“Hypocrites in the Church” (Colossians 1:21-23), May 17, 2009

Today in the sermon I plan to answer, once and for all, one of the most commonly asked questions about the church.  Pay attention.  I’m only going to tell you once.  Then I’m going to post this sermon on my blog, and from now until Jesus comes, when people ask this question, I’m going to refer them to this sermon.

Here’s the question: “Why are there so many hypocrites in the church?”

For many years, I’ve had a stock answer – a quip, really – that goes something like this: “I don’t know, but come on and join us.  One more won’t hurt.”

Today I’m going to attempt a longer and more serious answer to the question about why there are so many hypocrites in the church.  But when I’m done, it’s still going to sound a lot like, “I don’t know, but come on and join us.  One more won’t hurt.”

I begin with a story.

It has been almost ten years since I came to my office and had a note on my desk from a church employee who wrote, “I know in my heart I have to come clean.  It’s the only way I’ll ever have peace in my life again.  Some of (the church treasurer’s) questions will remain unanswered and cannot be explained… because I have misused the church’s money.  I have confessed to God that I am a thief, a robber, a liar, a hypocrite and a deceiver.”

There are so many angles we could explore about that story, but here is the heart of it for our purposes today.  The person who wrote that note had been employed at this church for nine years – longer than I had been at the time.  She was a personal friend to Linda and me.  She was not only a Christian – she was an active leader in her church family – faithfully attending and serving God on Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings, and Wednesday evenings.  She was generous, kind, gracious, and welcoming.  If you knew her, you liked her. 

But while she was doing all of that, she was, quite literally, a thief and a liar.  She was spending thousands and thousands of dollars of this church’s money to pay personal bills and purchase items to use or give away.  (That was part of her reputation for “generosity.”)  A hypocrite?  That’s what she was.

Why are there so many in the church?

I didn’t decide to go with this “hypocrite” theme in the sermon until yesterday, or I may have chosen a different sermon title.  The title in your bulletin, “Guilt, Grace, and Gratitude,” is borrowed from the Heidelberg Catechism, the primer on Christian teaching for our German Reformed heritage.  To wed the two themes, I would simply say the reason there are so many hypocrites in the church is because we don’t understand guilt, we don’t understand grace, and we don’t understand gratitude.

Paul summarizes the Christian gospel in Colossians 1:21-23 in words that sound a lot like guilt, grace, and gratitude.  In doing so, he also answers the question of the day three ways.

So let’s look at Paul’s teaching and try to discern what his answers might be if someone asked him, “Why are there so many hypocrites in church?”

Because if we banned all the hypocrites, we’d empty the church

Paul’s description of the Colossians – and, remember, he had never met them personally – was not very nice.  Read 1:21 again: “Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior.”

Alienated…enemies…evil.  Not nice words, right?  The Amplified Bible uses different words – estranged, hostile, and wicked.

I don’t know that there is any wider gap between Christian teaching and American culture than in how we describe the innate moral character of human beings.  A commonly held social value is that if we assume people are basically good, and treat them that way, they will, indeed, be good.

There’s a great scene in the movie, “Raising Helen,” where the aunt of an orphaned teenager finds her niece in a hotel room with a boy named BZ after the prom.  Aunt Jenny (Joan Cusack) is pretty tough on the boy: “You listen to me. If you ever so much as blink in her direction again, I can and will bury you so far in the ground that the heat from the earth’s core will incinerate your sorry *$#@!”

Then, just before she leaves the motel room, she turns to the boy and says, “You are not a bad person.  You do bad things.”

The entire Bible from Genesis to Revelation would strongly disagree – about BZ and about you.  You are a bad person, apart from Christ.  You are estranged from God.  You are his enemy.  And you also do bad things.

Do I need a few other Bible quotes to back me up?  “The LORD saw…that every inclination of the thoughts of (man’s) heart was only evil all the time” (Genesis 6:5).  “There is no one who does good, not even one” (Psalm 53:3).  “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way” (Isaiah 53:6).  “For all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).  “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8).

