we are all unworthy.

And third … the deeper truth that it is God who makes us worthy,

regardless of anything else we have done or left undone.

A very wise author once wrote that

the only difference between the just and the unjust

is that the just do not have the illusion that they are just.

One might suggest also that the only difference between the worthy and the unworthy

is that the unworthy believe themselves to be worthy,

while the worthy know themselves to be unworthy.

It doesn’t mean that God gives us carte blanche to do anything we want,

as long as we knock on the divine door at the end of the day

and ask for forgiveness.

Because once we understand ourselves to be truly forgiven,

we aren’t going to want to do those things

that previously got us into trouble.

The grace of God may sound like bad news

if it’s offered to those we disapprove of.

It may seem like bad news

if it’s offered to us when we don’t think we need it.

When we think we’ve behaved ourselves pretty well, thank you very much,

and why doesn’t God go strike down a few troublemakers?

Of course, truly, the grace of God is good news …

it’s what Martin Luther rediscovered five hundred years ago;

it’s what we need to rediscover from moment to moment

in the living of our days.

When "grace" sounds like a four-letter word,

the problem isn’t with God’s speaking,

but with our hearing.

With the human tendency to exalt ourselves,

and to humble others in comparison.

May we humble and quiet ourselves enough

that we can clearly hear God’s word that lifts us up,

offers us blessing and forgiveness and grace,

and sends us down to our homes justified.

Amen.

©2007 Julie Adkins (e-mail: DrJAdkins@trinitypresdallas.org