Apples, Oranges, and Happy Hypocrites - August 9, 2009

Text: Ephesians 4:25-5:2

There is a lot packed into these verses from Ephesians. Our choice this morning is to treat this passage as either an orange or an apple. How do we eat an orange? Section by section. How do we eat an apple? All at once.

There are a lot of individual injunctions here – put away falsehood, give up stealing, do this, don’t do that. We can treat each verse like a separate section of the orange. We could choose one specific section to focus on – like working honestly – or we could take a quick, cursory look at each of the various sections.

Or, we might look at it as an apple. With an apple, we just chomp into the whole thing. We could treat it as an apple and look at the overarching themes and principles at play here.

Well, being ever wishy-washy, I decided to do a little bit of both. So we’ll look at the whole passage in order to gain context, but spend most of our time on a couple of sections. So you might say we are going to treat the passage as a fruit salad.

Are you with me so far? First, the “apple” issues. Our passage begins with the word “therefore,” and as someone once said, when a verse starts with “therefore,” you need to look and see what it is there for.

When we go back to the beginning of chapter 4, we see that the big issue is unity in the church. We are to “make every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” We are all one in the Body of Christ, and there is “one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God and Father of us all.”

By virtue of our common life in Christ, we are new people, and we are to cloth ourselves with a new way of living. This is the background, and our text spells out some of the implications of living the New Life – what it looks like to “maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”

So what we have is not a list of random rules for Christians, not just a laundry list of do’s and don’ts, but a way of living our life together as a community. These are not just rules for individual Christians to follow, but a way of life for all of us to live together.

OK, that is a big bite out of the apple. But back to our fruit salad. In most salads, one or two tastes or textures really stand out. We could choose any number of items in this salad of a passage, but I’m going to deal especially with two. And I want to start by telling you the story of Frank.

I had been in town for only a few weeks when I first met Frank. He was not particularly friendly, but I learned not to take it personally—he was unfriendly towards a lot of people. He was a deacon at the church I had been visiting. On a Sunday morning, I went forward at the end of the service to join the membership. The pastor asked folks if they would support and encourage me as a brother in Christ and they indicated their desire to do so with a hug or a handshake after the service. It felt good to “officially” be a part of this church.

That evening, I went back to church for a potluck dinner and the quarterly business meeting. This was a small church and there couldn’t have been more than 15 or 20 people, tops, at the dinner. After the meal we headed upstairs to the sanctuary for what I assumed would be a quick, let’s-get-it-over with business meeting. But boy was I wrong! There were a lot of people upstairs—many whom I had never seen before. And the business meeting was one I will never forget.

This was a young church, a church struggling with its identity. Things had been changing and new people were in the church—people like me. There were growing pains. All of this was difficult for Frank.

Frank had a high-stress job and was all the time worried about how his boss would react to his work and his decisions. Things felt out of control at work. But at church, things were different. At church, he was somebody. Over the last 15 years, he had served in pretty well every office and on every committee. But things were changing. There were new people. The church had taken some progressive stands. Frank did not like the changes, but they came anyway. That night at the business meeting, Frank got together as many people as he could who weren’t satisfied with the direction of the church. For most of them, it wasn’t so much that they were upset with things as it was they didn’t really care—they hadn’t been to church in years, but Frank got them to show up for the business meeting.

In the meeting, Frank criticized the pastor, criticized the finance committee, railed against the choir director. He broke confidences and slandered people. Others joined in with Frank. Finally, Frank rose and moved that the pastor be terminated immediately.

I was in shock. I had just joined the church that morning. I had thought these were nice people. Now I wondered what I had got myself into. Frank had gathered together enough folks that it appeared the pastor was gone. The core members of the church, those who had been at the potluck dinner, were shell-shocked, and no one seemed to know what to do. And so finally I stood up and said that given the importance of this vote, it seems like the membership should know about it ahead of time. So I moved the motion be tabled until a special called business meeting was held.

Now you can imagine what Frank thought of my idea. “Brother Moderator,” he said, “When does a person become a member of the church? Isn’t when we actually receive the letter of transfer from his last church?” In other words, somebody shut this kid up. But Judy stood up. She was thoughtful and fairly quiet, a much-respected person. Judy said, “This morning we all promised that we would encourage and support David as a brother in Christ, and now you’re slapping him in the face!” Gene, the moderator, ruled that I was a voting member and could make the motion to table.

That motion passed by 2 votes. When the special business meeting was held, 85% of the membership supported the pastor. Frank left the church, the other 15% never attended anyway, the pastor stayed 10 more years, and the church moved forward. But the outcome was very nearly quite different.

What happened in that church, and what happened to Frank, happens far too often. Paul’s words have something to say to Frank, and to all of us. The letter to the Ephesians was a circular letter, written to churches in the region around Ephesus. Frank’s church was a lot like those churches that Ephesians was written for—small churches, new churches, churches that had to decide in what direction they would go and what kind of church they would be. These were churches with conflicts and struggles, both from within and without, and these were churches that had to deal with anger.

Verse 26, this section of the orange, begins, “Be angry,” which may be one of the easiest admonitions in the Bible to follow. Being angry is not a problem. Read the news. Watch 60 Minutes. Drive to the grocery and watch some jerk driver will pull out in front of you. Go on vacation and spend extended time together with family and see if someone doesn't get angry at some point. Try to play golf and chances are you will get angry at whoever invented the stupid game. Anger is just part of life.

This doesn’t seem like a huge revelation, but sometimes we don’t hear the message in church that anger is OK. Sometimes we get the message that it is wrong to get mad, or that Christians should never become angry.

