There’s a secondary purpose to these festivals, especially for the Festival of the Reformation. It reminds us that there was a long period of time in the church — centuries — where the message was predominantly a message of works-righteousness, not the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ. And so the Reformation was an extremely theologically radical event that changed everything for believing Christians.
See, in the old times — the “Dark Ages,” quote unquote — people believed that faith wasn’t enough; works needed to be added. And on November 1st, All Saints’ Day — that was at one time restricted to simply worshiping, praying to the saints that had departed this life, the ones that the church officially recognized as having just exemplary good works in combination with their faith. But Protestants came to understand, rightly so, that All Saints’ Day is a day that commemorates all Christians who are saints with the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ. We set a day aside in the church here to honor faithful Christians — some related to us, some we knew, some we’ve never known — but to honor them as beloved saints, holy ones, hagioi of Christ, who now live and dwell in the heavenly realm. That’s what it’s for.
Leaning into these two events is our reading this morning. As we head to these two events — these two Christian festivals and worship services dedicated to the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ — we have before us a parable that goes to the very heart of the human condition, and the two radically different approaches human beings take to God.
We have a parable of two men who went to church — but two men who went to church for very different reasons. Two men went up into the temple to pray, Jesus said in the parable: one a Pharisee, the other a tax collector. Two men went, and two men went with two different sets of doctrines, two different sets of beliefs, two different views about who they were and who God was.
The problem highlighted in the parable is a problem that has plagued humanity since the Fall, and it’s a problem that continues both inside and outside the church to this very day. Today, the very few people left attending church services on a regular basis in the West is filled — quote unquote, relative term — with two kinds of people, two kinds of people who are there for two very different reasons. And these reasons have been at war, now openly and publicly, within the Lutheran church for about 40-plus years. We have a name for it. We call it the worship wars. What is the church service supposed to be about? What’s it supposed to do?
A significant percentage of pastors, congregations, and church bodies have forsaken right worship — the historic liturgy, theologically sound hymns, good songs, and good traditions. Rather, they’ve embraced an evangelistic style, a revivalist kind of meeting designed to appeal to human emotion, to human good nature, to human works and praise for God, via contemporary models of entertainment.
Which brings me to a Latin phrase you’re going to hear throughout the sermon, and this phrase is often used in order to highlight a spiritual axiom of truth above all truths: lex orandi, lex credendi. Forgive me — lex orandi, lex credendi. The first half of the phrase, lex orandi, translates thus: the law of prayer. When you hear that word “prayer” in the old Latin, it means worship. The law of prayer — the worship service — is the law of belief, that is, faith. Lex credendi means the law of belief is the law of worship. Put it together, it simply means this: people worship the way they believe, and they believe the way they worship. And once you’ve changed one, the other by necessity is also changed.
Two men in the parable went up to the temple to pray — that is, to worship — and they went there to worship as they believed, and to believe as they worshiped. Now there’s nothing subtle about this parable. Jesus, in Luke, made it absolutely clear who the primary targets of the parable were: Jesus told this parable to some people who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and viewed others with contempt. Jesus was addressing the holier-than-thou, self-righteous crowd — the self-righteous crowd who did not have true Christian faith. True Christian belief and self-righteousness and unbelief are the two great sins of all humanity.
Here Jesus was addressing people who thought they were better, more virtuous, more respectable, and more pleasing to God than sinners — in particular, the sinners with whom Jesus associated.
In the parable, both men go to the temple to pray. Oh, they’re going to church. The tax collector was in the church, worshiping as he believed and believing as he worshiped. The Pharisee was going to church to worship as he believed, to believe as he worshiped. One of the men was a true Christian; the other a hypocrite, a false believer. And Jesus did not hide calling the right one by the right name.
“The tax collector, standing at some distance away, even unwilling to lift his eyes to heaven, was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner.'” That, folks, is the very posture — compunction, true belief — that any Christian walking into any self-respecting church service should have. Not one of levity, but rather one acknowledging who they are when they stand in the presence of the Holy One of Israel.
The Pharisee, on the other hand, believed in a religion of works-righteousness, and in his own good works and his own righteousness. “The Pharisee stood and was praying this to himself: ‘God, I thank You that I am not like other people: swindlers, unjust, adulterers, even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and I pay tithes on all that I get.'”
