I was reminded in recent weeks of something we had done when I was a freshman in college. I lived in the Towers Dorms at West Virginia University and those dormitories had particularly large elevators. So, when my friends and I would come in at what was a somewhat early arrival time after being out until 12:30 or 1:00 a.m., we would arrive back and, with some time on our hands, we would arrange the elevator like a room. We would put a table in there, and chairs and put a fern on a chair in the corner and take the elevator rules off the wall and put up a picture and make it look like a room. We had card games in there. We would play cards and have things to drink and chips. When people came in a little later in the evening and the elevator door would open and there would be a room with people playing cards. They would sort of look around and then the doors would close and we’d be gone. Then we would come back and the person would still be there – after the second or third time they would get in. We had a couple of chairs; we would deal them in while they were going where they were going. We just liked that kind of change of perspective we provided for those people as they came in.

Well Jesus is talking about a dramatic change of perspective in a serious way; turning things upside down. Speaking, I think, to our tendency to invert things in life; the kind of inversions of life that the scribes and Pharisees were practicing acutely. So Jesus took them to task on all of that, reminding us of the fact that we do that; we tend to turn things upside down. In our culture we tend to love things and use people, as opposed to the way God would have it. We read scripture and realize that scripture is meant largely to examine ourselves and we read it and use it to examine others. I can read scripture a lot of times and tell Mary how it applies to her. I can read scripture and tell our girls how it applies to them…but it is a little tougher to apply it to myself, it is much easier to look at the scriptures that cause us to examine ourselves and then examine the person next to us. Well we tend to do that! We tend to seek our own plans and our own will then ask God to rubber stamp and endorse them, as opposed to seeking God’s will and then trying to find a way that God can put us into it.

We function in life so often with the philosophy that "seeing is believing," when so often the fact is that "believing is seeing," and so we invert those things. There are these inversions and Jesus is speaking of that in this passage in Matthew. He is talking to the scribes and Pharisees – this passage is in the midst of seven woes Jesus speaks to them. "Woe to you for this and woe to you for that." First of all he talks about the tithe. The Pharisees recognize that the principle in scripture says that we are to give ten percent of our material things back to God, keep ninety percent, give ten percent back. The Pharisees practiced it so meticulously it was ridiculous. They tithed their spices and herbs, just tiny pinches of things and were very proud of that, while at the same time they ignored the weightier matters, the sweeping issues of the law of God – justice and mercy and faith and grace.

And so he said, what I think in the day was very humorous, sort of a Robin Williams kind of humor, probably in it’s day, "to strain out a gnat and swallow a camel." It was the practice of the Jews at the time to literally strain their wine because, for them a gnat and a camel, either one, were ritually unclean. If you came in contact with either one, you were ritually, ceremonially unclean and so they would strain their wine to make sure they didn’t have contact with a gnat. Jesus said, "You strain out the gnats but you swallow a camel." Exercising humor in his day and place that we probably don’t get. But this ritual cleanness and uncleanness was a big deal. It was the kind of thing that could exclude you from the whole party. If you were a Jew of that day, heading to the great festival or the great wedding celebration, like going to the West Virginia/Marshall game or you were going to the Symphony, or you were going to the beach for a week or two for vacation, you could do something that would immediately make you ineligible for any of that. You were on your way to the big celebration and you happen to come in contact with an unclean animal or a dead body or a grave and you were out. Suddenly all the planning and preparation was for naught. You can’t participate. You are ceremonially unclean. So it was a big deal. So it was that Jesus said the Pharisees were like whitewashed tombs. The reason they white-washed the tombs and grave sites was so that when the Jews, on the way to the big festivals and on big pilgrimages, wouldn’t inadvertently walk over a tomb or a grave or touch a tombstone which would make them unclean and would mean "everybody out of the pool." No festival for you. You are done for X amount of days. They whitewashed the tombs so you could see them, particularly at night, traveling the road, so you wouldn’t touch them or even stumble across them. They looked beautiful – all of these whitewashed tombs – but inside there was corruption and decay and Jesus compared their lives to those tombs, saying, "You’ve missed the point. You cleaned up the outside but you are posers! You don’t do anything about cleaning up the inside of your life.

This kind of contact with unclean things, we saw as something like the kind of situation medically and biologically in the story of the Apollo 13 flight when Ken Mattingly, who was a very skilled pilot for the command module of that mission, was found to have been exposed to measles and so, when they discovered that, they said, "You can’t go on the flight, you might get measles when you are in outer space and that won’t work," and they replaced him at the last minute with Jack Swigert, who piloted the command module in the Apollo 13. It is that kind of thing – you come in contact with something that eliminates you from the whole ballgame. So it was important to follow those customs but Jesus said, "You have gone way overboard and furthermore, you’ve majored in minors. You are bent out shape. Whitewashed tombs, unclean inside. You keep up appearances but that won’t do it."

