Facing the Bear

saintcolumbakent
Oct 23, 2016
8 min read

The Rev. Alissa Newton

The Twenty-Third Sunday After Pentecost

As some of you know, I've been out and about just a bit in the past couple of weeks. It is incredibly good to be back where I belong, here with you. A couple of weeks ago I spent three days in Sitka, Alaska. I was there to speak and teach at the convention for the Episcopal Diocese of Alaska. So I learned a few things – like there are some things that are bigger in Alaska and some things that are smaller. Geographically Alaska is the biggest state in our country – it has more coastline than the rest of the USA put together, and is twice as big (twice as big!) as Texas. But this giant state has a population that is barely larger than the city of Seattle. So the people are all spread out, and there are many places, Sitka among them, where nature and people sort of co-exist in a way that is not as familiar to many of us who live here. So, while I was in Sitka, there was a bit of a bear issue going on. But the salmon run has been a little weird this year and the bears are acting abnormally and so while I was in Sitka there was a lot of talk about the bears coming into town. Every once and a while a police or fire response vehicle would scream by and someone would say "oh there must have been a bear sighting." So I got all this advice about how to deal with a bear, should I run into one. I found out about bear spray, which is a thing I did not know about, but am very glad exists. And, more than once, one of my new Alaska friends would tell me "hey, don't worry. You don't have to be able to run faster than the bear. You only have to be able to run faster than the slowest person you are with, when you meet the bear."

It's funny right? It's actually horrible advice for bear encounters. More on that later. But it's a pretty accurate description of how many of us respond to the fear and anxiety of life. Just run faster than the slowest person. Look around and make sure that there is at least one person who is doing worse than you. We compete and compare – this is human nature. I want to be the best, which isn’t a bad thing. But also, sometimes, I will settle for just not being the worst. I don’t need the cleanest house, as long as I know at least one person whose house is messier than mine. My kids might not be the best behaved but that’s why I keep that one friend around whose kids are the worst – because hey, at least my kids aren’t as bad as THAT. Yeah, my marriage might not be heaven and roses every day, but I know three couples that divorced last year so, you know, it could be worse. We just have to run faster than the slowest person in our group, right? Is that a problem? I mean really, is there harm in that? Well, if you are a Christian than, yes. Maybe there is. Because it means that we look at each other with judgement. If we are just running faster than the slowest person, then we need someone to fail, to run slow, to get eaten up by the bear.

This morning Jesus tells a story about a Pharisee and a tax collector. Now, think for a minute about what comes into your head when I say the word “Pharisee.” Do you have a picture? Is it an angry man in robes, maybe strutting around with his nose in the air? Possibly Jesus is yelling at him? That’s the image I grew up with, because our gospels don’t give us a lot of background on the Pharisees, and mostly we see them fighting with Jesus, which we don’t like, because we like Jesus. But actually, the Pharisees were more familiar to us than that. They were a progressive movement, and they advocated for progressive things. They pursued a practice of faith that was good, robust, and included paying attention to the scriptures and to their times, and the issues of their day. So please notice, there is nothing in this text that is against this Pharisee’s religion. Think of the people you know who do good things -the ones who pay their taxes and tithe to their churches and have a regular pattern of prayer and strive to act decently toward others. That’s what this Pharisee is like. Like you, and like me.

By contrast the tax collector was by definition not a good person. Tax collectors come up a lot in scripture because they represented corruption and cheating and collusion with the bad things, the really bad things, of that day. You couldn’t make a living as a tax collector unless you took more from people than they could afford. So there’s nothing in this scripture that suggests the tax collector is doing good things. The Pharisee is doing good things, the tax collector isn’t. I mean think about the people who make a living cheating other people, loan sharks and slumlords, people who you are grateful not to be, the ones who have to, or choose to, compromise themselves in order to get by or get ahead. That’s what the tax collector is like.

