I want to begin this sermon with three disclaimers. Here’s what I am not saying in this sermon.

First, nothing that I am going to say during the next 45 minutes (!) should be construed as meaning that one can worship God any old place just as meaningfully as one can in church. The old adage – among those who can afford to say it – is “I can worship God on a golf course just like I can in church. I don’t doubt that one can experience a fine feeling of appreciation of nature on a golf course, on a beautiful day, especially if one tends to walk among the trees like I do. But folks, I’ve heard the name of God invoked on a golf course and – technically – that’s not really worship. Now, if one really wants to spend time in deliberate contemplation and prayerful appreciation of God’s world, which really is a wonderful practice, we have a labyrinth that serves that purpose very well.

Second, I am not saying that the church is full of hypocrites. Oh, I’m sure that there are some folks here, joining in the songs and voicing the prayers, whose mouths are confessing things that their hearts may not fully embrace. And I’m sure there are folks in every church whose actions don’t quite live up to their professions. If you want to call that quality of human doubt and finitude ‘hypocrisy,’ then I’m sure that every church has its share of hypocrites and I confess that I am one of them. But, even so, that does not mean that a church necessarily has more hypocrites per square inch than any other gathering spot; nor does it mean that going to church is what makes people hypocrites.

So, I’m not saying that going to church is easily replaced by going elsewhere nor am I saying that people who go to church are necessarily hypocrites. Third, I am not saying that one ought not to go to church. I believe that, as people who have been embraced by grace, we should run and not walk to a worship gathering. I believe that, as those who have been grafted into the body of Christ, it should be natural for us to gather with the Christian community to worship and to listen for the Word of God in Scripture and sermons. And even if any local gathering of Christians has those who are hard to bear, hard to understand, and hard to work with – even so, as a people embraced by grace, we should organize ourselves as servant communities, who begin by submitting to a wisdom higher than ourselves and proceed to serve others around us as a community. I am not saying that one ought not to go to church.

But, I am going to recognize what might be the greatest peril of going to church. And it is both explicit and unavoidable whenever we read a text from the Scriptures like the one that we have read together this morning.

Our Scripture reading today has a number of intriguing arguments in it, and it is part of a larger set of confrontations that Jesus has with religious people in his journey to Jerusalem, where he will be crucified as an enemy of the temple and an enemy of the empire. Christians have taken the easy way out of this Scripture for many years, arguing that Jesus was in conflict with a corrupt temple and a corrupt empire, none of which exist for us today as confrontational powers. But, there is one line in this confrontation that ought to shock us as no more avoidable today than it was 2,000 years ago. And that is when Jesus looks at the proper religious folk and says, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.” The reason that Jesus gives for this shocking disclosure is that when John the Baptist came preaching righteousness, it was these folks – folks who customarily had no place among the worshipful gathering of religious folks – who welcomed that message and followed it. For these folks – commonly considered outsiders to proper religious folks – Jesus has no condemnation. But, for the proper religious folk, Jesus has a strong and difficult criticism. There is something about being committed to a disciplined form of piety that disables us from hearing someone like John the Baptist, who comes from the outside, preaching a way of righteousness that is different from what we have grown to accept.

And that is where you and I cannot avoid the rub of this text. It is not just that a corrupt religion is the problem. It is that zeal and fervor, absolute loyalty and total commitment –which we hear throughout the Scriptures as the normative means of being faithful – contain within themselves a peril. It is the peril of going to church. With humans being the way that we are, it is almost unavoidable for us that the harder we work at being faithful, the more we forget that, even in our most righteous moments, we are called by grace and not because we deserve it. And that is the fundamental distinction between those tax collectors and prostitutes and we religious folk. They have – by conscience or by social ostracism – laid down any claim to ‘deserving’ righteousness. That is, prostitutes and tax collectors know grace when they see it, and they embrace it. So, when an outside voice like John the Baptist comes along proclaiming God’s way of righteousness, we who are on the inside are less inclined to hear it as an invitation than they are. That’s the peril of going to church.

Now, of course, one answer to this peril would be for all of us to become prostitutes, tax collectors, or some other form of outcast. To do that we’d have to ignore a host of other Scriptures that do not condone such “works of the flesh” or “greed.” A more serious answer would be that even our most zealous activities, our most fervently held beliefs, our most courageous acts of justice, our ways of teaching our children and professing our faith are always chastened by the frank recognition that none of these works make us righteous. In a way that is no different from prostitutes and tax collectors, our salvation rests on grace and grace alone. The only difference between ‘them’ and ‘us,’ is that they have better ears to hear the call of grace.

This provocative claim that prostitutes and tax collectors will enter the kingdom of God ahead of religious folks has been part of the church’s consciousness for many years. And one way that the church has tried to respond well to that claim explains a peculiar habit that we have when we gather. One habit that we cultivate is that we have prayers of confession that we pray together over and over again. Sometimes those prayers speak to personal failures that we all tend to experience; sometimes they address a more collective kind of sinfulness that none of us initiates, but all of us get swept up in as a result of being part of the human community. I know that sometimes it seems odd that we would gather with a joyous call to worship, sing an enthusiastic song of praise, then immediately start beating ourselves up over “things done and things left undone in thought, word and deed.” But, the reason that we pray this kind of prayer is not because we enjoy cultivating guilt. It is because our life depends on it. Unless we remind ourselves over and over again that we are not here because we have deserved it, that we are only here because of God’s grace, then we will never realize our profound solidarity with prostitutes and tax collectors. Unless we take this prayer of confession and make it a real part of our practice of faith, we will fall to the peril of going to church. Uttering prayers of confession is our way of taking off any robe of pretension and putting on the robe of a penitent, whose best efforts are no more than a humble offering of thanksgiving for God’s grace.