Sermon for Sunday, November 1, 2020

 

Sermon            November 1, 2020        Matthew 23: 1-12         Rev. Peter Hofstra

            Have you ever heard of the expression “Holy Indifference”?  I did not know what it meant, my first thought was that it somehow referred to teenagers in a monastery or something.  Apparently, this is something that was put forward by St. Ignatius in the Middle Ages in description of sanctification, of becoming holy.  Follow me along with this.  It is the idea that we work our lives so focusedly and forcefully into that which God demands of us that it becomes second nature.  In other words, we are so ‘in the zone’ all the time of doing as God has sanctified us to do, that we no longer have to pay attention to what we are doing.  The holiness is happening and we can be, essentially, indifferent to it. 

            Apparently, there is a whole code built up around the teachings of St. Ignatius, seeking to create for Christians a way of meditation and focus on things of the divine, it makes me think of a Zen master, someone calm in the face of whatever happens. 

            I bring this up because it seems to be the polar opposite of what Jesus is teaching in our gospel message today.  What have we shared over the last few weeks?  Parables and debates between Jesus and the leadership.  The leadership is looking for a way to bring Jesus down and Jesus, who intentionally avoided going into Jerusalem because it was not yet his time, well, his time has come and he is there going head to head with their best and brightest, and coming out on top.  Remember the questions, should we pay taxes to the emperor?  What is the greatest commandment?  There were so many others.  After last week, they gave up trying to challenge him any more.

            Now Jesus is talking to the people about these leaders.  It is an interesting double-edged message.  On the one hand, he recognizes that these pharisees and scribes ‘sit in the seat of Moses’, therefore their teachings should be listened to.  Jesus is approving the way that they are teaching the law and the prophets to the people.  Do as they say, Jesus commands.  But do not do as they do.  That is the other edge.  Because they are showoffs.  They want the best seat in the marketplace.  Their fringe is a little fringier than the rest of the people’s.  Their phylacteries are a little more…phylactal…than the rest of the people’s. 

            So this is not a “holy indifference”, this is a “holy aggrandizement”.  It is the place of honor at the banquet, best seat in the synagogue, being greeted with respect in the marketplace, they like to be called ‘rabbi’, teacher.  Rather, according to Jesus, the people are all students to the one rabbi.  They are children of the one Father, the Father in heaven.  They are not instructors, they have but one instructor, and that is the Messiah.  Instead of simply spouting the law of Moses, speaking the words of God and then seeking lives of flash and importance, Jesus wants the people to understand that sanctification comes from the one God, focusing on the one, not trying to climb above one’s station in God’s world. 

            And then he speaks one of those lines that is pretty well known.  The greatest among you will be your servant.  The exalted will be humbled and the humble will be exalted. 

            Esteem granted to the rabbi, that is a staple of near comic media portrayals of the Jewish faith.  From “Fiddler on the Roof” to “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”, the rabbi, the teacher, is one who is held in high esteem by the community around him. 

            What do we know about sanctification, about being made holy, thus far?  We know that it is rendering unto God what is God’s.  We got that from the tax challenge.  We know also that it is loving God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.  And these things, they are being taught and taught correctly by the leaders who were facing off against Jesus.  But there was something very significant that was missing from their place with God.  And that is personal humility.

            Now Jesus describes the legitimate authority that these leaders carry because they ‘sit on Moses’ seat’.  Why Moses?  He was the leader who saw the transition of the Israelites from a fleeing rabble of slaves into a people ready to march into the Promised Land.  He received the Ten Commandments from God.  He is viewed as the author of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, the law of Moses.  But there is another interesting connection-looking to the person and attitude of Moses.

            According to the Rabbinic tradition, Moses was supposed to have written the first five books of the Bible in their entirety, except for two parts.  The first described his death.  I think it is pretty safe to assume that somebody else added that final postscript to the books.  The other is a declaration in Numbers 12:3, that Moses was a humble man, the humblest man in all the earth.  Often, there is a humorous spin put on such a declaration.  But I think Jesus is getting at something deeper. 

            Moses is THE leader of Israel.  Prophets, priests, judges, and kings that came after him, they all looked back to his leadership as the paradigm.  Very much like George Washington was THE leader of the United States.  He limited himself to two terms.  That tradition was not codified in the Constitution until after FDR.  He gave up power voluntarily, some might even say willingly.  According to one source, when King George heard that news, he did not even realize that was a choice as a leader.

            What the people knew of Moses is how hard it was for the Lord to get him to become the liberator of the people.  He made every excuse.  His favorite was that he did not have a good speaking voice.  God’s answer was to send his brother Aaron to be his mouthpiece.  On one occasion, God expresses such frustration with the stiff-necked Israelites that God tells Moses that they will all be destroyed and God will start over with Moses’ family.  To this, Moses begs God in prayer not to because, how will that look if the God of the Israelites chose to destroy them?  There are story upon story like this that point to Moses’ character as a humble man.