Mary and I were at Disney World a few years ago and we saw a young father there, who had a stroller with a little child in it, and he had another child in his arms. He was buttoned down. This guy was preppy, he was looking good, he was coifed, he was really together and you could tell he was used to looking good and having his appearance just right, but you could tell by his eyes he had been through it that day with the kids at Disney World. It was at the end of the day and as he pushed the stroller by, carrying the other child in his arms, we noticed that as he passed by, on the back of his shorts there was pressed there, half in and half out of the wrapper, a Hershey bar – pressed right there. We said, "been there, done that," We have been there and done that. He didn’t quite make the appearance that he thought he did at that point. Well, that’s what we do – we tend to want to keep up appearances. I actually sustained an injury doing this. We were in our early time in New Wilmington, our children were very young and my parents were coming for dinner and Mary’s parents were coming for dinner and we were committed to creating the appearance that we had our lives together – at least to appear that way. And so, about an hour before they were to arrive, we noticed that the plantings all around the house were full of weeds and so I did a "speed weeding." That’s not where you get down on your knees and pull weeds in the sort of civilized way, it’s where you get down like a short-stop, and without even letting your knees touch the ground and just weed like mad. I did that and got it finished but only to find the next day my left knee was not operating right and didn’t for a year and a half. I sustained a "weeding injury," as embarrassing as that was. So, just to keep up appearances, I limped around for about a year and a half when I climbed steps because I had a "weeding injury." It would have been better if I had been saving a child from an oncoming train, but it was weeding that did it. And so we do go to all kinds of lengths in life to maintain appearances and to look good in life and the way the Pharisees did – so acutely.

Whitewashed tombs, while ignoring the inside and the weightier things of the law they missed the point and, the fact is, I think Jesus is saying to us, we all tend to miss the point to one degree or another. We get into inversions where we turn things on their heads and that’s not healthy for any of us. There are weather inversions, thermal inversions that happen in places like Los Angeles and Denver where the geography is such that there is an inversion – the switching of hot and cold air – and it holds the pollution in. I flew into Denver a few years ago and it was like flying into a brown cloud at that particular time and I understand those from Denver call the city the "brown cloud" when that happens. It holds everything in. The smog and the exhaust from the cars are held right in the city and it’s not healthy, it pollutes the atmosphere. It is a problem. Further, inversions in weather patterns can lead to violent thunderstorms and tornadoes. Often it is not a healthy situation. And so it is in life, these inversions, spiritually and relationally, can be dangerous. They can be damaging. They can pollute our inner lives and clutter our inner lives. Because we miss the point and we miss the best and brightest in life. We major in minors, and miss it as Jesus was saying to the Pharisees.

Tony Campolo tells the story about pouring out his heart at the University of Pennsylvania and also at Eastern College where he was a sociologist. He would have a class and he would be pouring out his heart – eloquent words describing relationships of people, movement of people sociologically and how important it is, passionate about it – really firing on all cylinders. Then after he just spent himself completely in this brilliant lecture, someone in the back of the room would raise his or her hand and say, "Do we have to know this for the test?" Oh, my goodness. Somehow missing the point, inverting the whole thing. We tend to do that. We see it in our culture and bureaucracies where we have a system that stops trying to achieve objectives and simply continues to exist to complete lists and complete quotas and perpetuate its own existence. In political correctness we have an inversion where a list or a set of rules, or one agenda, become more important than being human. We can see it in legalism where the letter of the law is more important than the spirit of the law.

My cousin, Dick, who is now a lawyer, was stopped (in his high school days) for speeding and he got a ticket. He was going one mile per hour over the speed limit. So he went to court and before the judge and he said, "Judge, I did violate the letter of the law, I was technically going faster than the speed limit, but I did not violate the spirit of the law which is to keep everyone safe and everything orderly." And the judge agreed. Dick went off to Duke University and became a lawyer. We weren’t surprised at all about that. But we do that, we tend to major in minors, we practice legalism over the spirit of the law. Someone said that our world is like a shop where there are things of great value and things that are absolutely worthless and everything in between and the only record of their value is on the price tags attached to those things. An enemy has stolen in at night and switched all the price tags. And that is what our world is like – we can put extreme value on things that really are absolutely worthless and we can see things that are absolutely beyond value that we think are without any value at all. We don’t have a good sense of the value in life – as Christ sees it, as God sees it. We’ve inverted those things; we’ve turned them upside down. It begs the question, "Do you feel like your life is upside down, is in upheaval? Have you ever felt that your life is in upheaval, is upside down – inverted?" Jesus said in this passage, "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how I’ve longed to gather you under my wings as a hen gathers her brood – but you would not." How I’ve longed to make it right. How do you do that? How do we enter into that? Certainly it will not happen following the prevailing culture – you won’t find it on the morning entertainment shows, you won’t find it on C-Span or Fox News, you won’t find it on the latest self-help systems, you won’t find it in the best of analysis and counseling. Those things can be great tools to sort out what the details are in our lives, and what the causes are, but only Jesus Christ can put the pieces together again. Period! We can sort them out. We can have systems to try and control them but, finally, only Jesus Christ can turn it around right and put the pieces back together. You will only find that in Christ. We really need to be found by him. You hear people say, and I’ve used the term, "I’ve found Christ, or someone found Christ," Christ has never been lost, really. We need to be found by Christ.

Robert Fulghum tells a great story about some children playing hide and seek. He was in his study, with the window open, and they were outside in his neighborhood. One little boy hid behind the bushes under his window. He could hear the children calling and a long time went by. The shadows were lengthening and they were still calling his name and he was still hidden and finally Fulghum leaned out his window and said, "Get found, kid, get found!" After all that’s the object of the game, finally to get found, not to be lost forever. You want to get found eventually, but the kid didn’t get that. You and I need to get found. We need to get found today, and tomorrow and the next day, because we keep tending to invert life. We wander into inverted values and find our lives in upheaval. Finally Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ alone can turn our lives right and bring us His peace and His joy and right relationships with God and those around us. Amen.

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