A HUMBLE HEART CREATE IN ME, O GOD.

“Jesus addressed this parable
to those who were convinced of their own righteousness
and despised everyone else.
‘Two people went up to the temple area to pray;
one was a Pharisee and the other was a tax collector.
The Pharisee took up his position and spoke this prayer to himself,
“O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity —
greedy, dishonest, adulterous — or even like this tax collector. “‘”

“But the tax collector stood off at a distance
and would not even raise his eyes to heaven
but beat his breast and prayed,
‘O God, be merciful to me a sinner.'”  Luke 18:9-14

Many of the ads we see daily focus on our tendencies toward self-regard, self-reliance, self-interest, self-love and self-perfection. That makes it easy for us, like this Pharisee, to leave church with the same assessment of our self-worth as we had when we entered the church. The tax collector, seen by some as a self-centered cheater, entered the Temple as a man aware of his attitudinal distance from the God in whose presence he was standing. In humility he stood there before his God. The story leads us to conclude that he left the Temple as a closer-to-God person than when he arrived.

What do I bring to my own weekly encounters with God and our communal presence with those gathered there? What do I allow and encourage to happen there? And do I leave the church as a closer-to-God person?

Sister Loretta