Psalm 136:1-9, 23-26 | Matthew 6:1-18
Jeremy Richards
Our reading this morning, Jesus’ teaching from Matthew 6:1-18, is pretty straightforward: don’t be a hypocrite. Don’t practice your religion for show. The focal point of your practices shouldn’t be the approval of others, but God, your “Father who is in secret” and who “sees in secret,” to use Jesus’ words.
We’re in a sermon series exploring the first sub-theme in our year-long theme on love: reimagining the love of God. While love is never explicitly stated in this passage, we know that love is at the very heart of this passage, as it is at the very heart of all of scripture, as it is at the very heart of our Christian faith. We saw last week, in 1 John 4, that to abide in God is to abide in love, that God is love. We saw in Psalm 136, which will be our psalm throughout this sermon series, that all that God does flows out of God’s steadfast love, which endures forever. So, whether this passage speaks of God’s love outright or not, we know that any talk of God, and our interaction with God, is rooted in God’s love for us and for the world. Love is the air we’re breathing, the water we’re swimming in, we just might not realize it. We could say that the spiritual life is simply waking up to this truth.
I told you all last week that the rest of the sermon series will be based on Jesus’ teachings from Matthew 6 and 7, and that our goal is to find some practical ways to open ourselves up to real spiritual experience with the Divine. At the risk of showing my hand too early, let me just lay it all out there for you. Our passage today is about our inner stance, our orientation, our priority, and it says that all these things should be directed at God and God alone. Everything else depends on this. If we miss this, then the next two weeks’ lessons will be meaningless. Our reading next week will focus on the things that threaten to distract us and pull us away from God, and our final sermon will explore the ideas of asking, seeking, and knocking, and what that looks like for us.
So, looking at the big picture, each of these lessons builds off the previous one’s pretty naturally, which I think was Jesus’ intention. Today’s scripture is about getting our priorities straight, next week is about avoiding those barriers that stand in our way or the distractions that might pull us away, and the final Sunday’s sermon is about the seeking itself, once we’ve got our focus straight and the obstacles out of the way.
But as I read through our passage this week, something I hadn’t noticed when I originally planned this series stood out to me, and that was the contrast between Jesus’ original audience’s perspective and, I would guess, most of ours. Jesus is warning his listeners not to try to appear too pious. But in our day and age, we’re not very in danger of that, are we? These days, at least in Portland, Oregon, no one wants to come across as too pious. Right?
In fact, I’d guess that most of us this morning, if not all of us, when we hear the word “piety,” have a negative gut-reaction. It’s not a word we like. Because when we think of piety, we think of the very thing Jesus is speaking against in our reading. We think of self-righteousness. We think of holier-than-thou respectability that is hollow and hypocritical. Most of us are not in danger in the least of appearing too pious to our neighbors (and I don’t mean that in a bad way! I mean that we aren’t self-righteous, or holier-than-thou). I don’t think any of us regularly stand out on the street corner, loudly praying long, ostentatious prayers. I know you aren’t trying to impress anyone by praying in church or in meetings, because I can’t get anyone to pray a simple, short prayer to start our time together!
But the Greek word that gets translated “piety” in our reading today means justice, equitableness, fairness, righteousness, uprightness. Now those words…for the most part those are words we wouldn’t mind being associated with. Maybe we still aren’t so sure about righteousness, but justice, equitableness, fairness?! Heck yeah, bring it on.
Come to think of it, we don’t pray on street corners, but we do protest on street corners. We don’t pray in front of the large, open windows of our homes that look out on our streets, but we do fill our windows and our lawns with signs that say “Black Lives Matter,” and “Love Over Hate” and “In this home…(and then goes on to list your family values),” and other similar messages.
And come to think of it, we don’t call it almsgiving, but we do make donations to the organizations we support and the causes we believe in. In a couple of weeks we’re going to collect food for those in need in our parking lot. So I guess we can kind of relate, maybe more than we realized.
So what if we substituted the word piety for justice, or equity? Would this passage maybe take on a new meaning for you? I know it does for me. “Beware of practicing your social justice, your equity, before others in order to be seen by them. So whenever you contribute to the cause you believe in, do not sound a trumpet on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter, so that you may be praised by others in the form of “likes” and “shares.” Truly I tell you, you will have received your reward in full. But when you fight for equity, when you give of yourself, when you sacrifice for the good of another, do not let social media know what you’re doing, so that your effort will be done in secret, and your Parent who sees in secret will reward you.”
Notice that Jesus is not saying to stop being pious, to stop being just, being equitable, being righteous. The assumption is very much that his audience is doing that kind of work. Definitely, definitely, keep doing the work. In his first example, almsgiving, he isn’t saying to stop giving money to those in need. But he’s challenging their motivation and the way they go about giving. Is it for show? Is it for recognition from others? Or is it done in humility and a pureness of heart.
In the same way, please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have yard signs or we shouldn’t make posts on social media, and I’m definitely not saying not to bring food to the church parking lot on February 13th! There is certainly a place for proclamation and prophecy and good works. Words matter. Service matters. Movements needs support. But we need to ask ourselves: why are we doing this? Is it really to help the movement – whatever it is? Is it really to raise awareness? Is it amplifying the voices of those who are often silenced? Is it promoting love, joy, peace, justice, etc.? Or is it about me trying to look good, trying to get some recognition. Did I post about the food drive beforehand to let people know about it and encourage them to show up, or did I post afterwards to show everyone that I was there?
