Hypocrisy.

Matthew 23:1-12.

I.

Hypocrisy.  I don’t know how many times I have heard people give as their reason for not attending church or even being a Christian, the hypocrisy of Christians.  “I don’t go to church because they’re all a bunch of hypocrites.” 

Jesus didn’t like hypocrisy either.  Hypocrisy is exactly what Jesus complains about in his rigorous criticism of the scribes and Pharisees.  That is, their actions do not match their words.  They are pretending to be something they are not.  They are not sincere or authentic in their faith.  They say one thing and do another.

So the criticisms of people about the church today, and the criticism Jesus leveled against the religious establishment of his own day, are the same.  This fact ought to give us pause, at least.  Are we doing the same kinds of things that these religious leaders were doing in Jesus’ day?  Do we place heavy burdens on people, which we are unwilling to lift a finger to move?  Do we do all our deeds to be seen by others?  Do we love to have the honor, recognition, status, and respect that, in the minds of some, goes along with being overtly pious?  What about our leaders and ministers?  Do we get off on public affirmation, or gain some vain satisfaction from being called “reverend?”

We Christians are infamous for our hypocrisy because of the way many acted, and still act.   Back when we are considered the de facto established religion of America, many abused that power and influence.  Hypocrisy I think is a liability mainly for people in power.  And people remember for generations that we sang about joy with the sourest of faces, that we talked about forgiveness but were not good at forgiving others, that we preached peace and supported war, proclaimed justice while perpetrating injustice, affirmed God’s love while expressing in our lives what can only be called hate.  This still goes on, God knows. 

Parents are often accused of hypocrisy by their children.  Children can see very clearly the distance between a parent’s words and actions.  And parents have a natural tendency, I think, to have their words reach for ideals that their behavior doesn’t quite attain.  We want our children to be better than we were, so we give great advice and make great rules, based on our long, hard experience... but too often we didn’t or don’t take our own advice or keep our own rules.

Leaders are prone to the charge of hypocrisy in the same way.  They take on the burden of setting an example, of maintaining social standards, of preaching and teaching what is best.  But that also means that when they inevitably fall short it is more visible and obvious.

There is this sense in which hypocrisy is a product of our trying to be better, trying to do better, holding ourselves to a higher standard, and striving to improve our life.  We all fall short of our own ideals, I think.  This is especially true for the kinds of ideals we hear about in church.  Aren’t we all hypocrites then?

II.

I am acutely conscious of what a hypocrite I am.  I don’t want to be.  But I am very conscious of the yawning gap between my preaching — which has lately been an exposition of Jesus’ words and actions — and my behavior.  I am not nearly as in tune in my own life with Jesus’ blessings as I would like to be.  Am I poor in spirit?  Am I pure in heart?  Am I merciful, gentle, mournful, and a peacemaker?  Do I hunger and thirst mainly for righteousness?  Am I persecuted?  Hardly.

I give myself a generous C+ on these scales.  And, as I have said before, I know very well that I break all ten commandments on most days before breakfast, at least in spirit.  This is because of the various evil systems in which my lifestyle involves me without my even thinking about it.  Was the cotton in my bedsheets once picked by slave children in Uzbekistan?  Was the wood that my bedroom floor is made of once standing in the Brazilian rainforest?  The electricity powering my clock, the natural gas burning in my furnace, the paint on my walls, the fruit and grain in my breakfast... was it all produced, manufactured, distributed, and sold in a way that demonstrated equity, justice, fairness, and peace?  Of course not.  It came to me by the blood, tears, and sweat of poor people and workers all over the world; and in the process made many other people, who didn’t do any of the work, very wealthy.                     

Maybe I hold myself to a nearly impossible standard.  But I think that Jesus wants us to know how we are connected to each other and to the Earth.  He would want us to be conscious of how the quality of these connections matter.  All the decisions we make, even just breathing, we are expressing our commitment to either God or to Caesar, either to the Kingdom of Heaven, or the Empire of those who dominate this world. 

