One of the central arguments many people use against God’s church has to do with hypocrites. If I may caricature the argument, it usually goes like this: “I don’t have anything against God or Jesus, but the church is full of hypocrites. That’s why I don’t belong to a church.” And usually the defense is pretty predictable, too. Sometimes the church apologist uses the “mea culpa” defense: “Yes, there have been hypocrites in our church; but we’re working on it and we hope you’ll forgive our mistakes.” Sometimes the church apologist uses the humorous defense: “I know the church is full of hypocrites, but there’s always room for one more!” In the end, however, it doesn’t matter how you defend the church: the label of hypocrite sticks like white on rice.
Jesus gives some pretty strong arguments against hypocrites in our reading tonight from the Sermon on the Mount. Hypocrites, according to Jesus, give their offerings loudly. Hypocrites, according to Jesus, pray loudly in public arenas and with lots of flowery words. Hypocrites, according to Jesus, take on spiritual disciplines like fasting with much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Hypocrites are the loud church members, according to Jesus; the kind who need a nameplate on every lightbulb and hymnal, who obsess over whether or not others know how hard they work at their faith, who would never give their opinion in 10 words when 100 will do.
So then, our task this Lent should be avoiding hypocrites, right? If only it were that easy. Let us pray. Father in heaven, we do not come to you as we should this evening, but only as we are able. We come as dust, in desperate need of your Spirit to bring new life into us. Fill us, we pray, with your life-giving breath. As we receive the mark of ashes, remind us that only you can heal our infirmities and forgive our many sins. Repent us of our pride, our envy, our anger, our laziness, our lust, our hunger for that which does not nourish, and our hypocrisy. Turn us again to set our faces on your Son, to remember His journey to the cross and our salvation. Be, as you have promised, gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. In the name of Christ Jesus we pray. Amen.
Jesus does give a fairly detailed description of hypocrites in his words to us tonight. But in the prayer Jesus gives as a remedy for hypocrisy, we find that even if Jesus’ description doesn’t indict us as hypocrites, his prayer certainly does.
“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” Right off the bat we’re in trouble. We invoke the name of God for all kinds of trivial, meaningless prayers, and in times of genuine need or outright thankfulness, we develop amnesian and are unable to remember who it was who promised us forgiveness and delivered what we need. We are hypocrites because we have been given the name of God and we treat it like God had given us a dead fish.
“Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Of course, Lord, by that we mean that your kingdom and will should give me everything I desire. Better yet, rescue me from this boring life and bring me into a heaven of my own choosing. Heaven forbid God’s will and kingdom should inconvenience or challenge us. We are hypocrites because we confuse God’s will and kingdom with our own will and our own, personal kingdoms.
“Give us this day our daily bread.” And bread for tomorrow and the day after as well. As a matter of fact, Lord, I don’t care about my neighbor’s daily bread; I want a bigger house and another boat. A snowmobile would be nice, too. We are hypocrites because we take our daily bread for granted and wish for more than we need.
“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” But not that jerk of an ex-husband, Lord – I can’t forgive him just yet. Don’t you remember how he treated me? Besides, he’s never even ASKED for forgiveness! We are hypocrites because we think forgiveness is for the sake of others – forgiveness is for our own well-being, and it is God’s greatest gift to us.
“And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” Don’t lead me into temptation, Lord – I can find the way myself just fine, thank you very much. We are hypocrites because we ask God to deliver us from our own irresponsible, ill-considered choices, and from the evil consequences they bring about.
With all of this, it’s easy to see that avoiding hypocrites this Lent will be about as possible as jumping over the moon. The gift of Lent is not a freedom from hypocrites – there’s always room for one more! The gift of Lent is the choices God gives us, and the opportunity we have to turn our lives over to God and be changed by what might happen, even in the midst of our hypocrisy.
We have the choice this Lent to be dismal hypocrites or devoted hypocrites. We can be the kind of hypocrites Jesus describes – the loud, obnoxious, deceitful, miserable hypocrites who have sucked every ounce of vitality and freedom out of their faith and exchanged it for a system of dry prayer, never-ending sacrifice and continual acts of penance. We can slouch every step through Lent, as if our perpetual misery has some kind of saving grace in itself, only to arrive at Easter miserable, despairing and unchanged – as dead as we were on Ash Wednesday.
Or, we can be devoted hypocrites. We can give our offerings in faith, focusing on what God asks of us and nothing more. We can pray in silence, listening for God’s still, small voice and joining that voice in conversation about our needs, our hopes, the needs of our neighbors and our growing trust in God’s peaceful presence. We can forgive sins and actually let them go, freeing ourselves from the burden of anger and grief, letting those who have wronged us find their peace with God in their own time and in their own way. We can dedicate ourselves to spiritual disciplines, but with an eye for how we might be changed in the process. We can take on a fast to rediscover the joy of simplicity; we can give up worldly pleasures to redirect our attention in other areas; we can leave behind any thought that simply suffering without what we want will impress God in the least.
We have lots of choices before us this Lent. The one thing we don’t have a choice about is our status as hypocrites. We will be marked as such tonight: as dead in our hypocrisy as we are in our other sins. But that’s not the focus this Lent – the focus is our growth in faith and our trust that if God loves sinners, we’ve been called to the right place. After all, saying we aren’t sinful would be, dare I say it, hypocritical.
Pastor Luke Bouman wrote a wonderful Ash Wednesday sermon a few years ago that I still read occasionally, not only because he quotes Paul Simon, but also because he closes with these incredible words:
We are called to rediscover who we are as God’s people. We are called to face our fears and our failures with courage and dignity, relying on God’s love and mercy. We are called to be God’s children. God does not need us to hear the words of confession that come out of our broken human spirits and our sin. We need to speak these words as a reminder to ourselves of our link with our human past…Lent marks again the earnest journey home for us, God’s flock. Wear your brand in humility, but never in shame, for it is the obvious reminder of God’s love and claim on you.[1]
May you be a devoted hypocrite this Lenten season, and may God use these forty days to change and transform you in new life for the sake of Christ our Savior. Amen.
[1] Rev. Dr. Luke Bouman, Tree of Life Lutheran Church, Conroe, TX.
http://www.predigten.uni-goettingen.de/archiv-7/050209-2-e.html
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