Practicing what We Preach

Joshua 3: 7-17
Mathew 23: 1-12


After repeated confrontations with the scribes and Pharisees, Jesus had had enough. Jesus had put up with enough vanity, hypocrisy and arrogance from the Jewish leaders. Unfortunately, these are common human characteristics that can be found in churches all over the world, it is not just the Jews who manage to alienate people with their unbending ways. As a Christian community we should be attentive to leaders whose mottos are more ‘do as I say and not as I do’. If any religious group should be aware of the ramifications of following our own wants and desires rather than those of God, it is Christianity since we have such a perfect example set before us in the Gospels.

The point of this passage is not just the hypocrisy of the Jewish leaders, but it is a message about true discipleship to us.  The passage begins with affirming the leaders by telling the people that the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. Jesus is telling the people that they are to follow the scribes and Pharisees in matters of religion – to do as they have taught them.

The problem is their actions and the way the Pharisees misuse their authority. They behave in ways that do not correspond to the words they have preached to the people. They speak of glorifying God and yet they only manage to make themselves look good. They tell the people to orient their lives around God, but instead they draw everyone’s eyes to them. They speak about being responsible for the peoples’ welfare but in their actions they do nothing to help the people.

These three tasks of the Jewish leaders are the same tasks Christian leaders are given. The pastor, the elders and deacons, the consistory members and committee members make oaths swearing to glorify God rather than themselves, they swear to help those in the church whom have elected them to lead, and to ask that thanksgiving go to God.

Or at least, that is the way it is supposed to be.

It is too easy to confuse our interests with God’s purposes, our power with God’s sovereignty, our standing with God’s glory. Whether we are speaking of ourselves or the whole Christian church, human beings have a strong tendency to create false and sinful hierarchies that displace God’s authority. We tend to ignore or rebel against God’s kingdom in order to protect our minor fiefdoms. We want to hold close to the power we have obtained and often do anything to keep it rather than acknowledging that the only true power comes through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

It is scary when churches use a constant reference to God and God’s purposes to support their own agendas. They are trying to lend holiness to their own aims and desires instead of allowing God’s will to prevail in the church. The truth is that pious words and convictions even when based on Christian beliefs do not make a person faithful to God’s will.

True faithfulness is found not in the words we say or the doctrines we profess to believe in, but faithfulness is fulfilled in our hearts. If our heart and life is oriented toward God, then we are faithful followers of God. However, if our hearts and lives are oriented toward our own selfish goals, then our faith in God becomes a shallow and empty boasting of our self and has nothing to do with God at all.

When we cling to the power we have in church, when we use it for our own selfish gains, we have corrupted the mission of our church. The committees we have, the positions we all take on are not for our glory, it is not to make us feel important and powerful. These are merely tools to do God’s work. The gifts and abilities God gives to each of us does not make us more special than another person, and we should not use them to make ourselves distinctive from one another. The gifts we have are to be used to help everyone because as Jesus told the scribes and Pharisees, “The greatest among you shall be your servant. All who exalt themselves shall be humbled, and all who humble themselves shall be exalted.”

However, there is another side to this passage. All of us who believe ourselves to be inferior, those of us who feel we are not worthy to be on a committee, to be a leader of the church must recognize that just as self-pride is a sin, so is continual self-doubt. It is a sin because it paralyzes us from helping those that would call upon us. It prevents us from partaking in things like Consistory or our many committees because we believe that we are not worthy to take on such a role. That is not true. Each person here has something to offer, it is why you have been placed in this church by God. If you think you do not have a gift to give, then you need to begin to pray because God will show you your many gifts and you will no longer have an excuse to hold up before God or yourself or the church.

 Jesus has tossed down a challenge to the scribes and Pharisees, but if we are honest, the challenge is ours as well. Jesus tells us to make our actions match our words, but not only that – Jesus tells us that our actions should not be done in order to receive praise from others. If, as your pastor, I work hard all week to write a sermon just to hear “Good Job” at the end of a service, then I am not doing what I am preaching. And there are times when I worry about having a boring sermon because I DO like to hear “good job”.

My grandmother asked me yesterday how I manage to come up with new ideas for sermons. My first answer was, “the scriptures provide different ideas”. When she brushed that aside and said, “Yes, but how do you know what to say?” My honest answer had to be, “I have no idea.” The truth is that I never know what I’m about to write until I type it. I don’t know because it is not ME that comes up with the ideas, it is not me that pulls the service together. I truly feel that if the Holy Spirit didn’t help me each week, I would have run out of things to say within a month. Sometimes when I am depending on myself too much, I feel that way. I become discouraged and disheartened with the passage, wondering how in the world am I going to find something to tell all of you this Sunday. Then when I begin to write and things aren’t going well, as soon as I look up and say, “God, this isn’t working, will you give me some help?” that is when it begins to flow. When I stop depending on myself and start depending on God.

The glory goes to God. Any one of you could do what I do – trust me in this. I just happen to be willing to do it every Sunday, although sometimes I’m not sure why! Just because I am the pastor, it does not make me any less susceptible to vanity, hypocrisy, and arrogance. The truth is that none of us are completely able to remove ourselves from temptation. We just need to be careful about not only giving our time and money to God, but the reasons behind why we do it.

If some of us like to give a lot of money to church or charities, we need to be aware that it can easily be addicting to give because we get praised for our generosity. If some of us like to be on a lot of committees because we like hearing, “Wow, Bart, you’re on so many committees I don’t know how you do it. Good job!” we need to pay attention that the praise does not become the only reason we sign up. If we refuse to let someone join us in a project because we do not feel they can do it as well as we can, we need to be aware that God does not need perfection, God needs willing workers.

It is not easy to follow Jesus. It is not easy to put others before ourselves. It is not easy to let go of our pride when we do well on a task and give the glory to God. It is not easy to make our lives revolve around someone as selfless as Jesus Christ – however we are called to do all of these things. If as your pastor I do not do as I preach, if as a leader of the church you abuse your position, then we have become like the scribes and Pharisees Jesus warned the people against. We must be clear on why we do things, we must be sure not to let our fears or our pride prevent us from fulfilling God’s call. The one thing we can and are sure about is that each of us here today has a place in this church; each of us has a gift to give.

The hypocrite will trade God’s quiet praise for the easy and loud praise of people. Hypocrites lack confidence in the divine ‘yes’ and we hypocrites make masks and broadcast our piety in order to win the human ‘yes’. However, the antidote to our hypocrisy is grace. It is the unearned favor of God. It is the love of Jesus Christ that continues despite our failings and blemishes. So into the midst of those masks we wear to hide ourselves, comes the one who loves our real face. Jesus is the one that tells us, “Come to me, I will give you rest”. It is enough to make us put down our masks, to put aside our pride and accept that God truly loves the person we hide from the rest of the world. We are not all the same, we do not all have the same gifts or fulfill the same roles in the church. But each of us is loved for who we are and we each have a gift to give to the world.

Amen.