Epiphany 5A
February 9, 2020

O God of mercy and 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, “yes, church is often completely unbelievable and we’re really not that organized.” But if I can keep quiet a minute and ask what it is the person doesn’t believe in or doesn’t like, it’s usually hypocrisy, and 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 testaments – is devoted to calling religious people to account for hypocrisy. The Bible may have been written by and for the people who need the most help. (I believe I am one of them.)

We have several examples of calling people to account before us in our readings today. We heard a most beautiful section of the book of Isaiah, which points out the gap between the intention of the worshipping community in ancient Israel and the actual behavior of the same community. Back 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 in worship, to experience transcendence. But, according to Isaiah, their beautiful worship lacked integrity because of a deep and dishonest inconsistency between the ritual practices and the daily lives of the people when they were 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. According to Isaiah, the Holy One desires our devotion to loosing the chains of economic and political injustice, undoing the bindings of exploitation in the workplace, letting people who are oppressed go free, cancelling debts, making reparations. 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 or “afford.” It’s about sharing what we have.

In his fiery commentary on the book of Isaiah, Walter Brueggemann says that to spend any 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 smoothes the way ahead of us and the presence of God, Who is Love, 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 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 was 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 as reasons to stay away. 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. Paul reminds the congregation that the power of Love is so much stronger than death; and the centrality of Love is 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 the food, sharing the shelter, sharing the clothing we have.

The Gospel of Matthew has some things to say about hypocrisy and conflict as well, and the scribes and Pharisees are often Matthew’s 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, and Jesus was speaking directly to his disciples, not to the crowds in this passage. 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 our Rabbi-in-Residence, Howard Berman sees Gospel evidence that the Rabbi from Nazareth (Jesus) was very likely trained by the Pharasaic Movement. 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 Holy One; 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 out the Gospel. It’s not that the accusations aren’t apt – but it’s an inside the family argument. And, according to Matthew, it too 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, also known as The Way. What does the kingdom of heaven (aka the kingdom of God) 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 rule 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 outlined by Second Testament scholar Eugene Boring: 1) The Holy One is without a superior and without a peer; 2) Anti-Love (or anti-God) forces are real and they try to disrupt Love’s power, not just by failing to live up to an ideal but by giving allegiance to other competing authorities, like economic, or political or military power. People are victimized by anti-Love forces; 3) The Holy One 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; and 4) The consummation of the realm of heaven – the realm of Love or 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, mercifully, and compassionately, no matter what, no matter where, no matter who.

One of the things I know from raising teenagers, and from having been a teenager myself, is that it’s fairly easy to discern hypocrisy in others, but much harder to see it in myself. I think this is true for us as a parish as well.  The best way to get help identifying our own gaps between the words we pray and how we behave as a parish is to ask people who are economically and socially disenfranchised. Bishop Desmond Tutu teaches that every parish should be able to get a recommendation from poor people. I’d add that every parish should be able to get a recommendation from people who are marginalized by white supremacy or misogyny or ableism or any of the other things that disenfranchise people. If we listen closely, if we pay attention, our “unbelievable and disorganized religion” will hold us accountable to a higher standard in here and out there. If we listen closely, we will live as a community worth our salt and light!

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