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‘Two Men Trusting”
There are some words that are so frequently that their meaning gets lost in the over-use. One of those words is love. We hear it used often and fervently only to be followed by behavior that seems most unloving. As a member of Presbytery’s Commission on Ministry, I’ve heard the word used to describe their relationship to the pastor they will fire in a year and the choir director or custodian they hope to underpay until the final judgment. The advertising world intends that I will just love their newest drink, their latest fashion, or their just re-discovered vacation spot. And there is a whole industry that uses the word love to describe the stirrings in human loins. The business community, I understand, uses the word love next to never, so we seldom have to figure out what it could possibly mean in that context.
Nonetheless, we are often left scratching our heads about what this over-used word really means. But this week, as I was struggling with the Jesus’ parable about the tax-gatherer and Pharisee, an answer dawned on me. Love—or, as the dictionary puts it, “ardent affection”—has meaning, depth, reality only when linked with mercy, with forgiveness.
Forgiveness is the touchstone that distinguishes love from infatuation. I have been infatuated with several women in my life and hope (beyond hope, of course) to be infatuated with more. It’s pleasant, as long as I remember what’s going on. I see no faults in them. Nothing annoys me. They are perfect gems. That, of course, is not true. But that is the nature of infatuation, not to see the full person. The nature of love, however, is to see the full person, flaws as well as charms, and to forgive the flaws. Not reluctantly, but swiftly, automatically. To the point even where the flaws themselves become charms.
Sometime, of course, flaws are too large to be forgiven, and then love dies, or is never born. Some people cannot live with less than perfection, and therefore they cannot forgive, and therefore they cannot love. The Pharisee in the parable this morning was like that: a perfectionist who simply could not tolerate less than perfection in other people like thieves, rogues, adulterers, CEO’s, politicians, and, of course, “even this tax-gatherer” (Luke 18.11). I suspect he even had difficulty tolerating himself—which is why he not only fulfilled all the requirements of the Law but then some. He fasted and tithed more than the Law required so he could reassure himself beyond a doubt that he would be perfect, righteous, and blameless before himself and maybe, just maybe before God.
But in the pursuit of perfection he missed the test of love. For the test of love is proximity and duration. Share the same bathroom, or children, or office for a few years and then say you love each other. Don’t say it right after honeymoon or childbirth. Don’t say it your first week, the first month, or even the first year on a new job. This is much too soon. Wait until you have been rubbed raw by the traits that annoy. Wait until you have lost your temper and said things to another you wish you could take back but cannot. Wait until you’ve been hurt or betrayed by your beloved beyond his or her power to heal. Wait until you have forgiven your beloved seven times seventy. Then announce your love. Love should be declared not during the wedding ceremony or in the delivery room but on the anniversary or birthday and more passionately declared every year it is proven.
Something I find astonishing is the number of people loving and forgiving me. I know I make it through life because they are willing to fill in for the things I forget or screw up or can’t do. So precious is that forgiveness by others of me that sometimes I even forgive myself, and even love myself. I find myself living on the edge of what the tax-gatherer prayed, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” yet tasting, thanks to others and if only as an appetizer, what being alive in the complete forgiveness of God the Psalmist declares so boldly must be like:
Praise is due to you,
O God, in
And to you shall vows be performed,
O you who answer prayer!
When deeds of iniquity overwhelm us,
You forgive our transgressions.
Happy are those whom you choose and bring near
To live in your courts.
We shall be satisfied with the
Goodness of your house,
Your holy temple. (Psalm 65.1-4)
You may be working in an organization or living in a family that demands perfection as a precondition to acceptance. It insists on power-point presentations. It tolerates no mistakes. It wears flawless clothing. It expects children with perfect school records. Approval is given as a reward for perfection.
If that is the case, your situation is ill-suited to the human condition. Not just because it places you in positions of tension, demands from you your very best and then finds you wanting. (No matter what you do or how hard you work, it always finds you wanting, doesn’t it?) And sometimes you find yourself playing the same game with others and delighting in the discomfort or pain they experience because if you suffer, why shouldn’t they? No, your situation is ill-suited because just as this unforgiving, unloving attitude does not work for you or them as individuals. And it doesn’t work for the organization either.
In a judgmental climate, people do not risk failure. Especially where failure might be the precursor of success.
