All Scriptures quoted are from The New Revised Standard Version unless otherwise quoted.

A few weeks ago Bruce Springsteen was interviewed on 60 Minutes. The interview was occasioned by Springsteen’s beginning of a one year tour with his E Street Band, which broke up some fifteen years ago. The interviewer told Springsteen that he was just guessing but figured that, after a very successful career, the rock icon was worth well in excess of $100 million. With that kind of wealth, the interviewer asked, why would Springsteen want to return to the grueling tour on the road.

Springsteen, who just turned 58, said that, if you have a story and you are an artist, whether a painter, an actor or a musician, you have to tell your story. The interviewer went on to ask him, then, why he had broken up with the E Street Band in the first place, instead of staying with them all these years. Springsteen answered something like this. That we all have a narrative inside of us, the story of our lives, the story we believe about ourselves and the world we live in and out of which we are living every day. Every now and then, Springsteen said, we have to interrupt that narrative and step aside from it so that we don’t lose the meaning of it. That’s why he’d broken up with the band.

Whether Springsteen’s music is your cup of tea or not, or you even know who he is, I resonate with that perspective of life. I have not one clue about Springsteen’s spiritual beliefs or values. But, if you are one who reads the Bible you will find that one of the things Jesus constantly did for those who walked with him and even those who read his words and study his life now is that he constantly asked them and asks us to rethink life’s narrative. In some cases, Jesus asked those who had never believed in God to step aside from their life’s narrative and ask themselves if there weren’t another way. In other cases, he would ask people who had been deeply steeped in religious tradition to do the same. How many times did Jesus say, “You have heard it said . . . but I say unto you . . .”? No matter what your life’s narrative, it’s virtually impossible to read the words of Jesus without rethinking the way you think, what you believe and how you live. Our text for the morning is an especially good example.

Jesus told a parable in which there were two main characters, a Pharisee and a tax collector. Just as with the parable we read last Sunday, Jesus uses a contrast of characters to get his point across. The Pharisee was a man deeply steeped in the religious tradition of his family and his nationality. The tax collector was, almost certainly, one with a reputation for extorting money from people in the name of the government for personal financial gain. There is no way to know how many lives, families and businesses he’d had a hand in destroying.

Despite their seemingly disparate spiritual lives, however, what these two men did have in common is equally interesting. They both seem to believe in God and they both seem to believe in prayer. It is that common ground of belief that Jesus used to get them in the same place at the same time for the sake of this small narrative. In the process, he is asking all of us to rethink our narrative, the story about God we’ve been told and out of which we’ve lived all of our lives. Are we willing to do that?

The Pharisee goes to the Temple to pray. What he does, however, has very little to do with prayer. He spends the entire time comparing himself to other people and bragging to God that he is not like them. He also takes advantage of the situation to reassure himself that, because he is not like thieves, adulterers and even tax collectors, he is truly a better man before God. He goes further to brag to God about all the good things he does, his fasting and tithing, and, again, how that makes him a better man before God. At this point, the parable has already snagged me. I, too, as John Donne might say, have the sin of bragging.

It would be interesting to know who told him that one can define one’s spiritual depth by comparing to the shallowness or depth of others? Was it his parents? Was it his education? Where did he get the idea that we can reassure ourselves that we are better or worse by comparing ourselves to other people, either way?

By the way, did you know that the most popular time to go grocery shopping in America today is between 8:00 a.m. and noon on – Sunday? Perhaps we should hold court at Tom Thumb! Which means what? That the day we consider most sacred is not considered so by the average person in America? Are we better than they are because we are here and not at Tom Thumb?

Did you know that adultery is hardly thought of any longer as sin, despite the fact that adultery still does as much damage to marriages and families and children, and society, as it always did? Over a cup of coffee in a café, I overheard one man ask another man a startling question some years back. This man knew I was there and he knew I heard him ask the question and he knew I was a pastor. “I know adultery is wrong,” he said, “but what’s wrong with a little recreational sex?” This man was a married man. Perhaps he should have gone home and asked his wife what she thought about “recreational sex.” Is sex just recreation? Is that all it is? How would you have answered the man’s question? All of which points out that, if we don’t have some standard for determining morality that goes beyond changing cultural mores, we are, truly, like ships lost at sea in a storm of moral calamity.

