If you stop reading with last week’s parable, you might get the idea that it doesn’t matter what you pray or how you pray. Go ahead and be self-centered and obnoxious. Prayer is like Campbell’s soup—it has to be good.

Stop right there before you go too far in one direction, let’s go back the other way for a minute.

If you’re as old as I am, you remember a time when nobody expected FSU to have a ranked football team. So, way back in those days, nobody was terribly disappointed when year after year we weren’t. Then along came Bobby Bowden and things started changing. In those early years Bobby became famous for trick plays – plays that caught our opponents off guard. The most famous was the reverse. Of course he didn’t invent it, but for awhile it seemed like a brilliant coaching strategy. But then, people came to expect it, so we needed something new and we started seeing the double reverse.

I’m thinking maybe Jesus figured out the effectiveness of a double reverse way before Bobby did.

By the time we get to the parable of the praying Pharisee and the tax collector in Luke’s Gospel, we have gotten pretty comfortable with the reverse play. Like the judge in the previous parable, Pharisees were supposed to be the upstanding pillars of society, but Jesus really liked to point out their fallibility.

And we also know by this point in Luke’s story that Jesus had this affinity for social outcasts like wanton women and tax collectors. We know that in that culture, tax collectors were despised, but Jesus likes them anyway.

So, right away, when we hear that our story is about a Pharisee and a tax collector, we have a pretty good idea about what is coming. The supposedly upstanding man of God is going to come out looking foolish and the sinful tax collector is going to be the hero.

You have the pillar of society who is actually an arrogant jerk on one side and over there across the aisle, you’ve got the despised tax collector who is all humble and asking for mercy.

I get it. Jesus is saying don’t be an uppity braggart, be humble and ask for forgiveness. There is your basic reverse play. It’s an easy lesson. But it’s a little too easy for the Jesus I have come to know and love.

There is something more going on here. In the first place, when you read the Pharisee’s prayer you have to ask yourself "what is he thinking?" I have known some arrogant, egotistical people in my time. Lawyers have a well-earned reputation for being at the top of the heap when it comes to arrogance and ego. But lawyers aren’t the only ones. Doctors, professors—OK, law professors may be the absolute worst. And then there are church people, ministers especially. When I first started shifting from the legal profession to ministry, people were always warning me that church people were worse than lawyers.

The truth is, the human ego is not limited to particular professions or segments of society, wherever you find yourself, there will be no shortage of the self absorbed and the self righteous.

But I have never met anybody like the guy in our parable today. It is one thing to go around acting like a pompous jerk in your day to day life, ignoring the suffering of others, hurting people’s feelings and just generally forgetting the business of loving our neighbor as ourselves. But I don’t know anybody who would walk into church and look God straight in the face and say "Thank God I am so much better than the rest of your children who are all a bunch of thieving, adulterers –no, not me. I fast AND I thithe.

This is one of the more familiar parables, but do we really need to be told not to pray like this Pharisee is praying?

Do you think anyone has ever read or listened to this parable and said: "Uh-oh, that’s me, I’d better change my ways."

No, we know. Even the most arrogant among us knows that we mess up sometimes. And if it’s just me and God talking, I’m not going to pretend God doesn’t know it too.

So we can just write that part of the story off.

That’s the double reverse. We listen to the story and say to ourselves—and to God, "thank God I’m not like that egotistical, arrogant Pharisee. Maybe I do need to be reminded sometimes to be humble like the tax collector, but at least I’m not like that Pharisee."

Let’s think about that a little more. Why do we think it’s a good idea to be like the tax collector and not the Pharisee? Remember, tax collectors were despised not for the reasons they are today—just because they happen to be the conduit for taking your money in order to support the government. In first century Judea, they were traitors. People who were consorting with the enemy purely for personal gain. Not only that, the system legitimized graft and embezzlement. They weren’t paid a salary. It was profitable because they could keep anything they collected over and above the official assessment. They weren’t like Robinhood. Nor were they victims of a failed social service system, just doing what they knew how to do to survive. They really were bad.

So, if you are thinking you are more like the tax collector, don’t take any comfort in that thought. I don’t think Jesus’ point here is that it is ok to cheat and steal as long as you act humble before God while you are doing it.

