Beyond Appearances

Joshua 3:7-17; Matthew 23:1-12

Actions speak louder than words. There is no way around that truth. Until we put into practice what we say we believe, we might as well be reading the phone book. 

We live in a time when direct experience counts far more than pedagoguery. People don’t want to be lectured, they want to see action. Folks are promised so much every day. What they don’t see are promises kept.

God makes an astounding promise to Israel as they prepare to cross the Jordan—God will drive out all the adversaries before them—Israel will do very little. As the book of Joshua tells it, there was much fear within the tribes. They saw the people in the land as giants. They were insurmountable. They were seemingly invincible. Even a promise from God seemed doubtful, given what was before them. Actions would convince them. So, God acts. The Red Sea incident repeats in miniature—the Jordan rolls back before the ark of God. The people cross on dry ground into the Promised Land. The promise is not empty. 

Jesus now turns God’s way of being on the community of faith—as God is, so are we to be.

Jesus critiques the leaders of the Jewish community for their empty promises. They claim to be the authorities on the ways and means of God, but their actions reveal them to be nothing more than authorities on authority! Revealing the ways of God is secondary to their enjoyment of being the authority for the community. Power is their end. If the community is to be faithful, change must come. There is one authority—God himself. Any human teacher of faith must know that, live according to that, and proclaim that through their presence within the world. Their actions will be the proof. Are they of God, or are they only yet another self-serving human power?

What an important lesson for this moment in time.

Our current President lives for himself. A narcissist, it is all about his maintenance of his own position. His tweets reveal an incredibly insecure person. He tolerates no critique. He is too fragile. His actions speak all too loudly of his need for power and his abuse of that power. There is no sense of service. There is no sense of a greater good of the people led. There is no sense of anything other than self-aggrandizement. 

That thinking begins to seep into every other area of life. The flurry of sexual harassment revelations illuminates a societal problem in which women are routinely objectified and made subject to male privelege rooted in a mindset that declares women to be nothing more than playthings. 

We refuse to acknowledge the stratification of dominance in our society—a tiered system of being that relegates anyone other than white to lower rungs who must figure out how to conform to a standard imposed on them from the seat of power. So, they take a knee, and a twitter storm ensues. 

To figure out how to minister to this hurting world in which we live, though, the church also needs to reconsider Jesus’ teaching. Mainline Protestantism celebrates a birthday this year—500 years ago, Luther set us on our way, nailing 95 critiques to a church door. These were things that needed to change if the church was to be a place of healing, solace, and reform within the world. The protest become Protestantism, rising in visibility and power. American Protestantism reached a pinnacle of sorts, becoming a piece of the very fabric American culture—e.g., Reinhold Neibuhr graced the cover of Time magazine. But over the last fifty years, that changed. Not many folks even know who Reinhold Neibuhr was, let alone anything he wrote. Now the church is irrelevant or defensively clinging to its lost place. Christians are seen by those outside it as leaders only in judgmental bigotry as moralism becomes the way of being—law trumps grace, once again. The original message of compassion, inclusion, and self-emptying is muted. Are we too fragile to let Jesus’ words sting us? Or will we let Jesus continue to reform us? That choice lay before us, here and now, this very day. 

Yet, I believe we really want to be something other than yet another manifestation of self-centered power. I believe we want to transform the world—or at least whatever corner of it we inhabit—into something full of grace, welcome, and healing. I believe the church is actually populated by people who want to see Jesus’ love lead. We want to see the hungry fed; the powerless empowered; the poor lifted up; and compassion the first impulse of all. We want to see a communion table surrounded by people of every color, every language, and every way of being. We want to taste and see that the Lord is good, experiencing that as the kingdom blossoms within and around us.  

To do that, we will need to rise out of ourselves. We will need to reconsider, recommit, and reconnect with the actual gospel presented in scripture. We need to note the consistency between Jesus’ words and actions. We need to see his absolute commitment to love. We need to see his eternal concern for the other. We need to see his radical welcome of any and all. Then we need to do more than simply tell folks what we believe. We need to do all that love requires! We need to make our actions fit our words.

We need to keep the promise Jesus entrusted to all of his disciples—if anyone is to see the Promised Land, we will lead them in word and deed—we will roll back the Jordan’s waters in all their manifestations of opposition to dignity, grace, and truth. We will be the people of Jesus, known by our self-emptying, other-centered compassion—the very things that made Jesus the Christ of God!

Then we shall see the world changed. We will see power in its place. We will see the reign of love overflow. We will see hope rise eternal before us all.