Our church is going through a season of transition right now.  And as I was thinking about all this church transition stuff, it made me think of my old days in my high school's marching band.

Yes, I realize that it's a very odd association.  For those who aren't familiar with marching bands, they're a part of the American football phenomenon, where musical entertainment comes out in the middle of the football game, during half-time, to put on a kind of show.  If it sounds kind of weird, well, that's because it is kind of weird. Even in America, people in marching bands are considered a little bit weird and geeky (and I can only get away with saying this because I used to be one of those weird and geeky people in the marching band!).  But it's tradition, so everyone kind of goes along with it.  Anyway, the way that a marching band performance works is that you've got a group of maybe 50 to 100 musicians (big tuba-like Sousaphones, trumpets, drums, trombones), and they're all marching around on the football field, creating an interesting visual performance while playing their music.  The whole thing basically works with the band morphing from one shape into another.

For instance, maybe they’re doing a half-time show on big Hollywood movie music... They might be playing the theme song from the Pirates of the Carribbean movies, for instance, and then march into the shape of a big pirate ship, as seen from up in the stadium.  And then, maybe they switch into a song from Batman, and then they move around and everybody changes places to make the famous bat symbol.  Or it could be more basic stuff, too -- like circles and diamonds and other geometric shapes... But this is basically how marching bands work.  It’s all timed to the music so that the coolest shapes come out at the most dramatic swells in the music.

But what’s fascinating to me about marching band performances (and what brings me to the analogy that I’m trying to draw out, here) is what they have to teach us about transition.  It’s amazing, if you think about it, that a group of musicians can take the shape of a pirate ship... And then you take the same set of musicians, and they can also take the shape of the Batman symbol... Or a circle, or a diamond, or the word “Ohio” or whatever!  However, if you’re watching a show, and you take any step in the process and select a random freeze frame, it might look like pure chaos.  Like something dumb or demented.  Because there’s really no good, natural segue from a pirate ship to a Batman symbol.  The morph has to be a bit messy.  But just because it’s messy at any given point doesn’t mean that we need to despair.  We can have faith and hope that we’re going to see something big and beautiful when the next swell in the music comes.

This is where our church’s current transitions (primarily related to adaptations in the way that we do small groups) may feel very chaotic at times.  People in our church may feel like, “I haven’t enjoyed good, small-group fellowship for over a month now!”  Or they might feel like they don’t really want to shift from Home Groups to Communities, because they liked the look and feel of Home Groups as they used to be.  Others might feel like they're being left out of the new plans, like there’s no natural point where they're going to fit in when all the dust settles.  It may often feel like “I can’t take all the drama of this church anymore!”  And honestly, I couldn’t blame anybody for feeling frustrated or confused at times!  Because I feel that way sometimes!  If you take any random freeze-frame from these last couple of weeks (or maybe from the next couple of weeks, yet to come), it might look like pure and total chaos!

It’s good to remember that we really sensed God’s leading as we went into these transitions.  We talked about it and prayed about it and talked about it some more, as a Servant Leadership Council (all nine of us).  And ultimately, we made a unanimous decision to move in this direction.  It wasn’t a 5-4 vote, or 7-3, or anything like that.  We all felt God’s leading together, and we did a lot of planning and preparing to make sure that we weren’t hastily jumping into things.  Our current ideas for how to do church may not be perfect -- but they’ve certainly been well thought-out!