Or how about these quotes from the “Guilt” section of the Heidelberg Catechism?  “By nature I am prone to hate God and my neighbor” (Q. 5).  “But are we so perverted that we are altogether unable to do good and prone to do evil?”  (You want the answer to be, “No, we’re not that bad.”)  “Yes” (Q. 8).

If that’s the raw material we start out with in the church, it’s no wonder that we look down the pew and say, “They’re all hypocrites.”  Usually the comments I get about “hypocrites in the church” are because someone has come into contact with one or more members of the church – that would be you – and they don’t like what they see. 

We call other people hypocrites because (a) their sins are not our sins, and/or (b) their sins seem worse than ours.  The truth is, we’re all in the same condition.  The title of a book by John Ortberg says it almost better than the book does: Everybody’s Normal Till You Get to Know Them.  Ortberg says we all belong on the “irregular” aisle of the department store.  We are all weird, broken, hurting. 

May I add: we are all hypocrites.  Let me tell you just one of my recent lessons.  The “empty nest” at the Thompson household has been partially repopulated by our youngest daughter, who just came from college for the summer.  After several days of “patience” (for readjustment and re-entry), I decided to be a little more direct on Friday about leaving the living room like you found it.  “When you get up from the couch, could you fold the afghan and lay it neatly on the back of the sofa, and straighten out the cushions before you go to bed?” 

“Sure, Dad.”  And Saturday morning I was so proud to walk into the living room and see her “sofa” looking so neat.  Then I turned to where I had been sitting last night and saw that afghan askew and the cushion on the floor. A hypocrite I am.

I remember ten years ago when I stopped being defensive about our former Office Manager and realized that I was guilty as well.  I had not literally stolen anything, nor did I know it was happening.  But I was responsible as her supervisor.  And besides, who knows, given the same set of circumstances, if I wouldn’t have done the same thing?  Why is it we always think the hypocrites are other people?

The Christian gospel begins with the awareness of guilt.  I am estranged from God.  I am wicked.  I am royally messed up and can’t repair myself.  The hypocrites aren’t down the pew or across the aisle.  If being a sinner in church is being a hypocrite, I am one.

If we banned all the hypocrites, we’d empty the church.  But thank God that’s not the end of the story.

Because the church is a hypocrite hospital

As harsh as Paul is in describing guilt in verse 21, he is at least that profound in describing grace in verse 22:  “But now (you have to love that opening) he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish, and free from accusation.”

Paul’s words in the original language are so amazing I just have to tell you about them.

“Reconciled”  (apokatallasso).  I just like saying it.  It means “to bring back to a former state of harmony.”  It’s the opposite of alienation.  Don’t you love it when two people who have been estranged can communicate again, respect again, love again?  That’s reconciliation.

Jesus Christ accomplished that by the death, Paul says, of his “physical body.”  If that sounds redundant, so it is in Greek.  While people were telling the Colossians that if Jesus was God he couldn’t be man, at least not a man that would die, Paul insists that the reconciliation happened because he became a man and because he died en to somati tes sarkos autou – in the body of his flesh.

Why?  In order to present you before him…

·        “holy” (hagious) – set apart for God, exclusively his.

·        “without blemish” (amomous) – faultless, blameless.

·        “free from accusation” (anegkletous) – unprovable, the kind of character against which gossip cannot stick.

That is how God sees us in Christ.  And that is the goal toward which Christ’s death and the church are aiming.

Why are there hypocrites in church?  Because this is where they belong, where they need to be.  It’s why our doors and our hearts absolutely have to be open to all sinners, right where they are.  There are no preconditions to admission.  We want hypocrites here – hypocrites of all types – thieves and gossips, prostitutes and drunks, workaholics and sloths, misers and debtors, heterosexual and homosexual, passive and shy, aggressive and angry, cowards and braggarts.  Bring your insecurities, bring your failures, bring your brokenness.  “Irregulars” are welcome here.  That’s what we do.