Now, let’s get back to the Pharisee. He really is a good guy. He goes above and beyond the law because he fasts twice a week AND he’s a thither. After the stewardship drive this church just went through, I really had to convict myself for disdaining this boastful Pharisee. If anybody has a good reason to boast, it’s him.

What gives us the right to look down on him because of the way he talks to God? I’ll tell you what. Nothing. Nothing gives us the right to judge him. It’s between him and God. The prayer really doesn’t have anything to do with us.

Still, there definitely is something wrong with the Pharisee’s prayer because Jesus says "I tell you"—we know something is up when Jesus starts a sentence with "I tell you"—the tax collector is the one who goes home justified, not the other

There it is. We are not just comparing a repentant sinner with an egotistical philanthropist. It’s not philanthropy that gets this guy into trouble. It’s his SELFrighteousness. His prayer implies that he is in a superior position due to his own effort. He has made himself right with God.

He thinks he is blessed because of the good things that he does, and he thinks that must mean God loves him more.

But both of our guys are the recipients of God’s grace. Both receive in spite of who they are, not because of who they are. The tax collector gets this, the Pharisee doesn’t.

For our purposes, it’s all about responding to God’s grace. We don’t get grace because we tithe, we tithe because we have grace. We don’t get justified because we tithe, we tithe because we are justified. So if we go up to God like the tax collector and say "God have mercy on my soul because I’m a sinner" it means we are at least on the right track to understanding that. But if we go up to God and say, in effect "I’m doing good here God, don’t worry about me because I have it all under control. Its you and me God, up here at the top we’re like this and other people just don’t measure up to us." well then it means we don’t get it and we need to take a step back to remember who God is and who I am.

Not too long after I heard God calling me, I remember sitting in this church while elders were being ordained. I didn’t really know what it was all about, I would like to say I was enlightened when I read the ordination litany. But I confess that as I read the questions and responses, I was smug and cynical. Smug, because I knew I had been called to follow Jesus Christ, love my neighbors and work for the reconciliation of the world. Cynical because I doubted that those being ordained that day had really given the matter serious deliberation.

Who does that sound like? It’s really embarrassing for me to admit this because I was so sincere in my desire to be a Christian, but I absolutely thought like the self-righteous Pharisee. I might as well have said thank you God for making me better than those other people who don’t really know what they are doing.

Now, I’ve seen how the nominating committee struggles to discern who should be asked to be an elder. I know how those who accept the challenge study and are instructed in what it means. Last year when James was ordained, I felt the outpouring of the Holy Spirit when all the other ordained members of this congregation came up and laid hands on him and the other new elders. This year, I was present when the elders-to-be were examined by the session and I heard moving testimonies from each one of them about their very intentional and thoughtful considerations on hearing and responding to God’s call in their lives. How they understand that they are called to a particular place of service in this particular Christian community.

It’s an awesome thing to hear God’s call and when we do it truly is irresistible. The joy of responding to it is beyond description. I used to think I was unique in this experience. Now I know I’m not. It happens all the time. As the Apostle Paul says over and over again, the grace of God in Jesus Christ is for all of us.

But, as Paul also shows, that does not mean once we hear the call we are on easy street. Over and over again in the Book of Acts and Paul’s letters we hear about the trials and tribulations suffered by the early followers of Christ. They lived in a world where life was hard. For most of them, having sufficient food, shelter and clothing took all their time and energy. And it was impossible to preach and practice their new form of religion without criticizing the existing power base. That was a threat to the establishment and made things dangerous for them. Becoming Christian didn’t solve all their problems then any more than it does today.

It was not an easy thing for Paul either.

But as far as we can tell, he didn’t give up. He lived out his life in response to that call and when he was getting near the end he had no regrets.

We’ve all heard the adage that nobody lying on their death bed wishes they had spent more time in the office. Nobody wants to feel like that when they die. We want to be like Paul. We want to be able to say to ourselves that we fought the good fight and kept the faith.

We want to be thanking God for calling us and for the grace that enables us to hear the call. That is quite a different thing from thanking God that we are better off, or more blessed than our neighbor whether the neighbor we’re talking about is sitting in the County jail or the Whitehouse. God calls everybody and we are not more blessed than others because of the circumstances we find ourselves in. What matters is our own response, so that like Paul we can say