What Would Jesus Say About Authenticity?

Rev. Dr. Christopher Carlson

I heard a story about a woman of wealth and social prominence.  She decided to have a book written about her genealogy.  Well a well-known author was engaged for the assignment and as he did his research, he discovered that one of her grandfathers was a murderer who had been electrocuted in Sing Sing.  When he said this would have to be included, she begged him to find someway of saying it that would hide the truth.  So when the book appeared the incident read as follows:  One of her grandfathers occupied the chair of applied electricity in one of America’s best known institutions.  He was very much attached to his position and literally died in the harness.  It seems that all of us in one way or another, on a scale of one to ten for sure, are into image management in the things that we say and the things that we do.  We want people to think well of us.  We want them to think certain things about us.  Over the last few weeks I have been preaching through the Sermon on the Mount, answering the question What Would Jesus Say About certain things.  We’ve talked about Happiness; we’ve talked about Relationships; we’ve talked about the Law; and today, it’s Authenticity, being real, being true.  The opposite of authenticity, of course, is hypocrisy, or the idea of play acting, comes from that Greek word that was used in the Greek theater.  In the passage today we find Jesus talking about hypocrisy.  He uses three religious acts, though the issue is really bigger than these acts; but you find him talking about doing good and praying and acts of personal worship, and his example is fasting.  But it’s a bigger issue of worship.  What is Jesus saying about what it really means to be a follower of him, a real follower?  Listen to these words again from Matthew, we’ve heard them before, they’re familiar to us; but listen to them with the ears of authenticity. (Matthew 6:1-18)

            “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.

            “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men.  I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full.  But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen.  Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.  And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

            This then, is how you should pray:

            “ ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed by your name,

            your kingdom come, your will be done

            on earth as it is in heaven.

            Give us today our daily bread.

            Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.

            And lead us not into temptation

            But deliver us from the evil one.’

            “For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.  But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.

            “When you fast, do not look somber as the hypocrites do, for they disfigure their faces to show men they are fasting.  I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full.  But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that it will not be obvious to men that you are fasting, but only to your Father, who is unseen; and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”

This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Would you pray with me?

Father you are unseen but you are very real.  In these words today that we hear, help us to know more what it means to be real in your faith and with you and with others. Be authentic to not play act, to not seek and desire the praise of human beings, but to seek the praise that comes from you.  We pray these things in Jesus’ name.  Amen.

Do you know what the biggest sin is for people outside the church, what they would consider the worst thing you could do?  I’m asking the question and I know it might be a little bit of an exaggeration but what would that be?  Well I believe it is hypocrisy.  If you ask someone outside the church what the biggest sin is, it would be hypocrisy, play acting, not being real.  Those of you who are part of my generation might remember the phrase that was often used, “It’s got to be real, man; I mean really far out, man.  It’s got to be real.”  Some of you might remember that, but you know it’s all the same in every generation.  You know the basic desire of human beings is for truth, for something they can trust, for something that can really make a difference.  We all want that.  God has made us that way.  Now it gets a little bit perverted.  I’ve actually heard people say “I may cheat on my wife but I’m honest about it.”  I’ve actually heard that.  Now that’s a little bit messed up but at the same time it does express a desire for people to be real.  That’s what the subject is today.  Jesus has been telling us what it’s like to live the kingdom life, His kingdom.  The basic message that we have talked about is that it’s what’s on the inside that counts.  It is no different from chapter six, which we are entering now, than from chapter 5.  It’s what’s on the inside that counts, not how we dress up on the outside.  Jesus is saying we are not to be hypocrites.  Now hypocrisy is that special kind of lie that is more than what we do with our mouth, it is what we do with our lives, because people look at that more than they hear what we say.  Jesus is saying we are to be real, to be authentic in our faith.  Then he chooses as an example for us the Pharisees.  Now scholars, some scholars, have said the Pharisees have gotten a bad rap because Jesus sort of paints this picture of them as just being crazy.  Well that’s probably right to some degree.  Not all of the Pharisees were hypocrites.  Some of them were very sincere.  Most of them were sincere in what they were doing; but they were doing it in a way that was confused.  Jesus, in some sense, paints a parody of them, at least in the first example he gives is, I think, kind of a parody, when he talks about how people used to have places where they would collect offerings.  He’s painting a picture, a parody, of someone who comes in with trumpeters, “Ta Da!  Here I am!  I’m giving!”  But even if it was a parody they knew exactly what he was saying because whether they had trumpeters or not that’s how they acted.  Then he gives another example of praying, how people would stand in public and pray so people could see them.  Now, I want to say, just an aside, Jesus is not saying, for example, that we shouldn’t do our good things so that no one could see them.  He’s already said “let your light shine before others so that others can see and glorify God.”  It’s really about an attitude, why we’re doing it.  Neither is he saying we shouldn’t pray out loud, but again it’s a question of motivation.  The last example is using fasting, which I really lump together in terms of worship.  His example is these guys would fast so that everybody would know they would look like that character on the Addams Family, Lurch, who looked half-dead, walking around looking like, I think Lurch actually had been dug up; but that’s what they were supposed to look like.  And he is saying don’t look like your somber or just really having a bad day if you have to show up at church, if you had to get up early this morning, even earlier than normal.  That kind of thing.  Jesus is saying we must be authentic.  We must be real.  We must not be like these people who where confused and it really isn’t that they weren’t sincere, they were.  But somewhere along the line they had come to believe that living the faith with God meant keeping all the outward rules, being rule keepers.  Looking good on the outside versus what was on the inside.  They forgot that God is the one who needs to clean up the inside. 

