Integrity and Hypocrisy
By Charles Rush
April 3, 2011
Luke 22: 39-51 and Luke 22: 54-62
[ Audio
(mp3, 7.7Mb) ]
rhaps you've heard “This American Life” some Saturday on National Public Radio and the host, Ira Glass, covering some offbeat story that you can't stop listening to, even though you are sitting in the parking lot at Home Depot. At the very beginning of the show Ira would say something like this.
“The Gospel story:
Act 1- A baby
is born in the midst of a people under occupation; circumstances mysterious but
very hopeful that ordinary people are players too; the world is full of
goodness and possibility; life is such a wonderful gift, we give our friends
and family gifts too.
Act 2- The baby
is a man now; teaches important spiritual lessons about life
Act 3- The
stuff of our adult lives. Challenges. Betrayal. Resolve. Why are we like this? We don't know. We just are.”
My wife had a
childhood friend who had another sister and another brother, all of them pretty
successful in life. They raise their families, one of
them divorces and remarries, sort of. It is not clear if they actually filed
the paperwork. They move away from each other and develop lives of their own. For
a variety of reasons, they stop doing vacations together, but they keep
communication going via the internet.
Mom and Dad
become older and one of them needs some nursing support, so the entire family
agrees that the best thing to do is sell the house and have Mom and Dad move
into an assisted living facility. Everyone helps with the move, they get the
house sold, and the three kids decide that the middle child, the brother should
probably manage the money since middle brother has the business training from
the University up east and has had the career in finance. He's been in and out
of work, it is true, but so are a lot of people in that field that are in and
out of work- and he has a pretty whopping abode which suggests that the down
times have been amply offset by the up times.
Things go along
for several years when suddenly the healthy parent dies, pretty much out of the
blue. So the older sister Sheila goes immediately to be with the other parent
and begin to think through the funeral and what comes next.
She is only
there for a couple of days and she is going through the mail, a box of other
mail, trying to make sure that they have all those papers you need. She's
looking through the mail, including financial statements from the bank and the
investment brokers that her brother has been using to manage their parents
money. Long story short, it becomes patently obvious that her brother has been
making rather generous withdrawals on their parents account. In a few short
years, he has pocketed half of the estate, tens of thousands at a time on a
fairly regular schedule.
It turns out
that his under-employment the past few years was more like un-employment. She
found herself re-playing phone conversations in her mind with him in the past
few years. Was it cocaine again at mid-life after a couple decades straight?
What is that? How could it come to this for someone so able when they were young?
What is going on?
And what do you
do with it? Do you tell your aging, feeble parent? Do you and your sister make
him pay it back when it will probably mean he'll have to sell his house,
possibly the only actual asset he has? Do you do the ‘tough love' routine and
call the cops and let the chips fall where they will? Or, in the mean-time,
maybe you just call Kate who will ask Chuck?
There is just
the sheer incredulity of it all? What was he thinking? Did he think he would
pay it back? Was he that desperate that he would steal from Mom and Dad? Do I
really actually know him at all? How is it going to go at the funeral? Do you
talk to him ever again? Is he a pathetic loser or in real need of basic help
that you didn't notice? As the African proverb puts it, “You can out-distance
that which is running after you, but not what is running inside of you.” It is
a complicated thing but Solzhenitsyn was right, when he said, “The line
separating good and evil passes …right through every human heart.”
People always
ask that question, “How could you?” How could you betray the people you love? Your family? The Bernie Madoff question…
What is up with
Peter? He's been with Jesus for three years. He is part of the team. He is on
the inside. He's been absorbing the spiritual message. He's been brought along.
And in the moment of conflict, when the Romans are about to arrest Jesus, he
not only takes off, he deserts the movement.
“I don't him”
Peter will later say.
“Dammit, I don't know him.”
“I said I don't
know him.”
I guess he
doesn't know him???
Peter was afraid.
Let's be clear about one thing, you would be too. I would be too. The Roman
army was fearful and they did not care if you screamed all night.
