If you want to define hypocrite — the person who does what they abhor; who does not do what they cherish — you must first understand the hypocrisy cycle.
Hypocrites! Hypocrites everywhere! The politicians? Hypocrites. The scientists? Hypocrites. The doctors? Hypocrites. The religious leaders? Hypocrites.
The person in the mirror?
Well…
There’s a soccer mom. She’s a spitfire, a tiger momma if ever there was one. Or maybe a hovering helicopter mom. Or maybe a homeschooling mom of a baker’s dozen. Her kids are playing in the front yard and some moron blasts down her neighborhood’s 25mph zone doing 45mph in some two-door car.
“SLOW DOWN!” She yells. “THERE ARE KIDS PLAYING!”
Two days later, she’s running late for soccer practice. She’s doing everything she can to keep up, loads the kids in the car and knows if she can just speed up a bit, she can get there on time. And so she does 45mph in someone else’s 25mph neighborhood, in a family van.
Hypocrite.
So how do we define hypocrite?
And once we define hypocrite, how do we make sure we eradicate hypocrisy from our own lives?
Hypocrisy: The expectations, desires, demands, rules, and preferences leveled upon others by someone unwilling to live up to the exact same expectations, desires, demands, rules, and preferences.
Look, I know that there are all kinds of people reading this blog. I realize many of you – maybe most of you – don’t believe in God, so relax. You’re here for the poetry or the editing or copywriting tips. If you do make some of your decisions based on faith, you probably don’t have the same kind of faith as me. Heck, there’s someone who logged in yesterday from the United Arab Emirites, a predominately Muslim country. I get it. I’m not preaching, I’m just trying to give you some background for tomorrow’s post on Lent. I’m trying to show you the world as I see it so you’re not completely and utterly lost when I talk tomorrow about some weird holiday based, seemingly, on the spare fabric in your pocket.
So let’s not even go there until I’ve given some background on my line of thought. That background is this:
Every single person I’ve ever met is pretty dang hypocritical, and I’m the biggest hypocrite of all. If you’ve read my Dead Christ poem, you know that the things that have gone on in my mind are far worse than anything some dictator or felon has ever done. It works like that picture :
We take license with the world. Americans call these licenses “freedoms” or “rights,” but people like Chomsky call it a prison house of choice, of personal liberty. We think we’re free to do as we please which means we expect, desire, demand people get out of our way so that we can have our own way. Russia and America both are taking license with their propaganda involving Ukraine, hardly stopping to consider what’s honestly best for Ukrainians.
That license gives us a kind of strength. We feel more secure when we’re do whatever we please, whatever we desire. We feel as if we can take on the world, argue the right side of our pet politic, or build ourselves a house with a white picket fence, a dog and two-point-seven kids. That strength makes us sure of our selves.
Which makes us arrogant. We think that we’re better than others, that we’re entitled things that we by our own strength have made – which is nonsense, because deep down we know we’ve all inherited this world, this sentence, this next breath. We use the lie of entitlement to seek dominion, to dominate other girls by our superior skinniness, to dominate other C.E.O.s by the size of our boat, to dominate other editors by the bottom line on our billings. But we forget that we’ve inherited this world and physics takes over. What goes up must come down. Pride comes before our fall and a haughty spirit before our destruction.
It might be a harsh word. It might be a detonated nuke. It might be a hasty firing or a set of signed divorce papers or a series of small pilferings from our work’s cash drawer. Whatever it is, we get sloppy with our façade of “strength” and our “strength” ends up wounding other people. Before long, these wounds pile up and come to the surface and it absolutely humiliates both us and them and splinters out in all kinds of pain for our community. We create suffering by breaking the very expectations we have put upon others.
Stop there.
This is why Buddhists talk about desire so much, and they’re totally right up until this point. Their conclusion, however, is that if we only stop desiring, this process will disappear. If we can somehow remove our desires, we can then enter into a suffering world to help others remove their desire. This makes… some sense, but this is where the word Nirvana comes into play. For you westerners, sorry, but Nirvana isn’t heaven. Nirvana is non-being, non-entity. It’s nothingness that is based on the assumption that pain is the strongest piece of the universe.
When someone asks me “Why do bad things happen?” they’re really asking “Why am I in pain?” and often that question has a personal question behind it: “Why did So-And-So hurt me so badly?”
My first response isn’t logic. My first response is, “I”m so sorry.” And then I sit there and hurt with them. The Jews “sit sevens” and the Christians say “mourn with those who mourn.” It’s my job to shut up and hurt for and with them. “I feel your pain, bro.” That kind of thing.
