Epiphany 5A, February 2, 2014; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz
1 Corinthians 2:1-16 So that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.
Matthew 5:13-20 You are the salt…you are the light.
O God of salt and light, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
I don’t know about you, but from time to time someone tells me that they don’t believe in or that they don’t like “organized religion.” My knee-jerk response is to shake my head and say, “We’re really not that organized.” But if I can keep quiet a minute and ask what it is that the person doesn’t believe in or like, it’s usually hypocrisy. I can eagerly affirm that I share the feelings of disgust for hypocrisy. And then, if the person is willing to continue the conversation, I muse out loud that much of the Bible -– both the first and the second testaments -– is devoted to calling religious people to account for hypocrisy. The Bible may have been written for the people who need the most help. (I am one of them.)
We have several examples of calling people to account before us today in our readings. We heard a most beautiful section of the book of Isaiah, which points out the gap between the intention of the worshiping community in ancient Israel and the actual behavior of the same community. Back in ancient times, in the olden days, according to the prophet Isaiah, there was a desire among the people for worship that felt good and sounded good, a desire among the people to experience a sense of right-relationship with God, to experience transcendence, that their worship lacked integrity because of a “deep, dishonest variance” between ritual practice and the daily lives of the people out in the community, between the intention of the words of their lips and the meditations of their hearts, and the impact of the ways they were living their day-to-day lives.1 Can you imagine?
According to Isaiah, this was a matter of life and death –- thus, the command to sound off like a trumpet call – like the shofar. Cry out that worship that is eager for the nearness of the divine, but self-absorbed, self-interested, self-satisfied, is false, and will never result in the long-term well-being of the community. What kind of devotion is longed for by the Holy One? According to Isaiah, God desires our devotion to loosing the chains of injustice, undoing the bindings of exploitation in the workplace, letting people who are oppressed go free, cancelling debts. And, if that’s not clear enough, Isaiah says, it’s about sharing our food, sharing our shelter, and sharing our clothing, and not hiding ourselves from people who are our own kin by virtue of being human. In the Biblical terms, it’s never about what we can spare. It’s about sharing what we have.
In his fiery commentary on the book of Isaiah, Walter Brueggemann says that to spend time arguing about whether this means “face-to-face charity or refers to public policy…is to miss the urgency of the mandate.” He asserts that “the triad of requirements [of sharing food, sharing shelter, and sharing clothing] speaks against a selfish preoccupation with one’s own needs and passions; that is, the imperatives speak against individualism in order to assert that we are ‘members one of another.’”2 We are members one of another, in here and out there.
The best part of this passage in Isaiah, though, is the assurance of what happens when we live as if we understand that we are members of one another, and we go about our days sharing our food, sharing our shelter, and sharing our clothing. Then our light bursts through like the dawn and healing springs up quickly. Our vindicator smooths the way ahead of us and the presence of God has our backs. Then we are like a watered garden, like a spring whose waters do not fail. Our ancient ruins are rebuilt and our foundations restored. We will be called repairers of the fallen walls and restorers of desirable places to live. Personally, I can’t think of anything I would rather have us be like than a watered garden and a spring whose waters do not fail. I can’t think of anything that I would rather have us be called than repairers of the breach or restorers of blessed inhabitation. How wonderful it would be to have the reputation of being able to fix what is so broken, to be able to make the community livable again!
