DEALING WITH DECEPTION AND HYPOCRISY
Matthew 5:33-37; 6:1-6
Sermon by Judy Turner

Jesus instructs his followers about integrity

How do followers of Jesus talk? Some talk fast, some talk slow. Some talk like Minnesotans and others like Arkansans. But they all say what they mean and mean what they say. Their word is as good as gold. In the greatest sermon ever preached, the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus instructs his followers about integrity.
Matthew 5:33-37
You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not break your oath, but keep the oaths you have made to the Lord.’ But I tell you, Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne, or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes’, and your ‘No’, ‘No’; anything beyond that comes from the evil one.

In the times when Jesus lived people were always looking for a loophole, perhaps things haven’t changed so much in over 2000 years. The Old Testament permitted a person to swear by the name of God to make an agreement or promise binding. Some people in Jesus’ day interpreted that OT permission to mean that only oaths that invoked the name of the Lord were binding. You could try to make people think you were really serious about keeping a promise, but you could still weasel out of it if you swore by less sacred things like by heaven, by earth, by Jerusalem. I didn’t know about any of this when I was a child, but I learned early to swear an oath in order to be believed, especially if I was lying. It went like this. I would tell my sister, “If you’ll do the dishes for me tonight, even though it’s my turn, I’ll do the dishes for you all the rest of the week. She’d look at me like doubtfully. I’d say, “Cross my heart and hope to die, before I’d ever tell a lie.” It wasn’t that I meant to lie. But neither did I fully intend to keep that promise.
Jesus is saying that true followers of his, true disciples, do not need to give oaths in order to confirm their trustworthiness, because their faithful lives repeatedly confirm the reliability of their words.

What would it be like to live in a world of trust?

What would it be like to live in a world where you could trust what people tell you? When the mechanic says the problem with your car is your alternative cataclysmic thingy needs to be replaced and that the part will cost $329.00, and you know that is the truth about what is wrong with your car and the part really costs $329.00. What about a world where the people you contracted with to do work on your house told you they would be there Friday morning at 8:00 and you could count on it, just as surely as the sun comes up. At 8:00 Friday morning they would be there ready to do what you needed done. What about a world where somebody said they wanted to be your friend and that’s what they meant? They will be there with you when you are at your best and when you are at your worst and will be there for you no matter what other people think? What about a world where when a man says he loves a woman, he is not out for anything for himself, but is willing to give himself for her good? What about a world where when a woman says she loves a man, it’s not so she can use him to get what she wants, but so she can devote herself to making his life as good in God as possible. What would it be like to live in a world where children don’t learn early in life to lie to protect themselves or to get what they think they want? What about a world where people are what they seem to be, where there is no pretense and no hypocrisy?

Jesus invites us into the Kingdom of God

In the greatest sermon ever preached, the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus invites us into such a world. It’s called the Kingdom of God. In this sermon, Jesus is not just giving moral commands. He is unveiling a whole new way of being human. Jesus pioneered this new way of being human and makes it possible for us, as we follow Him and as His spirit lives within us. The Kingdom of God is a right here, right now reality of God being in charge, of experiencing God’s loving goodness. But we can’t be part of such a world without a complete spiritual overhaul, like a spiritual heart transplant. We have to be willing for God to take out of us the fear that drives us to lie, the pride that makes us want to appear to be something we’re not, the desire to be in control of everyone and everything. We have to let our own control go, so that God can be in charge. When we pray, “Your Kingdom come, we’re saying, “My kingdom go.”To experience the right here right now Kingdom of God, we need a spiritual heart transplant.

A spiritual heart transplant

I’m old enough to remember the first time a heart transplant operation was successfully accomplished. In 1967, a human heart from one person was transplanted into the body of another by a South African surgeon named Dr. Christiaan Barnard. Barnard's surgical team removed the heart of a 25-year-old woman who had died following an auto accident and placed it in the chest of a 55-year-old man dying of heart damage. The patient survived for 18 days. Just the fact that such a thing could be done and someone survived at all astounded the world. Of course so many advances have been made since then. Getting valves, stints, and pacemakers is almost as commonplace as getting the oil changed in your car. But the astounding possibility Jesus offered over 2,000 years ago still leaves us wide-eyed and breathless!

