A Lord Who Loves to Hear Nothing Better Than 'I've Got Nothing'
(The Pharisee and the Publican by Ivanka Demchuk)
This sermon is from our friend Dr. Ken Jones of Grandview University:
Grace to you and peace my friends from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
In the gospel this morning, Jesus is contending with a batch of holier-than-thou snobs who look down their refined noses at those who haven’t achieved the heights of human potential they think they display every waking moment (and probably while they sleep in satin sheets as well). Our Lord doesn’t mince words and goes after them with a parable that undercuts their attainment of worldly glory … and ours, too. Jesus’ parable is just five verses long, but any good red-blooded striver for the American dream who’s paying attention won’t hear much good news here.
A block away from here in my office in the Cowles Center, I’ve had a sticker tucked into the corner of the frame of a mirror by my door for years. As I give myself a once-over on my way to class I see a black oval with two words in white: “low anthropology.” Our anthropology is our understanding of what it means to be human and of what our place in the world is. My low anthropology stickers there and on the back of my iPad are an ever-present finger wag, reminding me that, at my core, I’m not much to write home about. In other words, “Fully tenured full professor Dr. Ken Jones: do your work with humility.”
Back in the 80’s my friend Jeff sent me a mixtape of songs by T-Bone Burnett. One of the songs, “Trap Door,” starts this way: “It's a funny thing about humility / As soon as you know you're being humble / You're no longer humble / It's a funny thing about life / You've got to give up your life / To be alive / You've got to suffer to know compassion / You can't want nothing if you want satisfaction.” Even with a “low anthropology” sticker as a reminder to be humble, I like being known for some humility, which means I’m not humble. I’m actually proud.
A week ago a bunch of us from Grand View and Luther Memorial were in San Diego for 1517’s annual “Here We Still Stand” conference. Its title is a spin on Luther’s “Here I stand. I can do no other” speech at the Diet of Worms. The conference is two-and-a-half days of preaching, teaching, music, not enough fellowship, and too much food.
On Saturday morning we heard my friend David Zahl give us the core ideas of his new book. Dave serves an Episcopalian church in Charlottesville, Virginia, where, among a constellation of other busy-ness, he ministers to students at UVa, the school Thomas Jefferson founded. His new book has a title familiar to anyone who’s gazed in my office mirror: Low Anthropology.
In his book Dave Zahl describes what he sees in university students, in his congregation, and in the wider world around him. People are exhausted by life's demands and the push to serve secular gods like financial stability, parenting success, and self-improvement. The need to achieve and maintain a competitive edge spills over into the very structure of our society and breeds competition and discord.
At the root of it all is what Dave calls “high anthropology.” It’s our belief in human potential and progress. You know how it works, because you’ve not only heard all the phrases, you’ve also probably spoken them, too. “You can be anything you want.” “If you work hard enough, you can achieve anything.” “Just do it!” The way we live our lives assumes we have it in us to “git ‘er done,” as Larry the Cable Guy says.
I was talking with wrestlers in my class on Friday about how demanding being a member of a national champion wrestling team is. Our head coach Nick Mitchell, who’s got a string of NAIA “Coach of the Year” awards, drills his guys on “living the championship lifestyle.” And our wrestlers win. Ten out of the last eleven years. That’s what a high anthropology can get you. But when I asked the guys in my class if they felt like there was always more to get done, if they felt that no matter how good they were or how many championship banners hang in the gym they’re never truly achieving their potential, Isaiah Luellen nodded in recognition. Maintaining your twenty-year-old buff wrestler’s physique is a losing game. Time and gravity will always have their way.
In spite of the vast number of self-help books you can order on Amazon, this is why Dave Zahl’s book is a better bet. The subtitle of Low Anthropology is The Unlikely Key to a Gracious View of Others (and Yourself). In other words, because the world, our work, and family life are just too much and no one gets out of here alive, the only solution is to get our heads around a low anthropology. That’s where grace and mercy lie.
