William H. Willimon - "A Parable of Parents at Prayer" (October 28, 2001)
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| - | Second lesson is from the gospel according to St. Luke | 0:05 |
| the 18th chapter. | 0:08 | |
| "He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves | 0:10 | |
| "that they were righteous | 0:13 | |
| "and regarded others with contempt. | 0:15 | |
| "Two men went up to the temple to pray, | 0:18 | |
| "one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. | 0:20 | |
| "The Pharisee, standing by himself, | 0:23 | |
| "was praying thus, 'God, I thank you | 0:25 | |
| "'that I'm not like other people, | 0:27 | |
| "'thieves, rogues, adulterers, | 0:29 | |
| "'or even like this tax collector. | 0:32 | |
| "'I fast twice a week, I give a tenth of all my income.' | 0:34 | |
| "But the tax collector, standing far off, | 0:37 | |
| "would not even look up to Heaven | 0:40 | |
| "but was beating his breast and saying, | 0:42 | |
| "'God, be merciful to me, a sinner.' | 0:44 | |
| "I tell you, this man went down to his home justified | 0:48 | |
| "rather than the other for all those who exalt themselves | 0:51 | |
| "will be humbled but all who humble | 0:54 | |
| "themselves will be exalted." | 0:57 | |
| This is the word of the Lord. | 1:00 | |
| Congregation | Thanks be to God. | 1:02 |
| - | President Cohan has read the parable | 1:20 |
| of the Pharisee and the publican. | 1:23 | |
| Jesus told a parable about people at prayer. | 1:26 | |
| Specifically about people at prayer | 1:34 | |
| who trusted in themselves that they were righteous | 1:36 | |
| and they despised everybody else. | 1:40 | |
| It is unsurprising to find a talk | 1:44 | |
| about prayer in Luke's gospel. | 1:47 | |
| It's one of the major concerns of this gospel. | 1:49 | |
| This is the only gospel where Jesus' disciples say, | 1:51 | |
| "Lord, teach us to pray." | 1:54 | |
| And in response Jesus told them this story | 1:56 | |
| of the Pharisee and the publican, | 2:02 | |
| a story about how to pray | 2:04 | |
| which is what we've been trying | 2:07 | |
| to do for the last 30 minutes. | 2:08 | |
| How do you pray? | 2:11 | |
| Now, the story begins. | 2:14 | |
| Two people went up to the church to pray. | 2:15 | |
| One is a Pharisee, that is a good Bible believing, | 2:18 | |
| church-going, moral person. | 2:22 | |
| The other is a publican, | 2:26 | |
| that is a bad, tax collecting, collaborator | 2:28 | |
| with the oppressive Romans, cheating, bad person. | 2:32 | |
| So Jesus says that any church | 2:38 | |
| and any service of prayer on any Sunday | 2:40 | |
| you mainly get two types of people, | 2:43 | |
| Pharisees or publicans. | 2:46 | |
| Pharisees, good people. | 2:50 | |
| Publicans, bad people. | 2:54 | |
| But for today's purposes, | 2:57 | |
| let us say that both of these types of people, | 2:59 | |
| Pharisees and publicans, happen to be parents. | 3:02 | |
| Let's take this as a story about Pharisees | 3:06 | |
| and publicans who are parents. | 3:10 | |
| Let's listen in on their prayers. | 3:15 | |
| One parent prays, God, I thank you that I am | 3:18 | |
| not like other parents. | 3:23 | |
| That couple that abandoned their children in Connecticut, | 3:27 | |
| the woman who smothered her infant child | 3:30 | |
| to death in Georgia, or even those people, | 3:31 | |
| what's their name, down the street | 3:34 | |
| who's always leaving their feral children unsupervised | 3:35 | |
| while they play tennis at the club. | 3:38 | |
| I thank you that I'm not like these parents. | 3:40 | |
| I thank you that I have planned and sacrificed | 3:42 | |
| and sent my children to the very best and selective schools | 3:45 | |
| and then there was soccer camp | 3:49 | |
| and the Duke Young Writers camp | 3:51 | |
| and the Young Leaders Camp | 3:53 | |
| and the Future Computer Programmers Camp | 3:55 | |