In this sense we are indeed all hypocrites, and the more clearly we hear and proclaim the call of Jesus to live according to the values of God’s Kingdom, the more aware of our own hypocrisy we become.  The deeper we scratch the surface of our own lives, the more horrified we must be at the suffering of those who bring us our necessities and conveniences.

But what Jesus talks about here is more than hypocrisy.  He is looking at the scribes and Pharisees, and he sees not just their hypocrisy, but their attitude towards their hypocrisy.  And he sees the attitude — and the nasty, self-righteous, smug, judgmental practices — that their hypocrisy leads to in their relationships with others. 

Realizing the yawning gap between our words and our actions ought to make us more humble... but in the religious authorities of Jesus’ day, it didn’t.  They appear not to have been conscious of any such gap.  Indeed, to even suggest such a thing to them was tantamount to treason and criminality.  They felt, like every establishment, that the stability of whole society depended on them being legitimately in power.  The very survival of the nation was based on their being in charge.  To undermine their authority was to undermine the integrity of society itself.  Such is the view in every generation of the 1% (or fewer) who control things. 

III.

Realizing our own hypocrisy, facing it, admitting it, confessing it... this is sort of the first step.  Hypocrisy is really a kind of blindness.  Once we begin to see it in ourselves, once we begin to ask the question about the gap between our words and our actions, then we have begun to turn away from it. 

Hypocrisy is most lethal when it is accompanied by self- exaltation.  It begins to lose its power over us when we are moved to sorrow, remorse, and humility.  So Jesus concludes his talk with his famous aphorism: “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

It is the lack of humility and absence of responsibility exhibited by the religious establishment that Jesus is most upset about.  Can a humble person “tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others”?  Will a humble person be “unwilling to lift a finger to move them”?  Would humble people “do all their deeds to be seen by others”?  Would they “love to have the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues, and to be greeted with respect in the market-places, and to have people call them rabbi”?

What about folks who give themselves multi-million dollar bonuses as a reward for wrecking the whole economy?  What about those who justify having others bail them out by saying they deserve it?  What if the same people are strict about imposing financial austerity on others, even foreclosing on people’s homes?

No.  A humble person is deeply aware of the gap between Jesus’ blessings and one’s own behavior.  That awareness is what makes one humble in the first place.  When Jesus says “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted,” I wonder if he means more than grieving for someone who has died, or something lost.  I wonder if he also means a kind of grieving for one’s own sins, one’s own shortcomings, one’s own failures, one’s own participation in evil systems.  That’s supposed to be why monks and nuns wear black, you know.  It’s an expression of mourning for their sins.

As in 12-step groups, the first step in healing is realizing you have a problem.  Our problem is the distance between God’s Word and our actions.  You cannot go through the 12-steps without a rather comprehensive humility, they tell me.  And that kind of humility is essential for the Christian life.

So Jesus says his disciples should not hold themselves up over each other.  “You are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all students.  And call no one your father on earth,” Jesus says, “for you have one Father — the one in heaven.  Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah.” 

None of us is Lord or Master.  None of us is better or closer to God.  Some of us may have special training and we all have particular callings, but there is not supposed to be a hierarchy, a pecking order, among Jesus disciples.  There are no superiors and subordinates, in his family.  Elsewhere, Jesus points out that in God’s Kingdom there are brothers and sisters, mothers and children, but no fathers.  We have only one Father or Lord, and that is God.  And there are no mediators between God and humanity except him, the one Mediator, Jesus.  And we all relate to him.

“The greatest among you will be your servant,” says Jesus.

IV.

Think of the saints of the church, those in history who followed Jesus well.  Some of those figures were more powerful in the world than others.  And certainly we do not lift them up as in any way mediators between us and God.  We don’t pray to them or consider them our teachers in any but the most derivative and secondary ways.  They are exactly like us, in every way.  They are us, in a sense.