But what do you
do with people that collapse like that? Tough call isn't it? Because
we do collapse from time to time. We sure do.
I had a couple that
wanted to add a phrase to their vows. They'd had both been married before, so I
was curious about this request. They had both grown through their failures and
they had learned some things for the second go at it. So they included the
usual. “I Michael take you Abbey to be my wife to have and to hold from this
day forward, for better for worse, for richer and poorer, in sickness and in
health”… And then they added this line, “when I am proud of you, when I am
ashamed of you”, to love and to cherish, as long as we both shall live.”
I thought to
myself, gutsy and realistic because you may well find yourself ashamed and
disappointed with your spouse. In fact, you probably will.
Someone asked
me a thoughtful question a few years ago, ‘what have you learned about
marriages that succeed that you probably wouldn't have expected to be true?
What is it that surprised you?' I could have answered a few things but what I
actually said was ‘how important it is that your spouse respects you, as you
grow along together.' You don't have to be perfect but it really helps if your
character is converging as you approach and transcend middle age. If your
spouse's respect for you starts eroding around that time instead, then the
other symptoms of distress that you identify pale in comparison. I'm not
totally surprised but I'd never thought about it until I listened to enough
people describe the great unraveling and respect comes up more often than I
would have imagined.
No we don't
want that. We want to partner with people that will point us towards our higher
Angel. We want to be converging, growing, becoming
somewhat more whole. We are all works in progress but the truth is that our life is all about soul formation. It is about
becoming substantive. And our life with God, make no mistake, has that
dimension of God telling us, “I take you for my child when I am proud of you,
when I am ashamed of you.” But how much better our lives go when we have a
spouse that keeps us grounded like that, when they keep us on the higher path,
the profounder path, the way that leads towards integrity…
That is why we
make those big vows in marriage. It is not just because your love is so special
that- kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss- that I just can't
believe it. Of course, your romance is wonderful. And it is also true that your
project will succeed only after both of you have had
many personal, hurtful failures, and mutually you turn again towards
reconciliation and growth. It is also true that some of these will be the
biggest personal challenges of your life because most of our troubling demons
only get expressed under stress in our most intimate relationships. But that is
who we are, not the airbrushed image we can fairly easily control in our
vocations or at parties. We do fail. We hurt. We have to deal with that and
make it right.
And for all
those difficult challenges, we can look to Jesus. In our passage, Jesus knows
that he is in the deep weeds, there was no mistake
about that. Jesus knew that he would be arrested in all likelihood. He knew
what that probably meant, the Romans were just crystal
clear like that. They nailed their dissidents to crosses and hung them outside
the city gates, so that every week, you could have a visceral reminder of the
price of ‘free speech'. You didn't need clairvoyant powers to see the likely
future here.
He prays, “Not
my will, but thine.” I know what I would like to do.
I know what I need to do, what I have to do. This is not just about me, it is about something bigger than that. I have to commit
myself to the higher way, to God's way, the way of integrity, the more
difficult path but, ultimately, the only path that is actually really real.
Atticus Finch
put it like this in “To Kill a Mockingbird” “Before I can live with other folks
I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by
majority rule is a person's conscience.” Sometimes you have something big
enough to address that you have to have the deeper resolve to face it.
We start developing
resolve early in life, praying before a big exam, praying for your nerves, to
focus on the game when the stands are full of fans and that nervous energy is
overwhelming you. These challenges may just be games, but o kids they are
important at the time.
I see it occasionally
at weddings. With some regularity, I'm standing around with the groom and,
shortly before the beginning of the service, I can
tell that he is suddenly thinking, “what am I doing?” And he needs a word of
prayer because he knows he is over his head.
Parents have
that moment, sometimes walking around the hospital or driving home, after the
birth of a child. What a great blessing and you make a vow, a commitment. You
know that to get this project right, it will take more than you actually have
at the moment you know you need divine help to make it materialize on time. You
call up the deeper well of resolve.
