Practicing Righteousness

The decay of true spirituality can be recognized by the practice of religious ceremony without concern for its content.  George Fox reacted against the formalism of his day.  The church had lost contact with the meaning of its institutions.  Through repetition of an act or recitation of a creed, succeeding generations begin to focus more on the external deed than the internal reality.  Reformers down through the ages of Christian history have turned people "back to the basics," to an awareness of why we do what we do.

Jesus sought to teach his fledgling disciples the proper way to practice their religious duties.  In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus discussed three of these religious duties:  almsgiving, prayer, and fasting.

Jesus warns his disciples not to practice their religious duties in such a way to be noticed by others.  He objected to showing off one's religiosity for the sake of earning respect or gaining some spiritual status.  An important feature of Judaism is the earning of rewards for one's deeds.  In each of these three duties, Jesus stresses that if a person practices their religious duties for the sake of being seen by other people, they will have received their reward in this life and will not receive any in the age to come.

It is important to keep in mind when reading the gospels that Jesus' teaching was directed towards a reformed Judaism.  The primary application of his words belong to the Jews of his day.  It is by secondary application that we believing gentiles who have received the benefits of their rejection of Jesus seek to find relevance in our circumstance.

The first religious duty is charity.  Jesus describes a caricature of a person he calls a hypocrite.  This term is actually a word used for an actor who would portray a part by holding a mask in front of his face.  We call this type of person "two-faced" because they pretend to be something they really are not.  Jesus causes his audience to imagine this comical scene of an ostentatious Jew who blasts on a trumpet to get everyone's attention as he places his coins in the almsbox in the synagogue and as he performs acts of charity in the street.

Jesus states that this type of person who gets noticed for his philanthropy already has his reward.  Instead of acting like this, Jesus tells his followers that when they engage in benevolence, not only should other people not know what they are doing, their left hand shouldn't even know what they have done with their right hand.  What is done in secret will be rewarded by God.

We have our own ways today of making our giving known.  It's a good thing that we do not give out ribbons or bumper stickers in church for putting money in the collection.  Some TV ministries will give you rewards depending on how much you give them.  We could have a stewardship program in which the top givers belong to the "Sound-the-Trumpet" club.  There would be many, however, who would fall into the same category as the man who sat in church one day, and when the usher paused with the collection plate in front of him he didn't move.  The usher continued to stand there with the plate held out.  Finally, the man gestured to indicate for him to move on.  Instead, the usher bent down and whispered, "Take some, it's for the heathen."

A Gallup poll in 1995 showed that the average household contributions to charity in 1995 was $1,017.  The percentage of households that did not give to any charity in 1995 was 31.  The greatest percentage of income given to charity was by people with household incomes under $10,000.  That was 4.3 % compared to 1.3% by people with household incomes of $40-50,000. (Gallup Organization for Independent Sector, cited in Chicago Tribune and Omaha World-Herald,10/10/96).  These numbers are especially significant when considered together with the statistics related to hunger in the world.  According to World Bank, the number of children who don't get enough food to fully develop mentally and physically: 500,000,000, while the number of hunger-related deaths every day is 40,000 (World Bank).  Think of that in relation to the estimated $3,000,000,000 that Americans spend annually on pet food (The Loose Change Newsletter, Nov.-Dec./95).

Jesus took for granted that his audience understood the importance of benevolent giving.  The point of his comments is that a person should perform this religious duty out of genuine charity and not to be noticed and honored.  Don't even let yourself think how wonderful you are because you have sacrificed a dollar:  "Don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing."

The second duty is prayer.  Again Jesus assumes that everyone understands the value of prayer.  His concern is how one prays.  The image he creates in the mind of his listeners is this person who stands in public whether in the synagogue or on the street corner and prays for everyone to hear him.  Instead, a person should go into the pantry or storage room, a place hidden away where no one will see or hear, and then pray to the Father.

When I was a teen-ager and freshly committed to Christian faith, I carried this out literally.  Most of my clothes never made it upstairs to my closet anyway, but were hung in a large clothes rack in the utility room.  So I made a little spot in my closet where I would kneel on the floor and there was a tiny shelf along the wall on one side.  I don't know what I used for light, but I remember I could read my Bible in there and look at a prayer list.  I would spend as much as an hour praying for people and worshiping God through the scriptures.  I didn't tell anyone about my closet, not because of my humility, but because I thought they would think me strange.

There was another time when I was attending a Bible institute that I got up about 5:30 every morning to read a devotional book, study the Bible, and pray using a journal.  I was sincere in my spiritual exercises, but I also did it in the living room of the house which was our dormitory.  I can remember feeling a little self-righteous as people commented on my discipline.