But then, once the dust settles, we begin to realize that the first question is never “Why am I in pain?”
The first question was stated best in my friend Alex Giltner’s poem Holy Saturday:
Why is there something and not nothing?
How can we even have those thoughts? How can a question like this be asked? Whatever has come to be seems to have come to be ex nihilo, out of nothing. When you look at a forest, you see more living trees than dead ones. When I look at the universe, I see more vibrant stars than supernovas. Why is there something and not nothing?
Which means that non-being – Nirvana – though a decent answer to suffering and hypocrisy is not the best. It certainly takes into account many other things, but the simple fact of existence is left out. I’ll hold off on my personal answer until we make a full circle…
Humiliation, when it finally reaches the eyes of the public, brings us to weakness. Prison, unemployment, loss of friends – these are things that immediate show us that no, we are not strong. We know after humiliation that we can fall, we can be broken, we can lose the game. We put limits upon ourselves to keep ourselves from falling. We pad ourselves with borders and restrictions to keep ourselves from breaking. We invent rules for the game to keep ourselves from losing. They’re there to protect us, to keep us sober.
Then we expect others to play the same way.
And then, because we are weak, we break out own rules, restrictions, and expectations.
Hypocrisy comes back. And we start over.
All of us do this, every single one. We must begin whatever philosophical or political or personal discussion we hope to have with the mutual acceptance of personal hypocrisy. We must start here. Without it, nothing can aspire to integrity. Which is why I say:
It’s not that the church is full of hypocrites.
It’s that the world is full of hypocrites and the church is in the world.
Chesterton once said, “Christians are worse than everyone else because they’re supposed to be better.” Brennan Manning said, “I’m just one beggar trying to tell another beggar where to get the bread.” My pastor says, “It’s not that I’m better than other people. I’m just better off.”
Somewhere in the intersection of all that is where Christian hypocrisy begins. The whole point of this good news begins with the mutual acceptance of hypocrisy:
I’m a hypocrite. I’ve told you that. I give people deadlines, but then I miss some of my own. I give people a hard time about the way they treat their wives, then I say something harsh to Kiddo. I’m a hypocrite.
Then this grace thing happens.
Grace is where I get everything I want and everything I deserve. It’s not mercy. Mercy’s like a Presidential pardon. Justice is where I eventually get humiliated and punished for my hypocrisies. Grace is what happens when someone else gets punished, someone else gets humiliated, and I still get off scott free. That’s not me taking license with the world. That the intersection of justice served (the stuff I deserve) and mercy offered (the stuff I want).
Everyone – even the tiger mom – tries to excuse their hypocrisies, but they can’t. Deep down, we all know we deserve to be publicly humiliated and punished for not living up to the demands and desires and expectations and rules we put on others. As someone who follows Jesus, I actually believe he’s the only non-hypocrite who ever lived and that he was a particularly Jewish king who, unlike normal kings, conquered with a cross, with suffering just like the Buddhists talk about – with mourning with those who mourn. He was publicly humiliated and punished for our hypocrisies.
But I believe he happened to be God. Not a demigod. Not your metaphor for the divine. Simply the being behind even non-being, the ex nihilo being who makes me wonder, “Why is there something and not nothing?”
Which is why, in the Dead Christ poem, I say quite simply, God suffered more in our world than ever we could in His. He was killed as a Jew, was chased into Africa as a refugee, was falsely condemned at the hands of the state, betrayed by all of his close friends, lived until his death without getting married, the list goes on. God feels my pain, bro, but I can’t ever get to a point where I feel His.
And then, and we could get into the history and metaphysics of why I think this is rationally and historically possible, but then he rose from death in accordance with the ways he and a bunch of other old guys predicted, which means that even in his body he showed that being is more powerful than non-being, even in the case of death. As my buddy Dexter says, “If a guy predicts that he will die, stay dead for three days, and then resurrect and then actually pulls it off, I think I’d listen to what he has to say.”
And then, like this weird twist, Jesus – the guy that touched lepers, drank with drunks, and handed out free hugs to prostitutes – invited hypocrites like me, invited even all of the people that betrayed and flayed him, into a community that would go and do likewise for others, go and suffer for others that they might rise, for the poor and the orphan and the poor in spirit (Wallstreet?) and the philosophical orphan (the guy who ran from home to the big city?).
