Rev. Marvin M. Ellison
Matthew 6:1-18
This morning I invite us to think about the difference between authentic and bogus spirituality. What are the signs of “true piety”? If you’d like an early clue, I’d suggest pondering our calling to be a loving, welcoming, and serving community of faith.
On my study wall I have a framed print that a friend from Tennessee gave me years ago. Stewart and I both grew up in the South during Jim Crow segregation, and the print depicts a white-skinned minister standing with a Bible in his hands and with a sign behind him that reads, “We reserve the right to refuse service.” It’s sobering, isn’t it, to think about how religion has often been used against people, caused them grief and pain, and divided families as well as communities? So, too, we know that religious people have been on the wrong side of important issues of the day. Some of those good, misguided folks have been us. When religion is used to exclude or to devalue some as less worthy, we need to stop and ask, “Where is the love of God in that?”
David Gushee, a progressive evangelical theologian, has long been interested in Christian formation. How does the church go about promoting strong character and good conduct in persons? Equally important, what is going on when things go awry, when character becomes deformed, and, alas, when people even feel permitted to do evil in good conscience?
In his book entitled Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust, Gushee analyzes three groups of Christians during Nazi Germany. The largest cohort he calls “unrighteous gentiles,” those who eagerly persecuted Jews and saw no contradiction between their Christian faith and the practice of hatred toward those defined as the despised Other.
A second group he names “Christian bystanders,” those who often felt sympathy toward Jews and others criminalized by the state, but they failed to take action to protest or protect those in harm’s way. As Gushee explains, the problem is not as simple as a compassion deficit or lack of courage. Often these Christians agonized about their silence, but they failed to go public with their opposition to moral evil because they feared that they and, more to the point, their families would likely become targets of the Nazis.
Finally, the smallest group was comprised of “righteous gentiles,” who found a variety of ways to resist, disrupt, and subvert the Nazi war machine and took great personal risks to protect neighbors and strangers. When asked why they had acted as they did, most responded as if the question made no sense. As they saw matters, their faith had prepared them over a lifetime to show compassion and regard for others, so taking action in the hour of danger was nothing out of the ordinary. The question they wrestled with was: where were others, and why didn’t they act similarly? Framed in biblical language, “Had they not seen, had they not heard?”
This Matthew text from the Sermon on the Mount addresses the question of how to practice true piety. Jesus encourages his listeners to engage in the very traditional practices of gift giving, prayer, and fasting, but he admonishes them to “be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them.” “Don’t do as hypocrites do” seems to be the message, and this familiar passage can easily be read as a straightforward moral condemnation of hypocrisy. After all, hypocrisy or lack of integrity deserves condemnation – and yet, if we notice, there’s more to Jesus’ sayings than a critique of hypocrisy.
The operative word here, repeated six times in these three sayings, is “secret.” “But when you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your Father-Mother who is in secret.” Give to those who are in need, but do so in secret. Fast, but do so in a way that it will not be obvious to others. Do it in secret.
Why the secrecy? Jesus’ directives make greater sense when we examine the social-cultural context of the first century. Throughout Roman Empire, including its colony of Palestine, there were two and only two social classes, a very small elite who controlled the land, wealth, and political power and a very broad underclass of landless peasants, artisans, and farmers. Talk about the 1% and the 99%! Without a middle class in between, what kept things from breaking apart? Sociologists suggest that the entire social order depended on maintaining a complex patronage system. A vast network of social, economic, and religious ties linked multiple parties together in the roles of clients and patrons. As one New Testament scholar explains, “Those without power could be clients to the patrons above them, and those patrons might even be themselves clients to others far more powerful still.”[i] This benefactor system allowed the necessary social exchange of influence and patronage, established hierarchies within families and groups, confirmed the dependency of the many, and stabilized the dominance by the few.
