By Father Casey

The witness of the Christian faith would be greatly improved if Christians would spend more time in the gospels with Jesus and less time plotting ways to gain and flex power.

Over the last several decades, polls have showed a steady decline in societal attitudes toward Christians. Christians are increasingly associated with hypocrisy and judgmentalism, and decreasingly associated with compassion and mercy.[1] It doesn't help that the Christian faith is now regularly cited by people in power to defend things that directly contradict the teachings of Jesus – hostility toward migrants, contempt for the poor, and celebration at the the suffering of enemies. It is all too easy to look at the activity of Christians and see little correlation with Jesus.

For Christianity in our country to  begin to recenter itself in the authentic Way of Christ, a good place to start would be meditating on the parable we'll hear this weekend (Luke 18:9-14). Jesus told it to a group of people who "trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt" – which means he is talking to just about all of us. In the parable, he describes two people at prayer. The first is a highly "religious" person with lots of influence and credibility, who marches into the Temple and boldly prays, "Lord, I'm so thankful I'm not like other people. Just look at all the great things I do to show you what a good person I am."

Meanwhile, the second person simply prays, "Lord, have mercy on me, for I am a sinner."

The first man is essentially saying, "Lord, aren't you lucky to have me," while the second man is saying, "Lord, I am so lucky to have you."

For our witness to become more like Jesus, we will need to recognize when our prayers are starting to sound like the first man, and reshape them to sound more and more like the second. The first man's prayer is the prayer of the proud and powerful, the smug and self-satisfied. It's a non-prayer, really, for God is irrelevant. He's not actually talking to God, so much as congratulating himself and reinforcing his own sense of superiority. All the spiritual ailments afflicting American Christianity right now – contempt, cruelty, dishonesty – are fueled by such non-prayers. "Lord, aren't you lucky to have me… I'm so glad I'm not like those people."

The way to know God better is not by dressing up in an artifice of awesomeness, but rather by admitting our desperate need for grace. Those who think that the exercise of faith is about convincing God of how great they are have tragically mistaken the message of the Gospel. The way into the heart of God is through humility, not hubris. Honesty, not self-promotion.

Jesus says at the end of the parable that it's the second man who goes home justified, rather the first. Which means that the risk of these non-prayer prayers isn't merely that God won't like them as much; it's that God won't be listening. Self-aggrandizement and pomposity may be the hallmarks of the powerful, but they have absolutely no bearing on God. Quite the opposite, in truth, for "all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted." Or as this is translated in The Message, "If you walk around with your nose in the air, you're going to end up flat on your face, but if you're content to be simply yourself, you will become more than yourself."

Father Casey+

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[1] His Followers? Not So Much, two decades researchers pointed out CLICK HERE TO READ