A low anthropology tells us a different story about ourselves. It says human nature is crude and craven. It recognizes what St. Paul saw in himself: “The good I want to do I don’t do. The bad I want to avoid I keep doing.” Low anthropology is more honest about our potential and the likelihood of our achieving success on our own power and by our own will. I think one of the reasons some don’t open a Bible is because they think it’s full of success stories about super-religious folks who achieve a spiritual connection with the divine that they think they themselves could never attain. But they couldn’t be more wrong. The Bible is one story after another of people who can’t get their act together, who sin against God, who have utterly messed up family systems, who can’t make it over a curb, much less climb Jacob’s ladder to gain heaven’s heights. The Bible is a long ballad sung in recognition of low anthropology.
Our parable today is a case in point. Jesus sets up a contrast between the high anthropology of the Pharisee’s braying in the temple and the private low anthropology prayers of the tax collector beating his breast with regret in the corner. It was just as great a criticism of first century Jews as it is of us, and it turns the world upside-down. Pharisees were religious heroes. They knew scripture inside and out. They studied it all day long in order to know what the law demands and then they worked to achieve it. But tax collectors were unrighteous sinners who worked for the occupying Roman Empire. You paid them your taxes, and they turned the money over to Rome after skimming something for themselves off the top. Pharisees live a visibly rigorous life aimed every day in every way at getting better and better. Tax collectors were lard butts who lived off others’ hard-earned money. If God-made-flesh were to praise anybody, you’d expect it to be the high anthropologist not the low anthropologist.
But here’s the deal: Jesus has come not to reform the well-intentioned who come up just a little short but still have good intentions. He came instead as physician for the sick and raiser of the dead. When you have your act together like the Pharisee, you have such little need for Jesus that you’ll not only turn from him, you’ll seek to eliminate him because he’s a threat to your foundational beliefs about who you are. But someone like the tax collector is just the kind of mensch Jesus comes to save. He knows something’s missing and turns to the only one who can provide it.
It’s the same story with the man who came to Jesus in desperation and asked him to heal his son. Jesus asked, “Do you believe I can do this?” And the father responded “Yes, Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.” He had a low anthropology and knew no strength within him but only weakness that had to depend on the Lord for the merest faith. Dave Zahl is right that this is the only stance that yields grace from God. When you haven’t got it in you to do what needs to be done and have to depend wholly on him, then it’s all grace all the time.
I worked at a Bible camp during summers in college. Kids would arrive on Sundays, but on Monday a bus would roll in with a dozen developmentally and intellectually disabled adult residents of the State Hospital and School. Each cabin of kids would have one resident with them for the week. One week I told my fourth- and fifth-grade boys that Robert Schieffelbein would be in our cabin. I gave them the task of inviting Robert to everything: meals, canoeing, kickball, crafts, and campfire. And they did just what I asked of them. The problem was that every time they invited him Robert’s response was “I can’t do it. I can’t do it, buddy.” The funny thing is his “can’t do it” spurred those boys to redouble their efforts. They were determined to make sure that whether he was capable or not he had a place among them. Robert Schieefelbein is no doubt long gone through the gates of heaven, but he remains the patron saint of low anthropology.
Isn’t this why we begin every worship service by confessing our sin? The words “We are captive to sin and cannot free ourselves” is 200-proof low anthropology. When we speak those words, we stand far off with the tax collector, hardly daring to look up to heaven, beating his breast and saying,“God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” Who do you think speaks a prayer that warms the cockles of God’s heart, the self-made and self-reliant Pharisee or the actual sinner who can’t do it, can’t do it, buddy?
When you, dear anthropoids, find yourself low down, broken down, or upside-down, and all you know how to say is “I got nothin’,” you have a Lord who loves hearing nothing better. You’re the exact sort he’s made his special project. Jesus loves being needed. You can count on him to have you in his embrace. This is what we come to the Lord’s Supper for. He bids us to come to his table and hear what he has to say to his friends in low places: “This is my body and blood given and shed for you.”
The Christian life is no high jump competition. Instead it’s a fine game of limbo. The question is not whether you can achieve performance heights but how low can you go. Dave Zahl says the lower your anthropology is, the higher Jesus can be. In fact, when you’ve got nothing, he can be everything. That’s a deal you might not want to turn down. Amen.
And now may the peace which far surpasses all our human understanding keep our low-down hearts and minds on our Lord Jesus lifted high on the cross. Amen.