Go and Be Hypocrites....

...Or Something Like That.

Go ahead and read the comments on, say, any article you could find defending orthodox Christianity on Huffington Post. Well, on second though, maybe don't. All you're going to find is a lot of anger and hatred and resentment towards Christianity, or more precisely, as Fulton Sheen put it, what people think Christianity is. 

One of the choruses that you'll hear repeated over and over again by people who don't like Christianity is that Christians are a bunch of hypocrites. You preach a big game, they'll say, but then you don't back it up. You talk about all this morality and about love and about being perfect and living for Christ, and then you go and mess up. You're hypocrites!

As if we didn't know. 

I mean, it's not like this is something new. "For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want to do." (that's Saint Paul, in Romans 7:19, back in the 1st Century). 

You see, I think this is just part of signing up for Christianity. Christ tells us to be perfect, and yet we are all well aware that we aren't. We want to be better, we want to get rid of that sin, we want to be over it; and yet all too often we find ourselves in that same pit, that same despair, that same sin. 

The question, though, is what do we do about it? Do we let the com-box atheists win and stop defending the faith because we're not worthy of it? Do we grow weary, let fear win, and hide?

I, for one, certainly hope not. 

We're going to be hypocrites at times. Is that good? Of course not. We need to fight back from that, we need to pick ourselves up and return to the Father always, but we also cannot stop standing up for truth. Truth, we know, is not something we make up; it's not based on how well we live it, but it is based on the One outside of ourselves in whom we have life. 

So, you realize you're a hypocrite. St. Paul did the same-but he never stopped standing up for truth. Don't let your insecurities and faults stop you from standing up for what you believe in. In fact, if you and I stand up for Truth with courage despite our own faults, I think we'll all find that we become a little less hypocritical in the process.