And while we may be going through a season of transition, we need to remind ourselves that God is a God of peace, not chaos.  God is the one who created the Earth from its vague, mysterious, primordial soup.  Genesis 1 records how, "The earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.  And God said, 'Let there be light... water... sky... land... vegetation... heavenly bodies... fish... birds... animals... people...' God saw all that he had made, and it was very good."  This is also the same God who brought Israel through a dark period of its history, when the kings deserted the way of the Lord and the people drifted towards idols.  God spoke to Elijah during an especially dark and discouraging season of ministry, when the prophet was convinced that everyone had rejected the Lord’s covenant, broken down His altars, put all the other prophets to death, and seemingly left him all alone.  In the midst of that chaos and confusion, God spoke to Elijah and reassured him that everything was still under control.  And not just in a general sense either.  He provided specific names and details and reminded Elijah that he was not alone.  1 Kings 19:15-18 records the conversation:  "Go back the way you came, and go to the Desert of Damascus.  When you get there, anoint Hazael king over Aram.  Also, anoint Jehu son of Nimshi kind over Israel, and anoint Elisha son of Shaphat from Abel Meholah to succeed you as prophet.  Jehu will put to death any who escape the sword of Hazael, and Elisha will put to death any who escape the sword of Jehu.  Yet I reserve seven thousand in Israel—all whose knees have not bowed down to Baal and all whose mouths have not kissed him."

Furthermore, in addition to the anecdotal references to God bringing order out of chaos, it's significant to remember that the Bible tells us very specifically -- very directly -- that God is not a God of chaos or disorder, but a God of peace.  He’s one who brings order out of chaos.  1 Corinthians 14:33 states it unequivocally:  "God is not a God of disorder but of peace."

I don’t know about you, but I find it very encouraging to think about these things while we’re in the midst of transition.  I find it encouraging to remember that any discomfort that we’re experiencing is just seasonal and passing.  If we can keep ourselves centered on Jesus -- on the God of peace -- then we’ll be able to make it through just about anything.  We can trust that God has a well-designed halftime show drawn up for us; we can just keep marching in faith, following his directions until the next swell in the music and the next dramatic revelation of His shape for us.

It's crazy to realize that I'm currently writing...

• A sermon per week, for the first two and a half months of 2010 (squeezing my previous annual average into the first quarter of the year!)...
• An extra sermon for the first weekend in February, for a wedding...
• A two-page prayer letter each month (with January's annual extended edition just about to come out at a full six pages!)...
• A full-length work of creative non-fiction (trying for roughly a chapter every two months), collaborating with a friend to record the memoirs of an Albanian mobster / shepherd / thug / drug courier / refugee...
• A ~ 500-word original devotional per day, as a part of my Proverbs 365 project...
• And my regular blogging here (typically 2-4 posts per week)

I often like to dream about a second career in writing.  But then I realize that I'm already kind of doing that!  I don't know if it reinforces the dreams for the future or creates disillusionment.  For now, I'm enjoying the season of intense content creation.  I'm also aware of the acute dangers of such a collection of projects eventually swallowing me!

But for now, I'm living it up.

I hope that I've demonstrated, through the past week's series on Hypocrisy, that we've all got a lot to think about when it comes to confronting this issue of hypocrisy.  It's persistent, pervasive, and often so deeply embedded that it's practically invisible at times.  It may be helpful to have other trusted friends assist in the process of uncovering the hypocrisy in our lives (granted the fact that we can have such a hard time seeing it in our own lives) -- yet I still believe that it's ultimately an issue that has to start with each one of us examining his or her own life.  As I said in my introduction to the series, we're all recovering hypocrites -- and recovery is a life-long process that starts when we stop pointing fingers at others and turn our examination inwards.

Perhaps you already picked up on this refrain from my previous posts about five of the major outworkings of hypocrisy in our lives, but the ultimate answer to hypocrisy is repentance.

When Jesus spoke to the Pharisees about the issue of hypocrisy, people immediately tried to make sense of current events in the light of Jesus' teaching.  In Luke 13:1-4 Jesus was confronted with some of the "headlines" in the news about terrible disasters that had happened in Galilee and Jerusalem -- with the people basically wondering if the people who had encountered tragedy and death were the ones who were
the most evil (such that God was paying them back for their sins).  But
Jesus emphatically replied:  No, we all make mistakes sometimes.  We all need to repent.  He said, "You will perish, too, unless you repent of your sins and turn to God... No, and I tell you again that unless you repent, you will perish, too."  Repentence is a process that needs to be taken seriously.

But repentence doesn’t have to be viewed as a negative process.  In fact, it can be one of the most liberating experiences of your life.  Acts 3:19 frames this call to repentence in especially beautiful words:  "Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord."  It's not just rhetoric either; I can personally attest to the refreshing benefits of repentence.

