Ash
Wednesday 2019
Rev.
Adam T. Trambley
St.
John’s Sharon and Sharon First United Methodist
February
26, 2020
Your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
We tend not to trust the language of reward
regarding religious things. At least, we question a spiritual reward more
tangible than eternal life when we die. Somehow, our human brokenness manages
to turn the most sage spiritual advise into religious systems that we can game
for our own ends. Jesus is speaking against such tendencies in the gospel today,
where he commends almsgiving, prayer, and fasting, while advising us to avoid
making a spectacle of ourselves while doing so. We know there are rewards to be
gained by ostentatious alms-giving, pretentious prayer, and flashy fasting. We
know how much we all long for feelings of importance and affirmation and
acceptance. When we lack those, we can also run after power and prestige and
wealth. Even if most people don’t find prayer and fasting the most
straightforward way to lifestyles of the rich and famous, we can use anything
to prop us up a bit. And who doesn’t like to see their name in an annual
report, or on a plaque, or on a building?
Your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
Jesus is neither ruling out nor talking about
the rewards we tend to assume for prayer, fasting and almsgiving. There is a
place, and even perhaps a need, for public worship, just as there is a place
for lead gifts in capital campaigns. Public intercessory prayers will still be
answered and public alms giving will still feed the needy. The results of
spiritual disciplines is not in question, here, but rather our reward for
engaging them.
What is our own reward for these pious
disciplines? On the one hand, Jesus is not rewriting the rules of the same game
of human advancement such that if you send in your check anonymously God will
give you a bigger house, or if you fast in secret you’ll be on the fast track
to bishop AND lose lots of weight. (And by the way, fasting doesn’t really help
with losing weight, just like other binge diets don’t really help.) On the
other hand, Jesus is not saying that if you do pray and fast and give alms in
secret you will have to wait for your reward in heaven because you won’t get a
reward now. Jesus is saying that your Father who sees in secret will reward you
and it will be a real reward.
Your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
As human beings, we need go away by ourselves
to receive our rewards, and being in secret in this language means being alone.
If we aren’t alone, we get distracted. We are aware of all the outer
distractions in modern life. The addicting buzz of social media notifications.
The seemingly-urgent but relatively unimportant task we have to complete this
minute. The TV and music and every other bit of entertainment the world has
convinced us we need to have running constantly in the background. To actually
stop and pray, we need some way to silence the noise around us.
We also need to silence the noise within us.
That silencing is even harder to do than shutting off our phones if we don’t go
to our own place where it is only us and God. When others are around, we can’t
help but feel somewhat inhibited. We may need to let our aching hearts cry, but
tears won’t come if we around others, even those we love. We may need to sing
with joy, but we aren’t going to belt out our favorite hymn if someone else
might hear it. We may feel a great cheerfulness in giving our gift, until we
have it listed beside other gifts and suddenly feel that our extravagant
generosity is unimportant when printed beneath the gifts of wealthier
individuals. Our all-too-human sense of inadequacy keeps us from receiving
Jesus’ rewards for our work when we are with others. Jesus’ words caution
against pride and hypocrisy, but his advice is even more essential for all of
us struggling to accept that we are worthy of the extravagant, overwhelming
love that God pours out upon us. The love is ultimately our reward, and we
cannot receive that reward until we are willing to accept such love. Our spiritual
disciplines teach us how to accept God’s love, but we learn such acceptance in
secret.
Your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
Our deepest, truest reward is three-fold.
First, and most importantly, we receive a
deeper relationship with Jesus Christ at the core of our being. Being in secret
means that we are focusing what we are doing solely on Jesus. If we love
someone, we spend time with them and we give special gifts to them. Such
expression allows us give our love to them and receive their love for us. When
we take time for prayer, or offer our fasting privately to God, or gives alms
secretly so only our Father sees, we connect directly with the source of all
love. As we give these small gifts of ourselves to God, God responds. The
greatest gift God gives is a deeper and deeper relationship with Jesus Christ.
In that relationship we know ourselves as God sees us, as his beloved children.
In that relationship, we know our inheritance in the Kingdom of God, which is
our home now and for eternity. In that relationship, we know that we can have
already died with Christ, and will rise with Christ, and so we can live with
Christ and for Christ beginning this very day.
Second, our time in secret allows the Holy
Spirit the opportunity to come in our silence, stillness, and solitude to bring
us healing and peace. We are all broken. We all have cracks in our deepest
being from pain caused by others and by the sins we have committed. We have no
power in ourselves to heal ourselves. But God can heal us. Our repentance is
turning from all the things that increase our brokenness and toward the one who
can actually heal it. The spiritual disciplines we do in secret let God know
that we have offered this time, or this part of our selves for God to do with
as he will. When we offer that opportunity, the Holy Spirit will use that
opportunity for our own good. Our wounds begin to heal. The parched places
within us experience the slow bubbling of new springs welling up. Our fears and
anxieties are calmed and our hearts are softened as the soothing balm of God’s
grace seeps into every crack and crevice in our soul. This work does not happen
overnight, but it happens consistently, a little at a time, as we make time to
pray in secret and fast in secret and give in secret.
Third, our Father rewards us with the fruits of
each particular spiritual discipline as we look to God as we do them instead of
glancing around to see how others respond. The fruit of prayer is love. Our
prayer in secret increases our love for those we are praying for. Prayer is
like a stream cutting a channel of love between us and others. A trickle of
prayer will develop some love, and significant prayer is a raging river cutting
canyons between us that fill up with lakes and seas of love. Praise and
adoration lets us love God more deeply. Intercession gives us great love for
others. Confession and contemplation allows us to deepen our love for
ourselves.
The reward for our secret fasting is freedom.
As we give up food or other things that we rely on, we recognize that the
things of this world hold less sway over us than we thought. We find that we
can have a meal delayed and not yell at everyone around us because we are
hungry. We can fast from various media and realize the world has not ended
because we have not been constantly engaged. We are given the great reward of
remembering that we only need Jesus, and nothing else need have any power over
us. When we are free of the tyranny of what we had falsely decided we need, we
are free to love and follow Jesus in ever deepening ways.
When we give alms secretly, we are rewarded
with God’s abundance. We find that we can never give more to others than God
gives to us. We know the joy that we will never out-give God. We learn to live
extravagantly in our generosity while we also learn to receive the extravagance
of God for us. The smallness of our lives is slowly replaced by the realization
that it is indeed our Father’s good pleasure to give us the Kingdom and that
we, as our Father’s children, also receive immense pleasure as we give our
greatest treasures away. We can live in the abundance of the one who created
the universe and wants to share all of it with us.
Your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
When we pray and fast and give in secret, we
receive heavenly rewards, but we receive them now. A deeper relationship with
Jesus, the healing of the Holy Spirit, and lives of love, freedom and abundance
are all rewards that are treasures stored up in heaven. They are our inheritance
for eternal life. They never expire or fade away. And they matter now. We don’t
wait until we die to receive them. We are able to live them out now. These
rewards and all our treasure may be in heaven, which means our hearts are set
on heaven as well. With our hearts set on heaven, we get to live today as if we
are already in the Kingdom of God. Lent is the time the church sets aside so we
intentionally do the work we need to do to live for the Kingdom today. To pray.
To fast. To give alms. And to do them in a way that reaps the most important
rewards. A deeper relationship with Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit’s healing and
wholeness. The love and freedom and abundance that characterize the life of the
Kingdom of God.
And your Father who sees in secret will reward
you.
