-MLK Day tomorrow – read his ‘I have a dream speech’

-I preached on this issue last Spring, but thought it would be worth revisiting (ethnocentrism vs racism)

-You can go back and listen to that message if you want to hear more detail about it, but one of the biggest things I learned from my study then was the idea of “othering.” 

-Othering is at the core of relational strife and conflict, and all of us are guilty of it.

-Driving: anyone who drives slower than you is an idiot, anyone who drives faster than you is a maniac. We all condemn others while excusing ourselves. I heard someone say we view others through a judgment lens and view ourselves through a grace lens.

-Think back to Gen. 3 – the Fall. Instead of identifying himself with his wife, Adam removed himself from her and from God. “It wasn’t my fault! It was the woman you gave me!” And that sin has passed down to every child since then.

-Every person is trying to make sense of the world, and the differences between people are one of the easiest things to see! Tall vs. short, athletic vs. unathletic, smart vs. dumb, rich vs. poor. 

-Wherever you’re at, the human heart’s general drive is to look with suspicion on anyone who isn’t the same as you, and some of that is even taught in our culture! Think of sports where if you don’t adhere to a specific set of skills you’re out. Or school, which tends to reward those who can read and comprehend information, but penalizes those who are good at working with their hands.

-Every culture has a standard that it judges everyone by, and none of them align perfectly with God’s commands for how people are to live. But if we want to have God’s heart towards others, we need to recognize and confess of our own temptation to alienate others (“othering”)

READ/PRAY (pg. 511)

1. The Problem of Othering (9-12)

-Notice who Jesus directs this parable to: “confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else” 

-What is righteousness? Someone who keeps the commands of God, or completely innocent, or someone who is truly accepted by God. It’s a loaded term! It means no one has anything against you. But it always comes about by a sliding scale, or grading on a curve, because if you really dig down into it all of us have areas where we’re not even living up to our own standards, but we don’t like to admit it.

-And this sense of righteousness tends to manifest itself in looking down on others. Why? Because you judge everyone based on your strengths while refusing to acknowledge any weakness or wrongdoing of your own. I think football gives a great picture of this because of the wide variety of body types required to play football. Think of last year, when “iced Kirk Cousins” went viral, I heard someone comment “He doesn’t have a football players body!” And they were right! If he were a running, receiver, or lineman! But he’s a quarterback, which requires a very different set of skills!

-How does this tie into “othering”? If Kirk decided he was tired of getting sacked and started lining up on the line how well do you think that would go? Not very! Cara and I just watched the documentary Kelce (really hoping she doesn’t become an Eagles fan) and Jason Kelce (center for the Eagles) has a VERY different body type than either his brother (TE) or Kirk. But if any of them got frustrated about it and tried playing the other’s position it would be a disaster! That’s the idea Jesus is getting at here. God has created us uniquely and differently, and we need to ensure we’re using the right standards when we engage with others. 

-Back to the text: prayers at the temple happened 2x a day, during atoning sacrifices. Believed that if you prayed during those times God would answer your prayers. So Jesus is providing the context for us to interpret this correctly. 2 men joined the crowd of people who were going up to have God answer their prayers.

-Describes the Pharisee as standing “by himself” 

-Removed from the scum, didn’t want to catch the sin from those nearby. Contrast that with Jesus! Bleeding woman, lepers, blind, deaf, even the dead! Instead of “othering” or standing far off by Himself, Jesus enters in.

-Think of the way the Pharisee prays vs. the way Jesus taught us to pray

-In the Greek, the personal pronoun “I” appears 5 times in these 2 verses. Some people even argue that this should be translated as Him praying to Himself. How many first person singular pronouns do you see in the Lord’s prayer? Zero. I see 8 first person plural pronouns! God’s design is for us to be in community! 

-This Pharisee thought he was righteous because of what he did. In the 1^st century the Pharisees were the heroes! They gave generously, they followed the law perfectly. Jesus even acknowledged that: Matt. 5:20 “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” They were the gold standard by which everyone else would be judged! Yet Jesus is telling everyone that they’re using the wrong standard.

