It is sometimes said that the God revealed in the Old Testament is a God of wrath, and that the God revealed in the New Testament is a God of love. This is an attempt to over-simplify the Bible. The truth of God is one. God is revealed as He truly is throughout the whole body of the scriptures. In the Old Testament we find the love of God expressed along with the wrath of God. In Jeremiah we read, "The Lord hath appeared of old unto me saying, "Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore, with loving kindness have I drawn thee.'" In the New Testament, as you heard this morning in the reading from St. Matthew, Jesus vents His burning wrath against those who would make hypocrisy of religion. Jesus said, "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayers: therefore, ye shall receive the greater damnation."

The love of God is like a consuming fire. The Bible tells us that it created everything, it restores everything, it judges everything. In the New Testament the terrible imprecations which John the Baptist called down upon the heads of the religious leaders of the times - the Scribes, the Pharisees, the hypocrites - are an expression of the judgment of God's burning love against all insincerity, all hypocrisy, all attempts to take what is good and beautiful and life-giving and turn it into a hollow mockery. We are all reminded to take seriously the passage concerning the last judgment in the Book of Revelation in which all mankind says, "To the mountains and rocks, fall on us, and hide us from the face of Him that sitteth on the throne, and from the Wrath of the Lamb; for the great day of His wrath is come: and who shall be able to stand?"

The word 'sincere' has a Latin derivation; it means 'without wax'. The word for 'wax' is 'ceres' in Latin. The word for 'without' is 'sine'. The word sincere comes from the practice ages ago of clever artisans taking a broken work of pottery and mending it skillfully with wax and then painting over it and passing it off as a sound article. When it was placed in the presence of heat the wax would melt and the article would disintegrate. Something that was solid all the way through was 'made without wax'. It was 'sincere'.

This term describes the true human condition which God demands of all of us. We are to be sound all the way through. We are not to be patched together with a lot of pretence and makeshift rationalizations about our life, whether they be in our daily affairs or in our religion. We are to be 'sincere' in all that we do. We should be able to stand up under the judgment which is, as the Bible tells us, "like a consuming fire." We do not want to come all unstuck and collapse in the presence of the Lamb of God.

It has been the sad fate of followers of religion over the ages to become hypocritical at times. These very same Pharisees, who were the religious leaders at the time of Jesus and were the objects of His wrath, had a glorious history. They appeared some one hundred and fifty hears before as the leaders of a reform movement of Judaism. It was a time when Judaism had become corrupted and worldly due to its contact with the Greek pagan religion and the Greek demoralized culture. The word 'pharisee' means to be separated from the original body.

The Pharisees withdrew from the main stream of Judaism and emphasized the law and holiness of God and the strict observance of the religious practices that they had inherited. They effectively reformed Judaism. They became the leading religious party amongst the Jews. They became prosperous and they were looked up to. People said, "How holy they are. How righteous. How good." This lavish praise corrupted them and they turned into the kind of people that Jesus called hypocrites.

The Pharisees would make long prayers in order to impress the public, and then they would steal the houses of widows and orphans. They were extortioners. They were carrying on the blasphemous and dishonest trade of changing money in the temple. Jesus condemned this practice with righteous wrath. He cast them out and overturned their money tables. He said that they had turned the temple into a den of thieves.

The Christian Church, on occasion, has fallen into a similar state when it has given up its sincerity in exchange for worldly power. Each time it has had to be cleansed and renewed. At the time of the Reformation in the fifteenth century the medieval Christian Church had become a vast system to extort money from its members. The clerical leaders neglected the weightier things of the law.

Jesus criticized the Pharisees for the same thing. He said to them that they argue about whether they should tithe this kind of spice or that kind of herb, but they were not concerned about right and wrong. He said that they were not concerned about mercy, which is to forgive and to love those in need. He said that they were not concerned about faith, which is the means of receiving and dispensing the power of God.

This was the same challenge and accusation which Luther hurled against the medieval church. He said to them, "You talk about how many prayers one should say at penance, or how long a pilgrimage one should go on, or how much one should give to the Pope to get out of Purgatory. That is all you theologians are interested in. You neglect the weightier things of the law such as judgment, mercy and faith."

