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A reading from Lamentations.
Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,
for God’s compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion;
therefore I will wait for the Lord.”
We could use some good news. We could use a few compassions of God, freshly baked this morning. Flaky, luscious compassions: the mercies of God lovingly prepared for us, like a croissant with homemade jam and hot coffee.
We could all benefit from deep rest. I think it is both probable and likely that every person in this room is sleep-deprived.
Since our celebration in late June, when the bishop was here and we thanked everyone who made it possible to refurbish and rebuild this church, we have grieved the deaths of four people: Tom, John, Ellen, and now, just two mornings ago, our own Robin Jones. Please pray for his wife, Denise, one of our companions who prepares God’s compassions, new every morning. Denise is in our knitting group, the group of saints who keep neighbors warm during the cold and wet months. Denise is also one of our protestors, giving voice to the voiceless. Pray for Denise, as she grieves… and as you grieve.
I miss Robin. I do not know, and neither do you, a harder worker in the service of this altar. Robin took every role, every task, extremely seriously. He sought out Gary James, our musician, for coaching, and practiced for hours to sing our prayers. He practiced holding and swinging the incense thurible. He carefully studied all the details of our liturgies. He prepared short introductions for the altar-serving team, to rally us and make us ready.
But we are not only exhausted with grief for our companion Robin. We pray fervently for several people in the parish who are sick, sharing in their anxiety, and also their hope. We have organized weekly protests while keeping up our usual life-giving mission in this neighborhood, but the political turmoils keep raging, as they have done for nearly a decade now. I wonder if it feels right now like it did two generations ago, when St. Paul’s buried so many beloved friends and the world was ravaged by the HIV crisis.
I want us to rest. I pray for the repose of the souls of our friends, and for all who mourn; I pray for all who are sick, frightened, and alone; but my deepest prayer is for rest.
And I have one more prayer, for you, for all of us. I pray that we might learn from two teachers in our life of faith. We just met them again, in the Good News according to Luke. For many of us, they might be flat stock characters by now, stale stereotypes from an old-time Bible lesson. But they still have something to offer. They still hold compassions of God in their hands, new this morning.
The first is a Pharisee, and right away I fear I’ve lost your attention. ‘Pharisee’ is a Bible word, and it hardly evokes warmth or kindness. We meet the Pharisees when they rise up against Jesus, and they rarely transcend the caricature of bad guys in a B movie. Jesus sketches a portrait of a Pharisee in today’s parable, and it’s not flattering: this Pharisee “trusts in himself that he is righteous, and regards others with contempt.”
But the Pharisees were faithful. They did their homework. They cared about things worth caring about: “What does our tradition really teach us?” they wondered. “How does one live a good life?” “What does it mean to be righteous?” There is even a possibility that Jesus himself was a Pharisee.
This particular Pharisee may be guilty of too much self-regard, but he is praying faithfully, and he’s praying next to a tax collector. Tax collectors were collaborators with the empire. They were part of the problem. They were not known to take the tradition seriously. They didn’t seem to care about living a good and honorable life. For us today, in this room, the Pharisee might be pulling one of our SPiN wagons around the neighborhood, serving hot soup to our neighbors. Meanwhile, the tax collector might be wearing a red ballcap, and attending a church very different from St. Paul’s Seattle. So: give the Pharisee a second look.
Before I move on to give the tax collector a second look, I want to offer one more small defense of the Pharisee. There is a fuzzy, misleading translation of one small word in today’s Gospel, which was originally written in Koine Greek. In our English translation, we hear that the tax collector “went down to his home justified rather than” the Pharisee; but the original text doesn’t necessarily say that. It may be more accurate to say that the tax collector went down to his home justified “alongside” the Pharisee. If so, they were both justified, walking alongside each other, like a couple of altar servers walking down this main aisle.
So: The Pharisee isn’t a bad guy. He might not be someone you warm to; he might strike you as stuffy and pious; his contempt for others is not attractive; we’ve all met someone who is undeniably good but not good company. But I want that Pharisee on our team. I want to be his friend. I think he is our friend.
Next: the tax collector. He often seems much more relatable to us. What’s not to like about a guy who confronts himself with bracing honesty? But remember: in the ears of the first people to hear this parable, the tax collector was not a friend, not a companion, not relatable. If the Pharisee was a stuffed shirt, the tax collector was dangerous, even deadly. He defrauded them. Tax collectors of that day and time were not like IRS employees, just making sure people filed their tax returns. They collected funds for the rapacious Roman Empire, and only made money of their own by fleecing people on the margins.
In this brief parable, Jesus doesn’t tell us whether the fictional tax collector mended his ways. If he did, then the story isn’t all that realistic: tax collectors didn’t exactly have good career prospects. They were trapped under the boot of Rome just like everybody else, and it’s extremely risky to let go of a trade that pays for your food and your home. This brings us back, then, to the relatability of this character: he knows he does what he should not do, and he repents of that, even as he may go right ahead and keep on doing it.
Soon we will finish our prayers here, and our time together as a community on this Lord’s Day will end. Then, like the Pharisee and the tax collector, we will go down to our homes, alongside one another. And, again like the Pharisee and the tax collector, we will all be more than one thing: good but sometimes insufferable; bad but sometimes self-aware and remorseful.
But hear this Good News: today, we will go down to our homes justified. God justifies us; God makes us righteous – righteous, a word that might sound haughty to your ears, but a good word that really just means healthy, strong, in right relationship, of sound mind, of stout heart. God gives us God’s compassions, new every morning. These compassions make us righteous, that is, they make us useful, and good, as we go from here to mend the world.
And so, when you go down to your home today, justified in God’s sight, I will be saying a prayer for you. I will be praying that whoever you are and however complicated you may be – the good and the bad within you, the proud yet prayerful Pharisee inside you who brushes uncomfortably against your inner tax collector with a heart of gold – whoever you are and however complicated you may be, I pray that you will rest in the soothing peace and healing mercy of God, all the night long.
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Preached on the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 25C), October 26, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.