So there’s this faith that emerges, but it’s not like how most of us use the word “faith.” It’s not a religion, though religions and cults have been formed to shield people from it. In fact, the guys who started this Way said things like, “Pure religion is to look after widows and orphans.” Nah, this faith is more like the word faithfulness. It begins in wonder and ends in obedience.
It’s the kid who doesn’t really believe in Santa who spends his time trying to convince everyone that Santa is real. The kid who really believes is too busy setting out cookies, hanging stockings, setting their alarm clock, and going to bed early. Faith that leads to faithfulness of action is real faith. Faith that’s trying to convince isn’t faith. So I’m not trying to convince you here, I’m just trying to talk about how my own hypocrisy cycle is slowly breaking. Faithfulness to the grace that saved me brings freedom:
That freedom shows up wherever the Spirit of The Lord is. And so it enables me to do as Augustine said, “Love God. Love God, and then do what you will.” But Augustine said that knowing that love of God immediately leads to love of others, for that’s what Jesus himself did.
Which is why my freedom leads to strength – the power that rose Jesus from the dead is at work within me. I have power to heal (which is why Christians invented hospitals). I have power to adopt (which is why Christians started taking in the Roman babies that were left exposed to the elements). I have power to sit with the dying (which is why Christians started hospice care). The list goes on, I have strength.
But I’m not to be confused with God. When that happens, I start to think that I by my own strength made these things happen. I get arrogant:
Which sinks me right back down into hypocrisy.
I’m humiliated, one way or another, and that starts the hypocrisy cycle of weakness all over again. This is why people – especially people of faith – get stuck in a rut of trying to work their way out of a hole. They’ve forgotten that nothing is theirs. They brought nothing into the world and can take nothing out. Everything’s a gift, even the next heartbeat.
Humiliation is either forced upon me or I recognize my arrogance and repent:
Which is really just a fancy shortcut for the phrase “change my mind.” I change my mind about where power comes from, whom invented strength, whether I actually made anything from nothing or non-being in this world or if I’m really just a glorified borrower. I change my mind about my hypocrisy, about my expectations and demands on people, about my rules and my indignation when people break the law. I change my mind because I’m a hypocrite and I need help.
Out of this mind change comes restrictions that I create with the help of this community of the Way that holds me accountable. These restrictions help me grow in faith, grow in my weakness so that the strength that isn’t my own can go toward inventing more things like hospitals and orphanages and safe houses for girls rescued from the sex trade.
That weakness leads me to transfer those same expectations onto others and then, when I break them (and I often do), I become, once more, a hypocrite. Thus the stronger brother judges the weaker for his lack of strength and the weaker brother creates expectations for the stronger which create hypocrisy. This leads to schism and deeper hypocrisies and all kinds of messes.
But here’s the thing, and I’m talking to the hypocrites in the church now.
You can actually let the cycle end if you head off your arrogance and your hypocrisy at the pass, if you recognize it coming and let go of your control long enough to let the grace of Christ come into your life again.
Watch:
These highlighted areas, if you can imagine this drawing on a horizontal surface like your tabletop, are the places where we forget to slow down. Our back wheels move get ahead of themselves, ahead of even our front wheels. We drift. We spin out.
“Good” people actually operate out of a gratitude that realizes they need grace to carry the momentum through from strength to repentance or from weakness to faith. They’re not good by their own power because no one is good but God, the non-hypocrite. If you see your hypocrisy returning, ask for grace in your weakness to increase your faith. If you see your arrogance returning, ask for grace in your strength to increase your humility, your repentance.
It’s an act of the will to allow grace to work in these ways. Will yourself to rely on grace until it creates enough peace (personal peace and peace in your relationships) that your weakness relies on God’s power (instead of your hypocrisy) and increases your faithfulness to other people. Will yourself to rely on grace until it creates enough patience that your strength relies on God’s indwelling (instead of the lie you tell yourself about the “self-made man”) and increases your repentance, your humility that defers to God’s power at work in the world, in nature, and especially in other people who are always better than you, always better than me.
In this way you will see that your strength comes from service, your repentance from brokenness (humility), your personal restrictions from the Holy Spirit of God rather than the law, your weakness will be your power, your faith (faithful actions) will shine in midst of your doubt, your freedom will glow most brightly in the middle of obedience.
We’re all hypocrites, it’s true.
Some of us have simply grown tired of our own hypocrisy. I’m the chief hypocrite here. Forgive me, I’m a weak man, but the good things that do happen through me come from Christ in me.
And with that, I feel ready to write a short post on Lent tomorrow.
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