The eCrozier

“Imposters, yet true.”

There’s a phrase in today’s Epistle lesson that seems at first oxymoronic. St. Paul says that he and his companions are “treated as imposters, and yet are true.” St. Paul was speaking to a divided church in Corinth; one that had broken into factions. Each claimed the one true faith, while consigning all others to the status of fakes and imposters. So, St. Paul says that while some of his readers in Corinth think he is an imposter, he is in fact truly proclaiming to them the good news of God in Christ.

I want to take some liberty with this phrase today: “We are imposters, yet true.” Maybe more than St. Paul realized, he hit on a profound truth. We’re all in one way, shape, form, or another, imposters. We literally make “poses” that are not truthful. When we hit our knees in prayer, we’re not always penitent. When we stand to sing praises, we’re not always glorifying God. When we sit and hear God’s Word, we don’t always listen and heed its instruction. We make our poses hoping that someone will recognize us as Christians so we can maybe believe it ourselves. It’s like those commercials on TV where an actor looks into the camera and says: “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV” and then he gives us medical advice. In our moments of greatest honesty, we must admit that we at times must say: “I’m not a Christian, but I play one on Sundays.”

Our status as imposters is undeniable. A Rabbi friend of mine once said to me: “All we Jews ever want from you Christians is that you truly follow Jesus. If you did, we’d never fear for our safety again.” Yet even as imposters, we are true. What makes us a truthful people is our capacity and willingness to name who we are; to confess that as we pose as Christians, we are imposters. This is the beginning of a right relationship with God. For us to be a truthful people, we must learn to speak the language of truth about ourselves and the world around us.

Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has written on the differences between the three great monotheistic faiths: Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. He said the greatest difference between them is that Christianity is full of irony and the others are not. At the heart of Christian irony is that God can die and that because of Jesus’ death on the cross, life in all its abundance is poured out to the world. Archbishop Williams has gone to the heart of the matter. It is ironic that a 1st Century Jewish Rabbi could be God’s son and through his death redeem the world from its sin and separation from God. Death bringing life to the world is not anything if it is not ironic.

So the irony in our own posing as Christians is oddly congruent. It is our confession of the pride and hypocrisy of our lives that leads us to our own truthfulness. It is the recognition of our own selfishness and exploitation of others that leads us to know that we need God’s forgiveness. It is the awareness that we have squandered so much of what God has blessed us with that leads us to our poverty before God. Our truthfulness comes from our confession that we are indeed imposters.

+Scott