Matthew 23:1-12

Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’s seat; therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it, but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others, but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them. They do all their deeds to be seen by others, for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long. They love to have the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and to have people call them rabbi.

But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers and sisters. And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father, the one in heaven. Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah. The greatest among you will be your servant. All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.

Sermon Text

It is easy to have high expectations. Despite the constant thrum of disappointment that characterizes our mortal lives, there are still ideals that we strive towards at all times. These ideals naturally produce an expectation of how the world should be, and when someone or something fails to meet them, we react accordingly. Last week we looked at how attempts to make the world fairer are thwarted by our acceptance of the status quo. On the other side of our pursuit of ideals is the equally dangerous establishment impossible expectations. The Church falls short when it throws up its hands and says that something is impossible, but it also fails when it sets up impossible expectations for those it meets.

The impossible standards we set are often built off of no writ of scripture or proclamation of God, but standards of our own creation. Jesus describes this sort of standard as The Tradition of the Elders, a collection of teachings – perhaps formal or perhaps colloquial – that were made to help people live out a Godly life. Jesus, and the Church following him, has never been opposed to traditions or standards outside of scripture. In fact, you will never find a Church or a denomination that does not have them. For we Methodists we have the General Rules, often summarized by their three subheadings – Do Good, Do No Evil, and Attend to the Ordinances of God. Beyond that we have the Book of Discipline which accounts for our broader perspectives.

Whether it is the Catholic Catechism or the Book of Discipline that guides a Christian through their life, these traditions are common, and most of the time they serve a person well. The Book of Discipline has many well thought out stances on a variety of issues and our general rules offer insight into how we can live a Godly life in every imaginable way. The danger of any standard, however, is that we can quickly replace the high calling that God has given us with a far lower and more precarious one that we have written for ourselves.

The contradiction of Jesus’s call to all people is that we should be, “Perfect as our Father in Heaven is perfect,” but that this call is such that, “[his] yoke is easy and [his] burden is light.” That contradiction is quickly fixed when we realize what makes the difference between the expectations Jesus sets forth and the one’s that we put on others. Jesus, without fail, helps the people that he calls to action. When someone takes on the yoke of faith, when they bear the burden of the cross, they find that Jesus is strengthening them in their pursuit of what is right. Jesus lived a human life and died a human death so that every step of the way we would have a God who knew what we were dealing with and how to help us.

The problem with the expectations set forward by people and organizations is that they are sometimes made with an outcome in mind without any consideration for process. I think of those who look at those struggling with addiction and say they just need to, “Get their act together.” Easy to say, the destination is clear, but how in the world are they going to get there? Only by people walking alongside them, only by a community working with them through it all, will most individuals make it through recovery. We can apply this dichotomy to many aspects of our life, essentially anytime we say “Why don’t they just…” We can usually turn the conversation back on ourselves. “What have I done to support them in…”

Jesus describes the leaders of his day as being worth listening to when they teach. The specific image of them, “Sitting in the seat of Moses,” connects them as teachers of God’s word. Pharisees especially were the closest thing that the ancient world had to a local pastor, teaching the town or neighborhood they lived in how to live as God calls them to. Despite Jesus’s criticism of these leaders, they were not trouble by default. Like any minister, they had taken on a huge amount of responsibility, and with that responsibility comes a need to strive toward excellence. As ministers, when you fall short… Well, you are gonna get some flak.

The teaching which Jesus gives his disciples is focused mainly on the status of people in leadership, but I think any lesson from leaders is a lesson for all people. Jesus here asks that we never hold an expectation for someone that we are not willing to contribute toward. If we want someone to treat us well, we better treat them well too! If we want someone to act a certain way then we better meet our own standards of conduct! If the Church was given a quarter for every time that someone said they wanted something to change in the world and then turned around and did the thing they claim to hate, then there would never be a ministry that wasn’t funded in full.

The digital age has given a wonderful window into the innate hypocrisy of our expectations. So many people talking about how the world is full of people who are disrespectful and do not know how to conduct themselves, and then comment every chance they can to trash talk their supposed enemies. They talk about how those people are so divisive and causing so much trouble and then do nothing with their free time but talk about all those people and how the world would be better if they would just disappear. The simple fact is that high expectations have to be met with equally high willingness to help people succeed – and genuine help, not just snide comments!

I once preached a sermon, in the aftermath of the El Paso shooting of August 2019, in which I said that there was a need for all people to actively work against the racism that motivated the shooting. That in a world where hate is so common, we cannot be neutral in the face of it. A man from my congregation came to the parsonage to meet with me and told me how he was not at all racist, but… That was the loudest “But,” ever spoken. He told me how he thought everyone should know English if they lived here, that blacks in the city were the real problem in this world, and so many other things that he firmly believed were ideas about what was right and wrong.

I listened intently and then asked him a question. “How are you going to help them?” He was confused, because he thought I was going to start a fight with him or something, but I was earnestly interested. You want people to learn English, so how are you going to help programs that teach immigrants English? You think that blacks in the intercity have problems unique to their context, so how are you going to help programs in those cities that work to strengthen neighborhoods and alleviate poverty? Point by point, I took each expectation he held up about those people and asked him to apply it to himself. You want all this to happen, how are you going to do anything to make it possible?

In our day to day it is not usually anything so dramatic. We want our spouse to listen more attentively to us, but do we listen to them? We want our children and young people to respect us, but do we treat them like people or objects? Our coworkers who can be difficult or the neighbor who always seems to be doing everything they can to annoy us, how are we working to love them even in the midst of their difficult personalities? The list can go on and on, but at the end of it all we are people striving to do the right thing, no matter when and how that presents itself.

The high call of the Christian life necessitates that we work our hardest to walk the walk as much as we talk the talk. That can be hard, but it is infinitely preferable to a life lived half-way between virtue and vice. When we say we care about a person or a cause, we need to follow that up with action of some kind. Sometimes we cannot donate money, but we probably have a bit of time. If we do not have time or ability, then we can at least offer our prayers. The thing that should be true of us all is that with every passing day we grow more compassionate, more grace-filled, and more like Christ. We do that through practice, and the best thing to start practicing are the things we preach everyday. Let us walk the narrow path of goodness together. – Amen.