Tuesday was a long day here at the church, made longer by the fact that I got a call from my neighbor who was hosting 30 Southern Baptist pastors from Korea. He was really hoping he could bring them by to see the church where Jonathan Edwards began his ministry, so of course I said yes.

I let them into the sanctuary so they could look around and pray, and then went back to my office to study. After about 45minutes, they came and found me and asked if I would come and give a talk about Jonathan Edwards.

Now I was not prepared for this nor do I know a lot about Edwards. Everything I know I learned from Susan Stinson’s book, “The Spider in a Tree,” and Jeff Olmstead’s folk-opera, “The Surprising Work of God.”

Not only that, when I walked in, they put a mic on me and began to record my remarks for the Southern Baptist Korean News. An interpreter popped up and before I knew it we were rolling.

So I told them a little bit about Edwards, his famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” that fell flat here in Northampton but was a hit down in Enfield, and the Great Awakening that caught fire as a result.

It was going pretty well, if I do say so myself, and then some one asked about the rocks right here. And so I began to tell them about the Season of Origins. I asked if any of them knew what Advent or Lent was because, as far as I know, Southern Baptists don’t really celebrate liturgical seasons.

But they knew enough to follow as I explained that we were in the process of developing a whole new liturgical season to help the Western church heal from generations of colonialism, genocide, patriarchy, and white supremacy.

“On the first Sunday of this new season,” I said, “we placed the first stone and invited people into a holy conversation to consider our past.

On the second Sunday we named some of the harm we have caused.

This Sunday we will talk about repentance and how we might repair the damage.

And on the last Sunday we will imagine a better future for the church; one in which we can act with more humility and care.

“Actually, this relates very much to the Great Awakening we just talked about,” I said. “All that evangelical fervor experienced by the early colonists eventually translated into a global missionary movement where my ancestors traveled around the world to convert people in other countries like Korea.

But we didn’t just bring the gospel to other countries, we brought our culture and our values. We set ourselves and our ways up as superior to the various indigenous people we hoped to save. There were a lot of missionaries who meant well and brought medical and educational resources right along with their faith.

But even when their intentions were good, their impact was mixed and harm was caused. Old ways were lost, other religions were dismissed, and missionaries often paved the way for our country to take over governments and profit from land and resources that didn’t belong to us. For that we need to repent and make amends.

And I have to tell you, they were very quiet when I shared this. You could have heard a pin drop as they looked at me and looked at each other. Now I may be projecting, but I think they were both surprised and moved that Christians like us would even be aware of our need to do this sort of work. I felt something shift in the atmosphere between us.

Finally, I asked: “What do you think of all that?”

And one pastor raised his hand and very quietly said, “You are right. A lot of harm was done…. But,” he said with such kindness that it nearly broke my heart, “you also gave us Jesus…You gave us Jesus and we wouldn’t be here right now without that.

I think it is like the story of Joseph. His brothers did a bad thing when they sold him into slavery. But God was faithful and used it for good."

It was a moment of profound grace, a conversation that never would have happened if we weren’t doing this work.

I asked the Korean pastors to pray for us and for our country. “You’re here because you wanted to see the place of the great awakening. We need another," I said. “This country needs to lean into Jesus now more than ever. Pray for us. Pray that this church can help with that.” And they said they would.

Friends, I don’t think I fully comprehend the import of this work we have been invited into through this Seasons of Origins, but I do believe that God is already working through it to do a new thing among us and good things within us.

The very fact that these rocks would give me the opportunity to ask descendants of the colonized to pray for the descendants of their colonizers on a random Tuesday - pray that we here in America would find Jesus - is a sign that God is up to something.

I mean, if there is one thing I know about God, it is that God delights in turning our expectations upside down and inside out, reversing our sense of who is in and who is out, who is high and who is low, till all the hierarchies we love to construct come a tumbling down.

We see it in Jesus all the time, and never more so then when he is teaching us through parables.

“Two men when up to the temple to pray,” he said, “a Pharisee and a tax collector,” and we already have thoughts - don’t we? - thoughts about who is right and who wrong, who we want to emulate and who we want nothing to do with. I mean it’s hard not to given how broadly Jesus draws these two characters.

“Oh God,” says the Pharisee, “I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax-collector. 12I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.”

He’s so over the top with his desire to not just be good, but better than others - what with all his fasting and tithing - that New Testament Scholar, Amy-Jill Levine suspects that even the Pharisees in Jesus’ original audience probably would have laughed at him (I am indebted to Levine for this insight and for her scholarship in “Short Stories by Jesus” that informs much of this sermon).

The Pharisee sounds like a judgmental self-righteous buffoon, doesn’t he? Yeah. Especially compared to the tax collector with his head bowed so low he cannot even look up to heaven; the tax collector who knows his place and owns what he has done, who beats his breast and simply prays, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”

The Pharisee comes across as insufferable, whereas the tax collector sounds like a poor, misunderstood soul, the lovable rogue at the heart of every romantic comedy who just needs the love of a good woman…I mean a good savior to set him straight.

It would seem, at first glance, that the saint is a sinner and the sinner is a saint. But beware! When it comes to Jesus’ parables, looks can be deceiving. It turns out that a straightforward reading of this story will get you nowhere. Jesus has laid a trap here for anyone who “trusts in their own righteousness and views others with contempt.”

Which, it turns out, is anyone who, upon reading this parable, is as thankful they aren’t like the Pharisee as the Pharisee is thankful he is not like the tax collector… which is all of us. Right? Anyone want to take this guy to lunch? Hang with him on a Friday night? I didn’t think so.