And something I think they all have in common is a humility and a deep, personal awareness of their own failings and shortcomings.  They were not superior, or self-righteous.  They did not claim elevated status.  They did not think of themselves as saints, in any special way.

These were servants of God and people.  They did their best to live according to God’s law and Jesus’ blessings.  They were anything but perfect.  Each had their particular failings.  But they give us hope for that very reason.  For what God did with these folks, God can also do with us.

But it’s going to take humility, and confession, and remorse, and commitment to change and find new ways of living together, according to Jesus’ commandments.  It will take finding out whom we have hurt, and making amends.  It will take gathering in peace, forgiveness, non-violence, and love.  And it will mean standing as an inconvenient and puzzling witness, both to the prevailing injustices of our world, and most importantly to the possibility of God’s new order for life. 

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Belonging, Then Believing.

            The standard pattern of church membership has been that we expect people to believe before we accept them as belonging.  We see this in the usual way Presbyterian churches receive members.  Part of the process of becoming a member is making a reaffirmation of faith.  We assume that the active members of a church are all people who have made this statement of what they believe.  We are a gathering of people who believe in Jesus.

            I wonder if this whole way of behaving isn’t wrong, or at least very unhelpful.  Isn’t it kind of like expecting someone to know calculus before they take a calculus class?  Or to play the trumpet, or speak Italian, or knit a sweater, before being allowed to participate in the group where those skills are learned?

            Isn’t it rather presumptuous of us to somehow expect people to be Christians before we welcome them into the church?  Isn’t the gathered community a place where we learn together how to follow Jesus?  Is there anyone in our church (or any church) who is willing to say they have it all together and don’t have anything left to learn about this?  Doesn’t requiring that people already believe/trust in Jesus before we will deign to make them a member exclude people from membership who may be on the way to becoming disciples?

            I am coming more and more to the view that people need to belong first.  We need to welcome and embrace people into our fellowship whether they are “Christians” right now or not.  The church that allows itself to become a closed club of people who already believe is not going to grow very easily.  First of all because even the people who have come to believe are not completed and finished as Christians.  Secondly, a lot of people have learned that they have to say they believe in order to be included… but really don’t trust in Jesus just yet.  Thirdly, often it is the ones who have the most trouble believing who end up with the stronger faith when they do develop a relationship with Jesus.

            When Jesus calls his disciples, he does not have them make complete statements of faith in him.  Peter does not make his confession of who Jesus is until deep into his relationship as a disciple.  Thomas doesn’t make the kind of confession we require of new members until after Jesus’ resurrection!  Jesus does not require anyone of his disciples or wider entourage to sign on to specific beliefs about him.  Indeed, he welcomes sinners of all kinds, and people will all kinds of diseases, without regard for what they do or don’t believe.  It is their relationship with Jesus, and the community gathered around him, that brings people to faith in him.

            Neither did Jesus bother with keeping detailed membership rolls, or deciding who was or wasn’t welcome at his Table.  Everybody was welcome: Pharisees, Roman soldiers, women, lepers, tax collectors, prostitutes, working people, children, and so on.  He knew that faith in him was not based on what their opinion was about him, but on what kind of relationship he had with them.

            Church, in other words, is not just for Christians.  I hope no one avoids gathering for worship with us because they “don’t believe all that stuff.”  I’ve got news: some of us who do gather also have serious questions about “all that stuff.”  And some of us who do accept it, do so in very different ways.

            The church is not a gathering of people who already believe.  It is a gathering of people who are open to a relationship with Jesus, through his followers.  In our life together, we are developing this relationship with Jesus and his followers, and anyone interested enough in hearing what Jesus is about to get themselves to a church on Sunday morning.  The people of the world are not divided into believers and non-believers.  Rather, there are people who are in different places in their relationship with him.  And those who say they “believe” are not necessarily “ahead” of those who are able to give the most orthodox opinions.  I have known atheists who were better followers of Jesus than some Christians.

