Sermon: Worship and hypocrisy

Sermon, Proper 14
Year C

Isaiah 1:1, 10-20
Psalm 50:1-8, 23-24
Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
Luke 12:32-40

What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?
says the LORD;
I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams
and the fat of fed beasts;
When you come to appear before me,
who asked this from your hand?
Trample my courts no more;
bringing offerings is futile;
incense is an abomination to me.
New moon and sabbath and calling of convocation--
I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity.

In the name of God…

I’d like to point out that we have read a passage of scripture in which God says God will not accept worship, smack dab in the middle of a worship service.  If that feels a little strange to anyone, that’s okay. It should feel a little odd.  Part of struggling with the text of the Bible is acknowledging that we will be confronted with dissonance.  The trick to biblical interpretation is to attempt to resolve the dissonance without removing the text from your life, or dismissing the text, or losing your own voice in the process, or shutting God out of the loop as you encounter the text.

In my own estimation, the brilliance of reading this text against worship in worship is that it is a denouncement of worship that practicing communities of faith need to hear—and communities of faith, by hearing this text in worship, are then confronted with that which calls their very existence into question.ibodd. t'rship service.  If that  accept  let our neighbors starveheir apathy toward the needy.  e

A week ago I mentioned that I loved the prophets.  I praised the power of the language the prophets used, and I spoke of the prophets’ offering insight into the mind of God.  But what I love most of all is that the prophets are examples of a religious tradition critiquing itself.  The prophetic voice is a remarkably valuable voice to have in the Bible where —instead of a unified book with only one voice dominating the story—we have a variety of believers speaking for God, and calling themselves and others back to the best and truest natures of the tradition

and the revealed nature and desires of God.

Why is this a valuable thing? Well, what the prophets bring to light, and are trying to warn us about, is the all-too-human propensity to allow our virtues to blind us to our vices.  In the Bible, the prophet is not simply one who seeks to predict the future.

The prophet is the ultimate BS-Detector,

A critic,

A herald of God who challenges those who fuss over the frivolities of the faith tradition while leaving the weightier matters of justice and love and faithfulness unfulfilled.

In other words, prophets called the people to drop the illusion that everything was okay, and see the reality of others in pain.  Prophets challenge the tendency of the religious to express self-satisfaction at a perfect worship service while letting their neighbors starve. 

This is seen very clearly in our passage from Isaiah today.  In the Bible, Isaiah is the first book of the prophets; we are in fact reading the first chapter of the first book of the prophets.  If you were to open the Bible, we are on the first page of the prophets.  And what is God’s first order of business through the prophet Isaiah?  An assault on worship!

Isaiah musters some of the strongest language he can; calling out both ruler and ruled alike by comparing them to Sodom and Gomorrah; cities tradition held God had completely destroyed because of their excessive wickedness.  That notion of utter destruction is Isaiah’s warning to the Kingdom of Judah.

Oh, by the way.  It is a common interpretation that the sin of Sodom has to do with sex, and particularly homosexuality.  The idea that Sodom and Gomorrah have to do primarily with sex is a later interpretation that shows up in history near the end of the formation of the New Testament continued with the Church Fathers, and has been misconstrued up to today.  The prophets understood the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah to be greed and injustice.

When the prophet Ezekiel wrote of Sodom, he said:

This was the guilt of your sister Sodom:she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.

There is much more to be said about this, but the part we need to remember for today is that the notion that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah had something to do with sex is nowhere to be found in the Old Testament or in the four Gospels. What is found instead, is that both cities were renowned for their inhospitable behavior, their greed, and their apathy toward the needy. That is the thread running through the Old Testament and the Gospels. [See, for instance, Luke Ch. 10, when Jesus notes that failing to heed and take in his disciples would bring a worse judgment on the town than was brought to Sodom. The comparison makes more sense given the reputation of Sodom to have been inhospitable to visitors.]

And by bringing to memory Sodom and Gomorrah, God speaking through Isaiah brings to light the problem of  worship in Judah.  Judah and Jerusalem continued their duties to God in worship, but left the harder work of taking care of the vulnerable undone.  And God will have none of it.  In God’s eyes, “worship unconcerned with justice is obscene.”[1]

In essence, God calls out Judah and Jerusalem for their hypocrisy.  The hypocrisy being that the service to God in the temple would remain so exacting while the love of neighbor so vital to God’s desire for the world would be ignored.