| and, Lord, you know none of that stuff is cheap. | 3:58 | |
| Not content with the intellectual | 4:00 | |
| and economic advancement of my children, | 4:04 | |
| I also force them to go to confirmation class at church. | 4:06 | |
| As our priest said, and I quote, | 4:12 | |
| it is good to find a parent | 4:14 | |
| who is truly committed to Christian education. | 4:16 | |
| Thank you God, Amen. | 4:20 | |
| Now, from what I've noted around here, | 4:25 | |
| behind every high academically achieving young person, | 4:27 | |
| somewhere there is a parent who is incredibly effective | 4:32 | |
| or, at least, manipulative. | 4:39 | |
| (congregation laughing) | 4:41 | |
| And in my experience | ||
| around here, these parents can be | 4:44 | |
| a real pain in the neck | 4:46 | |
| for those of us who have to administer their children | 4:48 | |
| here at the university | 4:51 | |
| because Pharisee parents | 4:53 | |
| who are good parents, | 4:55 | |
| who planned, who sacrificed, | 4:57 | |
| and worked for their children | 4:59 | |
| tend to expect a good return. | 5:01 | |
| I'd only been here about a year or so | 5:06 | |
| when I got a call from a parent | 5:08 | |
| and this parent had ordered flowers | 5:10 | |
| for her daughter's birthday | 5:12 | |
| but she was uncertain that the florist | 5:15 | |
| had properly delivered the flowers | 5:17 | |
| to her student's dormitory room. | 5:19 | |
| She wanted me to go over | 5:21 | |
| and make sure these flowers | 5:23 | |
| were outside of that door | 5:25 | |
| when her daughter woke up that morning. | 5:27 | |
| Now, will you understand me when I said | 5:29 | |
| I felt sorry for that daughter? | 5:32 | |
| 'Cause there's a claim that good parents | 5:37 | |
| sometimes lay upon good children. | 5:40 | |
| On the other hand, I must say that these Pharisee parents | 5:45 | |
| can be marvelously supportive of our work here. | 5:48 | |
| A few years ago, somebody left one of the chapel doors | 5:52 | |
| open at night and these three random rowdies | 5:55 | |
| got in, they got up to the organ loft, | 5:58 | |
| and they were prancing about in the middle of the night, | 6:02 | |
| accidentally stepped on the organ bellows, | 6:04 | |
| broke one of the bellows. | 6:06 | |
| This tripped the alarm. | 6:08 | |
| The Duke police came, nabbed them. | 6:09 | |
| Next morning there was a knock at my office door | 6:12 | |
| and this large, unshaven male appeared | 6:16 | |
| and he introduced himself as one of those | 6:21 | |
| who had been nabbed by the police the night before. | 6:24 | |
| He said that we never intended to break | 6:27 | |
| or damage anything. | 6:29 | |
| I'm really sorry. | 6:30 | |
| I want to personally assure you I will pay | 6:32 | |
| for any damage that have been incurred. | 6:35 | |
| I complimented him on his sense of honor. | 6:40 | |
| I said it's really quite amazing | 6:42 | |
| that you would come back here | 6:44 | |
| and take responsibility and apologize. | 6:45 | |
| I think that's wonderful. | 6:47 | |
| He said to me, well, I didn't want to do it | 6:50 | |
| but my mother made me. | 6:53 | |
| (congregation laughing) | 6:54 | |
| "Your mother?" I said. | 6:57 | |
| He said, "Yeah. | 6:59 | |
| "When I called her last night | 7:00 | |
| "and told her what had happened, | 7:01 | |
| "I mean, she went ballistic. | 7:02 | |
| "She said things you shouldn't say to children." | 7:04 | |
| (congregation laughing) | 7:06 | |
| She compared me to the Nazis in the 1930's. | 7:08 | |
| She said they defaced religious buildings. | 7:11 | |
| You've defaced religious buildings. | 7:13 | |
| She told me, she said I am ashamed I went into labor | 7:15 | |
| for somebody like you. | 7:19 | |
| (congregation laughing) | 7:20 | |
| I said to him, I think I would like your mother. | 7:24 | |
| (congregation laughing) | 7:28 | |