            My point is that the church needs to be a place where people feel welcome and know they belong.  Then we can show each other the love of Jesus, and grow in it together.  We can build each other up, learn forgiveness, practice encouragement, pray with and heal each other.  After all, every week we’ve been singing, “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love.”  We don’t sing that they will know we are Christians by the correctness of our theological opinions.

            The “they” in the song are the people we meet in the world.  Our little fellowship must be so welcoming, and our love for each other, and for the world, so apparent, that “they” will want to be a part of it.  We have to be a part of that love first, before we can talk intelligibly about it.  We have to be doing it before we can say we believe it.    

Love Is Everything.

Matthew 22.34-46.

I.

Occasionally in this business I encounter people who rationalize their lack of involvement in the church by saying things like, “Since God is everywhere I believe I can worship God on the golf course on Sunday morning as well as I can in church.”  There are many other ways this sentiment gets expressed.  Often it is an excuse for skipping church: “God wants me to spend more time with my family,” “I am worshiping God when I read the newspaper,” “God is glorified when I sleep late after a hard week at work,” “I worship by watching a preacher on TV while I’m making pancakes.”  That sort of thing.

At that level it is relatively harmless.  But by this reasoning any human activity becomes worship simply because we say so.  And that can become a huge problem, and often has. 

A couple of centuries ago, some Americans actually claimed they were glorifying God by owning slaves.  Others have claimed they were expressing their obedience to Christ by dropping high explosives on people from 30,000 feet in the air.  Many Germans during the Second World War thought killing Jews was a way to glorify God.  Some are very overt in their belief that making money glorifies God.  I have heard it said that exploiting natural resources — from meat, fish, and fur to water, wood, coal, and oil — actually glorifies God.

Thus, while the commandment calls upon us to love God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our mind, our interpretation and behavior drains those words of all meaning.  We have turned this commandment on its head so that anything we want to do is by definition an expression of our love for God simply because we want to do it.

So, to prevent this kind of abuse, Jesus, like many other wise rabbis of the time, appends a second great commandment to the first.  He says we are to love our neighbor as ourselves.  Thus it is impossible for us to say we love God while expressing hatred, violence, exclusion, or anything else that would be offensive to us, against other people.  Our love for God must be made real, can only be made real, in terms of our love for others. 

Of course, we have found many ways to get around this as well.  We justify and rationalize our violence towards our neighbor by saying it is really a form of tough love.  Thus we may say, when we inflict suffering and injustice on people, that we are assisting them in developing their own self-discipline, or that we are helping them see the error of their ways, or that we are aiding them in cultivating their own entrepreneurial spirit, or that what we do to them will aid them in character-building.

The real meaning of what is going on here has nothing to do with love for God.  In fact, God is out of the picture entirely.  All we have are our own desires, needs, fears, hopes, and dreams.  These have become our god.  The bottom line of this reasoning is that “God wants me to be happy, so whatever I do to make myself happy right now must make God happy too.”  In other words, if we think like this I wonder if any God larger than our own ego exists for us at all.

II.

To counteract even this rationalization, Jesus goes further by reminding the Pharisees that the Messiah is not dependent on David or any other human lord.  Rather all human lords and purposes are dependent on the Messiah.  Even the great King David is not superior to the Messiah.  This means that we do not get to decide how to love God or how to love our neighbor.  It is not up to our ingenious reasoning.  What we think doesn’t matter.  Loving God and loving our neighbor are not morally relative things that we get to define according to our present needs and desires.

No.  The criterion is not us but the Messiah, Jesus Christ.  He gets to decide and inform us about what is real love for God and what is real love for others.  The Messiah is our Lord; he is the One who defines what these things mean for us.  He shows us what real love is.