This was not an isolated incident either.  The prophet Amos also notes God’s displeasure at sacrifices without justice, saying,

 I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon.[2]
Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

And Jesus himself echoed the prophet Hosea, when confronted about the low company he was keeping or the rules he and his disciples broke, by saying:

If you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless.[3]

After the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, Paul and James also wrote against favoritism and the ignoring of the needy in the midst of the community of faith.

And sermon after sermon, treatise after treatise, throughout the centuries have pointed to the same temptation of the worshiping community of God: that there is a temptation that a Christian’s service to God will eclipse the service to neighbor, instead of providing the basis for service to neighbor.

Christians serve a God who enables through worship and community a tangible expression of God’s love and comfort. This is a wonderful benefit to relationship to God, but it can be twisted and fouled when Christians bathe in such feelings and leave worship with a sense of finality to our purpose. The danger is that sometimes Christians seek God only for solace and self-satisfaction without opening ourselves up to strength and purpose toward the world God asks us to participate in improving.

Christians are then open to the charge of hypocrisy by anyone with some understanding of our own scriptures and tradition; and so I believe that keeping an understanding of the temptation for religious self-satisfaction and self-deception matters for Christian mission and witness in the world.

In a world in which there is a longing for something more real than what we can be sold or what we can be told by figures in authority, the Church suffers a crisis of relevance that will not simply be solved by arguing over what worship style will attract new people; but by how we connect people to God and how we treat those whom we meet.

I remember a survey of young people that was conducted in 2007 which asked the youth to do some word association.  The interviewers asked the youth what came to mind when they heard the word “Christianity.”[4]

“The vast majority of non-Christians in the group — 91% — said Christianity had an anti-gay image, followed by 87% who said it was judgmental and 85% who said it was hypocritical.

Such views were held by smaller percentages of the active churchgoers, but the faith still did not fare well: 80% agreed with the anti-gay label, 52% said Christianity is judgmental, and 47% declared it hypocritical.”

Another way to interpret the data is that Christianity at large is known for who Christians are supposed to hate and for holding people to moral standards which Christians may conveniently excuse themselves from following.

Granted, these numbers are from six years ago, but I know of no new research that has indicated a massive change of opinion.

The numbers and the perceptions also resonate for me, because my own life includes the story of disgust with Christianity and of leaving the church.

In 2001, I was 17 or so, and I was in my final year of high school.  I was considering asking out a classmate.  Not an out of the ordinary thing for folks in high school.  What was slightly out of the ordinary was that my classmate was African-American.  A little bit of context, I am from Mobile, AL, which was officially racially segregated until the 1960s, and still seems unofficially segregated in many ways.

My parents, to their credit, were not dead-set against the idea.  They, however, remembered and witnessed the racism entrenched in Southern society, and were worried about me taking on all of the problems an interracial relationship could bring. 

Seeking some comfort and some strength, I sought out my church (I was not Episcopalian at the time).  I remember sobbing in the pew one Wednesday night as I struggled with what to do.  The pastor saw me at some point, and came over to talk to me.  I told him about wanting to ask this classmate out.  The response came swiftly; interracial dating was, as he said, “against the Bible.”

At that moment, I was done with Christianity.  The hypocrisy and double-standards overwhelmed me.  The same pastor who could stand in worship and talk about how in Christ the divisions between humans no longer matter and salvation was open to all [Gal. 3], was now telling me that racial separation was divinely inspired.  I had been raised to consider my church the pinnacle of Christ’s true faith, yetI thought that if the very Bible these Christians claimed to be infallible and without error could not break through the evils of racism, and instead confirmed in them their sense of racial superiority, then Christianity was a lie—a belief system totally compromised and malleable to the prejudices of the believer.

I left Christianity that night.  At the end of the year, the church gifted me a college scholarship, and I returned the money the very same day.  I wanted nothing from them.  I was done.