Because here’s the thing (if I can just get on my soap box for a minute): I’m so sick of privileged folx working so hard to appear woke, writing annoyingly long self-righteous social media posts and/or articles – which are very similar to the long, hypocritical prayers Jesus denounces – all in an attempt to get street cred from communities of color, or the LGBTQIA+ community, or the disabled community, or any other marginalized group. The term we use for it now is “virtue signaling,” right? It’s the worst. And I’m the most conscious of this kind of hypocrisy because it’s something I’m very tempted by myself. I want to be the woke, white, straight, cis, able-bodied pastor. I want to be told that I’m different, that I’m one of the good ones. I want to be told that I’m not guilty any more. I’m very critical of virtue signaling because I know it’s allure intimately. I also know how hollow it is. I know that it is not about marginalized people. It’s about me. It perpetuates the very problem I’m supposedly against: centering privilege and marginalizing the under-privileged. Because it’s really an attempt to amplify my own status, to place myself at the center, to make sure everyone sees me and hears me and tells me I’m special.
God is not in that. That is not love. That is self-serving vanity. That is hypocrisy.
Jesus says that instead of looking for the approval of others, instead of virtue signaling, we should be concerned with one thing and one thing only: God. But how he describes God is very interesting, isn’t it? Jesus says God is the one “who is in secret,” and he ends each section on almsgiving, prayer, and fasting by saying that our practices should be done quietly and in humility, and then “your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”
To be truly just, truly equitable, truly righteous – pious in the best sense of the word – requires an inward turn. It requires the secret, the silent, the dark. That is where God is found.
And so true piety – true justice, equity, and fairness – are, from a Christian perspective, impossible without religious experience. Love of others depends upon love of God. Turning to God and away from ourselves is the only way to truly release ourselves from our own ego. So long as we only operate out of our own goodness, then we will always be the point of reference. Everything will begin and end with us.
Turning to God results in humility, turning to ourselves results in pride. This will have real-life effects when it comes to our service and justice work, as well as our spiritual health, because if we’re centering ourselves and our goodness, then we will respond defensively when other’s point out our blind spots, or the times we’ve done harm despite our best intentions, because what’s most important to us is looking good. But if we live in humility, always looking not to ourselves, but to our loving Parent, then we can receive criticism and seek to address it, because we recognize that we are always in process, and we understand that we’ll always have growing edges, and at the same time we know that even though we’ve got stuff to work on, we’re still loved and known and held by God always. “For God’s steadfast love endures forever.”
Let’s turn now to this interesting way that Jesus describes God as “your Father who is in secret” (we might say your “Mother” or your “Parent” instead). Let’s explore this idea that God exists in secret for a moment. And this is where I’d like to bring in one of the contemplatives I was introduced to through the Living School. One of the first and most impactful books I read for the Living School was The Cloud of Unknowing, which is one of the most popular books on contemplation ever written. It was written in the 14th century by an anonymous author. The book is broken up into short chapters, often only a page or two long. It’s easy to read one a day as a devotion (I’m just saying). If you’re interested, I would highly recommend Carmen Acevedo Butcher’s modern translation.
The book’s title comes from the author’s assertion that God exists behind a “cloud of knowing” which we can never penetrate, at least not on this side of eternity, and that the key to experiencing God is to let go of all our notions of God, even the good ones. He says:
The first time you practice contemplation, you’ll only experience a darkness, like a cloud of unknowing. You won’t know what this is. You’ll only know that in your will you feel a simple reaching out to God. You must also know that this darkness and this cloud will always be between you and your God, whatever you do. They will always keep you from seeing [God] clearly by the light of understanding in your intellect and will block you from feeling [God] fully in the sweetness of love in your emotions. So, be sure to make your home in this darkness. Stay there as long as you can, crying out to [God] over and over again, because you love [God]. It’s the closest you can get to God here on earth, by waiting in this darkness and in this cloud.[1]
He goes on to say, a few chapters later:
I know you’ll ask me, “How do I think on God as God, and who is God?” and I can only answer, “I don’t know.”
Your question takes me into the very darkness and cloud of unknowing that I want you to enter. We can know so many things. Through God’s grace, our minds can explore, understand, and reflect on creation and even on God’s own works, but we can’t think our way to God. That’s why I’m willing to abandon everything I know, to love the one thing I cannot think. [God] can be loved, but not thought. By love, God can be embraced and held, but not by thinking.[2]
Jesus tells us in our reading this morning that when we pray, we should go into our room and shut the door and pray to our Parent who is in secret. While there’s a literal layer to this – Jesus is contrasting it to the hypocrites who pray out in public for others to see – there’s also a deeper, spiritual level to this teaching. When we pray, we’re to turn inward, to “go into our room,” and to “shut the door,” shut out all the distractions and worries that plague us, and to enter “the cloud of unknowing,” where God exists in secret.
There’s a great deal of freedom and relief in this kind of prayer, because it’s about resting not acting, it’s about receiving not giving, it’s about listening not talking. Walter Rauschenbusch, who I also quoted last week, says, “We do much for God, but we do not rest much in God.”[3] Prayer is Sabbath. It’s, to quote Rowan Williams, “a chance for God to get at me,”[4] instead of an attempt for us to get at God.
I think, if more people understood prayer to be rest and not action, more people would do it. Most of us feel like prayer is an obligation, something we should always do more of, and something we’re always feeling guilty about. We’re too tired to do another thing, so we don’t pray. But really, the more tired we are, the more overwhelmed we are, the more we need prayer. Prayer is spiritual rest, not religious gymnastics. Go home, close the door, sit in the secret and in the quiet. Rest in God. Don’t try to impress. Don’t try to comprehend. Just be. And know that God is.
Amen.
[1] The Cloud of Unknowing, trans. Carmen Acevedo Butcher, 12.
[2] Ibid 21.
[3] Dennis L. Johnson, To Live in God: Daily Reflections with Walter Rauschenbusch, 4.
[4] “Rowan Williams – The Problem of Prayer”, Nomad Podcast, May 24, 2017.