The apostle Paul was writing his letter that we call First Corinthians, from where he was in Ephesus to the congregation in Corinth, a gifted congregation experiencing conflict about ethical issues of worship and praxis –- how to pray well and how to live well in community. It’s not just disagreement, but power struggle that Paul is addressing. It reminds me that when hypocrisy is not the chief complaint about organized religion, it’s the infighting or schism that most often gets cited. Paul’s response to the church in Corinth is sixteen chapters long, and today we only hear the second chapter, a piece of his argument to them about what matters. The cause of the problems in the church in Corinth is clearly stated later in Chapter 11: “The contempt of the rich for the poor…those who have houses and plenty to eat despise and humiliate those who are hungry and have nothing.”3 It’s no coincidence that it is in the same Chapter 11 that Paul tells the story of Jesus, who on the very night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, broke it and shared it. You know that story well. And so, throughout his letter, Paul reminds the congregation of the willingness of Jesus to be executed rather than forfeit his integrity; the power of God that is so much stronger than death; and the centrality of Love as the essential ingredient in all things good: Love at the beginning, Love at the end, Love in all times and all places along the way. Love, at the bare minimum requires sharing food, sharing shelter, sharing clothing.
The Gospel of Matthew has some things to say about hypocrisy and conflict as well, and the scribes and Pharisees are often his punching bags. They should not be our punching bags, however, since Episcopalians are far more like scribes and Pharisees than Jesus’ earliest disciples ever were. To our ears, Matthew can sound anti-Jewish when nothing could be further from the truth. Matthew was most likely a scribe himself – that is a learned lawyer, and Rabbi Berman sees Gospel evidence that the Rabbi from Nazareth (Jesus) was very likely trained by the Pharasaic Movement, which came to be known as the Rabbinic Movement after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. Scribes and Pharisees, in the Gospel of Matthew are righteous and they, get blamed for weighing others down with heavy burdens and not lifting a finger to help; for trusting in the money on the altar, but not the altar itself; for not wanting to enter the kingdom of heaven and attempting to keep others out as well; and for tithing while ignoring God’s call for mercy and justice. The accusations are like one Episcopal parish calling out another Episcopal parish for not living up to its Gospel standard. Do you understand what I’m talking about? It’s not that the accusations aren’t apt, but it’s an inside-the-family argument. And, according to Matthew, it was a matter of life and death.
The scribes and Pharisees were righteous and devout. So what might it mean that unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven? Following Jesus certainly doesn’t mean that you don’t have to pay attention to the commandments or the Law, or the Torah, which can also be understood as The Way. What does the kingdom of heaven (aka the kingdom of God) even mean in the Gospel of Matthew? Matthew never says exactly what the kingdom of heaven is, just what it is like. But we can be clear that, for Matthew, the kingdom of heaven is not a territory or a place of God, but a power or reign of God. The term kingdom of heaven is a deep metaphor or a way of thinking about the meaning of life with these four essential ideas:
1) God is creator and sovereign – without a superior and without a peer
2) Anti-God forces are real, and they try to disrupt or usurp God’s power, not just by failing to live up to an ideal but by actively rebelling or giving allegiance to other competing authorities, like economic, or political, or military power. People are victimized by anti-God forces.
3) God has given kinship -– that is, special status with special obligations, to those who accept the discipline of a life devoted to compassion, mercy and justice (right relationship) –- that is, the commitment to love neighbor as self.
4) The consummation of the kingdom of heaven, the realm of God, is present and ongoing but not complete.4
Not being able to enter this way of being, this meaning of life, is beyond tragic. In her book Grace Eventually, Anne Lamott writes that she realizes that we are not kept from the kingdom of heaven for not forgiving, we are kept out by not forgiving. We are not kept out for not going above and beyond basic righteousness, we are kept out by not going above and beyond basic righteousness. Jesus’ point in the Gospel of Matthew is not so much theological as it is ethical. His purpose is to answer the question, “So how shall we live?” And the answer is justly, compassionately, no matter what.
As we know from raising teenagers, or maybe from having been teenagers ourselves, it’s fairly easy to discern hypocrisy in others, but much harder to see it in ourselves. So, Emmanuel, how can we close up our own gaps between the words we pray and how we behave as a parish? There’s no way I know of completely avoiding a gap between what we intend and how we behave, but we must be diligent, and we can do better. If we listen closely, if we pay attention, our “organized religion” will hold us accountable to a higher standard in here and out there, that is, if we continue to live as a community worth our salt and light!