It has always been the case that the visible church has had within it both true believers — sinners, repentant ones who know they have no righteousness of their own and no good works — and the other group: the hypocrites, who think of themselves and their good deeds as meritorious, worthy of God’s admiration, of God’s rewards, of God’s praise.
The Lutheran Confessions say a lot about this, by the way, because the argument of the Reformation was this: if you have unbelieving, heretical priests and laity in a parish someplace, the Roman Catholics maintained that the efficacy of the sacraments were no good. And so they accused the evangelical church of being full of heretics and hypocrites. And the Lutherans said: well, we have our share of heretics and of hypocrites. And they wrote this in the Confessions, in Articles VII and VIII of the Apology of the Augsburg Confession: “We grant that in this life hypocrites and wicked men have been mingled with the church, and that they are members of the church according to the outward fellowship of the signs of the church — the outward fellowship of the Word, profession, and sacraments” — if they have not been excommunicated. In other words: we have our share of hypocrites. Nothing we can do about it. The wheat and the tares grow together. Jesus will sort them out at the end of time.
The Pharisee said he believed. He wasn’t a bad guy — or so he thinks. He’s pretty good, and he brags about his good things and his good nature. The Pharisee said: “God, I thank You, I’m not like other people: swindlers, unjust, adulterers, even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, and I pay tithes on all that I get.” He’s so good he doubled the number of days he was supposed to fast. He’s so good he put offerings in the offering plate based on his gross earnings, not his net income. He went above and beyond, and he thought that made him a better guy.
Look at the difference in their doctrine and their disposition as they stand in the presence of the Lord. The tax collector knows how wretched he has been, how wretched he is by nature — as we say in our confession: sinful and unclean. He knows he’s unworthy to stand in the presence of God, so he doesn’t draw near to the holy of holies. He doesn’t go forward. He stands in the back. He also looks down. He doesn’t lift his eyes up to heaven. He doesn’t look at God. He doesn’t appeal as though he somehow deserves to be there. Rather, he’s embarrassed, he’s ashamed, he’s humiliated at his sins. He looks down, knowing he’s in the presence of the Holy One of Israel, the only one who is good.
When Isaiah was brought into the presence of the Lord God in the vision he had, where an angel takes him into the temple — what did Isaiah cry out? “Woe is me, for I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, living among a people of unclean lips.” The first thing that Isaiah does when he enters the presence of the Holy One of Israel is to confess how utterly sinful and unworthy, unclean, he is in and of himself.
The tax collector had but one plea. It’s the plea that is embodied in the liturgy: God, have mercy on us. God, have mercy on me. This man knows what he really is: a sinner to the core. The new English translation says: “God, be merciful to me, sinner that I am.” The tax collector doesn’t think of himself or of his deeds as good things, or as good before God. He doesn’t think of the things that he’s done as meriting any of God’s attention whatsoever. He understands he has no merit or standing of his own that could be a basis for God listening, let alone granting his prayer. He knows only one thing: he is utterly undone before God. And he only wants one thing from the Lord God: mercy.
In this parable we not only see the contrast between a confessor of a religion of self-righteousness and a confessor of a religion of pure grace and forgiveness, we also learn how we as Christians ought to enter the holy temple where the Word and Sacrament ministry is carried out in the name of Jesus Christ. Here Jesus teaches: the sinner’s disposition is one of faith and humility — trusting and knowing that the heavenly Father is forgiving his or her sins on account of the person and work of Jesus Christ, not because they’re sincere or they’re happy or they’re successful or anything else.
See, the liturgy is designed in a way to move us to follow the model of the Old Testament and the New Testament saints — of how they used to worship, and what was passed down from century to century — so that we would always be reminded. And every time the church has thrown out that stuff, it’s gone terribly bad for the church and for the people.
The service is composed of three basic parts. What’s the first part? The part that I’m focusing on today: Confession and Absolution. Everything from the invocation through the introit is part of the service of Confession and Absolution. That’s where we come in. We acknowledge that we’re in the presence of the Holy One of Israel. In the invocation we roll right into our confession, and then the pastor absolves you in the stead and by the command of Christ. And we respond to that with an introit that’s supposed to be appropriate to the given Sunday.
