Sermon: Keeping Up Appearances aka Be a Ninja Turtle
Southside Christian Church, Jacksonville, Florida
October 1, 2023
Scripture: Matthew 21:23-32
Well, it’s a pleasure to join you this morning, and I thought hard about a topic for this sermon, to make a good first impression. I want to say something meaningful to you. So naturally, this is a sermon about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Or at least it starts there. You know these turtles? You may remember the 1980s cartoon. 4 baby turtles transformed by glowing radioactive ooze into human like turtles, who grow up into their teenage years in a New York sewer, named after Renaissance artists, Raphael, Donatello, Michelangelo and Leonardo, venturing out for pizza and to take on villiains and tutored by their martial arts master and father figure Splinter, who is a human sized, upright standing rat. I promise, this is going to get theological.
You may have watched the 80s cartoon like me, or one of the series and movies since then, if not yourself then with your kids or grandkids. I took my son Will to see the latest movie a couple weeks ago. Going to the movies is one of our favorite pastimes. I took him and his sister to see the 30th anniversary showing of Jurassic Park last month, and Lila exclaimed, “Did people go to the movies in the 90s to be traumatized?”
Maybe not that, but maybe we go to be transported. Yet even when we are transported to fantastical worlds of dinosaurs and crime fighting turtles, the best movies speak right into our lives. It may be a silly thing like a Transformer or a Ninja Turtle, but there is more than meets the eye. It’s more than just appearances.
Jesus Makes an Appearance
I would be hard pressed to say our Gospel reading is about Ninja Turtles today but it is certainly about appearances. Who appears to have authority and who actually has it? The Chief priests and elders, or Jesus? Who appears in Jesus’ parable to be the faithful son? The one who says yes, but doesn’t show up or the one who says no but does show up?
In the church calendar, we are in ordinary time, but this is no ordinary time for Jesus. In fact, it’s holy week. What we now celebrate as the days between Palm Sunday and Easter, in Jesus’ time and Jewish culture, is the week leading up to Passover or as it is known in Hebrew, Pesach.
As many Jewish people arrived on pilgrimage for this holy season, Jesus has made a dramatic and triumphal entry on a donkey, widely hailed as a prophet and one who comes in the name of the Lord. Of course it was not entirely spontaneous. Here’s the thing – even Jesus was not opposed to making an appearance. He and his disciples staged this entry into Jerusalem. They put on a show.
And then, Jesus immediately proceeded to enter the temple and run off money changers who were robbing the people. You could say that Jesus followed up his appearance with substance, with acting on God’s justice.
Throughout this week, Jesus will continue to teach and confront and to relentlessly challenge authority, undermin\ing the assumed status of who ranked ahead of who, making abundantly clear that we should not just be keeping up appearances. What is more important than appearances? Doing what is righteous.
Righteoussss
Which brings us back to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as true products of the 1980s loved to say “Righteousssss”. They have kept some of their retro characteristics and lingo over the years, up to this year’s newest animated movie called Mutant Mayhem. This is the movie my son and I went to see recently, and I was strangely moved by it. It really is about doing what is righteous, not based on status or keeping up appearances, but doing what is right even when you don’t have to because no one expects it of you.
Ninja Turtles is the story of outsiders who in some ways just want to fit in even though they are very different. In the new movie, the Turtles find other mutants like them, and it feels to them like finding family. They appear to be allies. Meanwhile, their father Splinter warns them about humans, who can’t bear the appearance of the mutants. He only wants to protect his sons. Once, Splinter tried to enter the human world and was attacked by humans. Mutants are safe – humans are not. Appearances are what seem to matter.
But the Teenage Turtles also find a Teenage human friend, and start venturing further out into the human world. And their new mutant friend, a supersized insect known as Superfly, begins to reveal his true intentions – he wants to destroy humans. So the Turtles must decide – will they go with appearances, with their father’s understandable fear of humans, with their new mutant friends dangerous call to war on the human world, or will they risk going beyond appearances? How will they be met if they do that? Will humans accept them or attack them?
Status or Truth?
Attack and war would have been on the minds of first century Jerusalem too. When Jesus enters Jerusalem, he appears as a contrast to Roman power. Scholars John Domnic Crossan and Marcus Borg believe that in Jesus’ triumphal entry on a donkey he may be mirroring the Roman procession into Jerusalem at this time of year, before Passover, as a kind of threat to the Jewish people to celebrate without stirring up revolt against their Roman imperial lords, arms of the Emperor himself, who was the ultimate Lord of the realm. Thus Jesus rides into town in the name of a different lord, Yahweh, on a humble donkey, making a mockery of the ornate appearance of Rome’s supposed authority.
Jesus found conflict too with the local leaders, his fellow Jews, the elders and the chief priest, who would have understandably been fearful of provoking Roman military might that could stamp down on the city. As with other religious leaders through time and culture, they had their own power and wealth arrangements. An important note about this dynamic and our gospel reading today – these and other passages have been tragically and violently misused over the millenia to promote anti-Judaism and antisemitism, portraying “the Jews” against Jesus. But that’s not it at all, because Jesus was Jewish and what we see in these passages is the remembrance of an internal Jewish argument about power and authority and status – heated yes, but among Jewish people including Jesus trying to find their way forward under Roman rule and occupation. All of that to say, due to the deadly history of antisemitism and its frightening resurgence in our days, it always does us well as Christians to reaffirm our friendship with our Jewish neighbors and to reject any interpretations of Scripture which pit Christianity against Judaism.