For each area of our life, repentence looks slightly differently:

  Repentence in the area of factional hypocrisy basically comes down to fearing God instead of fearing people...

   Repentence in the area of financial hypocrisy comes down to focusing on a rich relationship with God, depending on Him (instead of our financial resources) for our every need.

  Repentence in areas of reputational hypocrisy centers on finding one's identity in Jesus instead of in external circumstances or cultural codes.

  Repentence in the area of religious hypocrisy comes down to actively pursuing honesty and transparency.

  And repentence in the area of knowledge-based hypocrisy starts with relying on the Holy Spirit over and above any conventional wisdom or education.

But these aren't the only areas of our life in which hypocrisy can come to roost.  I focused on these five areas because they are the most directly addressed in the middle chapters of Luke (which served as the base text for this study on hypocrisy).   But I can certainly think of other areas -- also addressed in the Bible -- which also need to be examined, if one is trying to root out all kinds of hypocrisy.  Sexual hypocrisy seems to be one of the most obvious (John 8:1-11 and Matthew 5:27-30 provide some great food for thought, if you wanted to study out this subject further).  Other potential areas of hypocrisy to be examined might include our relationships, our child-rearing, and our consumption habits.  And that is by no means an exhaustive list!

In everything, though, we just need to remember to be constantly vigilant against hypocrisy (examining our own lives!) and we need to remember to repent.  That's the end analysis of this series.  I hope you've enjoyed it.  If you have any further thoughts, please feel free to interact through the comments.

So I'm coming to the end of my little blog series on the dangers of hypocrisy.  And today I'd like to address the fifth and final major area of our lives in which hypocrisy likes to roost:  our attitudes toward knowledge.  For us, "Knowledge" could be educational systems or simply life-experience.  Whatever the criteria, we seem to naturally elevate or put down other people based on their level of knowledge.

This was certainly the case with the Pharisees, back in Jesus' time.  In fact, the main “commodity” that separated the religious teachers from the rest of the people was education.  Religious leaders in that time period simply spent more time reading and studying the Hebrew Scriptures than anyone else.  Thus, they were literate, while most of the population was not.  Unfortunately, they didn’t use their knowledge to help other people, but actually to reinforce their class system.  Jesus noticed this and called them out on it:  "What sorrow awaits you experts in religious law! For you remove the key to knowledge from the people. You don’t enter the Kingdom yourselves, and you prevent others from entering" (Luke 11:52).

These days, there's a classic debate about what "qualifies" someone for ministry.  It just so happens that I had a conversation about this in Berlin about a month ago, together with some other pastors from around Europe.  Historically, our association of churches (Great Commission Churches) has not emphasized formal education (i.e. seminary training and theological degrees), saying that diplomas aren’t always the best criteria for determining who’s prepared to lead a church.  I’ve always kind of agreed with that.  But along the way, there’s become a different, subtle, “knowledge” filter where your ability to teach others comes from life experience.  One regional conference recently boasted that no one was permitted to take the stage and teach at that conference unless they had been leading a Great Commission Church for at least 30 years.  And while, again, there’s some wisdom in this -- and I can kind of go along with it --  it also started to dawn on us, as we were talking, that we’ve developed our own special filter to determine who’s “qualified” and who’s not.  And to be completely honest, I don’t think that filter is the same as God’s.  Even while trying to be vigilant about knowledge-based hypocrisy, we had simultaneously allowed a subtle sort hypocrisy to creep in.  Scary how that can happen, isn't it?