Here’s the key: Roman imperial culture gave pride of place to social honor and public patronage. All important was the giving and receiving of gifts and services – the accumulation and the release of debts – which defined people’s standing in the pecking order. “Members of households constantly sought ways to enhance and display the honor of their ‘house,’ especially by ostentatious display of their householder’s status and wealth. Thus, ‘being seen by others’ while giving gifts, praying, or fasting was precisely what one most wanted and needed to happen. If no one was watching, acts of benevolence and piety were wasted.”[ii]
It is within this social context that Jesus warns his audience not to sound trumpets to gain notice or “practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them.” To the contrary, he urges people to give generously — without letting the left hand know what the right hand is doing. Act in secret, Jesus says, and that way, you will help subvert the dominant cultural logic and thereby undermine the social, economic, and religious hierarchies that elevate a very few as superior in knowledge and virtue while casting aside the many others as nobodies, as hardly worth noticing at all.
Jesus is talking about not just the practice of piety, but about the practice of power.
In the gospel of Luke, when this countercultural Jesus finds that his own disciples are jockeying for status and position, he tells them that they have it all wrong. “The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them,” Jesus observes, “and those in authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you; rather let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves.”
Godly power, moral power is not the kind of power that holds hierarchies in place or constructs empires. Spiritual power is rather subversive, turning things upside down and topsy-turvy. This disruptive power is the power of new life. It’s the power of loving enemies as self. It’s the power of entering into a community that gathers at an open table in order to share bread with all who are hungry. It is a community that stands in solidarity with those on the margins. It’s a community that, yes, welcomes even the powerful and the rich and famous. Everyone, without distinction, is welcome, but on one condition: you must welcome all others as you too have been welcomed.
In Matthew’s world, Jesus’ counsel to engage in the traditional spiritual practices of gift giving, prayer, and fasting would not have been received as either jarring or unusual. What was so disruptive — and what made the authorities so mad — was how Jesus encouraged people to keep their spiritual practices secret and hidden. When Jesus asked that of the powerful and well positioned, make no mistake: he was being outrageously subversive, explicitly counter-cultural, and unquestionable disruptive of the status quo.
And so, if that’s the trajectory of this biblical text, we should be asking ourselves, how might we live out a spirituality that is equally counter-cultural and disruptive of the prevailing social, economic, and religious hierarchies of our day and age?
Isn’t that a rather important question to ponder this week? How do our prayers, our worship, our community service, and our outreach challenge inequities, undermine hierarchies, and reflect the gospel logic that the “first shall be last, and the last first”?
Larry Rasmussen, a Lutheran scholar, describes the Jesus movement as a “contrast-society,” a ragtag assembly of people empowered by the Spirit to live a different way. Living as a contrast-community means showing faithfulness to God by a willingness to become spirited troublemakers. Don’t hide your light; instead, be known publicly as passionate peacemakers and lovers of justice. The church’s mandate? It’s nothing less, Rasmussen writes, than to “practice creative deviance on the frontlines.” Now that may not be the typical mission or vision statement of very many congregations, but then again, consider this. Deviance means refusing to adopt the conventional definitions of ourselves or of others. Creative means exercising our imaginations to entertain alternative possibilities, stretching beyond the givens. And “on the frontlines” means living an engaged faith, seeking to make a difference in all aspects of life, large and small, at your kitchen table and across the globe.
Rather than practicing your spirituality “in secret,” today following in Jesus’ spirit means living a bold, publicly expressed faith – a faith that befriends the marginalized, the outcast, and the oppressed and dares to believe that a radically different world and a radically different church are possible. For those who can see, signs are everywhere that God is at work, unsettling the settled and bringing about a different order in which the hungry will be blessed with food, the last shall go to the head of the line, and every tear will be wiped away.
The question the Gospel poses is this: do you and I regard this disruption of the status quo, this eruption of God’s upside-down Commonwealth as good news or bad news?
May God bless this, our holy calling to practice as much “creative deviance on the frontlines” together as we can possibly imagine.