“Giving Up Lent for Lent” (Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21)

[This is a sermon I wrote and preached in Homiletics class at Wake, using the lectionary text for Ash Wednesday a few weeks ago.]

Giving Up Lent for Lent

The lectionary text for today, Ash Wednesday, is Matthew 6, verses 1-6 and 16-21. During his sermon among the rolling hills west of the Sea of Galilee, as Jesus finished talking about the law, and love, and wholeness, he says this:

Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven. 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. But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you…

And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

I have to admit, I’m not good at all with “giving up stuff,” and I don’t really know who or what to blame for that one, whether me or my parents or both of us. But I know that my parents’ attic is, as I speak, crammed full of remnants from my childhood, with everything from Ghostbusters proton-packs, to Rubbermaid totes-yes, that big, and in the plural-full of Legos and Lincoln Logs, to the entire collection of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series of children’s “horror” books, and on and on. I do think I’m much better at “giving things up” now, but somehow since I left for college I’ve never quite made it back to help my parents tackle the monumental task of finally getting rid of the stuff that I sometimes claimed I’d be inconsolable over losing.

“Giving things up,” though, is a rather interesting phenomenon, particularly in the Christian tradition. We’ve come to the time of the liturgical year, Lent, when “giving things up” becomes rather vogue, particularly for the more “high church” among us, though the practice often spans denominational and liturgical peculiarities. This “giving up of things” is, traditionally, a way we outwardly express an inward type of preparation for the coming forty days of the Lenten season that lead up to Holy Week. It’s purpose, simply, is to make us recognize our lack of and need for God in our lives as Jerusalem slowly comes into view on the horizon, to cleanse and purify our soul as it once again enters its existential and liturgical “dark night.”

For me, this activity is an immensely foreign experience. Having grown up in a small, relatively rural Baptist church, this kind of liturgical practice wasn’t expressly or openly recognized as normative. I heard about it every year from my Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, and Methodist friends at school, though, and if giving up chocolate or pizza, or an hour of TV at night, or Instant Messaging was part of the deal-all of them things I felt I’d surely die without-then I decided there was at least one thing left that was good about being a Baptist.

The text we have before us today, though, obviously doesn’t mention Snickers bars or Seinfeld. What it does mention are three things-almsgiving (or, better said, acts of financial or material charity), prayer, and fasting-which, depending again on our denominational tradition, we also may or may not do much of. (Remember, I didn’t just grow up Baptist. I grew up Baptist in the American South. Asking Baptists in the South to fast is more an insult to their cooking than a humble suggestion for how to better practice their piety.)

Indeed, when Ash Wednesday comes around every year and the season of Lent cranks up again, the activities-some would call them “disciplines”-of almsgiving, prayer, and fasting are often three of the things we most avoid working on. Some probably do because they just think they can’t do them very well-I think for many of us, taking the time to do something like “go into [our] room and shut the door and pray,” as the text says, just us and God, doesn’t come naturally at all, what with corporate ladders to climb, or youth league soccer games to see, or yes, even sermons to write. Our lives are just way too busy. We’ve got places to go and people to see, and the solitude and contemplation that Jesus is asking of us slows us down and frustrates our plans. Our inability to center ourselves and take a breath once in a while, whatever the activity through which we achieve that centering may ultimately be, is a reality I think the text, and Jesus, may be trying to remind us of. Particularly as the Passion looms nearer, time will start to slow down. The eternal God, having taken on the identity of finite humanity, will on the cross be estranged from us once more and our world left in unsettling darkness. That’s something we won’t want to miss in our rush to get to the next item on our to-do list.

I think this text is about much more than simply centering ourselves, though, or about specifically giving alms, or praying, or fasting. While I think the text is rightly saying that these three specific activities carry great importance, particularly for the people of the various first-century Christian communities, there seems to be a bigger vision at work here in the Matthean author (and ultimately, Jesus himself). And this vision, I think, is one that we’ve tended to lose sight of over the long time span of two millennia since the text was first written for the spiritual benefit and instruction of the Matthean community.

But first, let’s set the hermeneutical table. Before we get to the vision I think is at work in the text, I think it would do us good to review a little about how that vision has maybe, in various ways, been missed over the years and, still, is maybe missed even today. One of the most important parts of the text, clearly, is Jesus’ use of a similar linguistic and rhetorical form in talking about all three activities of piety. To some degree, they all follow the same pattern: First, Jesus says, whenever we do one of them-whether it’s give alms, or pray, or fast-we aren’t to act like the “hypocrites” who trumpet their giving loudly, love to be seen by others on the street as they pray, and intentionally try to look pathetic to draw attention to their fasting. These “hypocrites,” as would have been obvious to everyone in the crowd that day, are the Pharisees. And, he notes, in all three activities they’ve truly “received their reward,” a sardonic but yet intensely serious way of saying that anything they reap in this life because of their “hypocrisy” is all they’ll reap-there won’t be anything for them in eternity, as Jesus hinted at earlier, rewarded by the “Father in heaven.”