Well, as you can see, I came back to Christianity.  That is a longer story, but the point I wish to make is this:

The realization that some expressions of Christianity followed the prophets in continuously holding up their own practices and social prejudices to sometimes painful introspection—and in so doing continually attempt to find ways to reform themselves into more just and loving communities of faith—convinced me to give Christianity another try.[5]  I know I was not alone in the longing for such a vision of Christianity, in which the people of faith struggle to find a fuller expression of what God was calling into being. 

I would suggest that if Christianity wants to be taken seriously, believers would constantly seek to find where our practice falls short of our pronouncements, and figure out how to bring our preaching and our actions in line.  

For in those moments in which self-satisfaction and illusion falls to reality,

—and when we see the world and ourselves as God sees us,

—and when we continue to act to bring love and justice into tangible form,

—dear people of God, truly holy moments are possible and accessible to a world hungry for good news.    

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[1] Paul Simpson Duke, Feasting on the Word, Year C Vol. 3, 319.

[2] Amos 5:21-24

[3] Mt. 12:7.

[4] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/religion/2007-10-10-christians-young_N.htm

[5] I may not have articulated this in the same way in 2004-2007 as I was making my way back into Christianity, but I understood the prophets’ call to Israel to re-commit to the poor and needy was part and parcel of my liberatory social ethic and eschatological hope as detailed in Matt. 25.

God's wrath and God's love

Sermon, Year C, Proper 13

Hosea 11:1-11
Psalm 107:1-9, 43
Colossians 3:1-11
Luke 12:13-21

Personally, I love that we have been reading the prophets of the Old Testament as we have done for the past weeks.  We will continue to do so for the next few weeks as well.

There is great power and emotion in the words of the prophets.  The language and imagery are visceral and striking.

Yet it is sometimes difficult to follow what is going on as we skip from prophet to prophet.  A few weeks ago we had Amos, now Hosea, next week Isaiah.  Perhaps the skipping around also leads us to wonder what is going on with the prophets.  And while the prophets often have overlapping concerns, the prophets all have a different emphasis and set of opponents with whom they are arguing, but we often do not get enough of the text to clearly picture what is really going on.  For instance, Ezekiel was concerned with the priestly class and ritual purity, Hosea spoke of Israel’s (in)fidelity to God with the imagery of husband and wife (and today, parent and child), Amos (actually all of the prophets) were concerned with social justice for the abused and neglected.

But simply catching snippets of the prophets leads to a sense of dissonance. The power of the language, which is often strong and condemning, may make us wonder why we follow this God at all.

Why read the prophets?

The prophet is angry.

God is angry—wrathful, in fact.

What is uplifting about this?

And the image of the angry God brings an uncomfortable question:  How do we reconcile a notion of a God of mercy and love with a God capable of wrath?

In trying to deal with what sometimes seems to be an unbridgeable contradiction, it seems to me that--sometimes­—Christians may err too far on the side of wrath or love to the exclusion of the other.

This may be an odd both/and to argue for, but stay with me.

I think you may know what I mean.  There are Christians who seem to take delight in the idea of others in suffering.  They at least seem apathetic to the suffering of others.  I remember, one night in Gilbert, I passed a street corner where a youth group was standing, shouting and holding signs up to the passing cars and assuring us of our place in Hell.  There was not even an attempt to offer a way out; which one might expect from them.  (Oh God! Where’s my fire insurance!) That is near the top of my list of “bad evangelism techniques.”  It’s not number one—someday I might tell you what is—but it’s close to the top.

I have heard Christians speak of wanting to see atheists burning in Hell, because “that will show the atheist who was right.”  I somehow think these Christians have missed some basic understandings of loving our neighbors as ourselves, and they attribute human wrath (and a longing for vengeance) to God.  St. Paul admonishes us to put away things that are earthly, and set our minds to things above.  I submit that longing for God’s wrath to fall upon others is a misplaced and earthly hope.

On the other hand, there are Christians who claim God is love and mercy with no hint of disapproval of anything.  I might lean more towards this view, because it has been important for Christianity to reclaim a sense of the goodness of the world God has made.  Yet, I am also troubled by this view.  If God gives an unqualified ‘yes’ to all we do, then God is essentially giving license to all forms of discrimination and abuse we see. That is not good news to poor and the oppressed, who often suffer for the sake of the comfortable and the powerful.

