Homily given by Rev’d Vanessa Elston, Sunday 27 Oct 2025 (Psalm 84.1-7; Luke 18.9-14)
Christians often say that they find prayer difficult; it’s something they know they should do but often struggle with. Sometimes I think we need to approach the topic from other angles, to come at prayer from a different route than the one normally taken, so prayer can be understood and experienced in new ways. I want to offer two such reflections today.
One comes from the story that Jesus tells in Luke about the Pharisee and the tax collector, and the other comes from the Psalmist’s longing to enter the courts of the Lord in Psalm 84. So, let’s start with Jesus’s parable. Luke tells us the point of the story at the beginning; he really doesn’t want us to miss why Jesus told his story.
“He told this parable to some who trusted in themselves, that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.”
I want to speak first about this huge danger in religion, in all religion, whatever its forms, practices, traditions and teachings, that Jesus is warning us about. The great danger, the treacherous bog into which we can fall, is that of self-righteousness. Being religious can quietly feed that inner voice: ‘I’m better than other people because I go to church, I give money to charity, I pray, I volunteer, I help others.’ We could all find ways of speaking those words that the Pharisee speaks. Jesus is giving us a caricature, but if we’re honest all of us have these scripts within us; it is a subtle temptation. We are seeking to be good Christians, to be faithful, diligent, but along with this something else starts to happen: we start to see ourselves as better than others. It’s what happens when religion becomes moralism, a set of rules whereby I can tick the boxes and say, ‘well I’m doing that so I am OK’, and then we start looking down on other people, we start judging others, and this can then turn into contempt. We can end up in that place that Jesus is parodying in the Pharisee. It is also a massive turn-off for people outside the church. Many people will not walk through the door of a church because they fear they will be judged by the people inside, they fear they might be regarded with contempt.
The Greek word for contempt appears a few other times in Luke, in Acts, and the apostle Paul’s letters. It’s very interesting when you look at where it appears. The word is exoutheneó; it means to despise, to count as nothing, to cast something out as lacking any value, to treat it with utter contempt. With regards to another human being, it is a complete dismissal of that person’s value and worth. The word is used in Luke 23:11 to describe how Herod and his soldiers treated Jesus with contempt and mocked him. In Acts 4:11 Peter says that Jesus is the stone which the Jewish religious leaders have rejected, set at nought. Jesus was despised by both Romans and Jews, treated with contempt, regarded as worth nothing. He knows what that feels like.
St Paul writes to the young church of Corinth, that still has not grasped the need for a radical overturning of human systems of worth and honour, and he uses that same word as we find in Luke for contempt: “God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God”(I Cor. 1.28-9). It is hard for us to appreciate how deeply the early church turned the ancient world’s systems of values upside down. Christianity was a religion where slaves, women and children, those that were regarded as nothing, of no worth, found value. And the Roman empire, like all empires, was built on its sense of superiority and contempt, despising, treating as nothing, the millions it enslaved. You can’t have an empire, a system of slavery, without this contempt, this despising, this dehumanizing of others. The revolution that Christianity brought to this world was that every single human being has intrinsic value in the eyes of God. We forget how deeply this has formed our own culture. It has been enshrined in the language of human rights.
So how does this impact prayer, our dialogue with God. I want to say that prayer begins with our inner dialogue, that before we speak to God it is what are we saying to ourselves that really matters, because this either opens the door into real, meaningful conversation with God or it makes it impossible. If we are full of ourselves, our prayers just bounce off the ceiling. Without a greater sense of humility we can’t pray.
What do I mean by humility? Humility is the place of honesty, it’s the place where we shed our illusions, our fantasies, our unreality about who we really are, and what is going on. This kind of honesty is not easy, it’s not easy to come to the place of truth about ourselves. We need others to help us, those who really love us and can speak that truth to us. And real prayer requires this kind of honesty, coming to a place of truer knowledge about ourselves. Spiritual direction is when we allow another to accompany us on that journey into greater truth and self-knowledge.
There are two temptations for how human beings see themselves. One is an unrealistic puffed-up vision, of how we are better than others, and the other is an inner contempt, or self-hatred, we despise ourselves. This is the spiritual danger of the tax collector, his temptation, that we see no hope for ourselves, we sink into despair.
Humility is a place of being grounded, earthed, between these two extremes. I know myself, I see my sins, my weaknesses, but I also know that I am valuable, that God does not abandon me, but in Christ has provided a path of grace and spiritual growth, the Holy Spirit to guide and lead me, and others in the church to encourage and support me.
So, prayer is this journey into greater honesty and grounding in God’s love and truth.
The other side of prayer is to get in touch with the deep longing we have for God, in the words of the Psalm, “my soul has a desire and longing to enter the courts of the Lord, my heart and my flesh rejoice in the living God.” There is so much distraction in our culture to smother that longing. I believe that the renewal of the church depends on us uncovering and discovering afresh our deep hunger for God, this existential longing. To awaken to this spiritual hunger is the beginning of prayer. God has placed this longing within each of us, like a magnet looking for north, like a worm coming up to the surface after it has rained. Prayer is attending to this deeper longing, so that even though we might feel we are passing through a dry and barren place, the valley of Bacca, we find this spring, the bubbling up of a deeper source, that can sustain us, beyond our own strength.
So, prayer is honesty and true self knowledge, and prayer is the deeper desire of our hearts. It is not something strange or foreign, but actually the truest coming home to ourselves and to God.
“Blessed are those whose strength is in you
in whose heart are the highways to Zion,
who going through the barren valley find there a spring,
and the early rains will clothe it with blessing.
They will go from strength to strength
and appear before God in Zion.”
Amen