| And yet as I've said, | 7:31 | |
| one of the trouble with the good parent, | 7:32 | |
| the contentious, resourceful, | 7:35 | |
| extremely attentive Pharisaic parent, | 7:36 | |
| is that sometimes these parents can look upon their children | 7:40 | |
| as projects, as their projects. | 7:44 | |
| All of that work on behalf of their children | 7:48 | |
| becomes a subtle claim upon the children. | 7:50 | |
| I need you to turn out okay | 7:53 | |
| to validate my parental sacrifices. | 7:56 | |
| Recently at a conference on higher education | 8:00 | |
| one of the speakers predicted | 8:02 | |
| that we're going to see at American colleges | 8:04 | |
| and universities the creation | 8:06 | |
| of an office of parental affairs. | 8:08 | |
| (congregation laughing) | 8:11 | |
| Because complaints by, interaction with, | 8:12 | |
| work for parents is consuming more | 8:15 | |
| of college administrators' time. | 8:17 | |
| What I'm saying in all this | 8:21 | |
| is that there can be something worse | 8:23 | |
| than being a lousy publican parent | 8:24 | |
| and that's to be a good Pharisaical one. | 8:26 | |
| And thus Jesus brings us to another type | 8:30 | |
| of parent at prayer. | 8:33 | |
| The publican. | 8:35 | |
| The bad parent. | 8:36 | |
| This is the parent that received the parents' weekend | 8:39 | |
| information in the mail but somehow forgot it. | 8:44 | |
| His daughter told him what time the chapel began | 8:46 | |
| but she waited out there in front for him, | 8:48 | |
| gave up, came in, took a seat, | 8:50 | |
| he finally shows up 10 minutes into the service, | 8:52 | |
| can't find a place to sit. | 8:56 | |
| Can't even actually get in the building | 8:57 | |
| and it's not just because it's a space problem. | 9:00 | |
| It's because he knows that in these religious buildings | 9:02 | |
| they're always talking about responsibility | 9:05 | |
| and righteousness and doing your part | 9:07 | |
| and he's incredibly uncomfortable in such buildings. | 9:11 | |
| So when it came time for prayer, | 9:19 | |
| this parent didn't join in with everybody else | 9:21 | |
| but stood at a distance outside | 9:25 | |
| and just mumbled, God, be merciful to me. | 9:30 | |
| I'm a lousy parent. | 9:35 | |
| I didn't mean for my marriage to break up | 9:37 | |
| and when my daughter was only 12. | 9:40 | |
| I thought I was working hard | 9:42 | |
| to give her all the things | 9:44 | |
| that I didn't have when I was growing up | 9:46 | |
| but now I realize that I gave too much to my work. | 9:47 | |
| I woke up one day | 9:52 | |
| and she was just all grown up | 9:53 | |
| and I've never really been able to talk to her | 9:56 | |
| and I'd like to tell her how I feel | 9:59 | |
| but now it's just too late to make a good start. | 10:01 | |
| God, forgive me for making such a mess of being a parent. | 10:05 | |
| Amen. | 10:12 | |
| Now, from my experience here | 10:15 | |
| these parents can be a pain in the neck. | 10:18 | |
| Sometimes they try to compensate | 10:20 | |
| for all of their parental mistakes | 10:22 | |
| by leaning on us at the university. | 10:23 | |
| They think that just because they're paying | 10:26 | |
| astronomical tuition that we can somehow make right | 10:28 | |
| all of their maternal, paternal goof-ups. | 10:32 | |
| Early in my teaching career, | 10:36 | |
| I dared to give a student a really bad grade. | 10:37 | |
| A C+ as I recall. | 10:41 | |
| And the next day I get this fax | 10:43 | |
| from a law firm in the Midwest | 10:46 | |
| telling me that this father is really concerned, | 10:47 | |
| that his son is upset, | 10:51 | |
| he makes an appointment to call me the next day. | 10:53 | |
| I received his call. | 10:56 | |
| He told me that his son was devastated about the grade. | 10:58 | |
| He told me that he took the grade personally. | 11:02 | |
