“It’s getting harder to be good.”  Do you believe it?  We know for instance that it is harder to do a lot of other things.  It is certainly harder to earn a living and harder to hold a job.  It’s harder to own a home and to get into college.  It seems as if it is harder to do a lot of things so it makes sense that it is also harder to be good.

 

I must admit when I first came across that statement while reading a Yankelovich briefing on trends for the future, it caught my attention and grabbed my imagination.  Has it ever been easy to be good?  Is goodness really a goal for which people strive?  What does this mean for the church?  Are we in danger of going out of business because people are going to stop trying to be good?

 

Bill Moyers tells a joke about journalists.  And I am sure that other professions have also been made the butt of this particular joke.  “Do you know why scientists are now using journalists instead of rats in their laboratory experiments?  First of all because there are more journalists then there are rats; second, you don’t get attached to journalists as you do to rats; and third, journalists will do things rats won’t do.”

 

As you well know, humor often illustrates the values of a society.  Today virtually all of our time-honored institutions and professions are under siege.  It was not long ago that physicians were considered the high priests of the culture.  Malpractice suits have exposed their feet-of-clay and shown that they too can make mistakes.  There was a day when clergy were placed on a pedestal and perceived to be above the frailties of the human condition.  It really did not take the exposure of a few T.V. evangelists to show us that wasn’t true, for clergy had fallen from the pedestal long before that.

 

The Yankelovich people maintained that there is a new moral tone which is part of our reality as we move into the 21^st Century.  That moral tone can be characterized in the statement, “It’s getting harder to be good.”  As they see it, in the 1950s a relatively strict moral code was enforced on the surface but transgressions were tolerated if one was discreet.  But this double standard has largely evaporated.  We now expect ourselves, our spouses, our colleagues, and our public figures to live by stricter rules and not just in appearance.

 

Does this mean that we should give up our quest for goodness?  Or is there a call here to rise to the challenge?  Our scripture lesson reminds us that the struggle to be good is not a new struggle.  It has always been hard to be good but Christian people have never shied away from the struggle.

 

The Apostle Paul puts the struggle in desperate terms when he says, “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.”  I want to suggest this morning that we are a people who are trying to be good.  But it is not easy because sometimes we adopt the wrong standard of goodness.

 

I.       The Standard of Looking Good -- The Double Standard

 

Certainly we want to be seen as being good people but too often the standard we adopt is the standard of looking good which is most commonly known as the double standard.  According to the Yankelovich people we have been able to document the double standard in public and private life for a number of years.

 

The double standard found application in all kinds of ways.  For men, certain behaviors were considered flirtatious; for women, they were seductive.  The basketball star Kobe Bryant is on trial for rape, but somehow the victim is put in the position of defending herself. 

 

The double standard tells us that it is more important to look good than to be good.  One of the most painful memories of my youth came in connection with my discovery of little league baseball.  I had to have been about 11 years old at the time and I was walking by a playing field and noticed that there were a bunch of kids about my age wearing real baseball uniforms -- you know, the kind the Yankees or in my case the Seattle Raniers wore.  Like any kid who fantasized about one day playing in the big leagues, I wanted to know how I could get one of those.  I was told, “Come to tryout next Saturday.”

 

The next Saturday my brother and I showed up with our baseball gloves, sneakers, and wearing some pretty tattered hand-me-down jeans which had been sent to us by cousin Darrel in North Dakota.  We were prepared to play some baseball because we thought we were pretty good at it, but we were not prepared for the barbs of ridicule which were thrown in our direction by one of the boys because of what we were wearing.  The assumption was because we didn’t look good we could not do good -- a double standard.

 

The history of the double standard is that it allows us the luxury of appearing to be good when we really are not.  From this pulpit I can be very self-righteous in opposing any behavior which pretends to be one thing while acting the opposite.  However, the reality is that my own feet-of-clay are all too obvious to anyone who knows me well. 

 

Sociologist Ralph Bellah of the University of California at Berkeley is surprisingly positive about the double standard when he makes this statement:  “Hypocrisy is the homage which vice renders to virtue; it at least upholds the standards.  We then can criticize the person for not acting on those standards.”  Bellah reminds us at the very least there is a virtue in the double standard which keeps before us that there is a higher standard toward which we strive.

 

II.     The Standard of Being Good -- The Impossible Standard

 

It is true that even though many people live according to the standard of looking good, upon reflection there are few of us who would argue for the supremacy of that standard.  But there is a higher standard to which we aspire -- the standard of being good.  You may want to argue with me but I call this the impossible standard.

 

Somewhere along the line our public relations people got it wrong and put the wrong spin on it.  The word went out -- the family that prays together stays together -- accompanied by a picture of a happy family dressed in their Sunday best about to enter the doors of a church.  Of course that family was always white, and it always included a father, a mother, a son, and a daughter.

