Pentecost 23, Proper 25C
In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
One of the most amusing maneuvers in the world of political
communications is the “Non-apology Apology”.
I’m sure you’ve heard them. Some
politician gets caught in a gaffe.
They’re overheard saying what they really think about their
opponent. When public pressure begins to
mount, they offer a half-attempt at the appearance of an apology and say something like, “I’m
sorry if I offended anyone.”
It’s not that they’re sorry for what they’ve said. They don’t really see a problem with what
they’ve said. They just wish they
weren’t having to live with the repercussions of their actions.
It’s a “Non-apology Apology”.
This morning, in the gospel lesson, we hear something very
much like that in its style: “Ungrateful ‘Thanksgiving’”.
The Pharisee of the parable - supposedly a holy man - isn’t
really grateful so much as he is bragging.
Bragging about all the pious things he does. Bragging that he’s better than others.
It’s a bit of a silly prayer, because God knows not only all
that he does, but all that is in his heart.
And his prayer tells us that it’s not really gratitude.
Last week, the message we heard was to “pray always and not
to lose heart.” But this week we hear
that there’s a way that we do these things.
Yes. We should talk
to God. More importantly, we should
listen for God. But until we figure that
out, talking is a decent place to start.
But it’s not enough just to talk. It doesn’t make sense to try to play politics
with God. It doesn’t make sense to try
to reason with God, or to convince God of your way of seeing the world.
It’s true that we will all, at one time or another, probably
argue with God, but that’s another matter entirely. Where we go wrong is when we try to
manipulate God. It’s the most futile
pursuit we might ever attempt.
One of the truths we hear from Jesus over and over again is
that he has no time for hypocrisy - particularly among the pious.
False gratitude is a particularly insidious kind of
hypocrisy. The Pharisee knew that God
required and expected gratitude, but the only gratitude he could muster was for
himself: for how good he was; for how superior he found himself to be.
He wasn’t actually grateful to God. He only tried to appear to be.
But God knows what is in our hearts.
That’s interestingly also one of the convictions we hear
over and over again from people outside the church.
When I was first learning to preach, my mentor gave me an
invaluable little bit of advice that I still take to heart. She told me to never lie. Never try to preach something you don’t
really believe, because the congregation will recognize it instantly, and they
won’t forgive you. Never try to tell
them what you think they want to hear in favor of what you think they need to
hear, because they’ll stop believing you.
Don’t be a hypocrite.
It may seem like simple advice, but it’s worth
remembering. And not just for those of
us who are called to stand in this pulpit and to preach, but for all of us who
are called to share the love of Jesus with the world we inhabit (and that’s all
of us).
One of the surest ways to drive away potential visitors to
the church is for us to lie to them.
People have well-honed, built-in hypocrisy detectors. Sadly, for too much of our history, we in the
church have given people outside of the church too many reasons to need them.
I remember the story my father tells of one year when he was
growing up: the First Baptist Church in town was holding its annual
revival. They decided to go around the
countryside around the town trying to rouse up all of the heretics and
backsliders to bring them to the Lord - which, of course, meant to bring them
to the church.
A group of parishioners visited the home of one of the
town’s most notorious “sinners”. If
Hance Koon had ever been to church, no one could remember it.
The good people of First Baptist Church put on the hard
sell. They told Hance about all of the
rewards that awaited him in heaven. They
told him about how God so loved the world that He gave up his only Son, Jesus,
to death on the cross. They told him
about the eternal damnation and punishment that awaited him if he failed to
come along.
After all the arguments had been made, one of the men asked
him, “Now Hance, don’t you want to come with us and be a Christian?”
Hance leaned back and put his feet up, he lit a cigarette
and said, “I could haul every Christian in the First Baptist Church to the edge
of town in a two-wheel wagon.”
Like most people we encounter today, Hance had a well-honed,
built-in hypocrisy detector.
The church may have been full, but Hance suspected it was
really empty. He knew that these people
weren’t really in it for God, even for Hance.
They were looking to make themselves feel good, and he wanted nothing to
do with it.
As we interact with the world around us each day; as we each
do our part to try to make this church grow and to help it succeed, we’d be
wise to remember the story of Hance Koon.
We’d be wise to remember the story of the hypocritical Pharisee.
The people demand more of us, and so does God.
Fake apologies won’t work in politics.
Fake gratitude and conditional love won’t work in the
church or in the world. God and God’s people will see
right through it.
Real Christians first have to be real - both in our prayer,
and in all the rest of our lives.
Nothing less will do. Amen.
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