It really comes down to the Holy Spirit.  Not education, not experience:  simply the Holy Spirit.  Jesus explained that the antidote to hypocrisy in the area of knowledge is to rely on the Holy Spirit and not on any conventional wisdom or education.  In Luke 12:11-12, Jesus told his disciples, "When you are brought to trial in the synagogues and before rulers and authorities, don’t worry about how to defend yourself or what to say, for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that time what needs to be said."  This is really cool.  It says that our most advanced systems of knowledge and learning are far inferior to the wisdom that the Holy Spirit gives.  And what Jesus said here actually came true in Acts 4.  Peter and John were put on trial, before the Jewish Sanhedrin, and Peter gave an impassioned speech, with the Scriptures specifically noting that he was filled with the Holy Spirit.  And in Acts 4:13, it says, “The members of the council were amazed when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, for they could see that they were ordinary men with no special training in the Scriptures. They also recognized them as men who had been with Jesus.”  The most important thing for us is to stick close to Jesus, and let him teach us through the Holy Spirit.

The more we can do this, the less we'll be susceptible to knowledge-based hypocrisy.  Like rooting out hypocrisy in any of the other four major areas of our lives, it's not always easy.  But it's definitely worthwhile.

When it comes to hypocrisy, religiosity seems to be the most obvious, most stereotypical pitfall.  It's all the little rules that we make for ourselves.  They can be religious rituals, lists of “do’s” and “don’ts, or just personal values of what we consider acceptable or not acceptable (either explicit or implicit).  It happens whenever we let the means to the end take priority over the end itself -- when we let a relationship become a religion.

Back in 1st Century Palestine, the religiosity of the Pharisees was legendary.  Jesus spoke to the problems with their religiosity when he said, "You Pharisees are so careful to clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside you are filthy -- full of greed and wickedness!" (Luke 11:39).  And it was true.  The Pharisees had forgotten about the most essential issues of developing lives of godly generosity and goodness, and had become obsessed with making and keeping rules about cleanliness.  What you’re allowed to touch or not touch...  What you’re allowed to eat or not eat... What you’re allowed to say or not say... There were very strict expectations for how a person’s external appearances and actions would be.  In Luke 11:46, Jesus said, "What sorrow also awaits you experts in religious law! For you crush people with unbearable religious demands, and you never lift a finger to ease the burden."  Religiosity leads to legalism, shaming, and blaming.  In the end, it often separates people from the true heart of God, even though the rules had originally been intended to bring people closer to God.  And in so doing, it creates hypocrisy.

At first, when I started thinking about religiosity in my own life, I was having a hard time seeing where I might be susceptible to my own sorts of hypocrisy.  But as I thought about it, I realized that I can have a problem with being religious about not being religious!

I realize that may not make much sense.  But for instance, last week I blogged about prayer and basically inferred how silly it is when people use really formal, flowery language in talking with God.  And while I still think it’s a good point, as I was recently examining my heart I realized that this value system can sometimes result in a judgmental attitude towards people who pray differently than the way that I might prefer to pray.  A sort of religiosity against the externally-religious -- without much consideration for the true heart behind people and their ways of connecting with God.  Or for another example of this, about a month ago I was encouraging the people in our church to:  "Read your Bible, Pray every day."  And while I was trying to make the point that it doesn’t matter how much you go to church, or how many religious acts you perform -- but that the personal, daily connection with God is the most important -- I also realize that if you take my words totally literally, they become a kind of religiosity just like the Pharisees’ religiosity.  And even I can’t keep up with those religious demands!  I confess that I do not “Read the Bible and pray every day.”  I still think it's a good guideline for one's personal spiritual life, but how fair is it for me to expect that or demand a particular standard from other people?!?  That’s hypocrisy, isn't it?

So as I was studying through the middle chapters of Luke, I was refreshed to realize that the antidote to hypocrisy in the area of religiosity is to practice transparency and humility.  Jesus told his disciples, "The time is coming when everything that is covered up will be revealed, and all that is secret will be made known to all.  Whatever you have said in the dark will be heard in the light, and what you have whispered behind closed doors will be shouted from the housetops for all to hear!" (Luke 12:2-3).  Think about that for a second.  If you really believed that every little thing you whispered behind closed doors would be shouted from the housetops, wouldn’t that change you?!?  I think it would probably change us in a good way... That's partially why I'm doing this blog series, to practice the discipline of transparency.  Practicing humility and transparency may not make us the most attractive people in the world -- but at least it keeps us from being hypocrites!