Sermon by Reverend Dr. John W. Mann | November 5, 2023

Matthew 23:1-12

Sometimes I have heard it said perhaps you have too, “I don’t go to church. The place is full of hypocrites!” I have some stock responses to that, depending on the situation and person sharing that view.

One is, “Right you are. We certainly don’t need one more.”

Or I might say, “At least they’re in the right place.”

Jesus talked about hypocrites from time to time. The hypocrite is someone who says one thing, but doesn’t follow his or her own words. While it is easy to condemn the hypocrite, there is also the idea that no one is perfect; if we point out the inconsistencies in someone else, we should ourselves be free of fault.

I’ve been privileged to have a front row seat to hypocrisy from an early age. Both in my family life and professional life. And there have likely been times when I have left my front row seat to take center stage.

When I was growing up, my family always ate our evening meal together. After the evening meal my dad would light up a cigarette. He would often say, “Don’t ever start smoking.” Even though he had begun smoking at the age of 12. The clear message was, “Do as I say, not as I do.”

One day when I was five years old my dad was out raking up leaves when I noticed he threw the unsmoked part of his cigarette into the street. It was still lit when I went over and picked it up. I did what I saw my dad do countless times – put it to my lips, took a drag and inhaled the smoke. I wondered what the attraction was.

He saw me and said, “What do you think you’re doing?”

I think I said, “I don’t know,” but I was feeling, “What does it look like I’m doing?” What could he say? He said, “Put that down! You go in the house and tell your mother what you did.”

Which I did; exactly. “Mom. I smoked a cigarette.”

“What? Why did you do that?”

“Dad told me to come tell you.”

Some years later, my brother found a navy flare gun and he took to a park one night and shot it off. My dad found out and yelled at him about all the things that could have gone wrong. He took the flare gun away, of course. Then he took it over to his friend’s house and they fired it into the sky. The flare came down and caught a neighbor’s garage on fire. Do as I say, not as I do.

In Matthew’s portrait of Jesus, the story is told of Jesus telling some home truths about the religious leaders of his day. His teaching was basically, “Do as they say, not as they do.”

Jesus was not critical of Judaism. He was critical of the way it was interpreted by the people who were in positions of leadership. He was critical of their actions, their life interpretation. They did not practice what they preached. They were hypocrites. 

The hypocrite is the one who says one thing and does another. But it’s more than that. A hypocrite is someone who presents the picture of believing that something is important, of standing for a truth or principle, but whose actions contradict their own truth.

The text we read from Matthew today highlights the continued rift between the followers of Jesus in the early church and the Jewish community. It was not enough for the early followers of Jesus to say, “He is the Messiah, believe in him, follow him.” They needed to demonstrate how the old religion was wrong, in their view. They did this by writing a script in the words of Jesus, condemning the leaders of Judaism.

In those days, just like in some places today, religion was a matter of life and death. There were people who would kill you for holding onto the wrong set of beliefs, at least in their opinion. And there were plenty of people willing die rather than give up their cherished beliefs.

When this gospel was written, just how serious a matter religion was could be seen in the rubble that was once Jerusalem. Jerusalem, the center of Jewish religion, had been utterly destroyed by the Romans. Like many catastrophes that have political and religious overtones, it was a simple task for people to connect the dots and say that it was God’s punishment for a variety of reasons.

To the people in the early church, leadership was supposed to be about service to others. Leadership was supposed to come with certain responsibilities. They were working against a system where leadership was more about privilege and entitlement. According to what Jesus said –

They, the religious leaders, create heavy burdens, put them on people’s backs, but do nothing to help lift them. The religion they practice is like a façade. It’s all a front with nothing of substance to back it up. They seek the places of honor. The head table at the banquet, the best seat in the house, wherever it is that someone of worth and importance should be, that’s where you’ll see them.  And they love their terms of endearment. Especially when you refer to them that way.

Jesus said, “If you want to be great, then be a servant.”

Jesus said, “If you exalt yourself, you will be humbled.”

In some sense to be a Christian is to engage in a struggle. None of us want to be labeled hypocrites. But it is really, really difficult to live a life completely free of contradiction. Any of us could probably have our lives laid bare and discovered things about which someone could point at us and say, “Well what a hypocrite you are.” And it’s always easy to look at other people and see how their lives don’t add up. The point is not judge people, maybe not even ourselves. With judgment comes guilt and shame soon follows.

I’ve seen some fairly blatant examples of hypocrisy in the church. I’m not talking about the people in the pew, but the church as an organization, a system. That sort of contradiction is hard to deal with, because it’s easy for people to go along to get along and no one person seems to be responsible for the corporate culture of hypocrisy.

Early on in my time in Scotland, I spoke in a very public manner about a political issue. I was tasked with conducting the funeral of a soldier killed in Iraq and the family asked me to share their feelings and views on the war. So I did and I told some hard truths. Within moments of the end of the service, my comments were broadcast on the national news.

To say that there was a lot of blow back would be an understatement. One newspaper even called Peace Presbyterian Church in St. Louis Park to see if there was any dirt they could dig up on me. But that was all part of the British tabloid press that thrives on that sort of thing.

What I found interesting was a phone call from the public relations officer of the Church of Scotland. They were upset not so much about what I said, but about the fact that I didn’t check with them first about what I was going to say. Their concern was the public image of the church. My concern was the people in my church and parish.

Over the years it became apparent to me that that church system was primarily concerned with institutional survival. Ministry for the people seemed secondary to propping up the institution and its norms. One example involved the controversy over issues of inclusion. There were some pretty vocal arguments for and against the full inclusion of LGBT folks in the life of the church. One of the most outspoken opponents of inclusion was a minister who had been arrested for soliciting sex in a public restroom. Because that made the church look bad, it was kept under wraps. That sort of thing makes it easy for folks to say, “There’s too much hypocrisy in the church.”

My job in life is not to go around pointing fingers, but to try to be a good and decent person and to try and live with some sense of integrity. It can be a struggle at times. What we try to do is to simply engage in the struggle. The struggle to keep our feet on a path of integrity. And if we slip and fall, we pick ourselves up and keep going. We struggle to live by the truth and not beat ourselves up when we falter. We hope to see ourselves as God sees us, as people who are worth another chance.

In contrast to the religious leaders of his day, Jesus could say to people, “Follow me. Do what I do. My yoke is easy and my burden is light. And if the load does get too heavy for you, I’ll help you carry it.”

Fortunately, I’ve seen him reflected in many, many people over the years. In their words and actions; in the sense that what you see is what you get and if you peeled back the layers, you would not discover a phony front, but a depth of character. There are plenty of folks like that around. We hope to be among them. Amen.