Prayer Acceptable To God

In today’s readings we see the people of God offering God sacrifices. Lifting up their prayers and petitions. Very oddly, God rejects these offerings. He said these offerings that they are giving him are an ABOMINATION.

It’s a disgrace. It’s causing disgust. It’s repulsive. He says:

“When you spread out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen.”

What’s happening here? This isn’t God ignoring sinners. This is God refusing to listen to worshippers. People with their hands raised in prayer, and God is closing his eyes to them.

How can prayer, sacrifice, worship of God become the thing that he’s repulsed or disgraced by? How can it be something he turns away from?

Isaiah says: “Your hands are full of blood.”

The hands in that time, they lifted on the sabbath, did violence on the other six days. That’s the danger that should shock us this morning. Because the hands we’ll lift up in a few minutes in prayer to God are the same hands that may have:

wrote the cruel message, the gossip message, that held the grudge, cut the corners, slammed the door.

So prayer, the worship of God, the offering of sacrifices are supposed to be done as a medicine, as a cure for our souls. But the moment we start using that medicine as a trophy — as proof of how good we are — it stops healing and starts repulsing God. What does that look like?

Worship: Feeling as if God should be proud of us for showing up?

Prayer: Feeling as if we did something good by praying every day?

Service: Feeling as if we did something good for the church? Or the church is lucky to have us.

If there is someone who prayed, worshiped, and served God, it was St. Paul. He preached to the Jews, he preached to the greeks, romans, he could literally claim that the conversion of a majority of the western world could be attributed to him.

He still didn’t take the credit. He still didn’t boast about it. Why? Doesn’t he deserve the thanks or the credit?

No, listen to why he refused it. Paul says, at the height of all that ministry: “I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.”

Not tired, uncertain. the greatest preacher in the history of the church admitted he could lose the prize, that he could spend all his life handing the medicine and still die of the disease of sin himself.

Paul knew that this service, prayer, and worship he was offering to God and to the church was a privilege, was a gift, but ultimately it was a MEDICINE that was given to him by God for the healing/salvation of his soul. Whenever he handed the medicine, he never forgot it was for him too. He was never foolish enough to think that delivering the cure meant he was already healed.

So how do we know when we’ve slipped? When the medicine has quietly become a trophy for us?

We become an expert at pointing out all the tiny little specks in everyone else’s life. We can see how wrong everyone else is. How wrong everyone else talks. How wrong everyone else leads. How wrong everyone else worships.

You’ve probably already thought during this homily, “I hope so and so is listening” that’s the log. That’s the disease surfacing in real time, in this church.

Which is why Christ also gives us a good check of the heart and asks us, “Why do you call me Lord Lord, and do not do what I tell you?”

He asks us this question to drag our eyes off our neighbor and onto ourselves.

Why don’t we do what the Lord asks us to do? The easy things? The things we commit to. The things we say we would never do? This question Jesus poses to us protects us from two things: pride and hypocrisy.

We can then stop presenting ourselves as having it al figured out. We present ourselves before God and each other, as someone who is simply trying. Someone who prays, worships and serves, not because I’m good, but because I AM sick, and this is the medicine, and I need it as much as anyone in this church.

It would be weird if a sick man bragged about the medicine he was taking and remained sick. It would be weird to brag that you take more medicine than someone else. The goal is that we alllll receive the medicine given by Jesus.

Me as a priest, I’m given the privilege to sometimes to carry that medicine, which I also need, to someone else in need. But I carry it as a patient on the same floor.

The second that me, or any other follower of Jesus, begins to think that we are better because we’ve received the medicine— in that second, our prayer, worship, and sacrifice no longer serves as medicine, and they become repulsive to God our Lord and the very thing God turns His eyes away from.

In the end, we don’t bring our goodness and righteous deeds to God, we bring him our wounds

The thing we want to avoid is to stand before Him boasting of the bandages. Amen.