And once we consider the example of the Messiah we realize that all rationalizations and convenient explanations are empty and false.  For the example of the Messiah is of one who emptied himself for us even to the point of giving up his own life, even to the point of dying humiliated and cursed on a cross.  That example, and not our self-serving, self-indulgent sentimentality, is what love really means.  The Messiah, Jesus, defines love for us.  We do not get to decide this for ourselves.

God does give us the world... but not to do with it as we see fit.  God does give us each other in relationship... but not to exploit, abuse, manipulate, and control.  Rather, we are to do with the world and with others only what God wills, and only what brings glory to God, and only what expresses love for God as we see this love revealed in Jesus Christ.

That is to say, we are to express our love for God in our love for others by following the example of Jesus.  Only by living according to what he says in the Beatitudes, to which we have repeatedly returned, can we truly say we are living in his love.  Only by purity of heart and poverty of spirit, only by righteousness and mercy and gentleness, only by peacemaking and even suffering persecution, can we truthfully say we love God and our neighbors.

Jesus shows us that love is a sacrificial, self-emptying movement in which we die to our own selves, our own agendas, our own desires, our own need to control and possess.  And in so dying we find ourselves reborn to eternal life, a life of profound abundance, a life of connection and unity with all things and with God.

III.

This kind of love is impossible for us.  On our own, we should not even attempt it.  Even the example and explicit teachings of Jesus are subject to misinterpretation.  More horrible atrocities have been committed in Jesus’ Name than I care to think about.  Following Jesus is impossible for us.  It is not something we can decide to do on our own. 

But God can do this.  And we can do it when we are united in purpose and spirit with God in Jesus Christ.  In him, by the power of the Holy Spirit, because we are one in him and with him, it is now possible for us to follow God, and even more.  The only way to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind, the only way to love our neighbors as ourselves, the only way to love with the love God gives us in Christ is to become one with Christ. 

This why God gives us the church, the communion of believers, the gathering of those who place their trust in Jesus Christ, to function as Christ’s on-going Earthly Body in the power of the Holy Spirit.  The church is here so that we may support each other in the work of discipleship.  For the calling we have, to love God and to love our neighbor, is something that requires mutual listening and encouragement, criticism and prayer.  We become one with Jesus Christ when we enter into true communion with others and gather together in his Name, to hear his Word, to do his will, and to celebrate his Sacraments. 

This is why God gives to us the Sacrament of Baptism, so we may symbolically, spiritually share in Christ’s death and experience rebirth in him.  He shows us what love is in coming into mortal existence to dwell among us.  In this he shows his love for the whole creation by becoming one of us, even to the point of death.  Therefore, it is when we express the same kind of love, a love that empties ourselves of our own prejudices and biases, that we share in Jesus’ love.     

This is why God gives us the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, so that we may actually participate in Christ’s own Body and Blood, remembering his sacrifice and anticipating his return.  He loved God fully and completely and in so doing showed his love for us.  

Everything we do in the church serves to remind us of the basic purpose for which we are placed here on the Earth, which is summed up in those two commandments: love God with all our being, and your neighbor as yourself.  Christ gives us this ability.  It is something we do in him, and together with each other.

IV.

Every so often, God sends a tsunami of change into the world and into the church.  The point is to blow away our complacency and our self-satisfied attitudes, and return the people to what the prophets call the love they had at first.  Periodically we are called back to our original calling to love God and our neighbors.  These are times of reformation and renewal in the church.

I think we are in one of those seminal periods now, when God is thrusting aside the old order and something emerges that really expresses in our own time this eternal good news.  It is a time when we are being brought back to face very basic questions, and to remake very basic affirmations.  Like loving God with all our being.  Like loving our neighbors as ourselves.                 

But in the church, the essence of reform has always been a return to basic and essential truths, practices, beliefs, and spiritual experience.  They may explode into each generation in new ways, but the basic core is always to tap into the original energy, the original spirit, the original message of God’s love for the world in Jesus Christ.

I would like to be a part of that.

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