3 before Lent

 Isaiah 58.1-12, Matthew 5.13-20

“Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?”

The people Isaiah was writing about weren’t happy – that much is obvious. Things weren’t as they ought to be, and God didn’t seem to be listening. Many of them had been in exile for generations in Babylon, following the conquest of their nation, and those that weren’t were scratching out an existence among the ruins of Jerusalem and the surrounding areas. Their society had collapsed. Everyone was scrambling for their own security. The weak were being left to fend for themselves. It’s an ancient story, but also a very modern one. Times of crisis can bring out the best in people, but they can bring out the worst too, especially if they drag on for a long time.

They hadn’t forgotten their ancient religious practices though. In fact,  seemed to have doubled down on them, fasting, and praying, “[bowing] down their heads like bulrushes and [lying] in sackcloth and ashes”, but although they had remembered what to do, they seemed to have forgotten why they did it. They were treating God like a sort of “coin-in-a-slot” machine, behaving as if performing the rituals and keeping the rules were simply a way of trying to manipulate God into giving them what they wanted. The words of their complaint give the game away. “Why do we fast but YOU do not see? What’s the point of being good if the boss doesn’t notice? 

God’s response, essentially, is “don’t focus on me, and don’t focus on yourselves. Focus on those who are in need, focus on justice, focus on doing what’s right because it’s right, not because you think it will get you into my good books.” “Is not this the fast I choose; to loose the bonds of injustice, to share your bread with the hungry, to house the homeless, to clothe the naked.” 

That might make us wonder whether prayer and worship really matter at all. People sometimes ask me “why does God need us to worship him anyway?” The simple answer is “he doesn’t.” God doesn’t need anything from us. He’s not like the paranoid dictators of our world –Vladimir Putin or Hitler or Kim Jong-Un. He doesn’t need people to fawn on him to build up his fragile ego. God is complete as God is. 

So what is our worship for? Perhaps we could think of it like this. If you’ve got children, of any age, you’ve probably got, somewhere in your house a wonky clay pot or unidentifiable painting that they proudly came home from school with and presented to you, and which you can’t bear to throw away. Why do we treasure these things and keep them? It’s not because we need them, it’s because they remind us of the love we have for our children and they for us. I suspect that the same is true for God, as he listens to our stumbling prayers, and receives our inadequate offerings of thanks and praise. They just delight him. He likes to be with us; he likes having us around, he likes hearing from us, and being invited into that divine joy heals and strengthens us too.

Prayer and worship matter, but they aren’t payments to God for services rendered, still less bribes to make him do what we want.  Instead they are things which reshape us, and send us out into the world to love others and to bring them joy in our turn. 

It reminds me of the story Jesus tells in Luke’s Gospel of two men who go up to the Temple to pray. The first is a Pharisee who stands where everyone can see him and thanks God that he is such a good man, who fasts and makes charitable donations. He doesn’t commit any big sins, like adultery or murder, and in particular, he boasts to God, he isn’t like the other man in the story, a collaborating tax-collector. The tax-collector, meanwhile, kneels in a corner and prays quietly, desperately, to God to forgive him. Which one goes home set right with God, having done the business they need to do? asks Jesus. The answer is obvious. It’s not the Pharisee, who thinks he has earned God’s love through his own brilliance, who thinks God jolly well ought to love him and approve of him, that God owes him one. It’s the one who knows he can’t earn God’s love, but that God loves him anyway. He’s the one who has found true security – salvation might be another name for that –  because he has discovered that God’s love is a gift of grace, not dependent on what he does, not a contract either he or God is obliged to fulfil.   

In the Gospel reading we heard today, Jesus says to his disciples “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” It might sound as if he is setting an impossibly high bar, but I think it is really our attitude to faith that Jesus is questioning, challenging us not just to do right, but to do right for the right reasons, simply because it is right and will make God’s world, his beloved creation, a better place.  Jesus calls us to be salt and light in the world, not so that God will notice our saltiness and brilliance, but simply because the world needs salt and light. Virtue is its own reward, as the saying goes, or, as Isaiah puts it, it's water in parched places, building up what is ruined, repairing breaches, restoring streets to live in – something that is good for us all, right here and right now. It’s what the kingdom of heaven looks like, a place where there is healing happening, where the seeds of joy are growing.

It reminds me of the story of Nicholas Winton. He was a respectable, middle class finance director from Surrey, but his family discovered, late in his life, that just before WW2 broke out he’d gone to Czechoslovakia and, alongside others, had organised the rescue of hundreds of Jewish refugees on the Kindertransports. He’d never really talked about it, but they discovered his scrapbooks in the attic, with the names and photos of those he’d rescued, none of whom he’d heard from or seen since, and many of whom had no idea who’d saved them. You may have seen the programmes made by Esther Rantzen in the late 1980s in which she told his story. At the end of the second of those programmes, she asked the studio audience whether there were any of those children present, and one by one, dozens of people sitting around him stood up and applauded him, middle aged by then, with children and grandchildren of their own, who’d had the chance to live, to achieve, to give their gifts to the world, among other things as writers, scientists, doctors, and politicians – Alf Dubs was one of his evacuees – and all because of his courage and tenacity. In the midst of it all, Winton sat, overcome with emotion, seeing for the first time, what he’d accomplished. He'd never expected any reward or recognition. As far as he was concerned, he’d just done what was right, because it was right. Winton had no particular religious faith as an adult, but if ever there was a man who was salt and light to the world it was surely him, and I am quite sure that God would say of him, “here is someone who offered the fast that I choose, the worship that truly honours me, the righteousness that exceeds that of the scribe and Pharisees. Here is someone who entered and inhabited the kingdom of heaven in his lifetime by his actions, and opened it up to many others too as he gave them the gift of life.” 

Amen