So what does it mean for us to be authentic?  I think first and foremost it means a consistency between what’s on the inside versus what’s on the outside.  There’s a story I read about a pastor’s wife who said to her husband, “I’ve got a great idea.  Why don’t you be grumpy at church and charming at home for a change?”  Obviously something was not quite right there.  So we too must be examples to our children.  So when we say don’t watch something on T.V. and we turn around and watch it ourselves; don’t use these kind of words, and then use it ourselves.  Or you ought to go to church and then go play golf yourself.  I’ve seen that happen, all kinds of things, hundreds of things.  What’s on the inside, do our actions match up?  It means not wearing masks.  I think this is really where the rubber meets the road.  You know this idea of hypocrisy relating to the Greek theater and they would use masks to express what the characters were feeling and the idea of being one thing on the outside and something else on the inside.  But you know we all do it.  We all hide our feelings.  We all hide who we are.  We all wear masks.  It is almost like it is so human that we do it without even thinking about it.  I heard a story about a woman who wrote to a magazine about her daughter who is a sergeant in the Army.  The daughter called up her mother and said “Mom we’ve been out in the field for six weeks doing intense training and we are not allowed to wear makeup.  I’ve met someone who I’d like to get to know better but he doesn’t know what I really look like.”  I’m not against makeup, by the way; but we all do it, we’re all self-protected.  We don’t want people to see the way we really are; but you know what?  People really do see us the way we really are.  What they do is, they’re too polite to tell us.  I’ve probably told you this story before.  I took a year off in the pastorate and went to the counseling school.  One of the things they did to us is put us in a group setting and we each got a turn being on the hot seat.  That meant that we all sat around and told that person on the hot seat how they impacted us, what they’re really like.  Some of it wasn’t pretty.  What I learned from that experience was that all the things I went through to try to hide what I really was, didn’t do any good because they saw me.  They saw me.  And we see each other.  We know what we’re like.  We’re just too polite to tell.  Some of it is quite good but some of it is not so hot.  I’m not saying we should sit around say, “I got you.” “I got you.” “I got you.”  But we all wear masks.  I think that part of the goal of being a Christian is to take off the mask gradually, because our self-esteem, who we really are, doesn’t rest in what other people think of us.  It doesn’t matter what people think of us in the end.  It only matters what God thinks.  God knows every bit of you and me and he still loves you.  So in a sense it really doesn’t matter anymore for the mask to come off.  Too often in Christian churches we’re into looking good, pretending that it’s all O.K.  And it isn’t sometimes.  We need to take the masks off. 

Authenticity means knowing our real audience.  I told this story before but I really do like to tell it.  It is about a young boy who was a football player and he wasn’t very good.  He never got to play.  But one day he came up to his coach and said “Coach, I need to play today.”  “Yeah, that’s O.K.  Maybe later.”  Well the game went on and he kept coming up to the coach, “Coach, you’ve got to put me in.  Please put me in.”  Now, I’m a football player and believe me coaches don’t like for you to do that.  But he kept doing it anyway.  Finally they got ahead enough and they put the boy in and he was an explosion on the field, made tackles, made catches, did all kind of things.  The coach said “What happened?”  And the boy said, “My father died today, and he was blind and he saw me play for the first time.”  We have a Father that we play for and He is the only one who’s important and He’s our God.  Now, I’m not saying that we don’t live our lives trying to please others.  Obviously that’s not very practical.  We have to please our bosses.  We need to please our spouses.  We need to please our children.  We need to please a lot of people but it’s really a matter of who’s first.  Just like the Pharisees, we need not get confused about what’s primary.  It was O.K. to keep rules but they made that the first thing when it was really the second.  And we do the same.  We make pleasing others first; pleasing ourselves first.  God’s out there somewhere.  God is the audience.  It’s a great way to think about how we make decisions.  It is not necessarily what would Jesus do, but what would Jesus think?  Would God be pleased by this? 