It is ironic that the church would teach that anger is wrong. Anyone who has read the Bible much at all knows that God gets angry--angry at injustice, angry at corruption, angry at sin. Jesus became at the moneychangers in the temple. He got angry with the Pharisees for their smug self-righteousness, and was even put out at the denseness of his own disciples.

Paul did not say, “Do not become angry.” But he did say, “Don’t let your anger lead you into sin.” How might anger lead us into sin? This can happen when we allow our anger to control us. When anger controls us, it leads us to sin and has an almost exponential potential for compounding itself.

As a kid, I remember Jimmy Riess, normally a kind of reserved boy in the neighborhood, getting mad and taking a swing at me with a baseball bat. Most of us learn a measure of self-control as we get older, but it’s not always easy. Some never learn to deal appropriately with anger, and take it out by abusing their spouse or their children. At some point, we all let anger get the best of us.

Suppressing our anger may work--for a while. Frank suppressed his anger at work, and he had for the most part kept quiet about changes at church, but eventually the anger exploded.

Paul gives us some very wise, very simple teaching regarding anger: “Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil.” Failing to deal with anger can lead us into sin.

Now remember, Paul is speaking to the church. Anger is not in itself a threat to the unity of the church. Anger is just going to happen, whether we like it or not. But the way we deal with anger can be a huge threat to unity. It is important for the church to learn to deal creatively and constructively with conflict. Conflict comes with change, and if there is never any conflict and never any anger, we are probably not open to change and probably not being the church we are called to be. Be angry – but do not let your anger lead you into sin. We can allow anger to be a motivating force for bringing about justice, for working toward reconciliation, for building up. Like Powdermilk Biscuits, it can “give shy persons the strength to do what needs to be done.” Or anger can be a destructive force used to tear down, used to destroy the unity of the church. It’s all in how we deal with it.

And then one other section, one other orange slice, which can kind of be an antidote to letting anger lead us into sin. “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ ahs forgiven you.” Be kind.

I have known people to get all worked up over passages of scripture, sometimes over obscure passages. Folks get worked up about homosexuality, citing a verse in Leviticus that is right next to the verse about stoning unruly teenagers. People scream loudly that they are more Christian, more spiritual, more scriptural than others. Self-proclaimed Christians can resort to all kinds of devious means, rumor and innuendo and outright slander – they can take their playbook right out of the list of what not to do that we find here in Ephesians. And for all of these Bible screamers and Christian warriors, I just want to quote a very simple Bible verse. “Be ye kind one to another.” That’s the way I learned it in Sunday School, back in the King James days. “Be ye kind one to another.” Why don't people want to focus on this verse?

Zoe and Marian were among the couple hundred high school students who attended an All-State choir camp at ISU this week. Zoe said that one day, there was a guy preaching outside of the library. Yelling at people. Telling students he had never met how sinful they were. He believed the Bible backwards and forward, believed every word. Well, how about the part where it says, “Be ye kind one to another?”

On the way home from Virgil Lagomarcino’s memorial service, there was a crowd at the corner of Lincoln Way and University Blvd. Fred Phelps’ gang was there to protest, and counter-demonstrators were across the street. Phelps’ extended family is known as Westboro Baptist Church although as far as I can tell their only purpose is to travel around the country spreading hate and getting attention. They picket churches and schools and busy street corners with signs that say “God Hates Fags” and worse, and they picket military funerals with signs saying that this is God’s judgment on America. Bible believers, spreading the gospel, they say.

What about kindness? Do they believe that part? What about, “Be ye kind one to another?”

Well, the weird preacher on campus or the Phelps bunch are easy targets. What is harder to admit is that we don’t always do so well with kindness ourselves. It is extremely hard to be kind to some people, especially people like the weird preacher or the Phelps clan. And if we are honest, it is sometimes hard to be kind to each other in the church. Paul knew that. Kindness is simple, but it can be very difficult. But in a way, kindness is an antidote to all of the issues discussed here. Kindness leads us to speak truthfully, to manage our anger well, to work honestly and share with those in need. Kindness makes us build up rather than tear down and keeps us from bitterness and slander and malice.

Kindness is needed in the church, and it is certainly in short supply in our culture. The Kindness Index has dropped off even more than the stock market. There are all kinds of campaigns that go on, in and out of the church, but it seems to me that we could really use a Campaign for Kindness. Believe it or not, the very first record album I bought was a Glen Campbell album. And he sang, “you’ve got to try a little kindness.” What a difference that would make.

Well, we started with the apple and then a couple of orange slices. We’ll end with the rest of the apple. Which makes this a kind of sandwich, I suppose, if you are keeping score.

Paul concludes this passage by saying, “be imitators of God.” As a way of summarizing what it is he is asking of us, he says, “Be imitators of God.” And we thought kindness was hard. How can we possibly be imitators of God?

Craig Watts argues that in the “Christian life we are called to a sincere hypocrisy” because we are to be imitators of God. Hypocrites because of course we don’t measure up - we don’t live out what we claim to believe - but we sincere hypocrites because we sincerely wish to be like Christ. We pray that by God’s grace we become what we are not yet.

Max Beerbohn wrote the play, “The Happy Hypocrite.” Lord George Hell is a corrupt, wealthy aristocrat who falls in love with a pious girl. To disguise his debauchery, he dons a mask of a saint. They marry and live together happily until a woman from his past tells his wife of George’s true identity. Confronted by his wife, George takes off his mask only to discover that his face has conformed to the mask of the saint. He has pretended to be saintly until in the end he is.

By being sincere hypocrites, says Watts, “the goodness that we pretend to have may finally become real.”

We are to maintain the unity of the church by imitating the One we follow. “Be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us.” Amen.