Sermon by Rocky Supinger | November 5, 2023 | Fourth Presbyterian Church

All Saints' Sunday
November 5, 2023

Sermon

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor

Matthew 23:1–12

If you were to look at the job description for a prophet, I’m pretty sure that you’d see high on the list of requirements the criticism of current leadership. Protestors and prophets reserve some of their harshest invective for the leaders of their own communities.

This is certainly true of the job of prophet in the Hebrew tradition, in Jesus’ tradition; prophets criticize leaders.

The prophet Jeremiah does it by comparing the leaders of Israel during his time to shepherds who scatter the sheep of the pasture. “It is you who have scattered my flock,” God says through Jeremiah, “and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings” (Jeremiah 23:1–2).

The prophet Isaiah does the same thing, but with the image of a vineyard. He says, “The Lord enters into judgment with the elders and princes of his people: It is you who have devoured the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the face of the poor?” (Isaiah 3:14–15).

Jesus absolutely goes after the leaders of his day — not the empire that is occupying his people as much as his peoples’ own leaders, namely the scribes and the Pharisees. Jesus criticizes the leaders of his day a lot, both indirectly, through parables, and also very, very directly.

The scribes and Pharisees practice day-to-day governance over Jewish life in Palestine during Jesus’ day. They occupy “Moses’ seat,” as Jesus says, which means that they’re the ones up front during synagogue worship, teaching and preaching.

The scribes are literate professionals. They are the authoritative interpreters of and commentors upon scripture, Torah, and they also execute legal documents. They are leaders among the Pharisees, who are a group of Jewish people in Jesus’ time who are trying to, in one scholars’ phrasing, “renew Jewish piety and provide a stronger sense of Jewish identity in the face of incursions by Hellenistic culture.” They do this by extending to ordinary Jews the expectations of ritual purity usually reserved for priests, especially as it pertains to tithing and observing sabbath.

The Pharisees criticize Jesus repeatedly, most often about his failure to observe sabbath consistently, in the way that they prescribe. Instead, Jesus allows his disciples to pluck grain on the sabbath, and he even heals people on the sabbath. Right before these verses we heard, the Pharisees have taken part in a sort of “gotcha” campaign, trying to entrap Jesus by peppering him with controversial questions in the middle of the temple, hoping he’ll say something incriminating. He doesn’t, and instead he pounces on them.

It's important to get as specific as this about who Jesus is criticizing, because it’s been far too easy for the church to take his words here as a condemnation of all Jewish people, and that’s wrong. Jesus is Jewish. He’s a rabbi. He criticizes some of Israel’s leaders at the time, not all of Israel.

Jesus is a prophet. He criticizes his peoples’ leaders. Because that’s what prophets do.

But why? Is Jesus just a contrarian who needs to take the opposite view of those in authority? Does he have oppositional defiance? Maybe. Jesus also criticizes leaders who aren’t Jewish. “The rulers of the Gentiles,” he says to his disciples, “lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them” (Matthew 20:25).

Maybe Jesus has a problem with authority.

Yet he does say to do whatever the scribes and Pharisees teach and to follow it. So it’s not their authority that is the problem for Jesus, and it’s not even their teaching. The problem is that they don’t practice what they teach. The problem is that they are hypocrites, and Jesus has a lot to say about hypocrites.

Hypocrites sound a trumpet whenever they give an offering, so that they’ll be praised by people.

Hypocrites stand up and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners, so they’ll be seen by everyone.

Hypocrites disfigure their faces when they fast so that everyone will know they’re fasting.

We might add a couple for our contemporary situation: hypocrites make statements about social issues on Facebook so that their friends will comment “Thanks for your courage!”

Hypocrites share pictures of their Bibles on Instagram so that they’ll be praised as spiritual.

I’m sure you can think of a few more on your own.

For Jesus, it seems like the least common denominator of hypocrisy is the desire to be seen. Which makes sense, given that it’s technically a theater term; hypocrite literally means “one who wears a mask.” Hypocrisy, then, is the public performance of religion for its own sake, in order to be seen by others as being religious.

I think that’s different from what we mean when we accuse someone of being a hypocrite, when we fear that we may be hypocrites ourselves. I have a version of this conversation with our eighth-grade Confirmation youth almost every year, where some of them will say to me, “I don’t know if I can stand in front of the church and make a profession of faith and become an active member, because I’m not sure I believe all of it.” They’re afraid of being hypocritical, and what they mean by that is doing something outwardly that is inconsistent with their conviction internally.

Our young people hold themselves to a very high standard of authenticity, which is good, but sometimes that leads them to fear doing anything outward in the realm of religion. Because they don’t want to be hypocrites.

