Scripture: Matthew 7:13-27
We’re starting a new season for our Sunday School, and I was looking through the curriculum recently to get some feel for what the Sunday School themes are for the fall. The curriculum we use actually has a number of resources not just for the children, but for the whole congregation—artwork, poems, Bible studies, and so forth. As I say, I was scanning the material and I came across a writing by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and author Thich Nhat Hanh, who first came to prominence during the Vietnam war era and has subsequently written and lectured widely throughout the world. It went like this:
“Our true home is in the present moment. To live in the present moment is a miracle. The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green Earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now. Peace is all around us—in the world and in nature—and within us—in our bodies and our spirits. Once we learn to touch this peace, we will be healed and transformed. It is not a matter of faith; it is a matter of practice.”
It was that last sentence that caught my attention, not the part about living in the present moment so much—that’s a subject all to itself and could be a sermon for another time—but this time it was the part about how “it’s not a matter of faith; it’s a matter of practice”. This, by the way, is one of the ways I choose sermon topics. There is hardly a week that goes by where I don’t encounter something that brings me up short, makes me stop and think, or examine myself, or ask a question. And sometimes those little encounters become sermons, as this one did. I wasn’t looking for a sermon particularly. I just encountered Thich Nhat Hanh and he didn’t let go of me, so I figured I had to preach on what he said, which I sort of understood and sort of didn’t. So I guess that means that what I have to say may turn out to be sort of understandable or sort of not. You can tell me later.
Anyway: “It’s not a matter of faith. It’s a matter of practice.” In religion-speak, when we’re speaking in the language of churchly things, or maybe just broadly spiritual matters, we are apt to say that a whole lot depends on faith. Faith is a good thing to have, sometimes a necessary thing. You take things on faith, you go into projects with an attitude of faith, you act in good faith, you keep the faith, you do all sorts of things with faith, and although we can talk—and maybe I will a bit in the coming weeks—about what faith is, we usually talk about it as though it’s a good thing to have, that it has something to do with approaching things with a proper attitude, or that its good for the well-being of the soul. We talk as though a whole lot of things are indeed matters of faith, so when Thich Nhat Hanh wrote that “it’s not a matter of faith”, it caught my attention. Why not? What’s not a matter of faith? What does he mean by this faith that it’s not a matter of? And then, of course, what does he mean by practice? What is this thing that he thinks it is a matter of?
The first thought that crossed my mind was the whole issue of hypocrisy, the idea that it’s not so much a matter of what you say but of what you do, the importance of practicing what you preach, walking the walk, not just talking the talk, all that sort of thing. It seems to me that’s sort of a natural thought to have. “It’s not a matter of faith. It’s a matter of practice.” might likely have something to do with the gap between what we say and what we do. It’s a pretty common human failing after all—and a pretty serious one. Jesus, lover of humanity, lover of individual sinful human beings, was not above calling people hypocrites on more than one occasion. In this morning’s reading, which comes from the sermon on the mount, Jesus’ sort of keynote address for his ministry, in which he calls the poor and the grieving and the merciful people blessed and tells us to pray the words of the Lord’s prayer, in this reading he doesn’t use the word hypocrite but he might as well. It’s all about, as you heard, trees that bear fruit because that’s what they were meant to do, and about people who do the word of God and not just hear it or talk about how great it is or profess what great believers they are. In other places, he said the same thing and called it hypocrisy. It bothered him, to put it mildly. It bothers us—when we see it in other people, and probably most of all if we should chance to see it in ourselves. Anyone with a reasonable healthy conscience will be quite bothered if they see that they have been professing one thing and doing something else, or failing to live out something that they said they believed in. That’s not a hard concept, and maybe that’s what Thich Nhat Hanh had in mind.
But I’m not so sure. I have a kind of dissenting opinion about hypocrisy anyway, at least what I believe is the over-simplified version of it. I’m not so sure but what a little hypocrisy is not such a bad thing, in fact a good thing. Any idea we have for ourselves, any standard of behavior we set for ourselves, any idea of goodness or what it may mean for you or me in our own eyes to be a good person, any such notion that is worth having is going to be something we will fail to live up to. If it is my ideal for myself that I would like to speak and act in a loving way in every situation no matter what, I know at the beginning that I will fail. If my ideal is only that I will act in a loving way when I’m in the right frame of mind to do so and the situation makes it easy for me to do so, then that’s not an ideal that in my mind is very much worth having. The one that is worth having is one I know I will not live up to. So if there is a certain gap between what we profess on the one hand and what we do on the other, if there is a gap between what we are striving for on the one hand and who we really are on the other, not only is this something we don’t need to particularly beat ourselves up for, it is in fact a healthy thing. A little bit of the right kind of hypocrisy is a good thing.
