Your Heart Condition / Matthew 6:1–6, 16-21 / Pr. Ted A. Giese / Sunday March 5th 2025 / Season of Lent - Ash Wednesday / Mount Olive Lutheran Church

Mount Olive Lutheran Church / Pr. Ted A. Giese / Wednesday March 5th 2025: Season of Lent - Ash Wednesday / Matthew 6:1–6, 16-21 “Your Heart Condition”

“Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.

“Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

“And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

“And when you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, that your fasting may not be seen by others but by your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in Your sight O Lord. Amen.

Grace peace and mercy to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Good Christian Friends the aphorism “all that glitters is not gold”[1] is a warning that appearances can be deceiving, you might recognize it as coming from William Shakespeare’s play “The Merchant of Venice,” but it’s actually much older than that. Shakespeare also wrote the line, “God has given you one face, and you make yourself another,” that one is from his play “Hamlet.”[2]  In our Old Testament reading, as we are being called to return to the Lord with all our heart, “with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning,” we are being called to “rend [our] hearts and not [our] garments.”[3] That is to disregard the outward appearance of repentance and to actually repent deep down inside our very heart. Now day’s people may only think of the heart as part of our cardiovascular system, however in the ancient world and in Scripture the heart is where all your feelings and thoughts and desires resided.

In the Old Testament when people wanted to show grief or shock or dismay over some tragic event they would often take their clothing and rip them to shreds in a great public show of virtue to show how upset they were. Generally speaking this required an audience and it was as much about the show as it was about the emotions they might be having. Now in our modern context you don’t see this very much but one place you may have witnessed this sort of thing would be in professional wrestling, if you were ever a fan of WWF/WWE wresting you may remember the wrestler Hulk Hogan and part of his shtick was when he was very angry or upset he would tear his shirt off to show everyone just how emotional and bothered he was with whatever was going on. Both our Old Testament and Gospel Readings warn that appearances can be deceiving and what God wants is to have the rending, the repenting, the ripping to shreds to happen secretly in the hidden heart where He can see it and not outwardly where it might only be acting as a show for an audience to see and so Jesus teaches, “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.”

Same goes for prayer, we gather here together to pray and while anyone can join us it is relatively private, and for the Christian when we are in our quiet moments we are often even more secluded, when and where and for what reasons we pray is of interest to the LORD and so Jesus also teaches, “When you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”

The same thing goes for fasting: It’s common for people to give things up for the Season of Lent like coffee or chocolate or meat or alcohol or social media as a way to daily remember the suffering of Christ Jesus. The idea is that when we feel the pang for that thing which we have abandoned during Lent it provides opportunity to focus on Jesus. This too is intended to be a private activity and yet some people can’t but help telling everyone over and over again what they have given up and to make a big deal of how hard it is for them and how tempted they feel each day and how much they are looking forward to Easter and being able to have those things again making a big show of it and yet Jesus says “when you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, that your fasting may not be seen by others but by your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”

The warning over and over again is to not be hypocrites, to not be two faced, to not only appear righteous but to actually be righteous; to have your inner self, your heart, be repentant, to not simply go through the motions but to embrace the call to repentance and hold fast to what we are called to be. But here’s the catch, this is much harder that it appears; in fact it is often easier to give the appearance of this than to do it, to make it look like you have a heart of gold when it may actually be as black and sooty as a lump of coal. And this is why the Lord through the prophet Joel singles out the heart as the focus of change, and this is why the Lord through the prophet Jeremiah says,     

        The heart is deceitful above all things,

               and desperately sick;

               who can understand it?

        “I the LORD search the heart

               and test the mind,

        to give every man according to his ways,

               according to the fruit of his deeds.”[4]

The LORD sees through the golden glitter we present to the World, He sees past the face we make for ourselves to show the audience gathered around us and He sees what we have done with the true face that He gave us and the condition of our heart: there is no escaping the omniscient eye of LORD. And so Jesus a little later in the Gospel of Saint Matthew teaches, “whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach and is expelled … but what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person. But to eat with unwashed hands does not defile anyone.” The context of that last part was that the Pharisees, the same ones that Jesus says like the praise of others, saw Jesus and His disciples eating with unwashed hands and thought they were sinners, but these Pharisees couldn’t see their hearts as God is able to see them and were only interested in the glittering public appearance of godliness not on whether the disciples hearts were repentant, or whether Jesus’ heart was perfectly faithful to His heavenly Father.[5]   

Jesus’ appearance was not deceptive, and His heart was not “deceitful above all things” neither was is “desperately sick,” Jesus was not a hypocrite and while the Sadducees and the Pharisees and King Herod and men like Pontius Pilate could not fully see Jesus’ heart. God the Father who sees in secret rewarded Jesus for His faithfulness, sinlessness, His faultlessness and perfection by raising Him from the dead[6] because in Jesus’ innocence Jesus did not receive in death what He deserved; He received in death what we deserved, giving is His life.[7] Taking the wages of a heart that is “deceitful above all things” and “desperately sick,” upon Himself[8] even though He didn’t have such a heart means that in His death Jesus wrestles away from you your black and sooty as a lump of coal heart out of your chest promising instead to give you a true heart of gold, a new heart and a new spirit,[9] washed clean from all deceitfulness and every sickness of sin that dwells there overflowing with His forgiveness and love. And so we can sing “create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me,”[10] with men like King David trusting that the LORD can reward us with such a heart, on account of His Son Jesus’ heart.

Lastly, dear ones the ashes of Ash Wednesday are not a sign of fasting. They are a sign of mortality, “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.” So they show that we are dying.[11] Yet as Saint Paul says, “You also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.”[12] These ashes are here for a moment and then they are wiped off and we face the new day as ones who have been called to return to the LORD our God not as ones looking for the praise of some Worldly audience or to receive any self-congratulatory pats on the back but rather to face the day as ones called truly look into the depths of our own hearts, to repent of the sin we find there, yes even the sins that are secret to the World. We do this knowing that the contents of our heart are not secret to our heavenly Father and there is no use it foolishly trying to hide them from Him.

And so, through the season of Lent, as we daily return to God with all our heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning as we rend our hearts and not our garments because we know and trust that God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love we do so trusting that the LORD our God does relent over disaster. For this reason Jesus teaches us saying, “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” The rewards of the World are here and gone, they do not last, they are fleeting and transient, they are fool’s gold, they are false masks, they are deep bows to a false audience whose applause will vanish in an instance; they are utterly and completely unlike the eternal rewards that the LORD gives each of us on account of Christ Jesus. The World may not be able to see the heart your Lord provides you but what does that matter, we do not live our lives to impress the World. Amen.    

Let us pray: Lord have mercy on us, Christ have mercy on us, Lord have mercy on us, “take our minds and think through them, take our lips and speak through them, take our hearts and set them on fire; for the sake of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Amen.

[1] Paraphrase of a quote from Act II – Scene VII of William Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice (1596 and 1598) which is in turn a paraphrase of a sentiment that goes further back even to Aesop (c. 620–564 BC) the Ancient Greek fabulist and storyteller “Non omne quod nitet aurum est.”
[2] From Act III  –  Scene I of William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet (1599 and 1601).
[3] Joel 2:12–13
[4] Jeremiah 17:9–10
[5] Matthew 15:13–20
[6] Romans 8:11-13
[7] 1 Peter 3:18
[8] Romans 6:23
[9] Ezekiel 36:26-28
[10] Psalm 51:10
[11] Rev. William Weedon, 2025.
[12] Romans 6:11

Photo Credit: detail of man with heart condition from pxhere.