“Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder and the Justified Tax Collector”

Many of you know that the first 5 years of my career as an ordained minister were spent as a chaplain at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. What you may not know is that as an academic, non-religiously affiliated hospital, the over 1,000 bed hospital was woefully understaffed when it came to staff in the Department of Pastoral Care. The daytime hours were covered by 3 chaplains and a handful of student interns, and the evenings until 11:30 PM were covered by a single chaplain. The overnight hours were an “on-call” program with local community clergy, where we would compensate a local pastor with a whole $50 if they came in the middle of the night to handle the most horrific of cases. Now, down the road, St. Thomas hospital, owned by a Catholic healthcare system, had 24 hour, in-house chaplain staff in a department three times as large as ours for a hospital with half of the number of beds.

What this meant for me as a chaplain was that I had a lot of units assigned to my watch. I would do my best to simultaneously cover the emergency department, the level 1 trauma unit, which included both the trauma ICU and step down units, the neuro ICU, the PACU (or Perioperative holding unit), labor and delivery and postpartum units, and the maternal special care unit. Sounds like a piece of cake, right?

Ironically, what I found most draining in these years of ministry work was not the unrealistic number of patients, staff and families assigned to my care. What I found exhausting was that with such a wild variety of cases I would encounter on a daily basis, I felt as though I were constantly having to go back to the drawing board for my theology – for the fundamental foundations of my faith. You know how when someone experiences a tragic event – a loss or a life altering change – they struggle to find God in that experience, and make meaning for how God is present and operating in those moments? Well, every day for me in that role involved walking into a someone’s moment like that, while also being viewed as the theological expert.  

Don’t get me wrong, this was a beautiful season in my ministry and I really felt the sense that God had called me to the work I was doing every single day. I felt that more clearly than in any job I’ve had since. However, having to constantly revisit my fundamental understandings of who God is and how God operates in the world all of the time after seeing something traumatic and unexpected was simply exhausting work. Can you imagine walking around every day asking yourself over and over again questions like – Who is prayer for? What does prayer do? Does prayer move the hand of God or is it merely an act of surrender? Does it make a difference if we pray out loud or silently? Where is God in this awful, unimaginable thing? Did God want this? Allow this? Orchestrate this? Is God present in this? How is God present in this? I was actively wrestling with questions like these and more every single day. It was beyond intense. The challenge of trying to offer a non-anxious, calming presence with these kinds of questions always swirling in my mind was enormous. These were some of the best professional years of my life but they also the hardest I’ve faced thus far.

I am grateful for that exhausting work. It taught me important lessons about faith and discipleship that I would not have learned otherwise. It taught me the value of theological work. It taught me the value of questions and  the role of mystery in my faith.

We’ll talk about that a more in a little bit, but now I want to look at our final song in this year’s Songs and Scripture series – “Higher Ground” by the iconic Stevie Wonder – A song ranked number 113 on the most recent list of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

This song was released in 1973, at a time when Stevie Wonder was riding high on a wave of number 1s, with both his songs “Superstition” and “You are the Sunshine of My Life” hitting the top spots they year before. This song is a little different from Wonder’s other hits. It talks about God, or some notion of divine. Wonder had taken up silent mantra meditation and been hanging out with a yogi during this time, and was intrigued by the notion of reincarnation. Later in 1973, Wonder was in a near fatal car accident that left him in a coma for four days. When interviewed later about the song, he said, “For me, I wrote "Higher Ground" even before the accident. But something must have been telling me that something was going to happen to make me aware of a lot of things and to get myself together. This is like my second chance for life, to do something, or to do more, and to value the fact that I am alive.”

The song is about moving forward. It’s about always working and always striving to keep doing. A song about being given another chance to try again. The song seems to simultaneously celebrate persistence, starting over, and striving to be better. Consider these lyrics:  

I’m so darn glad He let me try it again
‘Cause my last time on earth, I lived a whole world of sin
I’m so glad that I know more than I knew then
Gonna keep on tryin’
‘Til I reach my highest ground

In an article for American Songwriter, Glen Rowley wrote: “The chorus references God, second chances, the choice to turn away from sin, a quest for spiritual redemption, and the constant struggle that comes with self-improvement, all with a sunny, relentless optimism and the boundless energy that comes from Wonder’s vocal delivery.”

So what then does this song have to do with today’s Parable from the Gospel of Luke – the Parable of the Justified Tax Collector? Well, let’s talk about it…

This Parable sets us up for a game of gotcha. “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.” We read it and think, “Oh boy, someone’s gonna get it today! Someone is going to be rewarded and someone is going to get a spiritual smackdown!” And because of how Pharisee’s have often been portrayed in the Gospels, many of us are probably looking in that direction. But the parable doesn’t exactly play out that way. There is no clear winner or loser in this story in the sense that Jesus takes someone down.