Asking why there are hypocrites in church is like asking why there are sick people in hospitals, why there are dented cars in body shops, or why there are depressed people in therapist’s chair. 

It’s what we do.  We’re a hospital for hypocrites.

Because we are all trying desperately to hold on

Paul throws us a bit of a curve in verse 23.  Twice.

Let me go to the second one first.  He says of this whole section of his letter, “This is the gospel that you heard and that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become a servant.”

Really?  “To every creature under heaven”?  Let’s do give Paul the benefit of the doubt.  He knew every single individual in the world had not heard of Christ.

Here’s a place where I prefer the New Living Translation.  The words are literally, “in all creation,” so what Paul seems to be saying is reflected in the NLT’s “The Good News has been preached all over the world.”  He means that Christ has brought good news to the whole creation and it’s being spread.

His other curve is in the first part of the verse.  He has already said that we were alienated and now have been reconciled, but then he adds in verse 23, “if you continue in your faith, established and firm, not moved from the hope held out in the gospel.”

The word “if” doesn’t seem very comforting.

The words Paul uses, “established and firm, not moved,” are from the world of architecture and engineering.  They are building words.  Remember that Paul is confronting a situation where alternatives to the Christian gospel are threatening the church.  Clearly one of Paul’s aims is to discourage toying with those alternatives.

So he says, “you have been reconciled…if you continue.”

The issue raised in most of our minds is variously known as the “perseverance of the saints,” “eternal security,” or “once saved always saved.”  Christians have batted that one back and forth because we can quote Bible verses on both sides.

I can illustrate the biblical balance with another recent conversation I had with my daughter, Jeni.

Bob: “I love you, Jeni.”

Jeni:  “I love you too, Daddy.”

Bob: “You’re such a great daughter.”

Jeni:  “Thanks.”

Bob: “But even if you weren’t a great daughter, I would still love you.  It’s not a requirement.”

Jeni:  “I didn’t know I had options.”

I don’t want my daughter thinking her relationship to me is conditional.  But when she grasps my unconditional love, neither do I want her thinking she has “options.”

This is what the catechism means by “gratitude.”  The full circle of Christian teaching is guilt (I am estranged from God by nature), grace (Christ reconciled me by his physical death) and gratitude (I continue in him because I am so thankful for his love.

Why are there so many hypocrites in church?  Because we are all trying desperately to “continue on in the faith.”  And when hypocrisy is exposed in one of us, I hope our response is not a push away but a jerk back.  We don’t want to lose any of our fellow hypocrites as we journey down this road together.  Not if we can help it.

Porcupines

When I ordered and started reading John Ortberg’s book, Everybody’s Normal Till You Get to Know Them, I really didn’t know until a couple of chapters in what the book is all about.  It’s not about what we pastors call “anthropology” (doctrine of man) or “hamartiology” (doctrine of sin), or even what you may think of as psychology.

It’s about community.  And Ortberg’s best illustration of why community is hard for human beings is the porcupine.  Their primary relational instincts are two – withdraw or attack.

Porcupines are generally solitary animals.  There is no word for a group of porcupines.  They live alone.  You can only imagine that relationships are difficult for creatures who, on average, have 30,000 sharp quills attached to their bodies – quills that can be ejected and imbedded into a predator. 

Obviously that cannot be an absolute rule, however, or porcupines would have died out a long time ago.  During mating season, males and females remain together for a few days.  They touch paws and learn to dance by walking on their hind feet.

Hypocrites can likewise learn to live in community.  They can figure out a third way – an alternative to withdraw or attack.  They can choose to pull in their quills and show their soft side.  They are likely to do so only in an equal relationship with other hypocrites.

What I mean to say is that the church is not for perfect people – not for people who are perfect (because they are as fictional as unicorns) or who think they are perfect (because there will never be enough authenticity to connect with those who own their flaws). 

The church is a place for imperfect people (hypocrites) like you and me can admit to our guilt, rejoice in God’s grace, and live our lives holding on to Christ out of gratitude.  Amen.