"Reward"

Rev. Matthew Miller

FROM THE GOSPELS Matthew 6:1-18 SERMON “Reward”

One of the benefits of preaching a sermon series like this is that it allows us to tie together pieces of scripture that don’t always get tied together for us. Today’s reading offers a couple of examples. The first has to do with what our translation calls the practice of piety, but what the updated translation more accurately names as the practice of righteousness. This particular passage from the Sermon on the Mount is almost exclusively heard in the life of worship on Ash Wednesday at the beginning of the season of Lent. And even then, it is usually edited in such a way that it excludes the prayer Jesus taught. More on that in a minute. The admonitions about outward acts like giving, praying and fasting are meant as a kind of corrective to the day. After all, it’s called Ash Wednesday because we mark the beginning of the forty days leading to Easter by receiving ashes on our foreheads in a sign of the cross. It’s a VERY visible sign of our devotion. So, we’re called to consider who we are and are not doing that for. 

The second example is the text that gets excluded from our Ash Wednesday readings, but is included in just about every worship service for which Christians gather. Not just on Sundays, but for funerals and weddings. It is the prayer Jesus gives us as an example of how to pray, but one that we often say by heart without giving much consideration for the context in which it is offered.  

Today we’ll view each of these teachings of Jesus within the whole of the Sermon that we are studying this summer. 

The word piety comes from the Latin pietas and means a sense of duty, the thing we do in dutiful response to someone we’re devoted to. Most days, I’m the first one in the kitchen, so it has become my practice, my duty, to make coffee for all the caffeinated members of the household. I do it for myself, of course. But I also make enough for others because I recognize the joy it brings them. Also, no one wants to encounter the Millers uncaffeinated, trust me. Certainly, our practices of generosity, particularly in the form of charitable giving, praying and even fasting, are a kind of duty we perform out of devotion to God. God is generous, and so our generosity is a connection to and an expression of all that God has given us. Prayer is how we talk to and attend to the God who is with us. And fasting is a practice across faiths that has been used over the centuries as way of focusing our hearts on the sustenance God provides beyond the food that fuels our bodies. But if we consider the updated translation of Jesus’ warning, “Beware of practicing your righteousness,” that changes things. 

First it draws upon a theme that Jesus introduced back in the beatitudes at the beginning of this discourse. Blessed are those, says Jesus, who hunger and thirst for righteousness. As noble as that sounds, the reality is often far different. We hunger and thirst when we have been deprived the essentials of human life: food and water. To hunger and thirst for righteousness means that what we have been deprived of something just as essential: justice. It means recognizing that the world is not as it should be, not as God would have it be. We desperately desire to set things right. Not right as we define it, but right with God. Right according to the words of the prophets like Isaiah who talks about loosing the bonds of injustice and letting the oppressed go free and then goes on to say that God would have us share our bread with the hungry, bring the homeless poor in from the street, clothe the naked and show up for those we call our kin. Such a desire for justice finds its blessing as we do just these things, as we find satisfaction in setting to rights a world gone wrong; a world built on the backs of the many for the benefit of the few, a world where differences get used systematically to exclude and divide, a world where might insists that it makes right and human worth isn’t inherent, but conditional. 

Jesus takes up righteousness a little further on in the sermon, insisting to his disciples that theirs should exceed that of the Pharisees. He then offers examples of what is considered unrighteous; murder, adultery, speaking falsely. The conventional wisdom on things like this is that righteousness, that is being right with God, living in the world as God would have us live, means avoiding such things. That seems self-evident, but murder, adultery, and speaking falsely are as rampant as ever. Only Jesus points out that refraining from such things isn’t the whole of what makes us right. Our actions are the product of an intention and that intention can exist even if it doesn’t find expression in action. Such intentions also keep us from living into the fullness of what God desires for us in the world. They are attitudes of the heart. Jesus wants us to know that there’s more to righteousness than the harmful acts that we abstain from. 

So, when we get to Jesus’ words in the passage before us, “beware of practicing righteousness before others in order to be seen by them,” we can see that this isn’t a new thought, but a continuation of Jesus’ thoughts on what righteousness is, and just as importantly what it isn’t. In the realm of God’s power and presence, the kinship created by God in which we see each other as siblings in the household created by God, hungering for what God would make right is a blessed condition that is satisfied by more than the things we avoid, it is satisfied by the inclination of our hearts away from anger, lust and falsehood. Likewise, such hunger is satisfied, or rewarded by more than the performative actions that other people see as righteous. If what we’re hungry for is other people’s approval, or their good opinion, or simply to be seen as “the right kind of people,” well Jesus would have us know the limits of such things. And here’s what I want us to hear because I think it is very common for us to approach Jesus’ words the way we often approach the bible, as prescriptive. But notice all along the way Jesus isn’t handing down instructions. “Do this. Don’t do that.” He is describing what life lived in the kinship of God looks like. It is blessed in the places and conditions that the world teaches us to avoid. It enhances the flavor of everything and saves it from going bad. It illumines what we might otherwise miss in the dark. It recognizes the attitudes of the heart that lead to harm and seeks the good of the whole of God’s creation and not just the parts and people we prefer. And when we see our place in it. When we rest in what God would make whole, what God would put right, our generosity comes from a place that doesn’t need recognition, because the reward is what that generosity makes possible, not how it bolsters our name or reputation in the community. Our prayers aren’t an effort to manipulate God, or those who might overhear our prayers, to get what we want, they come from a genuine desire to unite our hearts with the heart of God. As Jesus will pray much later in the garden before his death, “not what I want, but what you want, God.” And if we’re fasting it isn’t some kind of virtue signal meant to convey our holiness, or even our spiritual aptitude, it comes from a sincere effort to re-direct our appetites according to the one who gives us daily bread.  

Which brings us to the prayer we recite weekly, and really whenever we’re gathered in worship together. Even the prayer itself is a blueprint. He doesn’t say, “say this prayer.” He says, “pray in this way.” Pray like this. It isn’t about whether we say debts or trespasses, or if we say, “lead us not into temptation,” or “save us from the time of trial.” The right way to pray isn’t about the words themselves, it’s about how the words direct us toward God’s holiness, God’s realm of power, and God’s presence. It’s about how the words direct us toward what we truly need: bread, forgiveness, and salvation from the evil that would undo us. 

More than anything, Jesus seems to be telling us the kind of faith found in God’s ordering of things isn’t about calling attention to ourselves, but bringing attention to the goodness of God. It isn’t about the things we don’t do to keep from being punished and the things we do so people will think we’re a good person. It’s about turning away from all that would do harm to ourselves and others while turning toward God for God’s sake and God’s sake alone. Because the only reward that’s really worth having is the one that comes from being caught up in the generous presence of God that makes us wholly who God would have us be. That is a treasure beyond value. But, that’s a sermon for next week.