A Church not full of hypocrites

A Church not Full of Hypocrites

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            I am a creature of habit.  When I am removed from my habits it is easy for me to become disoriented, listless and lethargic.  On my first Sunday on my vacation in California I began thinking at least slightly of skipping church.  It wasn’t that I was tired of attending church, but it meant going into a place where I knew no one.  That wasn’t something within my comfort zone.  I am a slave of routine and to go to church where I knew no one wasn’t part of my routine.  But I felt my obligation and was determined to go to a church within my small denomination.  There was one between San Francisco and San Jose on the west side of the San Francisco bay in the hills sort of on the off-beaten track somewhere between California routes 101 and 1.  This would be Trinity Sunday.  I wondered how well this church might do Trinity Sunday.  I feel that the modern American Church thinks of the Holy Trinity not as God who is revealed to his people but as a doctrine hard to explain and unable to be made practical.  Perhaps it is part of the American problem that among those who consider themselves Christians, America was founded struggling for its soul somewhere between Deism and the Trinitarian faith.  So perhaps it should not be surprising that in our churches there is a sense that even if the doctrine of the Trinity is essential it is not practical.  I had thought about the Trinity and Trinity Sunday earlier and had written about it in this blog. For me Trinity Sunday ought to be a day in which we celebrate how we have been discovering throughout the Church year that we have new life together as one people in the church in Jesus Christ, unto the Father, by the Holy Spirit.  What would I discover at this church off the beaten path between San Francisco and San Jose?

            It was a small church.  There were some old people, some families, some small children and I discovered that once a month the church let the children have a more active role in worship.  Children read the Scripture readings.  They varied in their gifts of reading, one nervous and shy and one bold who had grown to love public speaking.  But I think we listened all the more courteously and attentively for the sake of the children and so the Word was heard.  A deacon preached the sermon.  I did not take good notes and as this was also Father’s Day as well as Trinity Sunday, there was a tendency to emphasize Father’s Day especially as this was also the children’s day.

            I remember the deacon with glasses, studious, and reminded me slightly of how I would imagine Dietrich Bonhoeffer speaking to us if he could.  The speaker came from a German background and I believe he mentioned Bonhoeffer at one point.  There was one comment he made in his sermon that I was careful to jot down for it was especially memorable.  The deacon who has a job in addition to being a deacon within the church spoke of a man he had worked with who was invited to a church where at least one of his family members went.  The fellow said of the church, “I know some of the people, that church is full of hypocrites.  That is what I don’t like about churches.  Is your church full of hypocrites?”

            The deacon let that sink in and then he told what he said to the guy he had worked with.  He said, “O no my church isn’t full of hypocrites, we have room for at least one more.”

            That is the truth I guess of churches.  Jesus came to save sinners, and when you get in churches the sinners there tend to have the sins of religious folks.  We had our sins of rebellion and various sorts of sins before we came into the church and we are tempted with sins after we come into church and after we come into church our tendencies is to sin like the religious folks you read about in the New Testament.  Hypocrisy is a tendency for us in the church.  There are a couple of ideas described in the word “hypocrite.”  The Greek word translated “hypocrite” in our English New Testament, I am told literally means a “play-actor.”  We discover ourselves all too often being play-actors trying to fill the roles expected of us.  Our lives less resemble liberation by a great Savior as much as role-playing according to a script we struggle to learn.  We discover that after we have come into the church we need a Savior as much as when we lived wholly outside the church.  We traded one tendency towards a certain kind of sin for a tendency to sin in a different sort of way than before.  We too easily become play-actors.  Truthfully we need the word of Christ to confront us, the Spirit of God to remain patient with us, and we need to be fed and nourished by the redeeming life of Jesus Christ.  It is certain; we are too often hypocrites.  I haven’t a doubt about that.  But a Scots Presbyterian minister saw a young woman in the church who said as communion was offered “I can’t take it, I am full of sin.”  He replied to her, “Take it lassie, it is for sinners.”  Yes we are hypocrites. That is most often where we sin now that we are in the church.  But our churches are not full of hypocrites; we still have room for more.”  Christ has come to save sinners.

            There was one other feature in this church that spoke to me on that Sunday.  Their church used the same liturgy my church did.  The words were exactly the same.  But the reading was done with a quicker cadence.  The words were spoken not as much with the sense of Christ’s death and the weight of our sins; but as Christ’s death remembered with him as the resurrected one who had finished the needed work and it was as the finished work of redemption that we were hearing a joyous reciting of a living liturgy.  I had heard the words of this liturgy for virtually every Sunday for at least a decade, and yet never had these words been expressed with such joy and comfort emanating from them.  We were being brought to remember a triumphant work of grace overcoming death through the death and resurrection of our Redeemer.  We were not made to be feel the death of Christ as much as we were granted to realize that in him we were being granted newness of life.  I was grateful that I had visited a church that was not full of hypocrites.  I was grateful that it had room for one more.  I was grateful they had room for one more.