For You Are All Equal As Brothers and Sisters

February 24, 2016 at Advent Lutheran Church in Cedarburg, Wisconsin. Wednesday evening worship service. Matthew 23:1-12. Humility.

It is abundantly clear that the Gospel lesson for this evening is about the hypocrisy of religion. Jesus, to use a popular expression “levels the playing field” among God’s people when he says;

“But you; do not let anyone call you ‘Rabbi,’ that is, ‘Teacher.’ For you are all equal as brothers and sisters, and you have only one teacher, the Anointed One.”

There are other references and all of them basically say that there is only one God, and that God is the God of all. He counters that by saying that the Pharisees and Scribes occupy the seat of Moses, meaning they most certainly do represent the religion of the people but have become hypocrites in that they parade around as if they were, again to use a modern expression; “Holier than Thou!”

Better than those they have been called to serve. Somehow above them in both stature and status. That’s wrong, says Jesus. They have let this go to their heads. Jesus says this rather clearly and forcefully;

“For you are all equal as brothers and sisters.”

And;

“You have only one father, and He is in heaven.”

The problem is, this flies in the face of everything that popular culture teaches us. It is no secret that we are living in a most tumultuous time of change.

In my lifetime I can honestly not remember a time when our nation was more divided on issues of critical importance to the future of our nation. Having lived through the Vietnam era and the cultural upheaval of the 60’s I see similarities that indeed led to massive paradigm shifts in social policy and the importance of the will of ordinary citizens like you and me.

At that time, I served in the US Army under both a Democrat and Republican President and it was neither political party that ended that devastating war, it was the American people, mothers and fathers sick of their sons and daughters coming home in boxes from what was at best a questionable war.

We dare not forget the lessons of history, because when we forget the past we are most certainly doomed to repeat it. In my relatively short life in the context of human history we have repeated the tragedies of the past over and over again!

Russia keeps saying that the cold war has returned while North Korea is testing its missiles and threatening both South Korea and the United States with declarations of war.

In some very significant ways the international situation and mood is very similar to the 1930’s when attempting to make sense of things militarization of Japan, the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany, the plot to overthrow our own democratically elected President by what were at that time called “RobberBarons,” there are troubling and striking similarities that we dare not overlook and ignore

All of this reminds me of one of the most insightful and helpful books on the subject of human behavior in the context of faith. Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Moral Man& Immoral Society”, in which he discusses how the collective mind and behavior of political groups say and do things that individually we would never think of doing.

The classic example that caused Niebuhr’s work to be crystal clear prophetic was Nazi Germany, that happened after his book was written. Germany was devastated by the First World War and badly needed an infusion of both hope and self-assurance.

Unfortunately, both were restored in the person of Adolph Hitler, at the cost of creating a war machine and extreme in difference to human suffering. After the war, and indeed even during Hitler’s reign there were individuals who saw and reacted to the evil from a perspective of moral and ethical conviction, hence the title of Niebuhr’s seminal work, the Moral Man,who as an individual would never do what is so easy to accomplish collectively.

In simple terms we also call that the Mob Mentality, when otherwise good and moral people find it so very easy to “go with the flow” as we say with often horrific results! One has only to see the documentary movies of when General Eisenhower, after liberating the concentration camps forced ordinary German citizens to literally walk past mass graves and the survivors of what the German Army had done.

At the very heart and core of our human behavior both bad and good are the words of Jesus;

“People who think they are better than others will be made humble. But people who humble themselves will be made great.”

AMEN.