And then the pattern closes with Jesus’ words on how we’re supposed to properly approach each practice. For each, the key ultimately ends up being how we do them-in “secret,” where only we and God know what’s going on-with the guarantee being that in this secret rather than public display, God “sees” us (or acknowledges the difference in approach) and “will reward” us in heaven. The point, as it has generally been assumed, is that Jesus is contrasting the Pharisees with his own disciples and followers, and characterizing their difference as that between acting with hypocrisy and, as most say, humility in regard to the practice of one’s piety.

But the text can get really complicated at this point, though, particularly stemming from our attachment of the typical English meaning of the word “hypocrite” to it. In the English, as most know, the word “hypocrite” usually refers to a person who is pretentious or insincere, or more informally, phony. This definition comes primarily from that of the Greek term, hupokrites, from which the English term is obviously derived, where the connotation in Greek is of an “actor” in an ancient comedy or tragedy who “puts on a mask” to play their particular theatrical part or role.

As a natural result, we’ve tended to come to the text and conclude that what Jesus is really getting at is that the Pharisees are really insincere phonies who put on a show in the synagogues and on the streets and for anyone who happens to cross their path while giving alms, praying, or fasting; and our job, rather, is to be sincere in going about those practices, which comes primarily from doing them in privacy and secrecy rather than with publicity. Sincerity of action, in the end, is positively equated with privacy and secrecy. The insincerity of the Pharisees’ action, on the other hand, is equated with publicity and exposure.

We can easily see where this leads. Remember, think here of us going “into our room” by ourselves to pray to God, or giving alms or fasting so that only God knows when we do. If that privacy or secrecy of relationship is equated with it being sincere, an individualism begins to progressively creep in and become normative for understanding our relationship to God-an individualism that can have profound theological consequences. One of those consequences, it should be noted, appears in a particular translation of this text. (Well, it actually appears in the translation of the part of chapter six that the lectionary has omitted, but a part which I think is nonetheless integral to understanding our text today-a point I’ll come back to at the end.)

Jesus, continuing to talk about prayer, goes on in the text to mention how we shouldn’t pray like the “Gentiles” who, in their praying, only “heap up empty phrases.” Interestingly, the New Living Translation renders “Gentiles” instead as “people of other religious faiths” who, instead of just “heaping up empty phrases” are said, more derisively, to be “babbling” in their prayers. You have to come a long way to get “people of other religious faiths” as a translation for “Gentiles,” leaping mightily over issues of historical context, and to get “babbling,” well, it’s tough to know out of what exactly that comes. These are bad translations, obviously. And like I mentioned before, their consequences are telling. But in their consequences, I think, they do have something to tell us about a different way to understand what this text might be saying, a different vision that it might be presenting to us.

So what are the consequences? Well, I think the major one is right there in front of us: we’ve set up a dichotomy with our interpretation of this text, between the “us” who get the almsgiving, and praying, and fasting right, and the “them”-the “people of other religious faiths”-who obviously get it wrong. Notice how this fits so seamlessly, too, with the sincere/insincere and private/public dichotomies we talked about earlier. The conclusion, which doesn’t take much interpretive movement to get to from here, is that the “hypocrites” whom Jesus is talking about are, for example, Jews or Muslims, whose various acts of piety (say, Islam’s “five pillars”) seem to much more often be directed outward rather than inward, and practiced communally and publicly rather than individually and privately. And so in the end, we rather interestingly and ironically end up making this text less about ourselves, less about our own piety, and more about others. We make the text scream loudly about their posturing and their damnation, while making it sweetly sing about our sanctification and our heavenly reward.

Here’s where I think the bigger vision of the text begins to reveal itself. The problem with our typical translation is that it relies on a definition of the word “hypocrite” that’s simply wrong. Yes, its most recent and lingering definition in the Greek did, indeed, refer to the “actor” of Greek theatre. That definition of the word, though, didn’t come into usage until, at earliest, the second century of the common era. In the first century, in the context in which Jesus would have uttered it, the word had a much different connotation. Instead, to call someone a “hypocrite” at that time was to call them not insincere or a phony, but to call them something akin to an overly public parader of their own scrupulousness. To call them that was to call them not insincere, not a person who put on a mask, but a person almost punctiliously or pedantically honest or even virtuous.