All of this gives us some serious food for rethinking our basic assumptions about ourselves before God. One of the worst things we can ever do is compare ourselves to others. It doesn’t matter if we are seeking reassurance that we are of greater worth or if we’re beating ourselves up for not accomplishing more. The saddest people who ever live are those people who are never free from the burden of determining their worth before God or humanity by comparing themselves to others.

If being a part of this church, or any church, never does anything more for you than this, it was well worth being a part if it accomplished just this. If you are finally convinced that you, in the sight of God, just the way you are and not compared to anyone else, you are a person of worth and value – that God created you uniquely for a unique purpose in this world, then all is not lost. That’s why, at the end of virtually every service, you hear this word of blessing, “Go now and remember that, in the goodness of God, you were born into this world.”

Some years ago, I had taken the boys to a local playground. While we were there, I overheard a mother yell at her little boy, “Stupid!” Anyone who has been a parent knows how exasperating it can be at times, how tired you can get and how you can say things to your children that you later regret. What is also true is that our children are forming their life’s narrative, what they believe about themselves and their worth in this world, even about God, in large part by what we parents are telling them about themselves. If that mother’s primary mantra in moments of frustration was to blame her frustration on her child and name him “stupid,” then there is a very good chance that child will grow up believing just that about himself or herself. Worse, they will likely spend their lives proving they are worth the name their parents gave them, “stupid,” even though they are worth much more. Even if we grew up in the most perfect home and the most perfect church, there is a part of all of us that is like the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable. A part of us that believes we are better than others because we don’t do what they do, or what we’ve been told they do or what we think they do.

The way we live is proof of what we believe about God, what we’ve been told about God and what God believes about us. How we worship, how we give our financial resources, how we serve others or reach out to them in time of need, all of it, is an expression of how our life’s narrative and “God narrative,” if you will, has been written. Every single time the Bible calls us to repentance, at a minimum, it is calling us to rethink our narrative, to step aside from it and take another look and ask ourselves if there is not another way.

Which brings us to the tax collector again. We don’t know what it is. But, something had caused him to step aside from the narrative out of which he’d been living that allowed for abusing others for the sake of personal gain, to question his life and his standing before God.

This is not the kind of person from whom you would expect deep theology. He had not been professionally trained to teach others about God. He might not have had much of a home life that nurtured faith. He may have never spent much time praying about anything. But, somewhere, someone had played a part in the writing of his “God narrative” that included the idea that God could be, might be, merciful. Clinging to that one thread of hope, he went to plead his misspent life before God. A God whom, he hoped, might not judge him by how he measured out as compared to others but only because he threw his life on his mercy.

Jesus then asks a pointed question. When they left the Temple to go home that day, which of the two men carried with them the peace of a right standing before God? Was it the one who, compared to others, didn’t appear to be as much of a sinner? Or, was it the one who, comparing himself to God alone, simply threw himself on the mercy of God? If you truly believed that your only hope was to throw yourself on the mercy of God, do you have any hope? Is there any room in your life’s narrative, your “God narrative,” for a God who is merciful to sinners? And, if so, where is the evidence of that in your life?

Last Sunday, the children’s choir sang. Those of us on the platform saw things from a different vantage point than those seated in the front of the platform. We could only see the backs of the children as they sang and even danced a little jig. Even from this vantage point, it was both cute and inspiring. It’s always powerful to hear children sing. What was particularly interesting was being able to watch the faces of the parents. Do you know what we saw from this vantage point, in the faces of the parents?

Intense, laser-like focus. Neck-craned, heads twisted and lifted high, parents watching their child as though that child was the whole choir. We saw more. We saw smiles. There is a smile that a parent has for his or her child that is no like no other smile they smile for any other reason. That’s what we saw from up here.

No one has helped me more in recent days to rethink my God narrative than has Philip Yancey, a great Christian author. In his wonderful book, Soul Survivor, he tells of a scientist who helped him to learn that, “at the core of the universe, the face of God wears a smile” (Philip Yancey, Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church, Doubleday, 2001, p. 49).

Do you believe that? Just as importantly, do those in whose lives you are helping shape the “God narrative” believe that? Based on what they see in your face, does God wear a scowl, a frown or a smile?

Something tells me that this tax collector knew that, if he went to the Temple and just threw himself on the mercy of God, he would see the smile of God. Not because he was better than anyone else, but just because he was.

Do you believe that when God cranes his neck, he looks at you with a laser-like focus, as though you were the only who existed, and, having looked, that he smiles on you? Well?