A sermon for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost preached at the campus ministry service for the St. Thomas Aquinas Episcopal Campus Ministry at West Virginia University
Focus Texts: Luke 15:1-10; Exodus 32:7-14
Jesus chooses to claim tax collectors and sinners as his people when he dines with them. Some Pharisees who witness this public acceptance are scandalized and ridicule him. Enter the parables of the lost sheep and coin and hear, “there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents."
Faith is evident when we realize that we can only approach God with outstretched empty hands to receive mercy, grace, forgiveness of sins, and new life in Jesus Christ. It realizes that we have nothing to offer God but our hearts and our acceptance of his acceptance of us and recognizing need for God.
Faith doesn’t rely on the condemning others for the sake of contrast needed for a self-justifying narrative. These contrast, like in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, fill the religious landscape of the United States. As David Zahl wrote in Seculosity, we have not become less religious but are rather more than ever before — just not in places of worship. New religions — new self-justifying stories that can stand only by comparing and contrasting ourselves with others — have emerged instead: religions of busyness, work, fitness, nutrition, sex, and politics.
In the new religion of political self-righteousness, it is not Christ who saves but rather the “correct” political agendas and leaders which fit our ideologies. The priests, pastors, and prophets of this religion are politicians, lobbyists, and talking heads. Righteousness is found in the ridicule of “diabolically evil political enemies” who stand against all that our nation holds dear (left or right) and purity tests are normative to determine distinguish “true belief” from “heretical apostasy.” The sacrifices offered to this religion’s “gods” come in the forms of horrors, such as school shootings and political violence, such as the school shooting in Colorado (in which two students were critically injured before the 16-year-old shooter turned his gun in himself) which happened just one minute after the political assassination of Charlie Kirk.
This self-righteous political religiosity defines how many progressive liberals talk about the demonic political violence that took a young man’s life, leaving his wife a widow and his young children fatherless. In like manner, one of the right wing purity tests is found in an often empty response in the wake of equally diabolical mass shootings.
Such schemes of self-righteousness that define our self-justifying stories pervade even within the church when we learn about the conversion of high(ish) profile individuals converting to faith in Jesus Christ as Christians take to social media, as these conversions are often made publicly known. There are Christians — both theologically progressive and conservative — who learn on social media platforms about these et repentant kin, such as actor Shia LaBeouf and former OnlyFans girl Nala Ray. They do not rejoice with the angels about these newborn Christian lives. Rather, they respond in pharisaical sneering and mockery (“Yeah, sure. We’ll see how long this lasts”) or refuse to forget a past that God has put out of his mind. Their conversion is treated in comments section with suspicion and the same ridicule of the Pharisees in our Gospel passage.
I am convinced that much of this arises as a way to ignore our own religious insecurity — our inability to recognize our own lostness, our own foundness, and the acceptance that we have in Christ when we see ourselves as unacceptable. We hold ourselves in high esteem only by dragging others through the mud because we hate to look in the mirror and find ourselves wanting (yet wanted!). This changes when we readily realize that we are the sinners who Jesus sits with at dinner saying, “these are my people.”
