When I was a boy we lived for about six years in Columbus, Indiana — a lovely little town, famous for its architecture, look it up sometime, though not right now — and one summer the circus came through. My mother asked whether I wanted to go. I was eight, maybe nine. I said no.
She asked why not. I said, because I don't like clowns.
Understand that this was long before Stephen King wrote It, and long before the internet gave us people who dress up as clowns and stand at the edge of the woods near playgrounds to frighten children. I had no cultural help. I had just worked something out on my own. And when my mother pressed me on it, here is what an eight-year-old told her: clowns have those big smiles painted on. And if the smile is painted on, then whatever is underneath it is not a smile. I do not want a stranger in strange makeup and strange hair, faking a smile, anywhere near me.
Thirty years later, living in Miami with three kids of our own, Barnum and Bailey came to town and I took them, grudgingly. It was wonderful. The clowns were terrific. There is a real art to clowning. So we are square, clowns and I.
But the boy was onto something, and it was not really about clowns. We have an aversion to the phony, the artificial and the fake. There is a reason for that. We are made in the image of a God who has the same aversion.
Which brings us to fasting, of all things. And when you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by others. Notice Jesus does not frown on fasting — he says when you fast, assuming his disciples will. He fasted himself, forty days, at the hinge of his ministry. It is a way of saying, Father, I am serious about this, serious enough to go without, so that every time my stomach growls it turns me back to you. What Jesus objects to is fasting as advertising. Long robes, long beards, longer faces.
He does what he does all through this sermon: compare and contrast. Four of them.
External religiosity versus internal authenticity
Every other faith system in the world runs on the same engine. Do these good things, avoid those bad things, and at the end of your life hope the deity you believe in gives you a passing grade. We have our do's and don'ts too — ten of them in Exodus 20 and six hundred and thirteen after that. But the gospel turns the whole equation a hundred and eighty degrees and says: you are lost, and there is nothing you can do about it. But praise God — I have done it for you.
Outward obedience versus inward devotion
An old man lived alone on a corner lot with a big yard, in a neighborhood full of boys who decided that yard needed playing in. He did not want them there. But he knew that shouting get off my lawn would only bring them back, so he tried something else. He came out and said, boys, I get lonely in this house, and I love seeing you play out here — here is a quarter for each of you. Back then a quarter was worth something. The next day: sorry, boys, I'm out of quarters, here are dimes. The day after: only nickels left, but thank you for coming. The fourth day he came out and said, boys, I am all out of change, I have nothing for you today.
They never came back.
He took an intrinsic motivation — they simply liked playing there — and made it extrinsic, and when the money dried up so did they. We do this with God. We come for love and gratitude, and somewhere along the way it becomes what we are supposed to do, what others expect. My seminary professor Richard Pratt warned a roomful of us headed into ministry: if you make your faith your job, you are liable to lose one of them.
The apparent versus the real
When the Queen Mary was decommissioned in 1967 and towed to Long Beach to become a floating museum, they set about refurbishing her. The smokestacks had originally been made of three-quarter-inch steel. When the crew lifted them off and set them down on the dock, they crumbled into fragments. Every bit of the steel was gone. What was holding those smokestacks up was layer after layer after layer of paint.
Some of us can relate. Over the years we have gotten very good at faking it. The appearance of spirituality, applied in coats.
False superiority versus genuine humility
Spiritual pride is toxic waste to the human soul. I have a friend, a committed Christian, not from this church, who told me he refuses to attend on Christmas and Easter. Why? Because that is when all the amateurs come out. He is there the other fifty weeks.
I said to him — gently, I hope — dude, in God's eyes we are all amateurs. The distance between the most spiritual person who ever lived and the shallowest is roughly the square root of nothing. We are all children in his sight.
And if I do not give you a C. S. Lewis quote on a Sunday you get your money back. Lewis wrote that when he first became a Christian he thought he could do it alone, in his rooms, reading theology. He disliked the hymns — fifth-rate poems set to sixth-rate music. But as he kept going, and kept meeting people of altogether different outlooks and educations, his conceit began peeling off. He realized those sixth-rate hymns were being sung with real devotion by an old saint in elastic-sided boots in the opposite pew, and that he was not fit to clean those boots.
Come to Jesus full of yourself and he will not deal with you. Come broken and honest — good teacher, what must I do? — and he is gentle as anything.
It is a fine irony that a passage about going without food lands us at a table. There is the fake, and there is real sustenance. Come and eat.
