"The Most Interesting Friends" - Sermon for 20th Pentecost, 10-26-25

In “The Thin Man” movies from the 1930s and 1940s, Nick Charles is a reluctant private detective who takes on cases in his retirement from the police department. His wife Nora comes from money, and their lifestyle shows it. Often they will cross paths with the ex-cons and ne’er-do-wells Nick had put away years ago, and Nora will say, with a subtle side-eye and smirk, “Oh, Nicky – you have the most interesting friends!”

Kate will repeat this line to me sometimes after we cross paths with the ex-cons and ne’er-do-wells I’ve come to know in my ministry on the streets in the Haight, and in the seedier parts of our city. I have the most interesting friends.

The tax collectors in Jesus’s time were of the type. They were outcasts, ne’er-do-wells with a job to do – to collect money from their fellow Jews to give to the Romans who occupied their holy land and enforced the uneasy Pax Romana – Roman peace.

(Which, he said parenthetically, was not unlike sending the National Guard to some of our cities today.) 

It is said that tax collectors would often overcharge people like the Pharisees, and pocket the difference. Tax collectors were collaborators and cheats, and they hung out with the only people who could be seen with them: other ne’er-do-wells, prostitutes, thieves, rogues, and adulterers. This is why Jesus’s call of the tax collector Matthew as an apostle, and Jesus’s choice of Matthew’s “most interesting friends” as dinner companions was so offensive to the Pharisees and scandalized their social class. This is why the Pharisee in today’s parable was thankful not to be like those other people.

And yet … I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I’d take this Pharisee as a congregant any day. He’s a regular church-goer. He prays. He keeps his nose clean. He practices his faith throughout the week. He gives a tenth of all his income. Find me any pastor who wouldn’t want that in a member! Go ahead … I’ll wait!

But what really makes this Pharisee attractive is that he is not fully formed. He has some things to work on. He has growth potential. He has room to develop humility, compassion, and kindness. He can be fitted with Jesus-tinted glasses, the prescription to see others as Jesus sees them. This otherwise admirable Pharisee is a candidate for conversion of heart … but then, aren’t we all.

What’s missing in this parable is the Pharisee’s motivation for conversion. As Jesus tells it, the Pharisee went home thinking he was right with God – and why wouldn’t he. His litany of thanksgiving for his social status, and his list of good deeds as evidence of his righteousness, were left both unchecked and unchallenged.

But this parable wasn’t for his benefit, this Pharisee being an imaginary person, after all. The parable is for the benefit of Jesus’s first audience: the self-righteous and the contemptuous. They – and we – can learn something, if we have ears to hear and hearts to listen.

There is nothing wrong with being thankful for what we have and for the good that we do. Jesus’s point is one of perspective and posture. The Pharisee is standing by himself – wouldn’t want to be seen next to that tax collector – and he doesn’t ask for God’s mercy and forgiveness for the sins he doesn’t bother to admit or confess.

The tax collector knows the place society has assigned to the likes of him. His eyes downcast, no doubt by habit and humility, he begs God’s mercy; we trust that he believed he received it – but again, like the Pharisee, the tax collector didn’t get an answer. It’s left to Jesus to tell us who went home justified, and why.

We’ve been using the option of placing the confession of sin and absolution at the beginning of Mass, rather than in the middle, where most liturgies place it most of the time. There’s a reason to start with confession: with our heads bowed or knees bent, confession puts us in mind, straight-away, of our deep need for God’s compassion, mercy, and love. It aligns our perspective and posture with that of the humble tax collector, the one who unknowingly got it right. The words of absolution, missing from Jesus’s parable, assure us of God’s forgiveness. Absolution gives us the means to stand straight and to thank God and praise God in the rest of the liturgy, with the integrity the Pharisee lacked.

And we do this together, at confession, yes, and at communion, not standing far apart from one another, but side-by-side; well-behaved Pharisees and ne-er-do-well tax collectors – and who can say just who is who – each of us Jesus’s most interesting friends.

Father Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP

20 Pentecost, Proper 25 – October 26, 2025

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco

“The Most Interesting Friends”