Today the Church is facing the same situation. Many church leaders who claim to be the representatives of the goodness and the truth of God are more like the religious leaders of ancient times whom Jesus described as resembling whitened marble coffins. They were all shined up and beautiful on the outside, but inside there was nothing but dead men's bones.

Our Lord pronounced His judgment upon the people such as this. He said to them, "Ye are serpents. Ye are the generation of vipers. How can you escape the damnation of Hell?" This pronouncement is one of the most powerful expressions of the wrath of God in all of scripture.

At this moment, we ought to be very concerned because we all have this tendency towards hypocrisy. We all have our faults and failures covered over with paint and sealed together with wax so that we can look at ourselves in the mirror every morning and say, "There is a fine person." In our hearts we know how weak we are and how prone to sin. Really, the only cure for hypocrisy is to begin by acknowledging the fact that you are a hypocrite. This is the first step towards being cured of hypocrisy.

To say that one is a miserable sinner is a first step towards being cured of whatever sin we are facing. To acknowledge that one is weak and a coward in the face of adversity is the first step toward being able to overcome fear.

We know in our very heart of hearts that when we are up against a great danger we may run away rather than stand and fight. We do not know how strong our courage might be. If we are up against a great temptation, how long can we endure before we give in and sin? It is by recognizing how weak we are that we can then be given the opportunity to receive the strength that God gives to make us into sincere human beings who can overcome hypocrisy. While we criticize the hypocrisy of religion, we should also be prepared to criticize our own tendency in this direction.

Worldly people like to point to the church and say, "They are all just a group of hypocrites. I know so and so, and they go to Church on Sunday, but during the week they act like everyone else." This is a true criticism and needs to be taken seriously. A friend of mine, an old deacon, when someone said to him that he did not go to Church because it was full of hypocrites would say to him, "Come join up; there is always room for one more."

In the church, if we take the gospel seriously we are to acknowledge the fact that we are all hypocrites and that we are weak and cowardly and sinful. However, we have come to the right place to overcome these faults We turn to God for His great strength in the midst of adversity. He has promised us the gift of the Holy Spirit. When a person is afraid, and is not afraid to say that he is afraid, he can find the strength to deal with the problem in front of him through Almighty God who said, "Fear not, I am with you always, even to the end of the world."

When we are tempted beyond our control, to whom can we go to find the strength to overcome our terrible burning desire? If we recognize this temptation and acknowledge that we are powerless against it, then we can turn to Him who can heal us. We can say as Jesus said to the Devil, "Get thee behind me, Satan." If you resist the Devil he will flee from you. If you think you are a match for evil, then you are sadly mistaken. There is nothing that Satan loves more than a hypocrite who is caught fast in his toils.

Our Lord has rightfully called down condemnation upon insincerity and hypocrisy in order to wake us up, and to make us realize how precarious our spiritual existence really is. All of us have to face the fact of final judgment. God's judging wrath is like a blazing fire. It burns away all insincerity and hypocrisy.

One of the worst criticisms we can make of anything in the world today in the twenty-first century is to say that it is plastic, that it is not real, and that it does not have any substance. We say this of our twenty-first century pop culture. We can say this of our twenty-first century pop religion. We can say this of so many people whose interior life is simply a combination of television commercials and political slogans. How it must grieve God Almighty to look down upon His creation and see how insincere and how unreal it has become.

The way to break out of this plastic existence is to accept reality as it truly is. Jesus wants us to cast aside all the dross and imperfections that we so eagerly build around our own lives. We need to accept the world that God has made, to come to Him in repentance, and to be filled with the power of His love and His strength, and to begin to live a new life. This is what Jesus came to bring to us.

May you be awakened from a hypocritical existence by these words of warning by our Lord, these words of condemnation, and recognize how seriously God takes the life He has given you. May you respond with a life of honesty, wholeness, and sincerity which is filled with strength and joy, and is made truly in the image of that perfect man, that perfect human being - Christ our Lord.

Christ came to reveal the full truth about life and the full truth about God. If we accept Him we are then lifted out of our hypocritical insincerities and are given a true life in God. We thank God for this gift, and we also thank Him for the words of warning which come to us from the Scriptures bidding us to flee from "the Wrath of the Lamb."