The Sermon on the Mount is famous (can a section of the Bible be considered "famous"?) for presenting us The Beatitudes (the "blessed is..." section from yesterday's extra credit reading) and the Lord's prayer. Today Jesus gives us His prayer as one of three tools - prayer, almsgiving, and fasting. He also guides us in how to use them.
Did you ever wonder where the Lord's prayer came from? It's here in Matthew 6 in a short form. The version we use is somewhere else in the Gospels (the first person to post it in the comments "wins"). Here, Jesus gives us a simple model of how to pray and what we should pray about. Do you remember the word ACTS from our Rite13 lessons - Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving and Supplication - it's all in the Lord's prayer somewhere. How is this a "tool" for our pilgrimage up our faith mountain? Prayer is how we focus our thoughts on God and ask God for help on our journey.
Almsgiving - giving to the poor - is another tool. We can't really grow as well by just sitting in a room and reading about God and praying. We must also use what we learn by acting and helping God bring His kingdom into being. Giving both time and money to the poor is what we can do to help. The action of giving also cements our learning and strengthens our faith.
The last tool is fasting. Because of our 30 hour famine, we tend to think of fasting as giving up food for a day or so. But it's really about giving up and letting go of things to better focus on God. Maybe we give up purchasing junk for a while, or maybe we give up watching TV. I could give up connecting to the Internet for a while...
OK, I can't, but you get the idea. When we "go without" we make room in our lives for God.
Finally, Jesus gives us a "safety warning" for using our tools properly. Remember all those stickers that cover tools today like "WARNING: Pounding your thumb with this hammer may cause pain, broken bones, tissue damage and lots of swearing"? Well, Jesus warns us to use these tools only to focus on our relationship with God. Specifically, we are NOT to use them to impress others with how "good" we are. So we are to pray simply without using lots of big words; we are to fast without bragging to others about how hard it is; and we should give to the poor without seeking publicity about our actions. Why? Because when we focus on how others see us, we get a reward in their approval, but then loose our focus on God. Our goal is not to use these tools to impress others with our craftsmanship, but rather to use these tools in our pilgrimage up our faith mountain.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please include your FIRST NAME and LAST INITIAL when making comments (we may remove comments from people outside our youth group community). If the comments don't work the first time, please keep clicking the post button (sometimes it takes a few tries).