But it’s not the outward exercise of religion that makes a person a hypocrite, even a person who harbors some doubt in their heart about the reality of it all. You see, those phylacteries and fringes Jesus points to — there’s nothing wrong with them. In fact, they’re extolled in a few different places in the Hebrew scriptures as a “sign on your hand and a reminder — an emblem — on your forehead” of what God has done for you. They’re little wooden boxes with scripture verses tucked inside. Wearing them is not hypocritical any more than wearing a cross necklace or coming to church is hypocritical.

The hypocrite is the person who dons that necklace or sits right up front at church in order to be seen by others and not in order to grow in the faith, not in order to cultivate a life of prayer, not in order to deepen their relationship with God. Hypocrites discredit faith by twisting it into a performance, and the world is not fooled by that performance.

Jesus has a lot to say about hypocrisy because hypocritical religion discredits faith for a world that truly needs it.

And now this is the point in the sermon where I remember standing in the kitchen as a kid, next to my brother, as one of our parents announced the punishment he was to receive for whatever it was I just told on him about. And just as the number of days for his grounding was pronounced and I was feeling about as good about the outcome as I could imagine, Mom or Dad would turn to me and say, “And as for you …” And suddenly the thing I took to be a reckoning for my brother, for his bad behavior, turned out to be a reckoning for me as well.

See this is the point — right around verse 8 — when disciples of Jesus hear our Lord say, “And as for you,” and we are made to realize that we’re not just here to dunk on the scribes and Pharisees. We’re here to examine ourselves, to take a critical look at our own lives, to search out traces of the same hypocrisy, the same desire for status and recognition and applause that we’ve been identifying with “them,” those other people, the ones with all the power and authority, you know, the hypocrites.

Jesus says, no. It’s not about that. It’s not about knowing who to blame and how best to blame them. It’s about patterning our lives and our life together after Jesus’ example of humility and service and learning. It’s like he’s saying, “I promise you, that’s better.”

“So no reverential titles, no deferential greetings, no hierarchy of leadership. You don’t need those. Leave them to the military. You — church — be a community instead.

So we are church, but we have leaders, and those leaders have titles. I’m standing up here wearing a visible sign around my neck that identifies me as a church leader. Didn’t Jesus just say to do away with all of that?

Yes, I believe he did, so let’s be sure that the way we address one another in here reflects the reality that we are all students of our one teacher, Jesus, and that we are all children of our one Father in heaven. Let’s make absolutely sure that if we must have titles those titles speak to function and not status. And let’s be vigilant about our structure and our organization, so that nobody’s input is privileged over another’s because of the degree they hold or how long they’ve been a member or how much they give to the church.

I promise you that’s better.

Look, the tendency toward status-seeking is a deeply human one, and we’re all going to be vulnerable to it, and we may be the most vulnerable to it just when we think we’ve got the tightest control over it. So we name that tendency, and let’s keep doing this: gathering together for worship, regularly, to hear the scriptures, to raise our shared voices in praise, to be quiet together in prayer — to do all the things we do in worship so that we grow into the community Jesus is teaching us to be, which is far, far better than the alternatives.

You see, the kind of community we’re invited to in church is gospel, it’s good news as Jesus preached it and lived it: the last made first, the hungry filled with good things, the humble exalted. It’s a different experience of life — new life, eternal life.

The first Sunday of November is the Sunday we mark as All Saints’ Sunday, and we take this Sunday as an opportunity to give thanks for all those “saints,” those members of our congregation who have died in the past year. This year we’re also giving thanks for new saints, people who have been baptized here since last All Saints’ Sunday. When we pray before Communion, we will have a chance to say the names of those whom we’ve lost this past year, and I’ll also invite you say a name or names of your own, people you know who were not members of this congregation but who are now living eternally with God.

Jesus promises us that those who humble themselves will be exalted, and I like to think of our naming of saints as a way we actually experience that, actually take part in the exalting of those who have humbled themselves. For what greater humility is there than death?

There is a short poem about Jesus a little later in the New Testament that talks about how he humbled himself, even to the point of death, and therefore God also highly exalted him. When we name those we’ve lost, I wonder if we’re not participating in something similar, exalting those who have humbled themselves in death. I think so. I hope so.

Church is that place that celebrates humility and service, not just to be different from the rest of our lives, but more because they’re better — they’re the greatest. The greatest among you, Jesus says, will be your servant. Jesus, who came not to be served but to serve, invites us to experience that greatness here (and I hope we do), and then to take it home with us, take it to work with us, take it to school and to the post office with us.

That, too, is how we exalt those we name here, living the example of their Lord and ours every day.

Our first steps in that direction are steps of offering, first offering ourselves and our resources in gratitude to the church’s ministry of humble service, and then offering our thanks at this Table, where a humble loaf of bread and a humble cup of juice are exalted as the very food of heaven. And so as we take our offering and prepare to take Communion, let us continue to worship the Lord. Amen.