February 22, 2012 | 7:30 p.m. | Ash Wednesday

Where Is Your Heart?

Victoria G. Curtiss
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Joel 2:1–2, 10–13
Matthew 6:1–6, 16–21

Reflecting on the scripture lessons for this evening, I am impressed by the distance between the situations being addressed and our situation. “Rend your hearts and not your clothing . . .” The prophet Joel speaks within a cultural context in which heartfelt emotion and devotion to God were expressed publicly; in a culture in which the keening of grieving women can still be seen and heard; a culture in which religious ardor is sometimes startlingly conspicuous.

You can see public expression of devotion to this day at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Each day devout Jews go to the wall to pray and to grieve because the temple is no more. You see them at the wall bowing from the waist, rocking back and forth, voicing their prayers, inserting prayers in written form into the cracks between the stones. Bar mitzvahs are celebrated in front of the wall, with un-self-conscious chanting, singing, dancing, and praying for everyone to see and hear. What a difference between these conspicuous expressions of religious devotion and our own reticence about expressing our faith with others.

“Rend your hearts and not your clothing,” said the prophet Joel. What counts is on the inside, not on the outside. His hearers would have understood that critique in their context. But we hear Joel’s words without such habits of public piety, with no experience of ritual wailing or tearing our clothing or sitting in dust and ashes. Hearing advice not to be showy with our religion hardly applies to us.

Similarly, in the Gospel lesson we hear Jesus say, “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them.” So whenever you give alms, don’t broadcast your generosity, but give in secret. Not exactly an admonishment directed to us, with our sealed offering envelopes and confidential statements of contributions.

“And whenever you pray,” he goes on, “don’t do it on the street corners but instead go into your room and shut the door and pray to God in secret.” Well, actually, making a public display like that never occurred to us. We are the people who, if someone suggests a prayer before a meal in a restaurant, are embarrassed.

“And whenever you fast,” Jesus adds, “do that in secret, too.” But the primary association we have with anything resembling fasting has to do not with faith, but with calorie-counting to lose weight.

These scripture lessons challenge spiritual practices that are foreign to us. We are separated from biblical times by centuries of cultural and religious change.

So what are we to learn from these teachings?

It may help to understand the purposes of the spiritual disciplines of prayer and fasting. Prayer is more familiar to us. The Presbyterian Constitution describes prayer this way: “In prayer, through the Holy Spirit, people seek after and are found by the one true God who has been revealed in Jesus Christ. [We] listen and wait upon God, call God by name, remember God’s gracious acts, and offer [ourselves] to God. . . . Prayer grows out of the center of a person’s life in response to the Spirit. . . . Prayer issues in commitment to join God’s work in the world.

In prayer we respond to God in many ways. In adoration we praise God for who God is. In thanksgiving we express gratitude for what God has done. In confession we acknowledge repentance for what we as individuals and as a people have done or left undone. In supplication we plead for ourselves and the gathered community. In intercession we plead for others, on behalf of others, and for the world. In self-dedication we offer ourselves to the purposes and glory of God” (Book of Order, W–2.1001–2.1002). Prayer is all about our relationship with God.

Fasting is less familiar to us, even though it was practiced as a normal part of the Christian life until fairly recently. The greatest leaders in the Protestant tradition—Luther, Calvin, and Wesley—were strong advocates of fasting. Calvin commended the practice as a means to subdue the needless desires of “the flesh,” prepare for prayer and meditation, and express humility before God in confession (Marjorie Thompson, Soul Feast: An Invitation to the Christian Spiritual Life, p. 70). “Fasting reveals our excessive attachments and the assumptions that lie behind them. . . . Fasting brings us face to face with how we put the material world ahead of its spiritual Source” (Marjorie Thompson, p. 71). In order to draw our attention to God, fasting sets limits on the many ways we try to fill up our stomachs and our lives. Fasting is an act of self-emptying to make more space for God to dwell.

Both of these spiritual disciplines—prayer and fasting—are means of expressing our dependence on God and putting God at the center of our lives. They focus on the need to have our hearts transformed. “Rend, not your clothing, but your hearts,” says Joel. And Jesus’ advice about the practice of piety concludes, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” This clue has to do with inwardness and a new orientation in relation to God. Where is your heart? That is what matters in connection to God.

We don’t need to be admonished to stop praying and fasting publicly, because we’re not doing those things publicly. We may not be doing those things at all! But these scripture passages do call us to reflect on why we do what do. It is so easy for us to be concerned about what others think of us. We want to be liked, we want others to respect us, even admire us, and we don’t want to disappoint. We are rewarded by doing what others want from us. We live in a culture that values appearances more than authenticity. We can create an appearance that is a far cry from our true relationship with God. Hypocrite is a Greek word that simply means “actor,” someone playing a role rather than being real. Our concern for how others see us can be a barrier to the working of the Holy Spirit that occurs largely from within and “secretly,” at the “deepest levels of our desiring” (Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, p. 90).

Dietrich Bonhoeffer struggled creatively to translate biblical concepts for a secular age. As you may know, Bonhoeffer was born and raised in an upper-class, highly educated German family. He was a brilliant student. He surprised his family by choosing as his vocation theological studies and the ministry. But his rapid rise, not only as a scholar and author but also as a Christian student leader, allayed his family’s initial reservations.

With Adolf Hitler firmly in power, Dietrich, in the summer of 1939, accepted a teaching position in the United States. But he soon decided to return home to Germany to direct an underground seminary and to participate in the conspiracy against Hitler. He was arrested, imprisoned, and, shortly before the Allies liberated the Flössenburg concentration camp, he was hanged there in April 1945.

In prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer explored modern frontiers for Christian thought and practice, seeking to take seriously both the claims of Christ and Christian responsibility to live fully in this world. Bonhoeffer spoke of interpreting theological concepts “non-religiously”; he wanted Christianity to have meaning for a “world come of age.”

Least noted among his creative explorations was his suggestion for the need for (what he called) “the secret discipline,” an inwardness of worship and prayer and biblical study “whereby the mysteries of the Christian faith are preserved,” a “secret discipline” to make sure that our necessary identification with the world does not swallow up our identity in Christ.

He wrote, “The secret discipline without worldiness is a ghetto, but worldiness without the secret discipline is only a boulevard.”

Bonhoeffer only mentioned the “secret discipline” twice in his Letters and Papers from Prison, although he clearly lived it. That secret discipline is similar to what we hear in today’s scripture lessons, which point to the centrality of “the heart” in our response to God. We are to claim the importance of the inward journey, and the interior disciplines of self-giving (alms) and prayer and self-denial (fasting), of Bible study and contemplation. Like the ritual we do later in this service, being marked by the symbol of ashes, these practices remind us of our dependence on God, without whom we are only dust.

Bonhoeffer also experienced dependence on God. Shortly before his death he wrote this poem:

Who am I? They often tell me
I stepped from my cell’s confinement
Calmly, cheerfully, firmly,
Like a squire from his country house.

. . .

Am I then really all that which others tell of?
Or am I only what I myself know of myself?
Restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,
Struggling for breath, as though hands were compressing my throat,
. . .

Who am I? This or the other?
Am I one person today and tomorrow another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
And before myself a contemptible woebegone weakling?
. . .

Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am thine!

(Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, pp. 347–348)

Glory be to God who made us, who knows us, who seeks our hearts, and to whom we belong. Amen.