An electronic wizard’s career begins when his mother praises him in children to taking the radio apart and forgives him for not being able to put it together again. A marriage begins when a wife, after hearing a heartfelt confession of disloyalty, throws the dishtowel and proclaims, “Okay, buster, it’s your turn to dry.” A church begins being a church when, in the face of all the human disappointments, denials, and betrayals people suffer from and inflict upon another, they forgive and move on together.
“Well now,” one might counter, “you can’t let people do whatever they want in the name of forgiveness.” There was a cartoon some years ago where Peter is complaining to Christ: “How can I implement intelligent policy at the gates if your mother is letting deadbeats in at the back door?” There is a point there. But my hunch is that we can go farther than we have in many organizations, with an increase rather than a decrease in the quality of both work and relationships as a result.
Here, as I have before, I take my cue from a tradition I barely know. Native Americans have the habit of showing up for an appointment only when they have finished whatever they were doing before. It’s a behavior that has had centuries of support. It is rooted in the insight that it is best to do what most needs to be done. Can you imagine an organization forgiving people for working like this and still succeeding? There is, I understand, at least one company that did. They were mostly Native Americans, so they found it easier. Any workday, if an employee had something that needed to be done, he or she could do it before coming to work or take off work to do it. However, whatever work needed to be done that day was to be done before they went home to bed. I’ll bet people did not choose the late-night finish casually.
Because of this willingness to absolve people for their sick children, their flooded carburetors, and their dental appointments, this company was quite successful working with people that others considered unemployable, until its major customer reneged on several promised large contracts. (As their consultant said to the CEO, “White man speaks with forked tongue.” But that is another sermon.)
The point here is that they ran a production shop that let people be people, so it’s hard sometimes to understand why professionals working in less interdependent situations, habitually show up late to pick their children at the day-care center because their boss needed to see them and they could not tell that boss that their child was waiting. They fear, perhaps with good reason, that their organization loves them so little that it will not forgive them their human need to do what most obviously needs to be done.
You know, I’m sure, many a place where if the tie wasn’t the right shade, the technology perfectly coordinated, the answer on the tip of the tongue, the hair coiffed splendidly, the charm facile, the offender had a limited career. In one such organization a while back, an executive was asked what it took to get ahead, and he answered, “Presentation skills.” That company crashed. It cared too much for the Pharisee’s perfect posture, too little for the tax-gatherer’s reality.
Our Native American friends take a more practical stand than that of mere screw-tightening. The demand that creates the façade renders the organization both frustrating and unpredictable.
Have you ever made a home improvement project that you planned it down to the “T.” You coordinated the craftsmen carefully so everything and everyone would be at the right place just in time. It’s going to be Oprah in reality. And then the plumber went on vacation. And the electrician has a guy call in sick. And the cabinet company delayed delivery by weeks for reason you can never get a live person to tell you and the trucking company decided they just couldn’t fit you in when they first said they could. And you’re slowly melting. But then you realize that this stuff happens all the time and why didn’t you figure those in the first time? You know, the potty breaks and coffee klatches, the traffic tie-ups and flooded carburetors, the document confusions and quality control errors. “They’ve got to do better,” you fuss to yourself. But you know they cannot. And so, finally, the project will be what it will be.
There was a project manager whose dictate to those responsible for providing the pieces was, “Draw me a PERT charts that allows for all reasonable contingencies. I do not care how long the plan runs. But I will take drastic steps if you miss the deadlines.” Always on time and up to standard, he was highly valued. He had a reputation for toughness. But that was only his back-up strategy. His primary strategy was that he loved his people, flaws and all, and because of his willingness to forgive he lived in a more predictable world.
Is it my imagination, infused by my infatuation with a people and heritage I hardly know, or am I hearing in the business processes of total quality management, in marriages and within families sheltered behind walls in his community, or in the sanctuaries, at coffee hours, or on the phone lines among church members, the muffled cadences of an ancient and kindly drum? Maybe the point of this parable Jesus tells his friends is not so much to force a choice between the tax-gatherer and the Pharisee but to encourage a measure of hope that, in living together, they discover anew just marvelous is the forgiveness of God that might prompt in them both (and for each other, no less) a bit more empathy, understanding, tolerance, and love.
Amen.
For the seeds of this
sermon, I am indebted to John Cowan in his wee bookie, Small Decencies.