April 28, 2002
Mstthew 6:1-6
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Matthew 7:15-23
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“The Importance of Good Taste in Religion”

When W.H. Auden, the famous English poet, was teaching at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, he led the college students in staging an evening of “Bad taste”. Auden himself acted as the Emcee and introduced the various parts of the variety show, which consisted of bad poetry, bad music, and bad dramatic skits. Throughout the entire performance, the audience displayed bad manners by booing and hissing and catcalling. Presumably, the whole affair was conducted to heighten the students’ sensitivity to the amount of poor taste they encountered and engendered in everyday life, and to help them prefer good poetry, good music, and good drama.

The truth is, there is no area of life that is immune to bad taste, not even religion.  Perhaps I should have said “especially religion.”  The history of religion is replete with examples of poor taste.  In the Middle Ages, for example, there were all those incredible and often vulgar tales about saints and martyrs, piling miracle upon miracle for the benefit of the gullible faithful.  During the 18th century, the so-called epoch of enlightenment, there was the eminent French preacher who every Good Friday had himself strapped to a cross, raised up in the chancel, and lashed before all the people “to the Glory of God.”  At the turn of the last century, thousands of church buildings were erected throughout America, many with tasteless scriptural mottoes inscribed on their sanctuary walls to remind the congregations of pithy moralisms from the Book of James.  And the history of evangelism, from Billy Sunday to Aimee Semple Macpherson to Jerry Falwell and Jim Bakker, is fraught with examples of awful taste, including garish sanctuaries, histrionic performances, questionable funding operations, outlandish life-styles, fake healings and conversions, and all those cheap paper and plastic giveaway items that are as popular today as splinters of the cross and hairs of the apostles heads once were.

My wife accuses me of being a television surfomanic, and I suppose I am.  That is how most of my education about TV religion has come, from (surfing) flipping through channels and catching little moments on the TV preachers’ shows.  I don’t think I could bear to watch one from beginning to end, which, incidentally, may explain the popularity of TV religion: That is, people can turn it off when they get tired of it, and don’t have to sit through an entire service.  I mean, you can’t turn me off and get CBS Sunday Morning, and of course, you wouldn’t want to.  But, one day I was happily flipping through channels and came upon the Jim and Tammy Bakker show (a few years ago) and they had an elephant on it.  All dressed up in circus clothes, that they claimed had won 32 souls to Jesus.  They said they had documented proof of all the people who had come to Jesus through the elephant’s ministry.  And, to demonstrate the elephant’s unique religious inclinations, they had it pray for people right on their show.  Tammy would say a line of prayer, the elephant would whinny, Tammy would say another line and the elephant would whinny again and so on.  (I thought elephants normally “trumpet” but this one seemed to whinny, as least when it prayed.)

Tasteless Religion.

And, lest our Roman Catholic friends feel left out, when the Pope visited Los Angeles and St. Louis a few years ago, in included skywriting, kazoo-blowing, souvenir-selling and a gift of Tony Lama Cowboy boots with the Lone Star of Texas on one side and the Papal seal on the other.  We sent our son to Italy and the Vatican a few years ago with the WFB choir and what did he come back with: a beer bottle opener with the image of the Pope on it.

Tasteless religion.

Let’s be fair, of course; even the Bible suffers from its share of tackiness.  There was the time when two of Jesus’ disciples wanted to call down lightening from heaven to strike the towns where their preaching was not received—just the sort of thing a disappointed TV evangelist might do today if he could bring it off.  There was the Palm Sunday parade, with Jesus and his disciples entering Jerusalem over the palm branches and garments of the people laid in the road, and all those people caught up in a display of sheer emotionalism that didn’t last out the week.  There was the woman who interrupted a dinner party by pouring an excessive amount of perfume on Jesus, so that several of the disciples made a fuss about it and Jesus himself had to come to the woman’s rescue.  There was the tasteless intemperance of the people around the cross, spitting on Jesus and cursing him because he was not the kind of religious leader they had hoped for.  And of course there was that enterprising fellow in the Book of Acts who approached the disciples, having seen the power of the Hold Spirit at work in them, and openly tried to purchase the secret of the spirit so he could use it for his own personal enrichment.  One can find plenty of bad taste at work in the scriptures themselves.

But what strikes me, when I think about it is that all the examples of bad taste in the scriptures are also examples of bad religion.  That is, the very reason they were models of poor taste is that they were, before that, models of poor theology.  They sprang from bad motivation, they took the form of bad taste, and they remain as examples of what happens when religion is bent to purposes for which it was not intended.

Isn’t this true?  And, if it is, doesn’t it suggest the importance of good taste in religion, and of examining our religion to be sure that it springs from true spiritual motivation and serves the purpose of glorifying God?

