Wherein Ye Stand

There’s a piece of furniture in this room that teaches the Christian life better than most sermons do, and we walk past it every week without a second look. It’s the rail. Look at it when you come up in a little while. One line of people, all at the same height, all with their hands open and empty, and not one place on it assigned by merit. You kneel down to receive. Then you stand up, walk back to your seat, and go on into your week. Kneel, then stand. The whole of this morning is built into a length of wood.

The Collect says the same thing in one sentence, and the order of it can’t be reversed. O God, who declarest thine almighty power chiefly in showing mercy and pity. Chiefly. Not in the making of worlds, not in the holding of the stars in their courses, but in mercy. Then comes the petition: Mercifully grant unto us such a measure of thy grace, that we, running the way of thy commandments, may obtain thy gracious promises. Mercy first. Then a measure of grace, granted and not accumulated. Then running. God speaks a verdict over people who’ve got nothing to plead, and what follows that verdict is a whole life of running, and the running never becomes the reason for the verdict. Get that order backwards and you’ve got this morning’s Gospel exactly wrong.

Two men went up into the temple to pray, and Luke tells us both of them stood. Watch how differently. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself. Augustine caught that phrase and wouldn’t let go of it. The man went up to pray, and he didn’t pray. He filed a report. God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess. It’s a thanksgiving. It’s addressed to God. And every line of it is factually true. He really did fast twice in the week, which was twice what the law asked of him. He really did tithe everything. Nobody in the parable calls him a liar.

So what’s wrong with him? Not his record. His record is better than mine. What’s wrong is that he’s standing on it. Augustine’s observation is that the man’s thanksgiving is real thanksgiving that’s been deformed by comparison, so that he’s giving thanks less for his own health than for the sickness of somebody kneeling twenty feet behind him. Nothing ascends from a prayer like that, because nothing is being asked for. It’s an inventory, not a petition. And that’s what it means to be unjustified. It isn’t having a bad record. It’s standing on your own, whatever the record says.

Now look at the other man. And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner. Seven words in our English. No creed, no defense, no accounting. And our Lord’s verdict: I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other. Hear what kind of word that is. Justified is something done to him. He didn’t accomplish it, he received it, the way a man receives a ruling in a courtroom where he hasn’t got a case. Hooker put the whole distinction in a phrase in his Learned Discourse of Justification: God justifies the believing man not for the worthiness of his belief, but of him which is believed. Even the faith isn’t the ground. Christ is the ground.

But here’s where the Epistle does work the parable can’t do alone. The publican had the posture and no content. He couldn’t have told you what God had done about his sin, only that he needed mercy. Paul supplies what he was missing. I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day. Delivered and received. Handed down, not thought up. And notice that Paul, of all people, could have argued his case. Instead he speaks the publican’s line in his own voice: I am the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am. That sentence is God be merciful to me a sinner with the doctrine filled in.

Isaiah gives us the ground the whole thing rests on. Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust. A verdict of acquittal is only as good as the resurrection standing behind it, and Isaiah says the dust is going to sing.

Which brings us to the question I suspect some of you are already asking. If it’s all verdict, why get up in the morning? Paul answers it in the same breath he asked for mercy in. And his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me. Read that slowly, because there are two claims in it and both are true. Paul really did outwork every one of them. And it wasn’t him. That’s sanctification, and it isn’t optional and it isn’t decorative. It’s the running the Collect prays for. Isaiah had already said it flat: Lord, thou wilt ordain peace for us: for thou also hast wrought all our works in us. Our works. Wrought in us. Not our works instead of His, and not His instead of ours. Ours, because He put them there.

So justification is the verdict, and sanctification is what a justified man does with the rest of Tuesday. They can’t be pulled apart, and they can’t be swapped. The moment the running becomes the reason for the verdict, you’re back in the front of the temple with a list in your hand.

And I’ll be honest with you about the trap in this parable, because I’ve walked into it standing right here. You preach the Pharisee and the publican, and somewhere around the third point you catch yourself quietly grateful that you’re not the Pharisee. Jeremy Taylor saw that coming three hundred years ago and warned that humility is the one virtue most easily added to the inventory. If you leave this morning thinking you’ve got the humble posture down, you’ve just prayed the wrong man’s prayer with better manners.

The cure isn’t more introspection. It’s in the last thing Luke tells us about the publican. He went down to his house. The verdict got spoken in the temple, and then the man went home. Back to a house, a table, a job, a week. Justification happens at the rail; sanctification happens in the kitchen. It looks like alms nobody ever finds out about. It looks like a confession that names the actual thing instead of sins in general. It looks like the sentence about a neighbor that you decide, in the parking lot, not to say. None of that buys anything. All of it is the running.

And the Psalms tell us what we’re running on. Our soul is escaped even as a bird out of the snare of the fowler; the snare is broken, and we are delivered. The bird didn’t break the snare. Somebody broke it, and the bird went free. Then: They that put their trust in the Lord shall be even as the mount Sion, which may not be removed, but standeth fast for ever. There it is. The Pharisee stood on himself, and it didn’t hold him for the length of one prayer. The publican had nothing at all to stand on, and he was given a mountain.

That’s the gospel Paul says we’re standing in. Not achieved by us, and not ours to lose by having a bad week. Paul does add a word to it, and it isn’t a threat: we’re saved by this gospel if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you. Keeping it in memory is exactly what we’re doing at this moment, and what we’ll do again next Sunday. It’s why the Church has us say the Creed out loud together instead of trusting any of us to hold it privately. In a few minutes you’ll come to this rail and say with the rest of us that we do not presume to come trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. And after we’ve been fed, we’ll ask God to accept our service, not weighing our merits, but pardoning our offences. That’s the publican’s prayer, translated into the Prayer Book, put in your mouth every single Sunday. This parish has been praying it for years, and it’s the truest thing we say.

So hear what’s true of you this morning, whether or not it feels true. You aren’t on trial at this rail. The verdict was handed down at a cross and sealed in an empty tomb, and it was never waiting on your performance. God’s almighty power is shown to you chiefly in mercy, and mercy has already had the last word about your sin. You’ll get up from your knees in a few minutes, and you’ll go home, and you’ll run. The running is real, and the work is genuinely yours, and God Himself has wrought it in you. But it isn’t why He justified you. It never was. It’s just what a pardoned man does on the way home.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.