Thursday, August 29, 2024 | Trey Comstock
If I didn’t love Jesus so much and find so much life in a connection to God, I honestly would consider leaving this entire religion behind. Jesus calls out the Pharisees as hypocrites, which they deserve, but we, Christians, have accepted that mantel from them eagerly.
In my teenaged years, I had a friend, who performed Christianity way better than me. He never used foul language, took a much more prim and proper approach to relationships with young ladies, and fussed at me if I swore too loudly in public. As if me showing local children how much fun one can have with the letter F constituted the height of sinfulness. He also spent the bulk of our high school years finding ways to sabotage my relationships in order to exact revenge for a young lady liking me more than she liked him.
Early in my career as a pastor, I got lambasted by a much more senior colleague for failing to submit paperwork properly. He had set a deadline for discounted camp applications. We messed up and missed said deadline by a few days, but our kids still needed the discount. I called to try and smooth things out. He shouted and raged at me for not following procedure exactly. A few years later, it came out that during that season of his ministry, he sexually harassed a number of his church’s female staff members.
One night, I sat in my office and got absolutely picked apart, point by point, for my failings as a pastor. The church member, representing the prosecution, had brought plenty of ammunition - all of my insufficiencies. The list of what I had left undone was legion. They all boiled down to the same issue, that despite my best and earnest efforts to care for her and her family, I simply hadn’t done enough. In a religion built on a king who came to serve and not be served, her core question was, “What have you done for me lately?”
I witnessed an entire generation of high level denominational leaders stress rule following and make it difficult for anyone outside a certain mold to make it through the ordination process. If one could not string together the exact right words for things, they would delay your career for years. You had to boil a lifetime of experiences and a three year masters degree into a checklist of correct insider words, and then, make sure to never put a toe out of line. So many of us lived in abject fear of their judgement, if we proved unable to rise to their specific vision of perfection. Many others, with tremendous gifts and grace, never made it past their inspection. When this same group of leaders got inspired to start their own project, they helped themselves to tens of millions of dollars for their new thing because they saw no issue with “sacking Egypt on their way out the door.” Following the rules stopped mattering, when it came to applying it to themselves.
All sin does harm. Sin combined with hypocrisy does harm twice – the original harm and the cognitive dissonance of one so faithful doing such wrong. As I seem unable to stop writing about, the world has noticed that we say one thing and so often do another. Crusaders for judgement and purity keep getting busted for sex crimes. Religious leaders seeking donations from struggling people keep ending up living large with mansions, private jets, and thousand dollar designer sneakers. A faith who claims to love the poor, the stranger, and the widow keeps selling anyone down the river for the sake of earthly power.
I know too that we’ve been at this for millennia. None of this constitutes an innovation. In our Old Testament iteration, God’s people got trapped in unless spiral of failure that eventually landed them in exile. Two millennia later, military crusades in the name of God gave way to selling indulgences to fund masterworks of architecture, which, in turn, gave way to Christian on Christian violence, where we fought wars over the correct way to worship the Prince of Peace. Christians aren’t unique in this. Hypocrisy courses through veins of all humans. Even a cursory survey of human history quickly proves our individual and collective capacity to profess one thing and act entirely contrary.
The chorus from Gospel’s “Alas for You,” Stephen Schwartz’s rendering of a similar scene between Jesus and the Pharisees in Matthew 23, keeps running through my head.
“You snakes, you viper's brood
You cannot escape being Devil's food!
I send you prophets, I send you preachers
Sages and rages and ages of teachers
Nothing can bar your mood”
All of this isn’t inevitable. we have a better option, if we will take it. Destiny and human predilection don’t bind us to inevitable hypocrisy. With God’s help, we can live differently. We can listen to the prophets, preachers, sage, rages, and teachers. We can let the Holy Spirit in and participate in our own sanctification. Then, we can stop traumatizing each other and live as a better witness to God’s reality.