Proper 26A
Matthew 23:1-12
October 30, 2011

Not the Walk They Talk

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

We’re nearly to the end of our annual stewardship campaign. We’ve heard some wonderful stories of the ways that people’s lives have been touched because for one hundred sixty years there has been a First United Methodist Church in Decorah. I hope that these stories have helped you to consider the ways that your lives have been touched, too.

I can tell you that we’ve only just begun to scratch the surface. There are some things that seem so ordinary and so common that we’re likely to overlook them. But remember that, because we’re here, children are growing up hearing the Bible stories. Some of those stories have been around for four thousand years. They’ve made us who we are and they continue to shape us.

Because we are here, mourners are comforted. Because we are here the sick are visited and cared for, the poor are helped, and strangers are welcomed. Because we are here community groups have a place to meet. Because we are here the community can gather and feast on Thanksgiving Day without marking as different those who are lonely or poor.

We are engaged here in the adventure of learning how to follow Jesus and of learning how to make a difference in our world. Where people are in pain—anywhere in the world—we are there with them, relieving suffering and bringing a word of hope. Where people are downtrodden, we are there proclaiming the God who hears the oppressed and sets them free. When a hurricane or a flood or a tsunami strikes, whether it’s on the other side of the world, or right here in Iowa, we are there, among the first on the scene and among the last to leave.

All of this happens because we are here. If you were wondering whether First United Methodist Church is worth your support, I tell you without apology, Yes, it is! If you were wondering whether it makes any difference whether you support First United Methodist Church, I can tell you without hesitation, Yes, it does!

Yes, it’s the annual stewardship campaign, but I also think we should think of it as an annual celebration campaign during which we give remember and celebrate some of our ministries and the difference they make. It’s almost over. Next week we will gather once again. It happens to fall on All Saints’ Sunday, so we’ll celebrate this connection we have with the saints who have come before us in the last two thousand years and the saints who will come after us in the next two thousand years. We’ll take our place among them and offer our continuing support for the work of ministry. We didn’t start it. We won’t see it through to the end. But we’ll do our part in our time with whatever we can contribute.

For such a grand theme as this, there should be a really great text, so I’d be able to preach a barn-burner. But once again the lectionary committee has let me down. Do I have the story of God’s creative power that fashioned the universe? Do I have the story of God’s willingness to live right along side of us as one of us? Do I have even something as appropriate as the widow’s mite or Paul’s call to cheerful giving?

Nope. None of the above. I have instead a vignette from Jesus’ last days in Jerusalem, last days that were filled with controversy and the sense of an approaching crisis. Our text comes right after another of Jesus’ run-ins with the religious experts in Jerusalem. They had tried to arrest him at the end of chapter twenty-one. In chapter twenty-two Jesus told the Parable of the Wedding Party in which the A-list guests were replaced by ordinary people. Then there was the attempt to trap Jesus with a question about paying taxes to Caesar, followed by a fun question from the Sadducees about how things will work when the resurrection comes. Then there was the question about the greatest commandment. Last of all, Jesus brushed aside their expectations about the Messiah being a descendant of David.

After these exchanges, Jesus stopped talking to the religious authorities and started talking about them. Our reading comes at that point, but Jesus is just getting warmed up. Right after our reading Jesus launches into a series of seven curses thrown at the authorities, the leaders who should have helped the people but who instead spent their time protecting their power. The chapter concludes with Jesus weeping over Jerusalem for all that it will suffer in the coming disaster.

This is perhaps not exactly what the doctor ordered as the stuff for a stewardship sermon. But we’ll see. After all, if it is true as someone has said, that stewardship is everything that we do after we say “yes” to God, then stewardship in that broad sense includes every attempt to live faithfully as God’s people. As the record of the struggles of God’s people to do just that, every text of the Bible is about stewardship. But that connection is more obvious in some places than in others and this story is surely a good test case.

On the one hand we understand Jesus’ point all too well. We don’t trust people who say one thing and do another. We have an ugly word for someone who does this: hypocrite. Americans are a famously forgiving people, but one thing we will not forgive is hypocrisy. Those who who hold up moral standards, those who decide how people should behave, those who offer themselves as ethical guides had better do as they say.

That in a nutshell is Jesus’ complaint about the Pharisees and the legal experts. They are the interpreters of the Torah—Genesis through Deuteronomy in our Bibles. That’s what it means to say that they “sit on Moses’ seat.” In those days teachers and preachers sat while their hearers stood as a sign of respect—I’ve always thought that might be nice, but I’ve never managed to get anyone else to see it that way. (I hesitate to mention this, of course, after the fiasco that followed my mentioning that congregations used to applaud the sermon.) This understanding of the importance of a chair is still bound up with notions about thrones. And, remembering that the Greek for seat or chair is kathedra, we are not surprised to learn that what makes a church a “cathedral” is not size or elegant architecture but simply that a bishop’s chair is there.