The performance of our religious duty of prayer is not for the benefit of our honor.  Prayer should be a private matter, and even the practice of public prayer in church has its danger of being formalized and merely done for show.

How we pray is also important.  Jesus' criticism here is not against his fellow Jews, but against the babbling of the Gentiles who think that the gods will listen to them because of their many words.  Jesus gives his disciples a pattern for prayer, an idea of how to pray and what to pray for.  This prayer we call "The Lord's Prayer" or, for the Catholics, the "Our Father."  It is ironic that an example of prayer to teach against meaningless repetition should be used by so many as a prayer to quote over and over again until it is bound to be stripped of its meaning and become a mere formula.  The expression "hocus pocus" originated mistakenly as a magical formula by parishioners who didn't understand the Latin the priest was repeating.

The prayer Jesus gives teaches that prayer is to recognize both the imminence and personality of God as Father, but also the transcendence, as He is the one who resides in Heaven.  The next phrase acknowledges his holiness, followed by an acceptance of God's omnipotence, for His will must be carried out on this earth in the same way it is in heaven.  Ultimately this must occur as God establishes His kingdom upon this earth.  Several requests are made:  first, for the sustenance needful for that day.  Secondly, we are to ask for forgiveness for our sins against God in the same way that we have forgiven people who have wronged us.  Thirdly, we ask God to deliver us from the time of trial so that we will not suffer like Job as God allowed the evil one to put him to the test.  The closing phrase which we normally repeat, is not found in a number of early manuscripts including the Latin Vulgate used by the Catholic church.  It does appear in the later manuscripts upon which was based the King James Bible.  That is why you will notice that concluding doxology to be placed in brackets in many of the newer translations and why Catholics do not recite it.

The third religious duty is fasting.  It was common in the Judaism of the day for some Jews to fast as much as twice a week.  Some Christians in the second century also carried on this practice.  The document called the Didache notes that fasting should not be done like the hypocrites as Jesus says.  In addition, "they fast on Mondays and Thursdays; but you should fast on Wednesdays and Fridays." (Didache 6:8)

Once again Jesus portrays these hypocrites in a humorous way.  We imagine the person fasting as messing up their hair and looking sullen so people will have pity on them.  Jesus tells his disciples that when they fast they should put on their hair tonic, wash up, and refrain from showing the signs of hunger and fatigue.

The issue of food and fasting is a difficult one since there are extremes on either side.  There are those who go to the extreme of asceticism believing that one can becoming closer to God and more acceptable to God by denying the body.  Fasting as a spiritual discipline is often misrepresented as a means of purification and of gaining spiritual alertness.  There is also a tendency then to speak against gluttony and even to place gluttony, described by them as over-eating, on par with sins like lying, stealing, and murder.  I heard one Christian radio Bible teacher equate gluttony -- which he defined as someone who is overweight -- with the sin of homosexuality.  In an article in Christianity Today magazine, a writer obviously influenced by Eastern Orthodox traditions, suggested that overweight Christians are on their way to hell on a doughnut.  I wrote a letter to the editors showing how skewed her opinions were and how wrong her interpretation of Scripture was.  In addition, one must conclude then that many of the great preachers of the last century including Charles Haddon Spurgeon and Dwight L. Moody were gluttonous sinners.  In fact, the Bible never mentions gluttony in its lists of sins:  the seven deadly sins are a medieval creation.  The Bible actually uses fatness to symbolize prosperity and blessing.

So, while fasting can be used as a means of spiritual discipline, it should not be misinterpreted as implying that the body is evil and feeding the body is engaging in sin.  One of the most pervasive prejudices in our society beyond racism and sexism is lookism.  Fasting is not about dieting, but is a result of devoting yourself so much to prayer that you do not have time to eat or that you are so burdened by circumstances that you do not feel like eating.  It is not to be misconstrued with the American ideal of the "beautiful people."  Most of all, it is a private matter between the individual and God.

Jesus named these three religious duties and the potential for people to practice them the wrong way.  The modern church can fall into the same trap.  For instance, Christians can forget that we sing hymns as worship, adoration, confession, and encouragement and instead concentrate on their performance.  Beautiful singing can lift the heart, but if the individual is letting it all out in order to impress people, we are the richer for it, but they may be missing the blessing of the words which they are too busy enunciating to comprehend.  Some people attend church just to be noticed.  Anything we do has the potential for misuse if we do not do it for the right reason.  We need to be conscious of our actions since ulterior motives in religious duty are inferior motives.