Your Father who sees in secret.

A Sermon for the Third Sunday after Easter

May 11, 2025 at Holy Communion

Matthew 6:1–6, 1 Peter 2:11–17

“Your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly” (Matthew 6:4). In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. ☩ Amen.

Katy and I have been reading a little book which gives you so much to think about that you can only read it in tiny bits. It’s called The Way of the Ascetics (by Tito Colliander), and it paraphrases classic spiritual writers who have something to say about inner stillness and reduction of the ego.

Among its counsels, it discourages talking about your spiritual progress. As you take on a life of inward discipline, “say nothing,” it says, “of the new life that you have begun or the experiment you are making or the experiences you expect to have. All this is a matter between God and you, and only between you too.” The author’s concern is that, if you make the intimacies of your inner life the subject of regular chatter, you will both ruin the intimacy of the God-soul relationship, and you will end up turning spiritual practice into just another way to build up your ego, instead of reducing it.

This week at the Wednesday Men’s Fellowship we heard a similar idea from the Lord himself. In Matthew 6, Jesus warns against “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” (v 1). You should give to the poor secretly (v 2–4). You should “go into your closet and shut the door” when you pray (v 5–6). “And your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (v 6).

The goal of life in the kingdom is not to look righteous, but to be righteous. The Pharisees have “already received their reward” for their ostentation, because they have already succeeded in their goal of looking righteous. But the person whose goal is to become just, or become generous, or become pious, the reward will be experienced in the heart, where the Father keeps his kingdom.

All of this came to mind for me this week because our Epistle reading contains a line that has been fraught with controversy: “be subject for the Lord's sake to every human institution” (1 Peter 2:13). Among commentators and ordinary readers alike, this verse became more distasteful after the Second World War, after Nazism and Stalinism. How can Christians “be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution” when sometimes human institutions are rotten to the core?

Our difficulty may be that as modern people living in a democratic society, we place great value on what we say. You might have observed, for example, that whenever there is a crisis or conflict or controversy, perhaps in a far-flung country, maybe in the Holy Land, maybe in Ukraine, maybe just in the United States, all sorts of institutions not related to the issue feel the need to make statements about it, to hang flags showing which side they support, to post about it on social media. We live in a society that values “taking a stand” for issues, which means expressing an opinion about them in public.

But in the spiritual life, what matters is not what we say, but what we do. That’s why I found Matthew 6 helpful for today’s Epistle. God rewards good conduct in the secrecy of the heart, but those who live for the praise of men have received their reward.

So when St Peter tells us to be “subject for the Lord's sake to every human institution,” his point is that Christians are not quarrelsome. We don’t live to be “for” this and “against” that. In a world which persecuted Christians, St Peter tells the church that they are not defined by their opposition to secular power. It would have been very tempting for the early church to think of itself as a kind of underground resistance movement to the Roman Empire. Some theologians today still wish that it had been. But the church was never a political body in that sense.

Instead, the church was always a “brotherhood” (1 Peter 2:17). Peter, who experienced his fair share of persecution—in fact, our Lesson from Acts records the prayer the church offers immediately after Peter’s release from imprisonment for preaching the gospel—that same Peter says that, even though the non-Christian world may “speak against you as evildoers,” our response should just be to pay no heed and get back to work, treasuring the love of the Father in our hearts and displaying by our conduct that we are above reproach (v 12).

The spiritual quest, he argues, is to learn how to “abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul” (v 11). The work of the Christian life is inward. As St Paul would say, we should “aspire to live quietly, to mind our own affairs, and to work with our hands” (1 Thessalonians 4:11)—that is, to go about our business with a humble spirit, submitting without controversy to the situation we find ourselves in day by day. As St Peter says in today’s text: “Live as servants of God. Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor” (v 16–17). The Christian’s job is to show respect for those who do not show respect, to honour even those whose conduct is dishonourable, to avoid controversy, and so to be free to love the brotherhood with all your quiet heart.