And then part two is the Service of the Word. That’s where the readings begin, and takes you all the way through the sermon, right up into the Lord’s Prayer. Then part three: the Sacrament. And all three of those parts have as one fundamental goal the forgiveness of your sins. No matter how wretched you have been or will be, your sins are forgiven — each and every time you confess them in true Christian faith.
The sinner in the parable enters the temple to worship, and the first thing he does is to admit his status as a sinner and plead for mercy. The Pharisee, on the other hand — he thinks the church service is about him: about his worship and his praise, about his good deeds and his works. He’s not like those terrible people, those swindlers and those unjust people and those adulterers, and the people who work for the Roman Empire, the tax collectors. They do bad things; he does good things. So he boasts: “I fast twice a week, and I pay tithes on my gross income, not my net.” The worship service and daily life for him is about what he does and doesn’t do. He gives, and God receives.
Yet he’s not the one that Jesus praises. Jesus praises the one who receives, who has nothing to bring and nothing to give, who simply acknowledges his state as an utter and absolute beggar. God gives, and the beggar receives. It’s very much backwards, isn’t it, to the normal way of thinking? That verse that’s so clear in Ephesians: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not of yourselves. Faith doesn’t even come from you; it’s a gift of God, not as a result of works, so that no one may boast.”
Jesus didn’t praise the Pharisee for the Pharisee’s generosity or his seemingly stellar obedience to the Law of God. Instead He says: “I tell you, this man — the sinner, the beggar, the man who has no merit — he went home to his house justified, rather than the other.” The Pharisee, the do-gooder: “For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and everyone who humbles himself will be exalted.” Jesus said the sinner went home justified; the Pharisee remains in his unbelief, in his sin.
That same word — “justified” — appeared in last week’s Gospel lesson, where the widow goes to the judge repeatedly, over and over again, looking for some kind of justice, and finally obtains it by persistence. The sinner went home forgiven. He’d received justification. He was reckoned as righteous. His sins forgiven, his wrongs forgotten, acquitted of the charges. And God called that justified.
That’s why the church growth movement, the alternative worship styles — whatever name the marketing agents want to come up with for church services these days — that break from the liturgy, that’s why they’re so harmful to the Christian faith and to the Christian church. Lex orandi, lex credendi; lex credendi, lex orandi. People worship as they believe, and they believe as they worship. Content and style both matter. When a church service is designed and conducted, and when a sermon is preached, in such a way as to emphasize the works, praises, and offerings of the worshiper rather than the mercy, forgiveness, and gifts of God in Christ, we look much more like a Pharisee than we do the publican. And believe me, it’s a lot better to look like the publican.
But when we think of ourselves as better than other sinners — when we put on a display, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, about what we do, what we deserve, what we’re owed, what we’re owed by other people — then we start to look a lot more like a Pharisee than we do the tax collector. “God, I’m glad I’m not like him or her.”
Isaiah wrote, in 64:6 — and of you, by the way, for all of us: “For all of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous garments are like filthy rags, and all of us wither away like a leaf, and our wrongdoings, like the wind, take us away.”
If a Christian, or a Christian congregation, doesn’t understand that he or she is a sinner, poor and in need of rescue, then the Gospel among us is diminished. If the person and the work — the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ as the atoning sacrifice for our sin — is not the central element in the worship service in the church, then services will be less and less about Law and Gospel, less and less about the Word and Sacrament ministry, less and less about sin and grace, and more and more about good deeds, principles of success, willpower, obedience, and human emotions.
If we keep ourselves and our congregation steadfast in the Word of God, in humility and God-pleasing divine services, then we will keep confessing our sins each and every week. And guess what? The Lord will keep forgiving those sins each and every week. 1 John 1:9: “For if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” That’s His promise.
That’s why it’s important to keep what we have here. So in this place, make the tax collector’s words your words. And in this congregation, we will make sure the tax collector’s words are our words: his confession our confession, his plea our plea: “God, be merciful to us, the sinners.”
And equally so — in fact, more so — Jesus declares of you: “I tell you, you are going to your home today justified. Your sins are forgiven.” Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.