It’s in the context of this argument with leaders in his own community that Jesus takes this moment to address authority and status when these leaders only seem concerned with keeping up appearances. They have seen Jesus’ bold entry to the city, his clearing out of the money changers from the temple, and they want to know, on whose authority? Who said you could do all this?
Jesus responds in a classic rabbinical move of answering a question with a question, and he seems to know just how to catch the leaders in their obsession with appearances. He asks them about his predecessor, his cousin, the prophet John the Baptist, who by now has been martyred and perhaps loved all the more for it.
Jesus catches these leaders in a bind. We are privy to their calculations. There is no discussion of what is true and what is right. For them, it’s a question of losing status to Jesus or losing status with the people. If John was sent by God, then why won’t they listen to Jesus, whom John endorsed? If John was not sent by God, then, well, the people will not be happy to hear that and may rally against the leaders. Notice, it is the leaders status and authority that matters to them, not painting the truth.
How about us? In our places of power, in the church, in society, are we more desirous of admirers or righteousness? Are we looking for allies who appear to be powerful or those who do what is right?
Painting a True Christ
One of my favorite movies of recent years is called A Hidden Life. It is adapted from the true story of an Austrian man, Franz, who in the 1930s refused to serve in the Nazi military. Eventually he died for his conviction. He stood alone, with practically only his wife standing with him. He is a devout Christian man who becomes disillusioned to see the bigotry and violence of the Nazi regime infiltrating the people of his own village. And he finds that the church will not stand with him in the truth.
He does find a sympathetic painter in a church, brushing frescoes of Jesus onto the walls, all the while lamenting his own complicity. The painter reflects on his paintings and I think on the role of the church, saying: “What we do is just create sympathy, we create admirers. We don’t create followers. Christ’s life is a demand. We don’t want to be reminded of it. So we don’t have to see what happens to the Truth. I paint their comfortable Christ with a halo over his head. How can I show what I have not lived? Some day I might have the courage to venture. Not yet. Some day, I’ll paint a true Christ.”
And this is what Franz does. Like Christ, he cares less for appearances than the truth, he cares more about other people than his own power, and gives his life for what is right. The movie title refers to his hidden life, his small act of righteousness, which he was told would have no effect. But his example lives. May we too paint a true Christ.
Jesus shows us this way of authenticity, this way open to anyone who seeks to do what is right, in the parable he shares in our gospel reading today. After catching the leaders in their obsession with authority and status, he tells them a story. Jesus so often uses these parables to challenge those with a higher status to see how they are missing the mark, and to see how those considered outsiders are getting right. Painting righteousness is more important than appearing to be admirable.
For example, Jesus told a lawyer who wanted to justify how much he loved his neighbors to go learn about loving neighbors from Samaritans – who were mixed blood people who worshiped on the wrong mountain. Jesus is telling the lawyer through the parable of the Good Samaritan – you think you have it all figured out? Go learn from that person you think is the wrong kind of religion.
Similarly, in this parable, of the son who says he will show up and doesn’t, and the other son who says he won’t show up but then does, Jesus wants leaders to look at their own supposed authority, at their own supposed high status, and see that it means nothing. He says, the prostitutes and the tax collectors, these sinners, traitors, outsiders, these people considered black sheep, they are figuring out righteousness before you! Their status may be low but they are responding to Jesus, and they are seeking righteousness. Their appearance is one thing – their actions are another.
So who should we be looking out for? Who shows us by their actions that they are allied with the righteousness of God? Who is defined not by being an admirer but a follower of Christ?
Be a Ninja Turtle
It’s time for us to visit with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Mutant Mayhem one last time. In the climatic scene of the movie, New York City is under attack from a mutant army intent on its destruction. The Turtles watch from afar, realizing that no one expects them to do anything. They could easily stay out of the fight. And it is in this moment that their father Splinter finally realizes that his fear of humans should not stop them from helping. They could stay but they go, they show up to help.
Now, at first it does not go well. The humans think the Turtles are also on the side of the mutant army. They cannot see past appearances. The turtles look like the enemy. Their human friend April has to get on the television news and get the humans to see with new eyes. To look not for those of the right status, but those doing right. And then one human after another joins the turtles in the fight to save the city.
So this is what I am saying today: be a Ninja Turtle. Don’t worry about status, authority, keeping up appearances. Show up for what is right. Look for those who do right even if they’re the “wrong kind of person”.
Out with appearances.
Don’t appear to be Christian. Follow Christ.
Don’t appear to be right. Love righteousness.
Don’t appear to be just. Do justice.
Don’t appear to be a good neighbor. Love your neighbors and learn from them and you know what, love your enemies too.
And then, maybe then, we’ll paint a true Christ.
May it be so. Amen.
Matt Hartley 