Proper 17

What is something that was declared illegal 100 years ago, but is perfectly legal today? I’ll give you a hint: it inspired the 18^th Amendment to the Constitution. In what was termed the Noble Experiment, the United States government made it a crime to manufacture, transport or sell alcoholic beverages. From 1920 to 1933—a period referred to today as the Prohibition Era—all the bars and saloons and liquor stores in the nation shut down. Officially, at least.

But instead of ending the practice of drinking, the 18^th Amendment just drove it underground. Speakeasies abounded across America.  Drinking went on.  My father, fresh out of the orphanage as a teenager in 1930, worked for bootleggers.  (It was safer and more profitable than working in the coal mines, he noted.) Dad delivered to most, if not all, of the illicit drinking establishments in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania in the early 1930s. In fact, there were more bars doing business during Prohibition than were in existence prior to Prohibition.  My father also recalled that he delivered to all the church rectories in town as well.  It seems that the local clergy had a hankering for more than just communion wine.

It would be easy to laugh at that kind of hypocrisy—if it weren’t so prevalent today. Let me give you an example. During the worst months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the mayor of a city in Texas recorded a Facebook video urging residents of his town to avoid travel or large gatherings. “Stay home if you can,” he declared. He sounded like a responsible leader of the people—until it came to light that he had recorded the Facebook video from his vacation spot in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.

But we all have problems with moral and ethical consistency. We all fail to meet our own standards sometimes. That’s not an excuse, it’s a reality. Somehow our hypocrisy radar fails us when we point it at ourselves.

Today’s Gospel revolves around a question of “optics.” The Pharisees and some teachers of the law noticed that Jesus and his disciples were not following the Jewish laws of ceremonial hand washing before they ate. Aha! The Pharisees had caught Jesus breaking the religious rules! Surely this invalidated Jesus’ authority as a religious leader! But, instead of hanging his head in shame and slinking away, Jesus turned the tables on the Pharisees.

He said, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me;
in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.’  You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”    

The Pharisees loved the Law more than they loved the Lord. They cared more about keeping religious rules than knowing and honoring God. They said all the right things, but they weren’t motivated by the heart of God. They set a standard for others that they did not live up to themselves.

This Bible passage is a good example of Jesus’ tough love. Hypocrisy is poisonous. It slowly kills trust and destroys relationships. And it kills the character of the hypocrite who is not honest enough or humble enough to admit his failure. And the Pharisees’ hypocrisy is doubly dangerous because it was driving people away from God and it was cheating the Pharisees out of an authentic relationship with the Lord.

The sin of the Pharisees is our sin, too. We say we follow Christ, but all of us fall short of living as he lived. Jesus says, “You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions.” In other words, most of us are satisfied to live according to the standards of our society. Yet Christ offers a higher standard.

Pastor Kyle Idleman tells the story of a man who came up to him after a church service in Houston. He had tears in his eyes. This father was broken-hearted over his daughter and the choices she had made with her life. And the father had come to a painful realization. He said, “We raised her in Church, but we didn’t raise her in Christ.”

“We raised her in Church, but we didn’t raise her in Christ.” There’s a key to understanding our hypocrisy. We can spend our whole life in church and never fall in love with God. We can miss the joy of knowing God and sharing God’s love with others. Remember when the Pharisees asked Jesus to name the greatest commandment? Jesus didn’t point to a rule or a religious observance or a church tradition. He pointed to a relationship.

He said, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” (Matthew 22:37-40).

Jesus is saying, “God isn’t pointing you toward the Law. The Law is pointing you toward God. Once you understand God and submit your life to Him, once you love God more than you love your own life, then you won’t need the Law. Instead, your goodness will be replaced by Godliness.”

When some of the great medieval cathedrals were built, most of the population of Europe was illiterate. Architects, sculptors and artists created these amazing cathedrals full of carvings and statues and stained glass windows to tell the story of God through art. They assumed that the average citizen may never read a Bible, but they could “read” the story of God through the images in the church buildings.

And that’s still the best way to spread the message of Jesus. Most people in our society will never read a Bible, or will only read it in part. We are the “living cathedrals” in our society. Others need to “read” the story of God in the way we live our lives.

The best way to defeat the sin of hypocrisy is to move our testimony from our lips to our lives. We cannot experience the abundant life Christ promises without living with the loving heart he exhibited.

Author Brennan Manning wrote, “The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.”

Can you blame them? So how do we ensure that our lips and our lifestyles match up? How do we get an unbelieving world to believe?

Many years ago, missionary E. Stanley Jones met Mahatma Gandhi, the lawyer and social activist who led the non-violent resistance campaign that freed India from British rule. Jones asked Gandhi, “How can Christianity make a stronger impact on your country?”

Gandhi gave Jones three key insights. He said that Christians need to live more like Jesus. He said that Christians must present the message of Jesus without adulteration, or cultural baggage. And finally, Gandhi said, Christians should emphasize love, the core message of the faith.

Take a moment and think back over this last month. Examine your life in light of these three insights. Did you live like Jesus in your actions, your attitudes, your priorities and your motivations? Did you present the message of Jesus in its purest form? Did you emphasize love in everything you said, thought and did? This isn’t a quiz. This is your life. This is your calling. This is your legacy.

So how do you get an unbelieving world to believe?

God can use our brains, our charisma, our energy, and our skills to share His message with the world. Those are useful, but they aren’t essential. The only essential thing God needs from us is our commitment. Our total desire to love God and serve God with everything we have will make us more effective, authentic, persuasive witnesses than any amount of “proper” religious behavior.

Yes, we’re all hypocrites. So what’s the cure for our hypocrisy? Loving God with all our heart, soul and mind, and loving our neighbor as ourselves. That’s the way to move our testimony from our lips to our lives.