Ash Wednesday, 2007
Matthew 6: 1-21
Today's Gospel lesson can be used as a guide for Lent. It is easily divided into the appropriate sections so we can't miss it.

• Giving to the Needy

1"Be careful not to do your 'acts of righteousness' before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.

• Prayer

9"This, then, is how you should pray:
" 'Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
10your kingdom come,
your will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
11Give us today our daily bread.
12Forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.

• Fasting

16"When you fast, do not look somber as the hypocrites do, for they disfigure their faces to show men they are fasting. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full.

• Treasures in Heaven

21For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

I don't think I have ever looked at it this way before. Call me slow or whatever, but when you put these things in order you realize again that it is all about keeping us from being controlled by the culture, temptations, and desires of the world. Jesus' teaching here is to help us have the disciplines to become aware of the ways we fall to the world's ways. There is nothing uniquely Christian in any of this. It is a spiritual way that religions and variations on religions have adopted and adapted for millenia.

For Jesus, as for the others, it is to be an anti-gravity teaching. It is to repel and withstand the gravitational pull of power, of wealth, of recognition for ourselves and our goodness. Sunday's Gospel will be the paradigm story from Jesus own life. But here he outlines how he has been able to do that himself.

As He says in one way or another several times in this passage, it is all about remembering that this is to be done for God and not for yourself.

your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.