Who is it for?

Sermon

Joel 2:12–13 “Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; rend your hearts and not your clothing.

Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.”

Matthew 6:2 ““So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward.”

Who is it for? That is the key question implied in today’s Gospel from Matthew 6 and answered in our Ash Wednesday liturgy, at least as a goal.

Who is it for? That’s also the key question we may ask ourselves as we enter Lent and walk through a season of fasting, introspection, and walking alongside Jesus toward the cross and, ultimately, the resurrection.

I’m in a class preparing for the exam to become a Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies and the training involves lots of information on different kinds of disabilities and best practices for supporting people with each of them.

A key part of disability etiquette, I have learned both from the course and other people with disabilities, is letting the individual guide the interaction. Don’t assume they need help (or a certain kind of help) - ask them instead. If you’re talking to a deaf person with a sign interpreter, look at the deaf person, not the interpreter. Don’t automatically ask the parent of a developmentally disabled adult what the person wants - ask them yourself. When you say it this way, these may seem obvious, but many people with disabilities deal with these little slights every day. What’s going wrong is that people with disabilities are often treated as objects rather than subjects - intended beneficiaries perhaps of what you do, but treated as if it is not them and their needs that ultimately matter and should have the power to decide how other people interact with them.

In trying to “help” others, that is, it’s good to ask “Who is it actually for?” And that’s Jesus’ message here in Matthew.

Repeatedly, he says not to do good works of giving or prayer or fasting “in front of others” “in the synagogues and in the streets”. The giving isn’t invalid, nor is this advice saying no one should put a check in the offering plate and we all need to give online or through a secret mail slot or something.

Instead, Jesus says those who make a point of displaying their piety for others have received their reward. What reward? The reward they sought - human approval.

“Do not be like the hypocrites!” - a word mostly used to refer to play-actors - Jesus says. When you give, do not do it for others. When you pray, do not do it to be seen by others.

And ultimately, it’s not even for others - when we show off our piety, we do it for ourselves. When Jesus says

Matthew 6:2 NRSV

“So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward.

“so they may be praised by others” uses the word Doxa as in doxology. We all are at times tempted by this - to do works ostensibly for others, even to help them (after all, if they see us giving maybe they will too, right?) but ultimately we want to usurp the praise that rightly belongs to God.

In Joel, we hear “Return to the Lord your God… Rend your hearts and not your clothing”.

And it’s here we get to the common question about Lenten observances: “Should I stop [eating chocolate, eating fish, drinking caffeine] for Lent?” Well, maybe.

Don’t give up chocolate for Lent and brag (or complain) about it on social media or in the office every single day. You can talk to select people for support or share your journey with others, but it’s easy (even with good intentions to encourage others to improve themselves) to use fasting as a kind of virtue signaling, something Jesus was VERY much against.

Also, don’t give up coffee for Lent to make yourself a better person. It’s not that you can’t give up coffee if it will help your attitude, health, or discipline. Those are all perfectly good reasons to re-evalute our habits. But that’s not fasting either.

The problem with both of these, at least as spiritual disciplines, is that they very quickly become about us. The hypocrites drew attention to themselves and even when they served others it was so they might be praised or recognized. But it’s just as easy (maybe easier) to say “I want to be a better person and this is how I start”. Just as the hypocrites succeeded in getting their reward in the praises of others, your efforts to be a better person might reap valuable rewards.

But every effort at self-improvement is fundamentally different from what God in Christ calls us to in this passage - which is humble openness to influence toward God. Most of us are familiar with this difference, at least in principle, because we pray the Lord’s Prayer and say “Your will be done” (implicitly contrasting that to our own will). Jesus says to go to a windowless closet and pray in secret. Sometimes that means not just keeping it secret from others, but also from ourselves, in the sense that we “don’t let our left hand know what our right hand is doing”. Being open to God’s influence is hard because it requires just this stepping back from us, so that “God who sees in secret will reward you in secret”.

In our service today, we remember why, ultimately, efforts to draw closer to God be being a better person fail. We do in fact receive our rewards when we seek them, often even good rewards. But we betray the first commandment in doing so.

In Luther’s catechism, he explains the First Commandment:

You are to have no other gods.

What is this? Answer:

We are to fear, love, and trust God above all things.

Long before that, Jesus told us the greatest commandment: “You are to love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength and love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus wants us to care for ourselves and not give of ourselves for nothing. But to “seek first the kingdom of heaven” is to set aside ourselves and trust that God knows how to care for us if we only sit with him and listen. It is a discipline that requires centering and meditation. But there is no other way.

In the end, we all will return to dust, the same from which we have come. This Lent, I invite you to stop seeking to be influential or even to be the best person. Instead, try for these 40 days to be open to influence from God and others. When we return to dust, what do we leave behind? The legacy of our love and of how we pointed others toward God. Truly, I tell you. You will receive your reward. What will you seek? The bad (praise)? The good (self-betterment)? Or the best (God’s kingdom come on earth)?