-Jesus goes on to say: Matt. 6:1 “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.” If all we’re looking for is horizontal (explain the difference between horizontal and vertical relationship) recognition and acclaim it’s really easy to self-justify.

-The way we do it today is “authenticity.” I’m just being true to myself! You can’t speak that way about me! What if you being true to yourself leaves a mess of relationships in your wake? Is that still ok?

-On top of that culturally today we’re all becoming increasingly tribal and partisan, when Jesus can’t be easily contained by any of our cultural or sociological boxes (listen to last week’s sermon for that)

-Notice who the Pharisee compares himself to: all those who were disobedient to God’s law, which this Pharisee obviously didn’t do! Not only did he not do those evil things, he didn’t associate with the wrong people (tax collector)

-And he went above and beyond God’s commands: fasting was required 1/year, he did it twice a week. Tithing was just monetary, he would tithe on his spices! Think about that! He believed He had everything in life figured out, and that there was nothing lacking in his life.

-He was comparing purely horizontally, neglecting (what Jesus described as) the weightier matters of the law. Matt. 23:23-24 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. ²⁴ You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!” How does Jesus summarize the weightier matters of the law? Justice, mercy, and faithfulness. 

-Jesus is saying if we truly want to obey the law, we need to practice justice, mercy, and faithfulness. Justice is a loaded term today! We’ll get there in a bit, but if Jesus is ok using it, so should we! 

-Now here’s where this gets difficult: if as we worked through this you started thinking of someone else who needed to hear this message, you’ve missed the point of what Jesus is saying.

-One of the commentaries I read shared a Sunday School lesson where the teacher worked through this passage and then asked Johnny to pray at the end, and he prayed “Lord I thank you that we are not like the Pharisee.” But then our tendency is to chuckle and say “Lord I thank you that I’m not like Johnny” and on and on the “othering” goes! 

-Instead, we need a (Copernican) complete revolution in where we looking and to whom we’re comparing.

• The Solution to Othering (13-14)

-Tax collector oriented his life in a different direction. Where the Pharisee only looked at others, the tax collector couldn’t even bring himself to look up.

-He’s standing off too, but not because he’s worried about infection, but because he didn’t dare approach God in his current state. Not necessarily demeaning himself, but recognition that he is a sinner in need of grace.

-What’s your approach when you wake up in the mornings? Self-justifying or self-demeaning? See if we only look at others or inward we’re going to remain broken, either looking down on others or looking down on ourselves.

-It’s only when you orient your gaze in the right direction that you can start to have a proper understanding and ordering of everything in the world.

-Tax collector faced othering all the time. Scorn, ridicule, belittled by everyone in his community. The Pharisee faced claim and recognition, and both are dangerous.

-Pharisee pursues othering from being good, tax pursue othering from the way he collected taxes and using finances as his way of achieving some level of acceptance.

-How does he respond?

-Beating your breast was very uncommon for men. Signified profound sadness and mourning, typically reserved for women at funerals. Yet here in public he’s demonstrating how broken he is and in need of help.

-The word used for “mercy” was better translated “atoning sacrifice,” he’s asking for someone to take his place because he knows that apart from that his situation is hopeless. Unless someone become “othered” for him, he has no hope of coming near God.

-The story leaves us on a cliffhanger for the man! He doesn’t know if he’s placing his hope in the right place! But we do. And that’s where Jesus’ othering is completely different than the way we other.

-Jesus provides a model for how we’re to view “othering” that takes place today. It has no standing apart from His atoning sacrifice (mercy)

-How is this man justified? He asks. Similar to the man crucified next to Jesus. The solution to othering is to ask Jesus to change your heart, perspective, and orientation. And the reality we’ll never fully get it right! We know that to be justified means we need to stop “othering,” we recognize that’s only possible because Jesus became “othered” for us, but what do we do with that now? 

• The Othering in Our Lives

-There are a lot of buzzwords that are thrown around today when we get to this idea of “othering” that tend to create even more divides in people than were in place before. 

-Additionally, the words themselves have almost become useless, and a way of merely stopping conversation than actually having a meaningful impact. Last year when I preached on this issue, I didn’t engage any of them, but this year we’re going to look at 3 of them: social justice, woke, and CRT (critical race theory).