            And he was exalted.  His name is used with authority by the Lord Jesus himself.  Such is the backdrop against which Jesus is explaining what it is to be made Holy, to be sanctified.  This stresses that God sanctifies, not us.  The scribes and the Pharisees are faulted precisely because they used their extra measure of sanctification as leaders of the people for their own purposes.

            But the language of humbleness does not stop with Jesus.  Paul picks up on this language as well.  In 1 Corinthians 15:9, Paul tells us that when Jesus was still God, he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on the cross.  Last week, we spoke of how the leaders saw the Messiah as Son of David, as Warrior returned.  That is NOT what Jesus is doing.  Let’s follow that through.  Jesus humbled himself and became obedient to death on the cross, and then God exalted Jesus by raising him to new life and giving him a name that is above every name!  Such is the plan of God worked out through Jesus the Messiah.

            So when Jesus tells the people to do as the scribes and Pharisees say, but do not do as the scribes and Pharisees do, he does not leave them hanging.  The behavior that goes along with the obedience to God’s Word, it can be seen in the life of Moses, who bore the law down from God to the people, and, for us, in the life lived by our own Lord Jesus Christ.  Paul again, a few chapters earlier in 1 Corinthians, tells the people to use him as an example, even as Paul has used Christ as an example. 

            Coming back around to the opening of this sermon, consider again the idea of Holy Indifference.  We live lives so devoted to Jesus that doing the good that Jesus did becomes second nature, something we no longer have to even think about.  The idea has a certain appeal to it, does it not?  Coming to a place of holiness where I am not constantly fighting my sin nature? 

            This sort of discipline, to do something without thinking about it, is certainly a human trait.  Driving is the example that jumps to mind for me.  We just go.  It is the practice of an athlete or a martial artist, drilling something until it becomes second nature, until it becomes muscle memory.  But I do not know how well that translates to sanctification.

            I am not even sure we would want to use Holy Indifference as a goal.  So good at it that we can be confident we have overcome sin in our lives?  Sounds like works make us holy.  Makes sanctification sound like it was an exercise regimen.  And I am not even sure it is possible.  Because if we could be disciplined enough to act without sinning, what we would even need salvation through Jesus’ death and resurrection for? 

            It seems to me that the practice of mindfulness is something far more useful to sanctification.  Mindfulness is the deliberate practice at looking at what we are doing in the moment, without judgement, to gain better insight into ourselves.  I like the idea of “Holy Mindfulness”.  We pay attention to what we are doing, whether obedient or disobedient to God’s law of love, without judgement.  It does not mean we do not evaluate what we are doing, but we don’t punish ourselves for it.

            Instead, to give an example, if a friend comes to us with good news and we find that it does not so much fill us with joy but anger and frustration, a mindful consideration would be to look at our reaction, especially because it doesn’t ‘fit’.  Maybe we are jealous.  Maybe we are covetous-we wanted what they got.  The holy portion comes in our recognition of our need for God’s forgiveness, for the Spirit to work in us to shift away from that kind of reaction.  This is a deliberate cooperation with God’s sanctification of our lives.  We pay attention, we confess, we are forgiven, we work more to follow Christ’s example.

            To be fair to St. Ignatius, the endpoint to such a process of deliberate mindfulness seems to be his ideal of “Holy Indifference”.  Doing good till it becomes second nature.  But to me, this sounds like something that will not be fulfilled until we are united with Christ in the life to come.

            To look around is to see the arrogant ones, the blowhards, the people who act like they are better than everybody else.  It could be that fame or fortune or even faith has made their heads swell.  That’s what Jesus was pointing out to the crowd.  Jesus is NOT saying that we should not work hard, nor go after our dreams, nor strive to be the best-not in the goals of our life or our faith.  Be great, but don’t be a jerk about it.

            Sanctification is not a goal, it’s a process.  Being made holy, it is a process that is integral to our salvation in Jesus Christ.  Humility, humbleness, that is an attitude for success in sanctification.  It does not mean that by being humble, we somehow generate holiness from within.  No, holiness comes from God, remember, in rendering to God what is God’s, in loving God and loving neighbor.  To be humble is to be prepared to take those steps as God lays them before us.  It is to be mindful, to be deliberate, to live a life that is examined.  It fuels a desire to be more like Christ. 

            And frankly, it makes life easier.  We don’t have to fight to ‘live up’ to some expectation or to be ‘the best’ because that is what is expected.  Rather, it is trusting that God has the best intentions for us and setting the stage to most powerfully and wonderfully accept the gifts in the journey of being made more holy, in more completely applying the grace won for us in the death and resurrection of Jesus each day.  Amen.