As we entrust our lives to Jesus, we enter the realm of the Kingdom of God. As we follow Him day by day, we live more and more in that realm, and He gives us a spiritual heart transplant. The agent is the Holy Spirit who does a work as radical as tearing down an old delapidated house and building another beautiful house in its place. Sometimes this spiritual heart transplant process is radical. We realize how untruthful or how hypocritical we are, and we repent, saying to God, “I don’t want to be this dishonest phony any more. Change me.” He does, and we become more genuine. In our study book we use on Wednesday nights, The Good and Beautiful Life, Jim Smith tells about being at a dinner party with well educated people. Someone asks him, “Don’t you think that Hawthorne was the most brilliant writer of his generation?” Jim, who has never read a single sentence of Hawthorne finds himself saying, “Well, he was quite good.” “Quite good? The best!” says the literature expert. The genius of The Scarlet Letter is in its irony. I mean, the fact that the accusers are the true sinners and the accused sinner is actually the most righteous character. Do you agree, Jim?” By this time Jim is beginning to sweat, but he says, “”Well, uh…yes, I agree.” And for another 10 minutes he talks about this book he has never read, sweating buckets and looking for a way to escape! When the conversation finally ended, Jim asks himself, “Why did I feel the need to lie?” He sees that he lied because he wanted to fit in, wanted to appear intelligent in this gathering of intelligent people. And he repents and asks God for help in becoming a person of integrity, who has no need to lie. And he gives witness to how God has changed him. Now, in similar circumstances, he can simply say, “No, I have never read that book.” He concludes, “That is the paradox of honesty. In the end, we do not seem foolish, we seem genuine, which is a lot more important to people than trying to impress them.” We may suddenly find we have zero tolerance for what used to be OK for us – the little white lies, the untruthful ways we protected or advanced ourselves. We used to rationalize it by saying the lies really didn’t hurt anyone else. No more! That is evidence of God doing a spiritual heart transplant within us.
Or maybe, the Holy Spirit does the work more gradually. We just wake up one day and look in the mirror and realize we like that person we see better now. We’ve become more truthful. Other people can trust us more, we can trust ourselves more, God can trust us more. It feels really great!

Because I really don’t want to be a hypocrite, do you? I don’t really want to appear to be something I’m not. I particularly can’t stand a religious hypocrite, can you? Jesus has some things to say in the greatest sermon ever preached about religious hypocrites.
Matthew 6:1-6
Be careful not to do your ‘acts of righteousness’ before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

Doing the right things with the right motives

Boy, if we’d lived in Jesus’ day, we would have spotted those religious hypocrites, the ones who had to make a big deal about their prayer time so that everybody would know they were devout. We would have pegged the man who stood on the street corner and prayed loudly so everyone could hear the eloquence with which he addressed the almighty right away. Hypocrite! Our hypocrisy detectors would have gone off. And we would have noticed how the wealthy woman at the collection box for the poor let each coin clink loudly as she dropped it in, so people could see how much she was putting in. We would have noticed her looking out the corner of her eye to see who was watching, and said, “Now there is a hypocrite”.
We just may be hypocrites!

But, does it bother you when people in the congregation don’t seem to notice when you’re knocking yourself out to serve them? Does it hurt when you put a lot of time in to prepare a meeting, teach a class, lead a ministry project, and nobody even says, “Thank you?” Do you find yourself saying, “People have no clue how much I do around here! Maybe I should just leave and then they would see!” The heart, as the Bible describes it, is the center of motivation, desiring, commitment. The heart issue here is why we do what we do. Is it to be noticed by people, appreciated by people, respected by people? Hypocrisy is doing the right things for the wrong reasons. Perhaps the hypocrisy detector within is starting to go off. Jesus tells us one reason in the Sermon on the Mount for people noticing what we do in serving the Lord, and that is to draw attention to God and not ourselves. If people see our good works, it is so they will give glory to God.

The life in which the inside and outside match perfectly

The genuine reason we pray is because we love God. The genuine reason we give is because we love God. The genuine reason we serve is because we love God. But if we’re using these practices so that people will think well of us, we need to repent of our hypocrisy and say, “God, focus my eyes on you and not on other people. I want to be free to do everything I do simply because I love you. And just getting to know you better is reward enough. I want to be your follower, the same inside and out. Change my heart, Lord, change my heart.”

Bible scholar N.T. Wright talks about walking down a street while in the Middle East. He was hungry and bought a chocolate bar. He got back to his hotel room, took off the wrapper, and was really glad he broke off a piece of the chocolate bar and looked before he bit into it. There were little worms inside the chocolate bar! He says, “If religious duties are done with an eye on the audience, they become rotten at the core. Jesus doesn’t say that outward things don’t matter. Giving money to those in need and praying are good. What matters is learning to do them simply to and for God himself. All the Sermon on the Mount is centered on God himself, who easily gets squeezed out of religion, if we’re not careful.”

Jesus invites his followers to a life in which, like a really good chocolate bar, inside and outside match perfectly.