| He told me that my course had not been that well organized. | 11:04 | |
| He understood from his son | 11:07 | |
| that I had not been that clear in my expectations | 11:09 | |
| and his son had had trouble understanding my accent. | 11:11 | |
| (congregation laughing) | 11:14 | |
| I told him, look, your son is an adult | 11:19 | |
| or at least a novice adult. | 11:23 | |
| Your son was in class. | 11:25 | |
| You weren't. | 11:27 | |
| I'd be glad to talk to your son about the grade. | 11:28 | |
| I'm uncomfortable talking with you. | 11:30 | |
| With that, the father got belligerent. | 11:32 | |
| Now, as providence would have it | 11:35 | |
| I had just spent about an hour | 11:37 | |
| a couple of weeks before | 11:39 | |
| with this son in my office | 11:40 | |
| but then his son wasn't concerned about my classes. | 11:42 | |
| His son was concerned that his father, | 11:45 | |
| without consulting him, | 11:48 | |
| had remarried after his mother's death, | 11:50 | |
| marrying a woman who was only 13 years older than the son. | 11:52 | |
| The father had written to say we've sold the home, | 11:56 | |
| we're moving into a condo, | 11:58 | |
| and we're going to get you | 12:00 | |
| your own apartment for the summer. | 12:02 | |
| Well, the son was going around in my office saying | 12:05 | |
| I gotta buy groceries, | 12:07 | |
| I don't know what to do. | 12:08 | |
| I've lost my home. | 12:10 | |
| I've lost. | 12:11 | |
| Well, my read on the situation | 12:13 | |
| was here was this father's big chance | 12:16 | |
| to prove he was a good daddy by leaning on me. | 12:19 | |
| And yet some of these publican parents | 12:24 | |
| are more like the publican in Jesus' story. | 12:28 | |
| I'm thinking about the father reflecting | 12:33 | |
| upon his Duke daughter who said, | 12:36 | |
| I cannot believe that somehow I managed | 12:38 | |
| to raise a really good student. | 12:43 | |
| I hated school. | 12:46 | |
| I hated every minute of it. | 12:47 | |
| But she's unbelievably good. | 12:49 | |
| And what I liked was that tone of wonder, | 12:54 | |
| that surprise, that recognition of a gift | 12:56 | |
| that I caught in that father's voice. | 13:02 | |
| I like the mother who said of her daughter, | 13:05 | |
| she's taken advantage of all of her opportunities | 13:07 | |
| at the university. | 13:11 | |
| She is just thrived here. | 13:12 | |
| She's made such great choices. | 13:14 | |
| I totally wasted my four years at college | 13:17 | |
| and I've never recovered | 13:20 | |
| but she's a wonder. | 13:23 | |
| I find these parents to be a delight. | 13:26 | |
| They're wise enough to know | 13:30 | |
| that their children are not some person project, | 13:32 | |
| not some extension of their personality, an appendix. | 13:35 | |
| And thus the church has always tried to teach us parents | 13:41 | |
| to regard our parents as gifts, | 13:44 | |
| gifts of God, not as our parental possessions, | 13:48 | |
| as signs of the unfathomable mercy of God. | 13:54 | |
| That, by the way, is why I've always thought | 14:00 | |
| that the term planned parenthood was a misnomer | 14:02 | |
| because few of us plan to have a child | 14:07 | |
| who plays drum in a rock band, | 14:10 | |
| whose body is pierced in eight different locations, | 14:13 | |
| but sometimes that's the kind of child you get. | 14:17 | |
| None of us plan to have disobedient | 14:20 | |
| or difficult children | 14:23 | |
| but sometimes those are the children we get | 14:25 | |
| because children are not part of my plan. | 14:28 | |
| They're part of God's plan. | 14:32 | |
| Children are gifts | 14:34 | |
| and sometimes God gives us the gifts that we need | 14:37 | |
| more than the gifts that we thought we wanted. | 14:41 | |
| It's all part of the mercy. | 14:45 | |
| It's all part of God's dealing with us, | 14:48 | |
