Showing Off
A sermon for Sunday, August 9, 2020
Would you pray with me?
God who is with us wherever we are, thank you for bringing us together in this time and place. By your Spirit, make your presence known here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
You know, the way I know that the Sermon on the Mount is still working on my heart is that every week when I go to preach on a new section of it, I feel the need to confess something. Jesus is still out here, using the same words he used two thousand years ago, to shape our hearts and minds so that we can be more like him, amen?
I remember hearing this passage in Matthew as a teenager and thinking that I needed to start praying in my closet if I was serious about being a Christian, so I went into the closet in my room, cleared out a space on the floor, wrote a couple of Bible verses in pencil on the wall, and started to pray. To be honest, this was not the most effective way to pray for me, since, whenever God and I have a conversation, I tend to gesticulate and I kept on banging my hands on the walls, but I kept it up for a quite a while, because I thought it was what you had to do.
Then, one week, in Bible study, we were talking about prayer and I proudly proclaimed that I go pray in my closet. The high school girls’ Bible study leader, Mary Nelson, bless her heart, said that I was being very scriptural but also asked if there was a reason why I would choose to hide in a closet to pray. Sensing that I needed to fill out my story a little more, I said that I had to go to my closet to pray because my house was SO LOUD all the time, I couldn’t find another quiet space for prayer. This was, unfortunately, a lie, because my older brother stayed in his room reading all the time and my little brother was either outside with friends or playing video games, but I stuck to it, because I didn’t want anyone to think I was weird. This is one of those stories that I will remember out of the blue and cringe a little. Yeah, in the end, it was just an awkward high school and no, no harm was done, but for someone who prided herself on being the smartest kid in class, I totally missed the point that Jesus is making here.
And I’ve found that to be true with several of my clergy friends. We were set on this path toward pastoral ministry because we were good at church. We were the smartest kids in Sunday School, the most devoted volunteers at the homeless shelter, the presidents of the youth group, the soloists in the church choir. We were shining stars of church and it turns out, if you shine bright enough at church, someone somewhere will give you a copy of The Christian as Minister and tell you that you should think about going to seminary.
But being good at church didn’t necessarily mean we were good at understanding what Jesus was saying. Sometimes, being good at church made us completely misunderstand what Jesus was saying, because Jesus tells us, in passages like this, to do everything for God, but being good at church sometimes, maybe even often, meant doing things for the approval of others.
Not that I haven’t heard several sermons in my life about doing good in secret, but it’s a little bit of a Catch-22 for the over-achieving kid. How can we show people how good we are at doing good in secret when we have to keep things secret? How can we get our gold star or our “Secret Do-Gooder” badge if we can’t tell anyone about the good we’re doing? And how does this line up with what we read last week, where Jesus told us not to hide our lights under a bushel and to be salt for the earth and shining city on the hill? Should we shine our lights or should we pray in secret? Is our faith public or personal?
This is a perennial question for us Christians, one that we’ve tried to answer over and over again, and one that we’ve wrestled with over the history of the United States. I should know. I’m descended from Increase Mather, father of Cotton Mather, both of whom were Puritan ministers involved in the Salem Witch Trials, a perfect example of faith lived out loud gone wrong. But both before and after the Puritans, the question of how we live out our faith as Christians has plagued us, and still does to this day.
I think it’s important to notice that here, in this passage, Jesus is talking about what we today call spiritual practices or spiritual disciplines, things like giving, praying, and fasting. Spiritual disciplines are like exercising for your soul, helping you grow spiritual muscle. The more we do this spiritual exercise, the more we show fruits of the Spirit. Giving can grow love, joy, kindness and goodness within us. Praying grows peace, faithfulness, and gentleness. Fasting can grow patience and self-control. We do these things because, as we encounter God more and more often, we see that we want to be like God and practicing these disciplines helps us be more like God. We do these disciplines because we want to, because we have hearts that long to be close to God but also hearts that need a little help getting there.
So it makes sense that Jesus would tell us to do these things in secret, because these things are not for the world; they’re for God. Giving to those who need it is not for other people to see; it’s for God, who Jesus tells us is in the least of these. Praying is not for other people to hear; it’s for God, who delights in coming close to us. Fasting is not for others; it’s for God, who can speak more easily to our hearts in times of emptiness. These disciplines that Jesus lists here, these common practices of faithful people in Jesus’ day, they were meant to grow a connection between us and God. The world doesn’t need to be involved in that.
And if the world is involved in these things that are best left between us and God, we run the risk of being performative, what Jesus later calls being white-washed tombs. Jesus spends so much time talking about these disciplines, I think, because we are so susceptible to being performative. It seems simpler and more rewarding to look like you’re doing what God tells you to do. It’s easier to get affirmation when someone sees you doing God than to trust in the affirmation that comes from God.
But here’s the thing: we already have all the affirmation we need from God. We are each beloved children of the one who makes us, saves us, and sustains us. We know where we stand with God. Nothing can change that and one else’s opinion matters.
And that frees us to make mistakes on our Christian journeys. It frees us to grow in generosity, being able to give freely to whoever needs it, without anyone judging what we give. It frees us to make mistakes in prayer, to change our minds in prayer, to not know what to pray for, exactly, and to be ourselves when we come to God in prayer. It frees us to have a relationship with God that is just between us and God, something that’s precious and holy and growing and changing. When we trust that God will give us what we need, including the affirmation we need, we don’t have to seek that approval elsewhere. We don’t try to receive what we need for life from other people. We receive it from God our life-giver.
That’s the knowledge and wisdom that I didn’t have in high school, and I’d bet it’s part of the wisdom that the people Jesus was criticizing were missing too. When we get our affirmation and support solely from other people, we’ve already received all they can give. When we get our affirmation and support from God, we receive gifts that last throughout this life and into the next.
And when we rest in God, when we practice these spiritual disciplines for God and God alone, then we are filled with what we need to go out into the world and do the good works God has set out before us. It’s not that our faith is entirely public or private; it’s that our faith is both. God calls for us to love God in secret, but that love was never meant to stay secret. It was meant to grow and grow and grow, until we can’t help but shine with it, give light to others with it, preserve the earth with it, and flavor the world with it.
So go. Seek out God in the quiet spaces where no one else is watching. But don’t stay there forever, because God wants to grow you bigger than that.
Amen.