A Pope and a pimp went to church to pray

Sermon Notes Sunday 26th October

Luke 18:9-14 by Desiree Snyman

A tax collector and a Pharisee went to the temple to pray; the tax collector walked away justified in the sight of God. A pimp and the Pope sent to church to pray. The pimp walked away justified in the sight of God. Desmond Tutu and a bikie gang sergeant at-arms complete the Camino pilgrimage; the bikie gang member was justified in the sight of God. 

John Crossan once wished he could use the image of a pimp and the pope going to church to pray as a modern way to illustrate Luke 18, but his editors refused, fearing it would offend Catholic readers. Yet offence and outrage are precisely the point of the parable of Luke 18. That shock is the good news. It is the beginning of liberation. These stories are meant to disturb us, to break open what we think we know about holiness and belonging.

I have sympathy for the potential shock that hearing a pimp and not the Pope was pleasing to God (Luke 18). I was trained as an Anglican priest in Johannesburg. One training rector described to me how a brothel owner had become a key member of his local church, having undergone life changing transformation. As she was unable to abandon her employment, her Christian mentors were discipling her to become the best brothel owner in town. What did this look like? She ensured her employees had the best protection available and that they were well cared for and safe at work. I remember my shock. In my youthful, evangelical naivete I had anticipated that she would abandon her line of work as part of her spiritual journey. The shock of Luke 18’s parable is there to remind us that life is messy, there are seldom straight lines to God, and God connects to us beyond the confines of societal expectations, religious judgements and in surprising ways. 

Read in isolation, the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector might seem a simple warning against religiosity, arrogance, or moral self-satisfaction. And perhaps it is that. But a slow reading of scripture invites us to see it as part of Luke’s greater journey, a continuous movement toward the question: Who will enter the kingdom of God? Today’s Pharisee and tax collector story is the climax of that question. Luke has been leading us here all along. The Pharisees had asked Jesus when the kingdom would come, and he replied, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed... for, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you” (Luke 17.20). Every parable since has been about persistence, courage, and the refusal to lose heart in the face of empire’s discouragement; the quiet insistence that the reign of God is already here, already breaking in, wherever righteousness and justice meet with mercy and humility. 

Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is at hand.” In other words, God’s realm of influence is so near you can reach out and touch it. God is within, among, and around us like breath. And like breath God vibrates as presence in every person we meet. Each face reveals the divine. This is both liberating and unsettling. If God’s presence is available to all, what then of religion, law, church or temple? If God’s presence is in all, then God is within the face of our beloveds, but also glimpses out from the face of our enemies. 

The kingdom invites us beyond boundaries into oneness with God. The good news is that the kingdom is here. How do we begin to see it? Through repentance, from metanoia, meaning “to go beyond the mind.” Metanoia is not about confession, but awakening. Greek thought saw four levels of reality: body, soul, universal soul or Mind, and God. To repent is to go beyond the mind, to go beyond all these identifications, to rest in the One who already holds us.

Repentance is not striving but surrender, a letting go into the reality that we are already in God.

Religion and sacrament have value when they lead us to this surrender as Denise Levertov writes in The Avowal:

As swimmers dare to lie face to the sky
and water bears them...
so would I learn to attain freefall...
knowing no effort earns that all-surrounding grace.