| to help us to grow into the grace of God. | 14:52 | |
| I remember one morning sitting across from one of mine | 14:55 | |
| and she could have only been about four or five | 14:59 | |
| and she asked me, "Where are you going today?" | 15:03 | |
| and I said, "Well, I'm going all the way to Michigan today." | 15:06 | |
| And she said, "What for?" | 15:09 | |
| And I said, "Well, I'm going to teach these people. | 15:10 | |
| "I will be explaining Jesus to these people in Michigan." | 15:14 | |
| And she said to me, "I certainly hope you tell them | 15:21 | |
| "more than you tell us." | 15:24 | |
| (congregation laughing) | 15:26 | |
| Like, where are you going to get something | 15:28 | |
| like that without children? | 15:29 | |
| Gifts. | 15:33 | |
| As a parent, I confess that one of the annoying | 15:34 | |
| things about children is when, many times, | 15:37 | |
| they turn out to be better people than you are | 15:39 | |
| and therefore you've got great difficulty | 15:43 | |
| taking all the credit | 15:45 | |
| and you realize this child is not some kind | 15:47 | |
| of extension of me. | 15:49 | |
| I didn't do this. | 15:51 | |
| This child's a gift. | 15:53 | |
| The significance of this child is hidden | 15:57 | |
| in God's unfathomable ways with the world. | 16:02 | |
| That's the trouble with both the Pharisee | 16:07 | |
| and the publican. | 16:09 | |
| That Pharisee takes way too much credit | 16:10 | |
| for his goodness but that poor publican | 16:13 | |
| maybe takes too much credit for his failures too. | 16:16 | |
| People, even people who are parents, | 16:21 | |
| are just not all that significant. | 16:25 | |
| We do this, we do that, but God is also busy doing | 16:26 | |
| and leading and impacting | 16:32 | |
| and we gotta learn, as parents, | 16:34 | |
| amid our achievements and our failures, | 16:37 | |
| we gotta leave some room for the inscrutable, | 16:41 | |
| unfathomable ways of God with our children. | 16:45 | |
| A student was telling me | 16:51 | |
| that his father's parents had died | 16:52 | |
| when his father was just a boy. | 16:55 | |
| His father was raised by a succession of relatives. | 16:56 | |
| This meant that his father grew up | 16:59 | |
| without having had a father. | 17:01 | |
| Well, he said one day my father decided | 17:03 | |
| he would try to teach me how to drive | 17:06 | |
| and this he did by sitting on the other end of the seat, | 17:08 | |
| shouting orders at me behind the steering wheel | 17:11 | |
| and it was, "Turn left! | 17:14 | |
| "No, no, no! | 17:15 | |
| "Turn right! | 17:16 | |
| "Put on the break!" | 17:17 | |
| And he said finally I had enough. | 17:18 | |
| I said, would you stop that? | 17:20 | |
| This is crazy. | 17:23 | |
| This is no way to teach somebody how to drive. | 17:24 | |
| And he said my father said to me, | 17:27 | |
| "Hey, I never had a daddy. | 17:30 | |
| "I'm flying by the seat of my pants here, okay? | 17:33 | |
| "I'm having to make up a lot of this stuff as I go, okay?" | 17:36 | |
| The son, in credit to him, | 17:43 | |
| said I felt genuine compassion for my dad. | 17:45 | |
| So Jesus speaks to us Pharisees and to us publicans | 17:51 | |
| and telling us that maybe we're more inept than we admit. | 18:00 | |
| We're making up a lot of this stuff as parents as we go. | 18:05 | |
| We're flying by the seat of our pants. | 18:08 | |
| I remember talking to a grandparent | 18:10 | |
| one weekend here at Duke, | 18:12 | |
| talking about some trouble that the grandson | 18:14 | |
| was having at the university | 18:17 | |
| and I said I met with the grandson. | 18:19 | |
| I tried to talk with him | 18:21 | |
| but he didn't seem kinda ready to listen | 18:22 | |
| and the grandparent said, well, kids. | 18:25 | |
| What can you tell 'em? | 18:27 | |
| You know, one of the problems is they're too young. | 18:28 | |