How do we reconcile a notion of a God of mercy and love with a God capable of wrath?

This question is why I want to stay with the reading from Hosea, because in this passage from Hosea, we have one of the very few inner monologues of God recorded in scripture.  And in this passage God has to reconcile those very notions of wrath and mercy in God’s own mind.

Let us return to the text.  After describing Israel’s abandonment of God, We hear God describe God’s tender care for Israel as though a parent caring for a child.  The language is evocative and heartrending as God says:

Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk,I took them up in my arms;but they did not know that I healed them.I led them with cords of human kindness,with bands of love.I was to them like thosewho lift infants to their cheeks.I bent down to them and fed them.

Can you picture such a scene?

Perhaps you have lived it.

The care for an infant.

The devotion to a life not your own.

Sometimes, the pain of separation.

God remembers taking Israel out of Egypt.

God remembers protecting Israel in the wilderness,

God remembers feeding Israel.

God remembers establishing relationship through covenant.

God remembers Israel’s turning away.

God remembers what once was.

God struggles, and gives thought to deserting Israel who has strayed so far.  Wrath and anguish, memory and love collide within God.  God suffers a contradiction.

Until God remembers who God is.  God speaks in the text again:

How can I give you up, Ephraim?How can I hand you over, O Israel?My heart recoils within me;my compassion grows warm and tender.I will not execute my fierce anger;I will not again destroy Ephraim;for I am God and no mortal,the Holy One in your midst,and I will not come in wrath.

Theologian Stacey Simpson Duke describes the passage this way: “This is not the story of the prodigal son who, having struggled with his own bad choices, finally turns and comes home.  This is the story of a prodigal God who—in anguish, heartbreak, and the fiercest love—comes seeking out the children who have strayed.”

God violently recoils at the thought of abandoning Israel.  And the components of the divine life, specifically divine wrath and divine love come together.  They fuse to each other in a new purpose.[1]  God will seek out and liberate Israel again with the ferocity of a lion…with a roar to which God’s people will respond with trembling, but God will not abandon them.

Beloved of God, listen carefully.

The simplicity of the Gospel is that God loves us.

The difficulty of the Gospel is the recognition that God loves all with the exact, same, equal loving regard, and so all are worthy of our love and care.  This is a powerful claim of the Christian faith--a powerful truth which deserves unreserved proclamation.

Our God is a god of love who has promised to stay beside us and never abandon that which God has made. It is a love deeper than wrath yet fired with passion by anger at the human capacity to injure others­--and in injuring others we subvert God’s equal regard for our neighbors.

But there is a difference between God’s wrath and human wrath. We’ve seen human wrath in the world. While human ways of showing power seem to be demonstrations of destruction, the imposition of will upon others, and the hording of resources, borne of malice and greed, God says ‘no’ to these forms of power and call us to a different way. 

For the power of God is love, a life-giving power stronger than anything the world can summon. The power of God is the power to bring about the fullness to which we are called to reach through the indwelling of the Spirit of God. 

All of the divine life--especially love, but also anger--come to the creative purpose of restoring the world which God has made--

to liberate those under oppression,

to mend that which has been broken

to call into being healing and peace where sorrow and division fester.

To bring generosity where greed reigns.

To bring forgiveness where situations are thought to be irredeemable and hopeless.

The deepest trait of God is that all else about God gives way to a ferocious love fused with a passion for all that beckons us to follow.  As St. Paul says, we are clothed in a new self which restores within us the image of Christ and our Creator.  God relentlessly seeks us, desires to recommit to relationships with us, invites us into--and empowers us for--the renewal of the world, which is God’s labor of love.  It is a fierce love that seeks to work against that which destroys what God creates us to be.  It is a love with a sense of urgency, drawing us to God even as it propels us into the world and toward our neighbors.

May you listen carefully for where God calls you to act in love for another.

May you may know it when a godly anger at injustice stirs within you God’s call to act.

May you know when it is your turn to be a prophet.

Amen.

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[1] Paraphrase of Katheryn Pfisterer Darr.