I know Jesus wasn’t talking about this when he called people hypocrites and ranted about trees not bearing fruit. He was talking about people who liked to make a show of their religion, pretending that it is important to them when it really isn’t so much. In the lead-in to the Lord’s Prayer, he said, “And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so they can be seen by others…” Hypocrisy was not only a question of whether you practice what you preach but the difference between something that was more of an outward thing versus something that is firmly and deeply embedded in your life. And that all leads me to take a little bit of a further look at what Jesus might have been getting at and also what Thich Nhat Hanh might have been getting at.
Practice is a word that has lots of meanings. When we say that someone is a practicing Catholic, let’s say, or a practicing Jew, we usually mean, I think, that they attend church, and maybe that they engage in certain other practices that go along with their faith. A practicing Catholic in the old days, would have meant someone who not only went to mass but who went to confession and didn’t eat meat on Fridays. Nowadays maybe it’s a little easier to be a practicing Catholic. A practicing Jew is someone who not only attends synagogue on weekends but who keeps the holidays, keeps a kosher kitchen, things like that. To put it negatively, a non-practicing Catholic or Jew is someone who has been brought up in that environment and maybe has Catholicism or Judaism in their blood or in their bones, but doesn’t do any of the things associated with that any more, doesn’t even go to church probably, or synagogue.
It occurs to me to ask myself: is there such a thing as a non-practicing member of the United Church of Christ? Is there anything there not to practice? To our credit, we don’t necessarily think we are practicing our faith by going to church, or at least we think there is a lot more to it than that. We are as likely to think that the practice of our faith depends more on what happens when we are not in church. This is more the hypocrisy factor I was talking about. Church is for preaching and professing and singing and standing and praying. Then we leave here and find out whether we’re going to practice what we were preaching and singing and praying about.
And that’s all well and good. That’s a legitimate way to look at things. But there’s also this question of whether there is some specific ritual or activity that would be a practice of our faith, something more than making a good honest effort to do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with God in all that we do in our daily lives. That’s important. In the end we all know it’s the most important thing. But this other is a real question and one that challenges me. I think immediately of two examples, one historical, one personal.
The historical one is about John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. Somewhere in my studies I remember reading about John Wesley. Some people lead orderly lives, and John Wesley was apparently one of them. Some people do not lead very ordered lives. I am one of them, and so I remember being in awe, or maybe it was aghast, when I learned what John Wesley’s life was like. He had a very strict regimen every day, a timetable that he followed, religiously as it were. Christianity, he felt, had come to be a pretty casual affair in his day, and he wanted people to take it more seriously, and he was not a hypocrite so he began by doing this himself. I don’t remember the exact details but it went something pretty much like this. He got up at 4 in the morning, prayed from 4 to 5, 5 to 5:30 had something to eat, 5:30 to 6:00 read the scriptures, 6 to 7 wrote, 7 to 8 family time including prayers, 8 to 9 took a walk, 9 to 10 led morning worship at church, 10 to 11 visited the sick, 11 to 12 played with the children, and so on throughout the day—every day. Some people might call this a disorder. For Wesley it was his way of being sure that his faith was firmly embedded in the way he lived his life, so that he could never forget who he was. The groups Wesley was active in forming were encouraged to be methodical in that same way, and thus they came to be called Methodists. Now there are the John Wesley’s of the world and there are the rest of us, and the world needs all of us. I’m not suggesting Christians all need to be John Wesleys. I would never make it. But I do ask myself what it is in my life that serves on a regular, daily, consistent basis to remind me of my Christian identity, or to use a more inclusive term, what do I do, what is my practice that reminds me consistently of my “child-of-God-ness”? That it seems to me is a legitimate question to ask myself, an important question to ask myself, and one that I’m not sure I have a good enough answer for, even though I make my living in the church. That’s why I said somewhat tongue in cheek that I wasn’t sure whether there was anything in the UCC not to practice. We don’t have a practice that embeds our faith in our daily lives, the way keeping kosher might for a Jew for instance. But the real issue, of course, is not the UCC. In the end, whether there is something that functions like kosher customs do for Jews, or not. It is up to each of us whether there are practices in our lives that remind us of who we are.
Another example. For me as a white person, whether I am serious about fighting racism is measured partly, in fact to a large extent, by whether I exercise the option I have—because I am white—the option I have not to think about racism except when it seems convenient for me to do so. If I exercise that option then my belief in racial justice has not become a matter of practice, a daily part of my life. I may do good things now and again, even fairly often, but it remains to become a part of my practice, and until it does, I have a ways to go.
And of course I do have a ways to go, as a person who believe in racial justice, as a Christian, as a child of God, as someone who feels charged with the words of Ysaye Barnwell in the choir’s anthem this morning. It is partly my job to “keep hope alive”, and I will do that not by waking up in the morning feeling optimistic about the state of the world but by being intentional about building in to my life words and thoughts and actions that are hopeful, just as I need in a very intentional way to build in to my life words and thoughts and actions that are faithful and that aim at justice. I don’t, I’m afraid, have any program to propose in this regard—for you, or for me. But I do take it to be my task as a person of faith. And I’ll be working on it. Amen.
Jim Bundy
September 19, 2004