Authenticity means playing for the Father.  It also means understanding the truth.  I’ll ask you one more question.  If you were to describe a one word description of God, what would it be?  For most people it would be love.  God is love.  That would be true.  But there might be another word that’s even more important and that is in itself, truth.  It’s interesting that in the bible Jesus nowhere is described as love. But he is described as “the way, the truth and the life.”  Eighty-eight times he says in one way or another, “I tell you the truth,” because there is a sense in which human beings need truth more than they need love.  I think that’s why as I said earlier that the folks outside the church think hypocrisy is the greatest sin in some ways.  Because we are all looking for what is true.  We judge every relationship we’re in by truth.  We are always trying to sniff out lies, even with our family members, even if we’ve been married thirty years, we can always tell, in particularly then, if our spouse is not telling the truth.  We want what’s real.   When people come and judge us here, they visit us.  They’re looking for, not just love; it’s interesting that most visitors don’t really want you to hover around them too much.  They don’t want to be over loved, at least initially.  But what they are looking for is what’s real; what’s true.  Does something strike them in the deepest part of their soul as being real?  God is looking for truth.  Authenticity is about truth and truth about ourselves.

Max Lucado tells a story about how when he was a missionary in Rio de Janeiro, he and his family went on a vacation and he thought he was unplugging his radio; but as he left he actually unplugged the freezer that was full of food.  So you can imagine, a hundred degree weather, seven days later, what was inside.  Needless to say when they opened the freezer they had kind of a moving experience.  But he goes on and tells this silly parody in his book called The Applause of Heaven and he says “What is the best way to clean out a rotten refrigerator?”  He says “I knew exactly what to do.  I got a rag and a bucket of soapy water and began cleaning the outside of the appliance.  I was sure that the odor would disappear with a good shine.  But when I opened the door the freezer was revolting.  No problem, I thought.  This freezer needs some friends.  So I threw a party.  I invited all the appliances from the neighborhood kitchens.  It was a great party.  Everybody played Pin the Plug in the Socket; had a few laughs about limited warranties.  I was sure the social interactions would cure the inside of my freezer; but I was wrong.  I opened it up and the stink was even worse.  I had an idea.  I gave the freezer some status.  I bought a Mercedes sticker and stuck it on the door.  I put a Save the Whales bumper sticker on the rear; installed a cellular phone on the side.  This freezer was classy; it was stylish; it was cool.  I splashed it with cologne and gave it a credit card for clout. “You might just make the cover of Popular Mechanics” I told it.  It blushed.  Then I opened it and expected to find a clean inside; but what I saw was a putrid, stinky, repulsive interior.  The bible says some very unpopular things about human beings.  It says that the heart is desperately wicked and we need to be cleaned from the inside out.  The Pharisees made the mistake of thinking if they just got their act together on the outside, they would be clean on the inside and they were very sincere about it.  But the more they did that, the more they tried to please other people on the outside and they became hypocrites.  Now we should study them and Jesus uses them for a good reason, because they were the church-going folks.  If you were to make a modern equivalent between ancient times and now, who would be the Pharisees?  We are the religious folks.  Sometimes we make the same mistake in thinking, “Gosh if I just clean up the outside, I’m going to be great.”  And God says “No.  It starts from the inside out”.  Well, how do we do that?  Well it’s interesting to me that in this particular passage you have the four ways that God uses to clean up and really begin doing it.  We really begin doing it by drawing closer to God.  You might say “He says that every week.”  “Well, Yeah!”  The formula is pretty easy.  It’s the doing it that’s hard.  He starts with doing good things.  He says “Don’t let your acts of righteousness be seen before men.” But it is acts of righteousness.  You know one of the ways to draw close to God is to go out and visit someone who’s lonely, like in a nursing home; or serve in a soup kitchen; or listen to a friend who is hurting; to do something that’s good; or worshipping God, either publicly or privately; or to really learn how to pray.  Most of us don’t know how to pray.  Praying is hard work.  And last but not least, Jesus talks about forgiving others as God has forgiven us.  You know, we like to brush over this, but it says very clearly if you don’t forgive others, God is not going to forgive you.  Now He is not talking about it in an ultimate sense; but it is very clear that if we walk around in resentment and have people we have not forgiven, that we have locked the door and shut God out and he is not going to be able to come in and clean as we need to be cleaned.

I want to encourage you, be real.  You need to draw close to God to become real, to be authentic.   It isn’t just about keeping rules or cleaning the outside.  It’s working on the inside, and the only way we do that is drawing near to our God who loves us so much.  Draw close to God and He will draw close to you.

Let’s pray. 

Father in Heaven, I thank you that you love us so much that despite our sins you have forgiven us and made us your children.  Forgive us for forgetting and getting confused and thinking that just cleaning up on the outside is what’s needed.  Help us to clean up what’s on the inside with your help.  We want to do this Lord.  We want to be real.  We want to be authentic Christians.  Help us, we pray, in Jesus’ name.  Amen.