Frauds Among Us

News broke this week of one of the most prolific editors of Wikipedia being uncovered as a fraud. Ryan Jordan, a 24-year-old from Kentucky, had claimed to be a tenured professor of religion at a private college, but has now admitted that this is not true. In fact, this article indicates he has no real higher education qualifications - but does not elaborate on his education.

It appears that the editing that Mr. Jordan has done has not come under scrutiny - either meaning he knew enough about religion and his claimed specialty of canon law to fool readers or that the readers knew so little they couldn't tell. It seems that he had made more than 20,000 entries in Wikipedia, none of which had ever been questioned.

This story blows me away. I'm not sure how the guy knew enough to pull that off or maybe he just spent a lot of time doing research on the items he did entries about. It saddens me that someone would attempt to deceive so many in this way, I think it just adds potential fuel to the fire of those who hold Christians and anything to do with religion or ministry in disdain - expecting it is all false and fraudulent.

The Gospels are full of people who held themselves out to be things they weren't. The easiest group to pick on are the Pharisees. These were the religious elite of Jewish society, they were the holier-than-thou personalities of that era. In my estimation there is no group that Jesus was more harsh towards than these people who loved to be esteemed by others and held themselves out as being of highest human holiness. In Luke 11:37-54, Jesus goes through a list of warnings to the Pharisees for their hypocritical ways.

While I am sure that Mr. Jordan is terribly embarrassed now that his deception has been found out, I wonder whether I am even more guilty of the same kind of deception when I walk around like I have it all together? The reality is that each of us has faults and sins that we struggle with daily. How easy is it for me to give the appearance that everything in my life is great - marriage, job, faith, etc. - when in reality I have my good days and my bad days? I think the lie that we too easily buy into is that if we don't have everything together we'll be judged unworthy and life will fall apart. So to avoid that we put up walls and keep others out. Mike Yaconelli wrote a great book called Messy Spirituality a few years ago that talked about how messy our real lives are.

My challenge to myself as the writer is to be honest with myself and God, first about who I am and who I'm not and second about the difficulties and struggles that I face each day as I try to follow Him. I would challenge anyone reading this to do the same. Robin Sigars had a great post this week spring-boarding from a C.S. Lewis quote about the sign that we are alive is that we're constantly being repaired when we fall down, not that we don't fall down at all.