Being Real--February 24, 2023

Being Real--February 24, 2023

[Jesus said]: “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.” (Matthew 6:5-6)

In this time of performative outrage everywhere, from cable news to sensationally hateful highway billboards, it is a truly radical thing to talk quietly to God where no one can overhear. 

And in a culture where just about everybody wants to send the message that they are close with God, from demagogues invoking the divine on the stump to the folks on social media who flood Facebook with memes announcing how proudly they believe in God, it is revolutionary to hear Jesus tell us, "You don't need to advertise your piety to the world."

But that's the difference between seeing prayer as conversation with the One who loves us, on the one hand, and seeing it as a social statement on the other.  And at least part of what it means to follow Jesus is to learn to stop misusing our faith as some kind of status symbol.  Jesus just isn't interested in using prayer as a tool for virtue-signaling.

For that matter, Jesus has more than a hunch that the folk who proudly tout their prayer lives doth protest too much.  If you have to tell everybody around how devout you are, it comes off like you are trying to persuade yourself along with everybody else.  After all, if you know someone who is going on all the time about what great conversations they have with their boyfriend, girlfriend, spouse, or friend, but they never actually seem to spend time with that person... well, it makes you wonder how solid that relationship really is, and how much they are putting up a front.  At the very least, something doesn't pass the smell test. And by contrast, the people who have the deepest and most durable relationships are often the ones who don't need to tell you about how great their marriages or friendships are.  They just don't see the need to shout it from the housetops. Maybe along the same lines, if we are spending more time and energy talking ABOUT how much we talk to God, rather than actually talking to God, maybe it reveals that we're pretending, too.

And this is really the crux of the matter: in a world full of posturing and pretending, Jesus invites us into real relationship with the living God.  And that means we don't have to spend any energy at all on how religious we look or how our faith could improve our reputations.  We are invited simply to love, and to be loved.

Now, reading these words of Jesus again--the same ones we heard earlier this week on Ash Wednesday--might well make us uncomfortable, but maybe it's a good kind of uncomfortable, a necessary discomfort, because it compels us to look honestly at ourselves and where we have become performers playing a role rather than friends of God invited into authentic conversation.  Today is a good day to re-evaluate how we spend our energy and time: if we're doing more to tell folks how religious we are than we are bringing our hearts to God when nobody else notices or knows about it, maybe we need to rethink things.  Maybe the question to ask is, "Am I more interested in being applauded by the people around me or in just being loved by God quietly?"  

There it is--what Jesus has been trying to offer us is the beauty of just being loved by God.  That's enough.  That's more than enough--that's really all that matters in the end.  And because God already loves you regardless of how often, how eloquently, or how long you pray, we can just be done measuring ourselves by those standards or judging others by how they compare to us.  If we can just rest in the truth that we are already beloved, we don't have to spend one single minute fussing over how much of our piety is visible to others.  We're not putting on a performance for them--we are being real with the One who calls us "friend."  And when that sinks in, we can at last be done with using our faith to puff ourselves up or to leverage our status.  

Amid so many other loud public voices who want to use their religious appearance for some ulterior motive, that difference is just what the world really needs.

Lord Jesus, let us be honest, authentic, and genuine with you--no matter who else is watching or listening.  Let us just be loved by you, and let that love sink in.