IN and OUT

When doing some work to discover my typology in the Enneagram Personality Indicator I have found that I am an “achiever.” This means that I function out of a desire to feel valuable and I do this by accomplishing as much and as many achievements as possible. Put another way, I want to impress other people into loving me by all the things I have done, and how good I look in doing those things to boot! So, in reading this coming Sunday’s Gospel lesson I have a hard time not immediately thinking, “Oh no, I am the Pharisee!”

 

While I have not said it exactly this way, I can hear myself praying as that religious leader did in Jesus’ parable, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.” Now my colleague Evan Garner has written a thought-provoking blog about how the Pharisee most assuredly went home justified alongside the tax collector from the story; however, I am still left confounded in my own (and the Pharisee’s own) trap falsely believing that God’s grace happens in a comparative way, instead of an overwhelmingly non-competitive, all-encompassing way!

If I am not careful my egoic-self pushes me into a place where I do not feel worthy on my own, and so I begin to compare myself with others. Thus, I say—not so much in prayers as much as when I am driving around in my car—“Thank you Lord, for making me who I am and not like those drivers who do not use their turn signals, yield at red lights, or wait their turns at stop signs.” The trouble here is that I am justified in being a good driver, but I am failing in being a free-flowing vessel of God's grace. In my fear I attempt to deceive myself and others into believing that I am better than them when the truth is that all of us are made worthy not in our accomplishments, but in the free gift that is the love of God! 

The Pharisee (from Jesus' parable) and I (when I am unhealthy) tend to want to make life about who is IN and who is OUT! And yet, in the life of God, which includes all of us and all of life itself, when we come together we are always made greater than the sum of our parts. Even though the passage hails from another Gospel account entirely, I believe that is why Jesus said, “When two or three are gathered together I will be in the midst of them.” When we come together we realize that Jesus is among us, and when we discover we are all IN-cluded in the Body of Christ powerful transformations occur, our work gets multiplied, and we discover that God leaves no one OUT!

My small self may want to continue to say, “At least I am not like him or her,” but Jesus in this parable confuses and expands the traditional understanding of who is IN and who is OUT. When we instead pray for the ability and understanding to come together the hope shifts from “I will make it, instead of you” to “I am not diminished but made greater being part of something larger than myself individually.” Lord, thank you for giving us the sinners and the saints, the thieves and the servants, the Republicans and the Democrats, the old and the young, the rich and the poor, all races, all genders, and all sexual orientations for we are much more when we realize that there is no OUT only IN, for we are all invited into the life and love of God. Now, if we can only allow this truth to sink into our being and our doing I wonder how this world might explode with new life and spirit!