 

It was the American dream at prayer on a Sunday morning.  That was the church in which I grew up!  Church was the place where we went to thank God for work, wealth, health, and happiness.  It was the place which stood as a monument to how God blesses those who get it right.

 

The church was perceived to be the place which upheld the standard of being good.  It was the place we came because we were good in order to teach our children how to be good, and to be reminded of how good we really were.  In those days (if the ads were to be believed) whatever conflicts may have been present within those double-breasted suits and nuclear families were left outside the church for that one hour on a Sunday morning.  The parents would go into the Sanctuary for worship while the children often would find their way to Sunday school during the same hour only to meet again on the steps of the church after the hour was over.

 

My friends, somewhere along the line some people got the message that only good folks come to church.

 

A few years ago (when we were in the midst of the Iran contra hearings) one person commented on Oliver North’s testimony before the Senate committee in this way:  “He was able to justify every one of his acts according to the highest virtues -- faith, love, hope, fortitude, and justice.  The testimony was so powerful to the American people because rhetorically and superficially it represented everything we admire.  And for that very reason it’s the more dangerous because the flip side, the dark side isn’t being seen.  We can do tremendous evil in this world in the name of good and in the name of God.”  That, of course, is a lesson that continues to be relevant whenever we try to justify our politics in the name of religion.

 

I have a plaque in my study at home which was given to me by a friend.  It says, “Never trust a man who says he believes his sins are forgiven.”  I am sure that can apply to women also.

 

While many of us who come to church claim to be conservative in our politics and our religion, we are really classic liberals in disguise.  We believe that there is something about this weekly experience that will make us good.  In our heart-of-hearts the church is not much more than Richard Simmons at prayer; an exercise for moral fitness where instead of a picture of the body beautiful at the front of our class we imagine a person with a halo who is passing out halos.

 

That is really laying it on a bit thick isn’t it.  We are not really that naïve.  However, if we are not that naïve; it is still difficult for us to admit that our church is more like a hospital for sinners than a hotel for saints.

 

Lord Acton said that every institution is finally destroyed by an excess of its own first principle.  Let me say that the first principle of the church is not to help people to be good.  When the rich young ruler came to Jesus frustrated because all of his goodness had not brought him happiness, he was rebuked when Jesus said, “Only God is good.”

 

My friends, to the degree that we are holding up the standard of being good as the goal of the church or as individuals, we have set an impossible standard that can only bring frustration and despair.

 

This is what Paul means by the law in our passage of scripture.  The law was that standard of goodness towards which Paul had been taught to strive but in all of his striving he found only failure and never salvation.

 

III.    The Standard of Doing Good -- The Gospel Standard

 

The church has always stood for goodness but there have been times when we have operated according to the wrong standard of goodness.

 

There have been times when we have acted as though the standard we believed in was the standard of looking good -- the double standard.  Certainly we have never consciously taught our people that standard but many of us have lived according to it.  But the one we buy into more regularly as church folks is the standard of being good.  It is impossible to be good just as it is impossible to earn our salvation.  We have tried and the more we try the more frustrated we become.

 

To be sure it is getting harder to be good because the double standard and the impossible standard just will not work, but we still continue to fall back on them.  However, there is yet one more standard which is so obvious it hardly deserves commentary and yet we keep missing it.  It’s the Gospel standard!  The Gospel standard for goodness has always been a very simple one, perhaps too simple.

 

The teaching of the New Testament is, “By their fruits you shall know them.”  When I was growing up in Sunday school, in a small Presbyterian Church, that wisdom was summarized in a more homey way as we sang, “Let your walk match your talk.”

 

What is the walk that is suppose to match our talk?  A summary is found in Galatians 5: 22 where is says, “The fruits of the spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control.  There is no law against such things.”

 

It is interesting to me that today the word Christian has almost become synonymous with the word good.  We say, “I try to live a Christian life,” meaning, “I try to live a good life.”  We say, “That person is a Christian person,” meaning, “That person is a good person.”  But we fail to remember that the word Christian literally means a Christ one -- a little Christ, a Christ in miniature.  When it was first used and applied to early Christians, it was said with a sneer.  A modern parallel might be the way we talk about do-gooders.  To be a called a do-gooder doesn’t feel like a compliment does it?

 

That is the difference between being good and doing good.  We would much rather be thought of as good in the abstract; but when we start doing good, that gets very specific and interestingly enough very controversial.  I noted a Bishop’s comments a few weeks ago when he said, “When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint.  When I asked why they were poor, they called me a communist.”  If the life of Christ teaches us anything, it is that doing good often meets resistance.

 

My friends, if you hear noting else that I have to say this morning hear this -- not one of us here this morning is all that good.  To try to look good or even to try to be good is to base our life upon false standards.  That Gospel which we call “good news” is not that we can be good but that we can be forgiven.  There are no good people; only forgiven people.

 

We are able to face up to who we are by using the “S” word (Sinner) and accepting God’s forgiveness.  When that happens, we have a chance of becoming little Christ’s and doing good.

 

 

Amen.