| They haven't failed yet in life. | 18:31 | |
| And I said, oh that's so true. | 18:34 | |
| They haven't launched out yet into great achievements | 18:35 | |
| and not realize those achievements. | 18:39 | |
| That's true. | 18:42 | |
| And he said no, what I'm saying | 18:43 | |
| is they've never been married. | 18:44 | |
| (congregation laughing) | 18:45 | |
| And for all that, maybe that's one reason we love | 18:50 | |
| and we are surprised by stories | 18:53 | |
| like the one Jesus tells about the Pharisee and the publican | 18:56 | |
| because it's a surprise to find out that Jesus, | 19:01 | |
| the Son of God, the embodiment of everything God is, | 19:04 | |
| loves sinners and he tells a story in which | 19:10 | |
| you got a bad man and a good man | 19:14 | |
| and by the end of the story it's the bad man | 19:16 | |
| that gets embraced and made righteous in love by God. | 19:20 | |
| Maybe that's why every time you gather for church | 19:25 | |
| and the first thing the church makes you do | 19:28 | |
| is to confess your sin and you're sitting there, | 19:30 | |
| Reverend Copeland put it nicely about | 19:33 | |
| let's all stand up and talk about our shortcomings. | 19:35 | |
| Well, we're talking about our sin. | 19:38 | |
| And we all stand up and when we say things | 19:39 | |
| like God, forgive us for all the things that we've done | 19:42 | |
| and we've left undone and not done | 19:46 | |
| and I noticed it's particularly parents | 19:49 | |
| that seem to say Amen at the end of that prayer | 19:54 | |
| with particular gusto | 19:58 | |
| because here's a Savior that's come to forgive sins, | 20:01 | |
| even the sins of parents. | 20:06 | |
| Some people think, like, sin is something | 20:10 | |
| that you know is wrong but you do it anyway. | 20:12 | |
| Sin is something you decide to do. | 20:16 | |
| Well, if that were the case, who would be a sinner? | 20:20 | |
| Paul says everybody has sinned | 20:24 | |
| because sin is also messing up | 20:28 | |
| and it's launching out to do something good | 20:31 | |
| and ending up years later, say 21 years later, | 20:34 | |
| and realizing gee, that wasn't the right thing | 20:37 | |
| to do after all. | 20:39 | |
| But the good news is this God makes right | 20:42 | |
| what we mess up and do wrong. | 20:45 | |
| Jesus just loves sinners, only sinners. | 20:48 | |
| Or, as Martin Luther who wrote the first hymn | 20:53 | |
| of today's service once put it, | 20:55 | |
| "This God can ride a lame horse | 20:57 | |
| "or shoot with a crooked bow." | 21:00 | |
| This God can make right our wrong. | 21:03 | |
| Two parents go to church to pray. | 21:08 | |
| One who had always done right, | 21:11 | |
| whose child was the envy of everybody at the country club, | 21:13 | |
| good manners, good grades, good friends, | 21:17 | |
| got absolutely nothing out of the service. | 21:20 | |
| After all, what on earth could God give the perfect parent? | 21:23 | |
| But the other, surprise, | 21:28 | |
| even though he didn't quite get all the service | 21:30 | |
| 'cause he was standing so far off, | 21:32 | |
| the one who had made a mess of the whole parenthood thing, | 21:35 | |
| who had trouble communicating with her child, | 21:37 | |
| who had made a bunch of wrong decisions | 21:41 | |
| in child development, | 21:43 | |
| thought this was the best story | 21:47 | |
| she had ever heard in church. | 21:49 | |
| When a story was told about a Savior | 21:51 | |
| who forgives sins and makes right people who are wrong, | 21:53 | |
| she thought Jesus was talking about her. | 21:58 | |
| In the end, when it's all said and done, | 22:02 | |
| the best prayer we can pray | 22:06 | |
| as parents or as products of parents | 22:09 | |
| is the prayer of the publican. | 22:12 | |
| God, be merciful to me, a sinner. | 22:15 | |
| And the good news is, God is. | 22:21 |