So the temptation with this parable is to think that big twist (because most parables have a big twist) is that the Pharisee is bad and the tax collector is good. But that’s not what is happening here. This is not a parable about what they do, because the Pharisee is doing good things – objectively good things, and the tax collector is not. The first hearers of this parable would have known this, felt this.

So if this parable isn’t meant to flip the script and make a saint out of the tax collector and a sinner out of the Pharisee, then what is it telling us? What’s going on here?

Jewish scholar Amy Levine points out that the twist in the plot isn’t about bad and good – but that both are equal in the sight of God. Our translation says the tax collector “went back to his home justified rather than the other one” but that line could also be translated that the tax collector went back to his home justified alongside the other one.” The scripture isn’t slamming the Pharisee’s religious practice – after all both these people are practicing religion, praying in the Temple. What Jesus is slamming is the Pharisee’s attitude. The Pharisee looks over at the sobbing tax collector and he sees someone who is slower than him, doing less than him, someone who will get eaten up by the bear before him. The Pharisee doesn’t feel good because his religious practice has put him into the right relationship with God and others – which is what practicing our faith is supposed to do. He feels good because he thinks his religious practice makes him better than other people.

The gospel of Luke, especially this part of it which is made up of lots of parables from Jesus, is really interested in God’s kingdom. Our diocese – all the episcopal churches in Western Washington, met together Friday and yesterday and kingdom was our theme – Your Kingdom Come. It’s an appropriate theme for this time in our year and in our lectionary, because all of the parables we are hearing, including this one, are telling us something about God’s kingdom. And the really tough thing about this parable, where the tax collector is “justified” alongside the Pharisee, is that it shows us that in God’s kingdom all of us are equally loved by God. It’s like working on a group project, where everyone gets the same grade even if one person works way more, or way less than the others. This feels unfair. But there it is.

We’re not told what happens to these two men, after they leave the Temple. This parable doesn’t seem to be about that. We do know that in the gospel of Luke, more than one tax collector changes his ways and begins to behave differently because of an encounter with Jesus. We see some Pharisees in our scriptures who change as well, whose hearts are softened and who begin to associate with people they never would have before, because of Jesus.

So back to bears. If running away and hoping the bear eats the slowest person and the rest of you escape is a bad method, how should one deal with a bear? This is what I learned: if you don’t have bear spray or a gun, the best way to deal with bears is to be in a group of people. To stick together and make yourselves big, together. And my new friend from the forest service told me that there has never been a recorded bear attack on a group of more than three people. So, hiking in groups is recommended. In short, face the bear, with your friends. Nobody runs and everybody lives.

Right now we are at a moment in time where it is very tempting to feel contempt for other people. Our politicians encourage it, and our election process feels like a big scary bear, and it would be easy to use the good things we do, the ways in which we practice our faith to make ourselves feel like we’re better than other people. In a couple of weeks there will be winners and losers and the temptation to be contemptuous of whoever is on the other side of that contest from you and from me will be really great. But here is the reality of God’s kingdom – we are all in this together. We are on the same hike, and we are facing the same bear. I believe the call of our scriptures to us right now today is to figure out how to pray together, to love together, to resist the human urge to view the people who we don’t think much of with contempt.

This is also a time of year in this congregation when we focus a little more than usual on certain parts of our practice of religion. We’re asking you to consider how and why you give money to this church. And this year, as in many years, we’re asking you to give more. So it is timely, and important to have this reminder that we don’t do these things to prove we are good. And we don’t do them to get ahead of the slower people, or because these things make us safe, or because they make God take better care of us than of other people. We do these things as a response to God’s love. We do the things we do because they are the good, right ways to respond to the God who sees us when we behave like tax collectors and meets us with love and belonging anyway. That is what the tax collector got right – he knew that his only chance in this world was the merciful love of God.

With a love like this, from a God like ours, we can afford to stand with each other instead of against each other. With a love like this from a God like ours, we can afford to face the bear together.