Passage: This Week's Second Reading

"No False Advertising"

Back about 15 or so years ago, I decided that I just had to have a Jeep Cherokee. Some of you may remember the maroon 1993 Jeep Cherokee that I drove for about 9 years. Before I bought one, I looked at them at a couple of dealers, but being reluctant to being saddled again with a car payment, I put off the purchase for a while. Of course, I think Mindy wanted one too, because she would point and yell "Jeep-Jeep" every time we passed one on the road.

Finally this ad came out on TV offering a pretty good price on a new Jeep, so off to the dealership I went. I told them that I wanted to see one of the Jeeps that was priced and equipped like the ones in the ads. The salesman, probably a well-trained car salesman, told me that there was no such thing as vehicles priced like the ones on the ads. The ads were just designed to get people into the showrooms.

Silly me! I believed that if Chrysler/Jeep was advertising Jeeps at a particular price, you would think they would have one or two in the showroom, or they could get one, and you would to be able to buy one for that. If not for a better experience at a different dealership, I might have said they were doing some false advertising.

God has the same kind of expectation when he looks into our hearts. God desires that the faith we profess and practice will in fact be the same faith he finds inside us. He expects at least as much faith on the inside as we advertise on the outside.

All too often, what God finds is that we are guilty of false advertising – with hearts that are far from him. That is certainly what Jesus found in the Scribes and Pharisees who came to him from Jerusalem.

These men have likely come as a delegation from Jerusalem, tasked with keeping tabs on this Jesus fellow and seeing if they can find some way to discredit him. After a little while, they latch on to the fact that they observe Jesus’ disciples eating their bread with hands that were defiled.

Of course, their hands were only "defiled" because they were ceremonially unclean. So that you have no doubt about this "ceremonially unclean" thing, all it means is that they didn’t wash up before they ate. The Scribes and Pharisees believe that because Jesus seems to be ignoring the "tradition of the elders," they had found a way to discredit him.

But Jesus uses their abuse of those very same traditions to unmask their hypocrisy. The Scribes and Pharisees were guilty of making up rules that excused or hid the evil that was in their hearts. Jesus points specifically to the use of their traditions that allowed them to circumvent the fourth commandment.

Basically, they permitted children to refuse to help their needy parents by simply calling what they could have given their parents "Corban," which was a gift dedicated to God or a promise to the temple. So their man-made traditions made the Word of God void.

When our profession of faith and outward works are not matched by a heart of faith, that’s spiritual false advertising. When we do and say all the right religious things because we’re supposed to, or because our parents make us, or because our spouse wants us to, or as a mask to hide our sinful behavior, we too are guilty of honoring God with our lips, while our hearts are far from him.

While we may fool others and even ourselves, God is not fooled. He doesn’t want worship and faith that is just lip service. What God really wants is our hearts. He so desires that our hearts belong to him that he gave his own Son.

Throughout Scripture we see how God does more than just pay lip service to his desire to restore this sinful world to himself. The lips of God’s prophets, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Moses, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, John the Baptist, all announced again and again God’s promise to give the world a Savior from sin and death.

The Scriptures record for us the stories of what God actually did in order to keep his promises, preserving his people through the flood, the captivity in Egypt, the Red Sea, from the Philistines, the Babylonians and the Assyrians.

God didn’t just make a bunch of promises. He kept them all, even finally, by giving us His own Son. There was certainly no lip service there. You see, God gave his Son to die. And Christ went willingly to the cross for us. All of his words, all of his teachings, all of his actions, he backed up with that action of deepest heartfelt love.

In the Sacraments, the God who loves the world that much also acts in our lives to make clear that his love includes you and me. In Holy Baptism, he called each of us by name and adopted us as his own sons and daughters.

In the gift of his Son’s body and blood in Holy Communion, he makes clear that his love for us is even more than just a promise. The very

body and blood given on the cross is the same body and blood given to us personally, in, with, and under the bread and wine.

Do you remember the story of King David? After he committed adultery with Bathsheba, David went to great lengths, even murder, to cover up what he had done. Then he went right back to living an outwardly religious life, just like he always had. But now, that life was just a mask used to hide his guilt.

But God loved David too much to let that go on. So he sent the prophet Nathan to confront David with his sin. God wanted David’s heart back. God wanted David’s faith to be real again, so he stripped away David’s mask. He confronted David so he would have to confess his sin. He also confronted David because he wanted David to know that he forgave him.

A young woman told her pastor about her grandfather. Everyone in the small town where they grew up thought very highly of him. After all, he had donated the land for their church, and even the money for building the church. People thought so much of him that they even named the church after him. Everyone thought of him as a religious and godly man – everyone, that is, except for his family. For them, his "acts of faith" were just a mask that hid the truth. His family knew him to be a mean, verbally and physically abusive father and grandfather.

Brothers and sisters, if you are just going through the motions, if you’re doing all the right things because that’s what you think you’re supposed to do or because someone expects you to, if you’re here to put on a show or hide an empty heart or an ungodly life, then please know this: You may fool others. You might even fool yourself. But God is not fooled. He sees right through us and desires that your heart belong to him.

God loves you and me too much to allow us to continue to wear our faith as nothing more than a mask to hide our hypocrisy. Through the Word of the Law, by the power of the Holy Spirit working in our hearts, he strips away our masks, because more than anything, he desires to speak to us words of forgiveness and grace.

He acts in our lives because in the place of an empty shell of religion he desires that our hearts belong to him. There’s no false advertising with God. What you see is what you get. What we see – made clear in the life and death of Jesus – is a heart of love that wouldn’t let us go our lost and empty way. And what we get is a loving heart for all eternity, his loving heart making our loving hearts. Amen.