The 24th Sunday after Pentecost, Year A - October 30, 2005
Micah 3:5-12
Psalm 43
1 Thessalonians 2:9-13,17-20
Matthew 23:1-12
Siblings of the Heart

Deborah Hutchison

In today’s gospel, Jesus lambastes the religious leaders of his faith, the scribes and the Pharisees, for their hypocrisy. But, his critique of religious authorities who don’t live up to their own teachings is, alas, timeless and applicable to every religious tradition. We humans are attracted to power, and we often obtain it before we are really grown up enough to have acquired the self-awareness necessary to use it wisely and compassionately. We humans tend to find it easier in the short term to appear to be pious, rather than to apply ourselves to the very difficult and often publicly unrewarding work of actually allowing God’s Spirit to transform our natures and make us truly holy.

Thirty years ago, Jonathan, our friend John Dillon and I were attempting to make a living singing the songs we had written while studying with a spiritual teacher in northern New Mexico. As you might imagine, our material didn’t go over real well in bars, so, although none of us had actually attended church for several years, we were trying to line up gigs in churches within a reasonable driving distance from Taos, where we all were living. Somehow we managed to convince the leadership of an Episcopal church in Denver to hire us to play a short concert during the coffee hour after their Sunday morning service.

All three of us had attended Episcopal churches growing up, so we thought we knew what to expect. But the church we knew was the east coast version of Episcopalian-ism – “low church”, very protestant in form and function, far removed from the Roman Catholic roots of Anglicanism. For example, we were accustomed to Sunday Morning Prayer services, with communion very occasionally. The priests we had known were usually married, wore simple cassocks and albs during services and expected us to call them “Mr.”

Imagine our surprise when we showed up on a Saturday night in October at St. Mary’s, Denver, and discovered that the unmarried priest and his unmarried assistant lived, complete with elderly housekeeper, in a rectory next to the church. I felt like I’d wandered onto the set of Going My Way. This was what is known as an Anglo-Catholic parish, an Episcopal church which, in form and practice, resembles the pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic church.

In the morning we were awakened by the housekeeper calling up the stairs, “Father! Breakfast is ready!” Whereupon priest number one called from his room to his assistant, “Father! Did you hear? Breakfast is ready!” Priest number two answered from his room, “Thank you, Father!” And priest number one responded, “You’re welcome, Father.”

The service itself was a revelation. It was Communion, not Morning Prayer, and the priests and acolytes, all dressed in elaborate lace-trimmed cottas over their black cassocks, had worked out liturgical choreography worthy of Gladys Knight and the Pips. It was all so interesting and, to us, strange, that we were paying quite close attention to the worship when the assistant priest began to read the gospel. It must have been the 24th Sunday after Pentecost ,Year A, because one line really stood out, “And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father-- the one in heaven.”

Given the flurry of “Fathers” we’d just experienced at breakfast, we sort of expected immediate repentance and amendment of life in response to this direct command from Jesus, but when we assembled at the rectory for Sunday dinner after the service, it was “Could you pass the potatoes, Father?” “Certainly, Father.” “Thank you, Father.” And so on…

Obviously, this honorific custom -- which goes back to at least the time of the prophet Elisha calling his spiritual mentor, Elijah, “father” -- was so deeply enmeshed in our hosts’ assumptions about priesthood, that their missed entirely the possibility that Jesus might be calling them to take a look at, and perhaps adjust, the way they were practicing their piety.

One of the greatest challenges inherent in a serious discipled reading of scripture is the requirement that we apply what we read to ourselves. It’s really a call to greater consciousness -- to knowing ourselves, becoming aware of our strengths and weaknesses, and committing to the frightening and liberating process of allowing God to grow those strengths and transform those weaknesses. The great thing about the lectionary is that the same readings come around again every three years, just in case we might be ready this time to hear something we weren’t able to hear last time around.

What I hear today in this passage is something different than the “don’t do this” aspect of the reading I first attended to – don’t call attention to your religiosity, don’t seek out public affirmations of your position as religious leader, don’t show off.

It’s something different from the “do this instead” teachings, which I noticed more recently – humble yourself, be as a servant. After all, it’s perfectly possible to make those admirable traits into yet another version of broad phylacteries (which are, by the way, two small leather boxes which contain verses from scripture and are worn by Orthodox and Conservative Jews during morning prayers). It’s perfectly possible to act “humbler than thou”, all the while harboring thoughts about the superior nature of your humility as compared to that of the other guy. Believe me, I know.

What I’m hearing this time around is Jesus’ asking me to take a good long hard look at myself, not in order to see if I have my phylacteries on straight, but to look deep into my own eyes and into my own soul. He’s asking me to face up to myself, to acknowledge – for instance -- how much easier it is for me to present those Denver Fathers (not to be confused with the San Diego Padres) as examples of religious hypocrisy, than it is to offer my own flawed self as an illustration of same.

The word “hypocrisy” comes from early Latin and Greek antecedents which mean “play-acting” or “pretense”. It’s an equal-opportunity character fault. We all adopt persona, we all put on masks, in order to survive in the world. And we all eventually end up identifying to some degree with those false selves we have constructed. Who we were birthed to be by our Divine Parent? – well, that true self often gets lost in the process.

This is the tenth time in the last thirty years that I have engaged with this passage of scripture and it speaks to me now with great urgency of the absolute necessity that we live our lives authentically. We are being asked to grow up and out of the need to measure ourselves against anything that is of this world – “call no one on earth your father…” and to fully recognize and live into our intimate familial relationship with our divine parent, God.

You will notice, looking at today’s gospel, that Jesus does not reject the teachings of his and his hearer’s spiritual heritage – “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat; therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it,” he says. What he condemns is the failure of the religious leaders to embody the teachings. “…do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach.”

I don’t believe we can embody the wisdom and essence of the Divine by attempting to put it on, like some garment of holiness. Embodiment is incarnational. It happens from the inside out. As a deep wound has to be kept open and allowed to heal from the inside in order for the flesh to be sound, our true selves must be kept open to the presence and action of God and allowed to grow from whatever state they may be in now into the fullness of God’s intention for them -- wholeness, holiness, authenticity.

That is why, I believe, God came to us in a human body, in Jesus – to show us that our human nature is intended to be the instrument of our transformation, the vehicle through which the image of God in us will come into full expression. As that happens, we will look around us and see no one on earth we can call “Father”. As that happens, we will look around us and see everywhere on earth children of God, siblings of the heart we will gladly call “Sister” and “Brother”. AMEN.