The whole matter is of immense importance today, of incalculable importance, because we live in an age when almost everything is cannibalized and desacralized by the power of advertising, public relations, and hype.  There is an incredibly large industry, representing millions of persons, at work all the time to change the way we perceive reality, to bend it, twist it, cosmeticize it, perfume it, alter its appearance, all for the sake of Mammon, for the economy, for personal gain.  The selling of General Motors, the selling of the president, the selling of the U.S., the selling of the world—everything is being marketed.  And, in the midst of such mass marketing, there is always the temptation to sell Christ, to sell the church, to sell the Christian religion.  People can’t help it; it’s part of our mindset.

How do we remain in control of our affections in such a world?  How do we maintain our sense of good taste in religion, our feeling for what is decent and acceptable to God?

There are two principles for this in the New Testament, and they work together: love and integrity.  Is it loving, and is it honest?  These two questions, asked together, are always a touchstone for good taste in religion. 

Is it loving?  Love was at the heart of what Jesus was about. It was the central command, he said on more than one occasion.  When he was about leave his disciples, he talked about love.  Love makes all the difference in the world, and it is often a guide to whether something is in suitable taste.

For example, how many parents in this room have ever received a drawing from a three-year-old child?  The chances are, many people would not have considered it a “tasteful” drawing—certainly nothing to put in a frame and hang on the wall of a museum.  But you treasure it as if it were more important than a Picasso or a Van Gogh and put is the most honored place—the refrigerator.   Because it was given and received in Love.

Love made the difference in the act of the woman who poured perfume on Jesus at the dinner party.  Jesus defended the woman and said it was a sacramental thing she had done because she loved him and was expressing her love in an act that would always be remembered—like today.  Love lifted the action from being tacky to being sacramental.

Is it honest?  Jesus was death on hypocrisy.  The one instance of a destructive miracle in his whole ministry was when he cursed a fig tree for putting forth leaves as if it had fruit in it when in fact it had no fruit.  He constantly inveighed against the Pharisees, who were the most outwardly religious and respectable people of their day, for being “Whitewashed sepulchers,” repositories of bones and stinking flesh that had been painted over to look attractive and alive.

It is no exaggeration, I think, to say that Jesus was crucified for being honest.  He refused to lie about what he knew, he refuses to join in the games important people played, He refused to misrepresent the nature of God and God’s wishes for the world.  Once, a crowd of people came to proclaim him a king and establish an earthly rule for him, but he slipped away to the wilderness, avoiding them, because he would not let them prostitute the true nature of the Kingdom of God.  He was an honest man, and he could not be made to live dishonestly.

These two rules, then, love and integrity, are the indispensable tests for good religion.  One is soft and the other is hard.  One speaks of kindness, forgiveness, compassion; all the dimensions of grace.  The other speaks of openness, confrontation, stringency, justice, dimensions of law and holiness.  Perhaps one is feminine, the other masculine.  In any event, they are invaluable quides as we thread our way through the maze of religious affection at the beginning of the 21th century.  And we must not only apply them to Jim and Tammy Bakker, and Oral Roberts, and Jerry Falwell and Robert Schuller, but to ourselves.  Is what we do here loving and honest?  Is the way we speak to one another in the halls, in the forecourt, in committee meetings and at annual meetings loving and honest?  If it isn’t, then it is as tasteless to God as the worst camp meeting or religious television show ever known.

Now, I have a confession to make.  The decision to preach this sermon was made, in part, several weeks ago when I attended another church in our association.  I was so overcome by the false piety and dishonest exploitation of the gospel in that church’s service that I thought I would be sick.  I came away inwardly furious at the church and its minister.  As far as I was concerned, they had failed dismally to meet the criterion of integrity in worship.  But as I was preparing the sermon and trying to listen to the New Testament for what it says about both love and integrity, I realized that I was falling as far short of the love criterion as they were in honesty.  I had to stop in middle of the sermon prep and say, “Lord, I’m Sorry; I may be worse than they are.”

It’s not easy to make an admission of this sort.  But the power of the insight, that we must be both loving and honest in our religion, so overcame me that I had to make it.  It isn’t my insight, it’s the New Testament’s insight, it’s Christ’s insight; and we ought to live by it in everything we do. 

Love plus honesty equal good taste in religion.

PRAYER:   We are often hoisted on our own petards, aren’t we, Lord.”  We get caught removing the splinter from someone else’s eye while carrying around a beam in our own.  Forgive me for insisting on honesty while I did not have a loving spirit, and help us to live both these criteria, love and honesty, for Christ’s sake.  Amen.