-Please don’t immediately jump to conclusions or get nervous. Church, we NEED to be willing to talk about these issues here because otherwise we won’t have be able to be the faithful presence God has called us to be in the world He has created. Just as the Pharisee stood far off as if other’s sin would somehow taint him, we can have a tendency to not engage for fear of being tainted. We need Christians who are educated and equipped to bring the solution to everyone’s problems into the world, including ethnocentrism!

-I’ve shared this quote before, but I want to begin with it again: “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He’s saying that in order to deal with the evil in the world, it must begin with us dealing with the evil in our heart, which means if we want to actually see justice taking place, we need the gospel.

-To deal with othering today, we need to admit and acknowledge that we’re no better than anyone else. Rom. 3:23 says ALL have sinned, they have fallen short of how God has created and commanded us to live. No one’s immune to sins effects! 

-In the midst of a lot of the noise that has been thrown around over the past few years, the EFCA this summer released a document titled “Where we stand in the EFCA: Denials and Affirmations” to provide an overview of what the EFCA believes and how we engage divisive cultural issues today. Hence why social justice, woke, and CRT is what I want to engage today! There’s more than I have time for today, so I will again be doing a Sunday School class walking through all of these issues in more detail starting in March.

-First up: social justice. Notice the quotes around that phrase (not scare quotes) and the capitalization. It’s referring to a specific ideology that runs contrary to the way Scripture tells us the world operates. By itself, that phrase is beautifully biblical! The gospel message is by definition social in that God restores a broken relationship with us, Jesus’ death allows us to be social again with God. 

-But that being said, biblical justice also has societal implications for us. Think of the story Jesus tells of his return in Matt. 25. Who does he invite into his glory? Those who gave him food when he was hungry, drink when he was thirsty, welcomed him when he was a stranger, etc. When asked when they did that, Jesus says it was whenever you did it to the least of these, the poor and the marginalized. We can’t do everything for everyone, but one thing we can do is pray for everyone, and start looking for opportunities in your life to care for those others aren’t (schools, neighborhoods, work)

-Justice video 

-Second, woke! Some big words here: critical theory, not CRT yet (humanities study that focuses on societal power dynamics looking for previously unnoticed power dynamics that marginalize people). It has become a whole way of studying humanities with all sorts of implications.

-The reality is we don’t need critical theory to tell us that people are sinners and will sin, even against each other! That’s page 2 of the Bible! This means that even the institutions and organizations that we build will be affected by sin in ways that we probably won’t even fully understand until glory. 

-We also see that part of what we’re called to as God’s people is pursuing reconciliation (2 Cor. 5) and restoration (1 Peter 5:10)

-I think it’s also important for us to remember that we don’t fight against flesh and blood. 2 Cor. 4:4 “In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel.” We need to implore people to be awakened from their blindness! Think of Eph. 5:14“Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” That’s the “wokeness” we want! Spiritually awake to the realities of what God is actually doing around us.

-Finally, for today, CRT. 

-Part of the difficulty with all of these ideologies is they’re great at pointing out problems, but terrible at providing legitimate solutions. For example, if everything becomes a struggle between oppressed and oppressor, what happens if the roles actually do become reversed, where those who were once oppressed now have all the power and privilege. Aren’t we now in the exact same spot we were before, we’ve just switched groups.

-Some of this is because we as the church haven’t been good at reading the whole Bible and bringing it to bear in our world and culture today. We pick and choose the issues we want to make primary and neglect the rest. 

-I think of someone like CH Spurgeon who faced death threats for speaking against the slavery of the US. We need at admit and acknowledge where we’ve gotten in wrong in the past, and be willing to admit where we’ve gotten it wrong today so that we can have a better understanding of what God has actually said to us in His Word.

-We’re all accidental heretics 

-We’re called to unity in the midst of diversity (John 17:20-23). Revelation talks about people from every tribe and tongue gathered around the throne. (7:9) We should celebrate where our culture starts to see sin manifesting itself, and then look to jump in with the gospel message, the only true hope we have!