The Pharisees and the legal experts sit in Moses’ seat and they have (or at least pretend to have) the authority of Moses himself. But they do not do as they say. The do not walk the walk they talk. In short, they are hypocrites, a word that means literally “under judgment.”

Hypocrisy always seems worse when we find it in the church. Whenever I hear fresh-breaking news of scandal—a drug or prostitution ring is broken up and some “customers” arrested along with everyone else—I pray, “Please, God, let none of them be a pastor!” That is a prayer, of course, which it is too late to answer and therefore too late to pray, but I pray it anyway. Or, if the headline reads, “Pastor indicted in relief fund theft,” my prayer is, “Please, God, let it not be a United Methodist pastor!”

When someone is caught doing something criminally nasty, it seems to hit just a little harder if the one with the red hands is ordained. Whenever that happens I feel a sense of shame. It’s worse if it is a United Methodist colleague. Hence the fervor of my prayers. Imagine what Catholic priests are going through these days, the good ones, I mean, who work hard, who move through their daily struggles with grace and who are carefully ethical.

We understand Jesus’ concern with hypocrisy and we understand his anger toward those religious authorities who used their authority for their own benefit, who defended a widow against the greed of her in-laws, say, but only at a price that used up her precious resources. Or they constructed elaborate codes around keeping the Torah which only the well-off would ever have the time or resources to follow. And then they blamed the poor, not only for their poverty, but for not keeping the rules that they had made, like if we complain when someone who must work the hours they are assigned at a low-wage job and so they are not able to come to church.

It’s bad enough for the well-off and the respectable to make rules that they expect others to live by, but when they don’t bother to live by them themselves, well, that’s hypocrisy. I know what Jesus means. I understand his outrage.

And yet. And yet there is another side to this. Hypocrisy is an easy charge to make because it’s so universally true. Of course I am unable or—let me be honest here—even sometimes unwilling to do as I have said. I have standards that I don’t always live up to. If there is someone here who entirely lives up to their own standards, I would like to know. I’d like to shake their hand, but I’d also like to suggest as gently as can be that it might just be possible that they have set their standards a little too low.

What are ideals for, anyway, if not to call us beyond who we are toward who we might become? Isn’t failure of this kind a requirement for moral and spiritual progress? We are not yet, after all, all that God dreams for us to be. If I am to be accused of hypocrisy for that, well, I’ll have to admit my guilt, because I am not fully (because we work pretty hard not to know myself fully) but I am pretty aware of just how far short of the mark I fall.

It seems that there was a monastery that was cloistered, that is to say, that the monks spent the great majority of their time in part of the monastery that were not open to the public. The monks had little direct contact with people outside although they never failed to remember them in their prayers. But every year the monastery had a open house and invited all their neighbors to come and visit. One year at their open house a neighbor of theirs approached one of the brothers and asked, “What do you do here, anyway?” The monk replied, “We work and eat and sleep, we pray, we listen and we talk, we read and write.” The neighbor was not satisfied and pressed his question, “What do you do here?” “Ah,” replied the monk, “We fall down and we get up. We fall down and we get up. We fall down and we get up.” And that, it has seemed to me, is what the church is about.

In the computer world they call it a “beta release.” When a new computer program is developed it goes through several stages. After the program is completed, it goes through several rounds of testing to make sure that it will do what it is supposed to do and that it will not crash. After it has passed those basic tests, the program is made available to a wider group of people who put the program through its paces. That’s a beta release.

Beta releases tend to be “buggy.” No amount of testing will find the flaws that real world users will discover. The beta release tests the program in the real world. Then the problems that arise in real world use are fixed. At least they’re supposed to be. One complaint about a certain software giant that shall remain nameless except that you know who they are is that it sells its beta releases at full price!

Anyway, friends, we are beta releases, all of us. We are buggy. We look like we should be able to do what we’re supposed to do, but in the real world we discover that there are still lots of glitches. We beta release Christians need a safe place for those glitches to appear and sometimes even for us to crash.

Between Jesus’ outrage at hypocrisy and our need to have the room to fail so that we can move on from where we are toward we are going, is the church, itself a beta release, a place where we can fall down and get up, fall down and get up, fall down and get up, as we stumble toward God’s vision of humanity.

I would never suggest that you hold up the church as the place where we’ve got it all figured out. That, I suspect, would be the hypocrisy that Jesus so rightly condemned. Nor would I say that, if we’re not living up to our ideals, that we don’t deserve to be supported. No, we are the place where it’s okay to be a beta release, in fact, it’s expected. We need the place where it’s okay to fall down, where we know that when we do that (and it’s when, not if) we will be helped to our feet so that we can try again. That’s worth our support, our investment of time and energy and love and devotion and, yes, our investment of money.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.