Sermon — October 1, 2023
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Have you heard the one about the guy who went to his pastor to complain about the Church?
(It’s a shocking premise, I know.)
So this guy walks into the pastor’s office, unannounced, and the first thing he says is, “I’ve just about had it with the church!” Okay, the pastor thinks. It’s going to be one of those conversations. She gestures, and the man sits down in a chair. “You know, we’re always talking about the Prince of Peace, but from the Crusades on down we’ve never stopped starting wars. You’re always preaching about how important it is to care for the poor, but everywhere I look there are pastors flying private jets and priests wearing fancy robes while people are sleeping out on the streets. Our church claims to be so loving and welcoming, but when I was stuck in bed for a month after my surgery nobody called me, nobody helped out, nobody cared a bit. I’m tired of it all. The Church is full of hypocrites!”
And the pastor leaned back in her chair, and considered it for a minute. And then she said, “Nah, I’m not buying it.”
The guy says to her, “What do you mean you’re not buying it?”
“Come on,” the pastor said. “The Church is not full of hypocrites. We’ve got room for plenty more.”
In his parable today, Jesus invites us to consider whether that might actually be true.
The story is simple enough. It’s hardly even a parable. A man tells his two sons to go and work in the vineyard. One says yes, but doesn’t go. One says no, but shows up anyway. Which one did what the father asked? (Matthew 21:28-31)
It’s not so much a parable as a leading question. The answer should be clear. It’s the child who said no but changed his mind who’s in the right. And you might even editorialize and say that saying yes and then blowing it off is actually worse than just saying no. You can rank the four options, best to worst: the conscientious one who say yes and goes right away comes first, followed by the flip-flopper who says no and then works anyway; the one who says no and follows through isn’t great, but the hypocrite who says yes and then disappears is clearly the worst. It’s hard to see how anyone could disagree.
But then Jesus connects the dots, and that’s where things get a little spicy. He’s in the Temple, remember, talking to the chief priests and the elders of the people, to the conscientious and the diligent, the respected and the holy. And he says to them: John the Baptist came and preached to you, and you didn’t believe him; “but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him.” (Matthew 21:32)
You, the good and the great, who claim to follow God and even to lead God’s people, ignored his chosen messenger. But the people who aren’t so great or so good—the ones who everyone else would’ve said were living in violation of God’s will—they believed John. You, the chief priests and elders, are like the hypocritical first son who said you’d work in the vineyard but refused. But they are like the second son, who strayed at first but later changed his ways.
And you could’ve heard a sandal drop, I imagine.
Jesus is like the disgruntled church member in the joke. He walks straight up to the religious leaders and accuses them of hypocrisy, right to their faces. He accuses them of saying one thing and doing another. And he may well have been right.
And it leaves me with the question: If Jesus appeared in our world, today, and took a hard look at our churches, would he say the same thing? Would he accuse us of hypocrisy in the same way that the indignant parishioner does? Is the Church really full of hypocrites? (Or is there, as the punchline goes, room for plenty more?)
Here’s the thing: Not one person in this room is perfect. I know that for a fact. And I know that, not because I’ve stayed up late into the night scrutinizing each one of you and your flaws, but because nobody in the world is perfect. Every single one of us falls short, by one measure or another, every so often; or maybe more often than that. Every single one of us is limited, by our scarcity of time or energy, money or willpower. Not one of us can ever truly love God with all our heart, and strength, and mind, and our neighbors as ourselves. We all have days where we say “yes” to doing the right thing, and then flake out; and maybe years where we say “no,” and then change our minds, or don’t.
Every one of us is like each one of those two sons, at different times. And if imperfection is what we’re measuring, then yes, the Church is full of imperfect people, and in many cases we’re here because we need a regular reminder of God’s love and grace, a regular reminder that, as our opening collect for today put it, God shows God’s “almighty power chiefly in showing mercy and pity.” We are imperfect, and we are loved anyway, and thank God for that.
But imperfection isn’t hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is more like imperfection plus judgment, a kind of “holier than thou” approach, a denial of your own flaws that puts you on a pedestal just high enough to make a big loud crash when you fall. Hypocrites can’t admit that they’re flawed; they certainly can’t admit that they’re hypocrites. And this is what works so well about the joke. To say that the church is not yet full of hypocrites, because there’s room for plenty more, is to disarm something of the charge. It’s not to excuse our many imperfections. It’s just to acknowledge that we know they’re there. There’s no such thing, in a sense, as a humble hypocrite.
And humility is exactly the way we should respond to the fact of human imperfection. “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit,” Paul writes to the church in Philippi, “but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.” (Phil. 2:3) He doesn’t say this to put you down. He doesn’t say you should humiliate yourself, or that other people really are better than you. To “regard” others as better than you is to make the humble assumption that you’re no better than anyone else. He draws a parallel to what Jesus chose to do: to humble himself, giving up the privileges of equality with God and taking on all the messiness of a human life. And Paul invites us to act in the same way, to empty ourselves of any claim to perfection, and to humbly recognize that other people may well be imperfect; but we’re imperfect, too.
Our task as Christians is to cultivate that “mind of Christ,” to live in the dual reality of goodness and imperfection: to hold onto the truth of being a beloved child of God, and to embrace the inevitable flaws that come with being human. This is the way of love and the way of life that Jesus lays out before us: to empty ourselves of our striving for perfection, and to recognize and admit that we are imperfect; and so is everybody else. And yet never to give up on the hope of saying “yes” and following through, of turning toward God and living as fully as God wants us to live; “for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for [God’s] good pleasure.” (Phil. 2:13)
So maybe the church isn’t full of hypocrites, exactly. It has an imperfect history and an imperfect present. It’s made of imperfect people, like you and me. But even then, the church isn’t full of imperfect people. After all… There’s room for many more.