And I can tell
you from my brief experience in politics that when you step into a big job like
being a Congressman, a Senator, a Governor even the guys with big egos and
self-confidence have a moment with as much sincerity as they have in them that
says, “Would you pray for me because this is much bigger than I realize and I
know that…” Of course, authentic leaders in every field think like that, live
like that. You have to tap into a deeper commitment and resolve. You know that you are
responsible for a broader vision. Not
just my will….
And most of us
here will have something that comes at us during our life, some moral challenge
that is difficult, some social movement that catches us up and in a short
amount of time, without the luxury of complete information, we have to act. You
don't have to look for your cause. In the world that we live in, the cause will
find you.
Think of the
citizens of Egypt, Tunisia and now every single country in the Middle East. Before that the Sudan, Rwanda, Bosnia, Tibet, Burma, The Ukraine, Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Russia.
And this is just the past 20 years.
These social
movements come to you with a very personal moral question. Most of us remember
our lives recalling the way that we responded to these moral issues. We know
that they force us to actualize our character, we have to take a stand for the
fundamental things that we believe in, and our families are watching, the
younger generation is watching, our friends are watching. We don't want to
compromise here. We don't want to screw this up.
In the case of
Jesus, as is often the case in extreme situations, we know that taking a stand
is going to come at the price of being attacked, of having to endure injustice,
perhaps violence and inhumanity, almost always ridicule and character
assassination by some opponent. But sometimes you just have to do it. You have
to pray the prayer of Admiral Chester Nimitz, “God grant me the courage not to
give up what I think is right even though I think it is hopeless.” As my
grandfather used to say to me, “Son the time is always right to do the right
thing.”
You have to call
on that deeper resolve. In our story, it is said that Jesus prayed so hard, he
sweated drops of blood. What a metaphor but sometimes we get to these moments
and we know that there is no real way out, except to go through them, possibly
even unto death but we can face all manner of hardship and pain if we are
filled with moral/spiritual purpose. It is one of the highest expressions of
the human spirit. It is transcendent. In our time, on our watch, we want that
integrity and authenticity in our lives.
We are a
curious mixture of the sublime and the petty, the profound and the compromised.
Why are we like this? We don't know. We just are. We are capable of heroic
self-sacrificial acts of moral purpose. We can be fearful, weak, and in the
middle of the night, under threat, just decide to cover our ass and be done
with it.
And this is
where our relationship with God is unlike our relationship with our best friend
or our spouse. With your spouse, with your best friends, with your brother, it
is possible that you can do something so ruinous to the relationship, so
hurtful and filled with betrayal that you lose the relationship. Your spouse
leaves you. Your brother doesn't call you anymore. They can't get by this, not
this time, not anymore. It is over.
But, for better
and worse, God won't let you go. Your life is all about soul formation,
character formation. Even after your worst mishap, even after your family has
unraveled and your marriage has unraveled. Even if you move across the country
and start a new life, your life is still about soul formation. We have to live
with ourselves, in our triumphs and with all our failures too and, hopefully
beat a new path towards redemption.
When we were
just young, after one of our first fights, Kate said that she was sorry, I said that I was sorry and both of us were just
standing there, still in college at the time. She said to me, “What are we
going to do now?”
I looked down
at the ground and said, “We are going to pick up the broken pieces of our lives
and figure out a way to go on.” She laughed. I laughed. The fight wasn't
serious.
We still say it
to each other, mostly for a smile. But by now, sometimes thinking of real
hardships endured by our friends or real tragedies that have beset our
families, it is said with some poignancy. And I genuinely hope that neither of
us has to say it with a literal application needed. But I know, and you know,
that we all probably will. So we read this story together about challenges,
betrayal, resolve- the stuff of our adult lives.
And we remember
the point: that our lives are all about soul formation through our friends, our
families, our spouses, our community, our world. Wherefore, as the writer of
Hebrews puts it, “seeing as how we are surrounded by this great cloud of models
we can learn from, let us also gather up every vice and failure that have beset
us, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to
Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who
had integrity of purpose to face even the cross, and endure the ridicule of the
crowd, and through such trial to become honored by God and sit at God's right
hand.” Amen.
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