Delivered Sunday, July 21, 2019 at Trinity Presbyterian Church, Arlington VA
Text: Matthew 6:5-16
Part 1 of a 2 week Series. Part 2 is here.
Manuscript:
It’s hot outside.
I mean, I know that’s not a surprise to any of you since you, especially those on the hike yesterday. The rest of you had to come through it to get here, but isn’t it nice that the air conditioner is fixed for this Sunday. Of course, you may not have even known it was out last week, either because you weren’t here, or because last week it really wasn’t all that bad.
Earlier this week, I wanted to check on the status of the air conditioning. I had half a memory of Courtney saying it had been fixed in an email, but in the moment I couldn’t find it again, and I did not trust my memory, so, at something like 10 pm Thursday, I sent an email. I then realized that for questions about the air conditioning, I probably should have emailed Mike…so I forwarded it to him about 5 minutes later.
This is one of the things I love about email. I can send my random thoughts and questions no matter the time they occur to me without worrying about waking someone up. Honestly, if I had been forced to wait until morning to call the church office…I would have forgotten…and not remembered until after the office closed on Friday.
I am old enough to remember the internet’s progression from non-existent to rare, and, by today’s standards, terrible and inconvenient. It’s genuinely difficult for me to acknowledge there was a time I was excited about dial-up…and for those of you who are under 25 and don’t know what I’m talking about, it was a dark time; ask your parents.
I’m old enough that I did not first have a smartphone until after college, and even then, getting one felt like an almost unjustifiable luxury in my first year of seminary…but by the time I graduated, it was expected. These devices that so many of us take for granted have massively restructured our society in a very short amount of time, but they are still something that we really only notice when they don’t work…and here I was, earlier this week, using it to ask about perhaps the last technology to have such an effect: air conditioning.
When we want to talk about something having an unspoken but pervasive effect, we might say that it’s “in the air we breathe.” Air-conditioning is the literal expression of that metaphor.
I know some members of this congregation have been around Arlington long enough to remember summers before air-conditioning was widespread. I don’t know how you did it. I don’t mean in a literal sense here. I spent some time this week reading up on life in this area before air-conditioning. A lot was keeping a slower pace, sleeping on the roof, getting up into the mountains or on higher ground (there was apparently a time when Petworth was as much as 10 degrees cooler than downtown DC, though I’m honestly more inclined to think NPR is lying about that than to believe it). We also owe the “summer blockbuster” movie to air conditioning as well—movie theaters were among the first public buildings to be consistently air-conditioned.
It even changed the population distribution of this country: the so-called Sun Belt has gone from housing about 28% of the U.S. population before the spread of air conditioning to about 40% today.
I’m grateful we have functional air conditioning this Sunday. My childhood church resisted air conditioning for many years and I remember people passing out from the heat some summer Sundays.
But despite our immense dependency on the internet and air-conditioning, we take them for granted; we only think about them when they aren’t working.
I think prayer can easily fall into this category. Prayer should be all around us, something that is part of us as is the air we breathe, while also being something of which we are deeply aware. That may sound like a paradox, and perhaps it is. I think we fail to hold those two ideas in balance.
This passage on prayer is in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, and it is immediately flanked by two other exhortations on religious practice: just before this text, Jesus talks about giving, and he tells people not to announce their gifts with trumpets, like the hypocrites, but to give in secret. Immediately following his introduction of what we now call the Lord’s prayer, Jesus talks about fasting, and tells people not to exaggerate the effects of fasting and look miserable, like the hypocrites, but to keep themselves presentable and continue going about their business so that it’s not immediately obvious to everyone passing by that they are fasting.
Jesus is telling people to make sure the focus of their religious practice is God and not themselves.
In our text on Prayer, Jesus contrasts proper practice with two different kinds of bad prayer, the first attributed to hypocrites like in his other examples on giving and fasting, the second attributed to Gentiles, who only get singled out here. Jesus’ audience by the time of the Sermon on the Mount was probably starting to be a bit more mixed, so I don’t know that either group was necessarily safe to pick on.
Jesus doesn’t feel any need to engage in any rhetorical hedging. There’s nothing here about what may or may not be in someone’s heart or the ecclesial or philosophical status of any of their bones. Jesus names hypocrisy based on actions. It’s a “You know it when you see it, and if you don’t, here’s what to look for.”
Look for people who are not practicing their faith; they are performing a faith. Look for people whose focus is not on God, but on themselves.
Whenever there is any sort of national or regional tragedy, our leaders are always quick to offer their “thoughts and prayers.” Always those words, always in that order. Offering, I suppose, thoughts to their more secular constituents and prayers for the more theistically minded.
Thanks to air conditioning and the internet, these thoughts and prayers can be quickly offered out from comfort no matter the season.
And, of course, it’s not only our leaders who fall into this habit. I know we do too. Most of us don’t have the same stage on which to do it, but Arlington is still the South…if barely. We know what “Bless his/her/your heart” means. Even more, I have been in conversations with people who have accidentally stumbled over some pain in my life and have used an offer of prayer as a cover to let them hastily retreat to safer conversational ground. I’ve done the same, and it took me a lot of work to stop doing that…or at least start doing it far less.
I know I’m not the only person in this room to have done that work. If you have, thank you, on behalf of me, and everyone else you will care for.
Jesus’ second criticism of prayer practice is similar to his first. He says, “When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”
I want to break this apart a bit. Jesus criticism of the gentiles includes the same critique he offered the hypocrites: the performance of faith, rather than the practice of their faith.
But he adds two things.
First, the word “empty.” If his complaint was just about the heaping up of phrases, and the hope that many words would get them heard, this would just be about the performance of faith, but that one word adds so much more.
That word “empty” can get lost, seen as just a reiteration of the core point—that these are people who aren’t praying to and with and for God, but to humans with and for themselves. We need to add another layer. Prayers become empty when it is about something we don’t really want, something we aren’t willing to put in any additional effort for, something we aren’t willin
g to allow ourselves to be changed by our own prayer.
A politician’s public promise of “thoughts and prayers” can be meant for public performance without also being empty. I don’t know how often that happens, but it can.
Someone can offer long, loud, ostentatious public prayers to draw attention to themselves while also meaning and wanting everything in the prayer.
I want to pull just one more piece out of those two verses, where Jesus says “God knows what you need before you ask.”
I know all too many people who get caught up in the idea that a prayer needs the perfect words. I am one of them, and that anxiety can be silencing. I want to say to all of you: relax. Prayer can include many words, they can rhyme, they can be sung, they can be stuttered or stumbled over, written, spoken, or signed. They can be silent. I know people who have been afraid to pray because they fear they will use the wrong words and accidentally end up heaping empty phrases.
Words and phrases are not made empty because of a lack or excess of elegance. This is one of those things where the fact that you are concerned about doing it right means you almost certainly already are.
Our text continues, and Jesus offers the Lord’s Prayer, the most well known Christian prayer, and I want to invite you all next week when I will be talking more about the Lord’s Prayer.
For this week, for today, I want us to think about how prayer can be thoughtful. I want to think about how prayer can be constant, something that we don’t just pull out when we want something, but how prayer is an opportunity for each of us to be in constant conversation and communion with God; about prayer can be like the air. Breathe in: Jesus. Breathe out: Mercy.