It wasn’t, for Jesus, that the Pharisees weren’t honest or virtuous in their almsgiving, or praying, or fasting, by the standards of their time. Nor was it that their piety was overly public. Their overt meticulousness, their overt fastidiousness in doing so seems to be the real problem for Jesus, and the real dividing line between what constituted the right and the wrong way to engage in such activities. And thus the heavenly reward lies not in practicing piety-and ultimately understanding faith itself-as fundamentally something particularly private and individualistic, but rather as something you do with humility, openness, and honesty.

So let’s rewind back to Ash Wednesday and Lent, but take with us the comparison we’ve been making between scrupulousness and humility, which seems to characterize Jesus’ vision here. I think, particularly, that this comparison has something very subversive to say about our yearly practice of “giving up” things as a part of Lent, the most important being that “giving stuff up” is itself the problem. We pick things to “give up” like desserts, or Diet Coke, or our morning latte from Starbucks. Or watching any one of the number of seriously awful but addicting reality shows VH1 keeps putting out every two weeks. Or Facebooking and chatting on Google Messenger. This is the most significant image we often seem to have of Lent-of “giving up” stuff-yet, like the Pharisees that Jesus lays into on the hillside, we may be honest but we’ve become so scrupulous, so careful about what it is that we’re giving up-in order to keep us from really having to give up much of anything significant-that we miss the meaning in the practice itself, the attitude of humility that it’s supposed to flow out of and evoke in us as we walk the road toward that other hill of significance, Golgotha.

I think this gets at the real meaning that Matthew, and of course Jesus, is trying to convey both to the Matthean community and to us today. We’ve essentially made the practice of “giving up” something for Lent a distraction that keeps us from witnessing and immersing ourselves in the real, and authentic, meaning of the Lenten season. So I think it’s time we tried something drastic. I say we “give up” Lent for Lent this year. Let’s give up Lent for Lent’s sake. Go and dip into that pint of Ben and Jerry’s in the freezer and feel no shame. Login to Facebook and write a long message to the close friend from college you’ve lost touch with. I’ll even suggest sitting down for a marathon of Rock of Love or Charm School, if you can stand it. The point, most assuredly, is that “giving up” stuff isn’t. The attitude with which we approach the Lenten season, most assuredly, is.

But the text is still trying to tell us one last thing, I think. Earlier, I said that the lectionary committee left out a significant portion from this chapter, which basically amounts to the words about Gentiles and prayer that I mentioned above and the Lord’s Prayer which follows it. And I think we should see this as a big mistake, not only because the Lord’s Prayer is basically the centerpiece of the entire Sermon on the Mount that spans from chapters five through seven, but because it particularly has something to say to us about how to approach acts of piety in general and, specifically, the Lenten season.

The one thing we miss most often about the Lord’s Prayer is how eschatological it really is. We recite it during the time of prayer in worship on Sundays like zombies, which really doesn’t do justice to the energy and the force that its words carried for the original people of the Matthean community. They were taught to pray for God’s community to come and will to be done, which wasn’t just a lingering hope but an active expectation in-or a calling for God to institute, if you will-the coming of the eschatological consummation of the world. There was, in the end, a confidence present in the midst of struggle and uncertainty which the text here only barely begins to reveal, but which is nonetheless striking.

But that confidence wasn’t, for the Matthean community, the primary characteristic they understood their lives to be centered around. The rest of the Lord’s Prayer closes it out for us and tells the story on the ground: they are to ask for bread only for each day (and, eschatologically, for the banquet in heaven), but also to be forgiven of their debts as they forgive the debts of others. And they are also to forgive others for their “trespasses” against them as a way of mirroring the forgiveness they understand they will one day receive from God.

What we glimpse in the Lord’s Prayer here is part of the way that the Matthean community understood how they were supposed to act in the world. Forgiving debts. Forgiving trespasses. Asking for bread only for the day ahead. There is, like Jesus seems to be hinting at with his words on almsgiving, prayer, and fasting which surround the Lord’s Prayer, a certain humility that begins to be emphasized. And the point becomes that we’re not supposed to start asking, say, for bread to metaphorically be given one day at a time during the Lenten season when we start to miss our chocolate or our caffeine. The emphasis is on the year-round, the constant, displayed in the urgency of the time in which the Matthean community perceived they were living.

Living with humility about our faith, as opposed to a kind of scrupulousness about it, is something that doesn’t just come around once a year for forty days. Jesus intends it to be a consistent aspect of our lives, something that characterizes the very core of our being-to be, as our text for today ends, the “treasure” where our heart is. May we not forget that to live a life of faith involves the shaping of this kind of identity, not just during the months of March or April but during every day of every week of our lives. And may we remember, then, that to give up Lent for Lent’s sake may be the most appropriate thing we can do this year, as we approach the coming Passion of the God who came to us, and goes before us, and meets us in Jerusalem once again. Amen.