The Pharisee is clearly very righteous and is living a life marked by faithful discipline – even more than would typically be required by Jewish Law. Some may say he was boasting, but maybe not. Perhaps he was just explaining how he lives and expecting that this will surely merit God’s blessing. Then there’s the tax collector, who doesn’t even look up, but beats his chest and prays the simplest of prayers, saying “I am a sinner, please have mercy on me.” Nothing more. No words of conversion. No words about how he plans to change his life. Just simply, “I am a sinner, have mercy on me.” And the parable ends with Jesus saying that he went home justified rather than the other.

So what are we supposed to make of that? One man who is seemingly doing all the right things, and one who shows up and says one little prayer, and he is the one who goes home justified and not the other? What the heck, Jesus? Many read this parable and think, “that is not the ending I was expecting.” Many read this parable and ask, “How is that fair?” Is this justice? Is God being unfair?

There are two very important things to note about this parable – namely, what it teaches us about GOD’S GRACE, and what it teaches us about the LIFE OF FAITH.

This parable reframes for us the notion of how God’s grace operates. In this story, God’s grace is not doled out just to the who is perfect. God’s grace is not given more abundantly to the one who has done all of the things required and more. In this parable, God’s grace is for everyone. It is for both the one who is doing all the things, and the one who does one thing. God’s grace is given to the one who points out all of the things he has done right, and God’s grace is given to the one who simply utters the words, “Have mercy on me.”

The reason the pharisee went away without justification was not because he did not receive God’s grace, but because he believed that he deserved it more than others. The games of comparison we are so apt to play in this world don’t apply to the economy of God. It’s not a tit for tat transaction. You can’t earn God’s grace more than anyone else. You can’t store it up like wealth. And as human beings in a capitalist world, that will probably feel unfair at times. But the power of God’s grace rests in its abundance – not in its scarcity. The power of God’s grace is that it is available to us wherever we are on our journeys – as long as we are willing to acknowledge we need it, and ask for it.

The second takeaway from this parable is that it tells us something about the LIFE OF FAITH. It tells us something about discipleship which is this – Our faith is not a place of arrival. At no point in these earthly lives can we think, OK we have crossed off everything on the list. We have checked all the boxes so we can turn to God and say, “Look at me! I’ve done all the things. I’ll take all my blessings now!”

This is what the Pharisee got wrong in this story. He seemed to think that because he was living a righteous life, doing more than others, that he had arrived at the place of favor – at a place of being able to judge himself as more worthy of God’s love than the other people he names as less faithful.

If we look around our world today, it is not uncommon to see Christians talk about our faith in the same terms. We use the past tense language of “saved” to refer to those who have received the sacrament of Baptism and professed faith in Jesus Christ. Many talk about faith as a place of arrival – and like the pharisee, point a finger at others and offer similar judgmental comments about being glad they are “not like them.”

But our Christian faith is not a place of arrival. It is a journey. A constant striving to learn, to serve others, and to draw closer to God in new ways. Discipleship is a journey. Jesus described the Kingdom of God, and charged us with participating in building a world that more closely reflects that Kingdom. He taught us the words, “Thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” And I don’t know about you, but I look around and think, “We aren’t there yet!”

Just like those years I spent in chaplaincy, where I had to revisit and rework my fundamental understandings about God because of what I was encountering, and Just like Stevie Wonder’s Higher Ground reminding us to keep striving, keep going, this Parable reminds us to that there is always more to our faith than our own understandings, on any given day. God’s grace is available to us wherever we find ourselves on our journeys in discipleship, as long as dare to actually be on a journey. Discipleship is a journey that includes hard work. A journey that can be scary and confusing. A journey that we don’t have to take alone if we are willing to link up with others.

As human beings, with human emotions, this parable is simultaneously frustrating and comforting. It’s humbling to know that you can’t deserve God’s grace more than anyone else. It’s available to everyone who seeks it. And it’s draining to think that our work is never complete in this life – discipleship is a journey, and not a destination we can reach.

But also, as human beings, full flaws and rough edges, how wonderful to know that God’s grace is equally available to all of us, and what a gift it is to be alive with the opportunity to keep moving forward in our journeys toward understanding God. Every single day.

We are on grace-filled journeys together. Perhaps another way of saying this is this….

I’m so darn glad He let me try it again
‘Cause my last time on earth, I lived a whole world of sin
I’m so glad that I know more than I knew then
Gonna keep on tryin’
‘Til I reach my highest ground

And all of God’s children who could said, Amen!