Jesus uses this story to tech us all an uncomfortable truth: no matter how good or bad we are, we all judge. There are people we like and people we view with contempt. Everybody thinks they’re better than somebody. And here’s the thing, we probably are. Just as there are other people out there who are better than us. But at the end of the day where you fall on this particular spectrum  doesn’t really matter, because God isn’t grading on a curve. There is grace enough for everyone.

The rub is that in order to receive that grace we must acknowledge that we need it and then honor it by doing our best to make amends and sin no more. What’s so confounding about this parable is that we have one guy who thinks he’s all set, thank you very much, and another who knows he’s not but has no plans to change.

The Pharisee wasn’t perfect, but not for lack of trying. Obviously he has some issues of pride to work through, but he was a heck of a lot better than the Jewish tax collector who made his living enriching himself and the Roman Empire at the expense of his own people.

You need to know that the tax collector is not a saint in disguise. He really is a bad guy. He knows it. And this is a problem. He’s a bit like Trump, who’s been confessing to people right and left that he doesn’t think he’s getting into heaven because of all the bad things he has done. There is a modicum of self-awareness here, but that is not enough.

I mean, it’s not like this guy accidentally collected taxes last week, see the error of his ways, and has resolved to never collect taxes again in the future. Nope, he knows full well that he has built his whole life and livelihood around abuse, extortion and oppression. He knows that makes him a sinner and to his credit he feels bad about it. Really bad. Just not so bad that he’s willing to change.

“Acknowledging our sin and asking for mercy are commendable actions,” says N.T Scholar Amy-Jill Levine, “but if they are not accompanied by a resolve to stop sinning, they prompt (nothing but) cheap grace” (“Short Stories by Jesus" p 189). The tax collector confesses no such resolve. So how is it that this sinner returned home justified rather than the Pharisee who was not only living a righteous life but has the receipts to prove it?

If we, like Luke, think this is simply a story of the humble being exalted and the exalted being humbled, the tax collector getting right with God and the Pharisee now in the wrong, we’re still missing something. Because if we’re holding up one as a hero and looking down on the other with contempt we’re still falling into the trap of judging others. The very trap Jesus has come to save us from. So there must be another way out, and if you liked last week’s sermon then you’ll love this.

Remember how I told you that the gospel writers, translators, and scribes all made interpretive choices as they tried to capture these stories for posterity? Well, there’s a word here that may hold the key to freeing us all, and it’s the word “rather.” In Greek the preposition is para which literally means to throw two things down side by side for comparison. It’s where we get words like parallel, paradox, and parable. It can mean this rather than that. But it can also mean alongside, because of, on account of.

So we can read the Greek here to say that the tax collector “went down to his home justified rather than the” Pharisee. Or we could read it such that the tax collector went down to his home justified alongside the Pharisee, because of the Pharisee, or on account of the righteousness of the Pharisee.

Amy-Jill Levine points out that Judaism is “a communitarian movement in which people pray in plural (just like Jesus does in the Lord’s Prayer when he says, “Our Father….give us this day our daily bread…forgive us our sins). (It is a faith) in which each member of the community is responsible for the other. Just as one person’s sin can stain a whole community, one person’s righteousness can save it” (p 209).

It would have made sense to the people in Jesus’ day that the righteousness of the Pharisee could provide cover for the tax collector just as the humility of the tax collector could be counted toward the Pharisee. If we read the story in this way, we come to realize just how thoroughly our salvation is bound up with one another.

None of us is shaped or saved or sanctified in a vacuum. At our best and at our worst we need each other and we effect each other. Whether we are spurring one another on to works of grace and mercy by our own good deeds or standing in need of grace and mercy because of the ways we have failed one another, we all have something to contribute to the spiritual growth of each other.

I mean in order for you to grow in patience you need someone to get on your nerves. Right?

In order for you to be forgiving, someone needs to give you a reason to forgive.

We’re all in this together, which gives us a window into that last phrase that all who humble themselves will be exalted and all who exalt themselves will be humbled.

I don’t think Jesus is reversing the hierarchy here to create new heroes and new villains, because again, that keeps us trapped in judgment. I think he’s leveling the playing field such that we can all meet each other in the middle with grace. Hang in here with me for one more minute.

When we hear this story we are drawn to the humility of the tax collector. His humility is appropriate. It is his one redeeming quality. And we immediately know that we want to be humble like him rather than proud or disdainful like the Pharisee. So the idea of the humble being exalted sounds good.

But weirdly the idea of the exalted being humbled sounds bad. It sounds like a punishment.

We all want to be humble, but we don’t want to be humbled.

But what if being humbled is as good a thing as being exalted? What if it’s actually a good thing to be brought low when we’ve become too full of ourselves?

I’m not saying it’s an easy thing, but I think it’s a good thing for us to see our mistakes, our sins, our flaws, our failures, because that acknowledgement is what enables us to repent, to reach out to those we have wronged, to ask forgiveness for the harm we have done, and do what we can to make amends.

In that place where the the humbled are exalted and the exalted are humbled, things can be made right, which is what it means to be justified. In that place where the humbled are exalted and the exalted are humbled, where those who have caused harm bend low to help those they have harmed get back up, grace abounds and relationships can be restored.

That is what I felt as I explained the symbolism of these rocks to those Korean pastors.

Grace.

It was a grace born of the humility it takes to engage in an honest reckoning with our past.

It is a grace that can unlock a better future for the whole church if we honor it with a willingness to change and do better.

It is a grace that can give us what we long for most.

Jesus.

Amen.