Sermon at the Sung Eucharist on the Last Sunday after Trinity 2016

It’s easy to despise others, without quite realising what we are doing. Don’t bother with Tom – he’s useless. Just leave Mary be - she’s well past it now. Or sometimes we might slip into showing sheer lack of respect. That young fellow who’s sleeping rough? He needs to pull himself together and get a job. And as for her, she’s good for one thing only, the little tart.

It’s easy to stereotype without really thinking about it. That lad with a beard and a rucksack on the tube, is he a terrorist? And look at Donald Trump or Hilary Clinton (or whoever), we grumble. All politicians are the same, we say. They lie to us – they show the electorate no respect; despise us, and treat us as fools. We hate being held in contempt, and yet we so easily slip into being contemptuous of others.

And look on a bigger scale. What does it mean to threaten with a knife, or to point a gun at someone? That their life is worth less than yours? Or what does it mean to send an army into battle – that right is on our side more than on the enemy’s? Or when we point a nuclear missile at a foreign city – are we saying that our citizens are more valuable than ‘those foreigners over there’?

I’m not saying that these are easy moral questions to address. They are not. In the case of national defence, and when faced with the possibility of war, we may well be left with a choice between evils. But the very fact that our society is ordered in these ways suggests an implicit hierarchy of values: ‘we’ are more valuable than ‘them’; my family is more worthy of respect than theirs; I am more worthy of life than you. We make moral judgements: I deserve better than you.

We may not sneer, or pepper our conversation with racist or sexist remarks. But it’s important to recognise that we live in a society which is inherently unfair, and can be implicitly immoral in how it regards and treats people of differing backgrounds and circumstances: we’re seeing this played out in the debates about immigration and prisons at the moment.

Today’s gospel reading challenges those assumptions. Why do we humans have a tendency to hold others in contempt – consciously or not? The answer, in part, may be: in order to shore up ourselves, to protect ourselves and our families, to guard our hard-won identity and status. Sometimes we act out of fear. Sometimes out of pride. Sometimes we are only trying to keep the complexities of life simple: it’s easier to pigeon-hole someone else than to go to the effort of getting to know them properly. Sometimes we act out of a misplaced sense of personal worthiness – at least that is how Jesus describes it.

In Jesus’ parable, the Pharisee passes a religious as well as a moral judgement on the tax collector. For the tax collector is that most despised of people: a collaborator with the occupying forces of Rome, and morally reprehensible. To make matters worse, the tax collector is also contaminated and unholy, because of his dealings with the gentile Romans. So the tax collector is infringing the Jewish law every day – and for the Pharisee this is unforgivable. For the Pharisee, the obedient keeping of God’s law is his life’s work.

But Jesus’ parable makes it abundantly clear. Forgiveness belongs to those who know their need of God, and of God’s free grace, and who have the humility and confidence to ask for it. What is condemned is the making of a moral judgement: I am better than him. The Pharisee thinks that he has earned forgiveness – but forgiveness isn’t earned. It’s free for all; an uncomfortable truth for those of us who like to think that we are autonomous and in control.

For the difficulty with despising others is that in doing so we are despising the God who never despises us. All are made in the image of God; all are infinitely valuable in God’s sight; all have the potential to know and to be transformed for good by the Holy Spirit. We are all created by God – rich and poor, good and evil, clever and stupid, young and old. All are created by God, and all are loved by God – equally and without measure. To consider that somehow others are less valuable in God’s sight than we are – that is to forget our creaturely-ness, our utter dependence on God, our need for divine grace and forgiveness. God first loves us – all of us – and a response of humble, grateful, confident love is what God invites us to make.

It is therefore no accident that the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector is followed in the gospel account by Jesus commending us to become like little children: trusting and open to God. Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.

And to learn to trust God, as God trusts us, is also to make ourselves open and vulnerable to our neighbour: to commit ourselves to respect them, to want to seek their good, to learn to love them as we love ourselves.

I have a small book which contains a collection of children’s letters to God – letters written by children aged between four and nine years old. The last letter in the collection has always appealed to me as a fine example of humble, grace-filled, and properly confident trust in God – worthy of that tax collector himself:

Dear God,
Count me in.
Your friend,
Herbie.