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Saturday, May 2, 2015

God Knows

This is the message given in the United Methodist churches of the Wheatland Parish on Sunday, May 3, 2015.  The Bible verses used are Matthew 6:1-8.


            We are in the fourth week of our sermon series on The Paradoxical Commandments.  It’s a series of ten statements put together by Dr. Kent M. Keith when he was at Harvard to try to encourage his friends, who were becoming disillusioned over the way the world is.  We’ve put the whole list in the back of the church and it’ll be in the church newsletter, too.  Here’s the statement we’re going to talk about this week:  “The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.  Do good anyway.”
            Most of us already know the truth of that one.  We’ve all had times when we did something good and nobody noticed.  Maybe we did something good for a specific person.  Maybe we did something good for a group.  Maybe we did something good for the community.  Maybe we even did something good for the church.  And nobody noticed.  And if anybody did notice, they did not care.
            It’s frustrating, right?  Here we go out of our way to do something good, and for all that anyone cared, we could’ve just as well saved our time and our effort.  And it’s not that we do these things for applause, necessarily.  It’s not that we want everyone to tell us how great we are.  But still, it’d be nice if, well, somebody at least noticed.  It’d be nice if someone would at least say thank you once in a while.  And it can be frustrating for us when nobody does.
            I think that’s probably what Dr. Keith’s friends were experiencing when he wrote these paradoxical commandments.  They had gone out to do good and change the world, and they were finding out that the world was not all that interested in changing.  And they were getting frustrated.  Here they were, trying to do all this good in the world, and nobody seemed to care.  In fact, nobody seemed to want to know anything about it.
            I don’t think it’s sinful for us to feel the way Dr. Keith’s friends felt.  In fact, I suspect most of us have felt that way at times.  We all want to be appreciated.  That’s part of human nature.  Again, if we’re just doing things so people will say how great we are, that’s different.  But even if our motivation is pure and we’re just trying to serve God or serve our community, it’s still natural to want to know someone appreciated it.  I don’t think that’s a sin.  I think it’s just part of who we are.
            But what Jesus told us in our reading for today is that someone does appreciate it.  It may not be someone on earth, but it is someone in heaven.  God sees the good things we do, even if human beings don’t.  And God will not forget them.
            Jesus told us that the way we’re supposed to do good things is quietly.  In fact, Jesus says to do them in secret.  We’re not supposed to let anyone know what we’ve done.
            Again, I don’t think this is a matter of sin.  Jesus does not say that.  What Jesus says is that it’s a matter of reward.  Who do we want to reward us for the good things we’ve done?  Who do we want to get praise from?  That’s the point here.
            If we’ve done good things and let people know about the good things we’ve done, we’ve still done good things.    We’ve still done things that help people.  And we get a reward for that.  But the reward we get, if we let everyone know about the good things we’ve done, is to get the applause of people on earth.  And that’s nice, but the applause of people on earth is fleeting.  It’s here today and gone tomorrow.  And nobody knew better than Jesus how fleeting that applause was.
            And so, Jesus said that we should do good things in secret.  We should not let anyone know about the good things we’ve done.  Now, that does not necessarily make the things we’ve done any better.  The fact that no one knows what we’ve done does not necessarily help people more.  But the reward we get is different.  When we do things secretly and quietly, we don’t get rewarded by people on earth.  But we do get rewarded by God.
            And you know, if we think about this, this statement actually contains a paradox within a paradox.  Because, ultimately, the harder we try to have our good deeds remembered, the more likely they are to be forgotten by human beings.  And the harder we try to keep our good deeds secret, the more they get remembered by God.
            Because, again, the applause of human beings is fleeting.  People get all excited about something today, and then the next day or the next week or the next month, they move on to something else.  Have you ever gotten an award of some sort?  It’s nice at the time, but it does not really change anything.  In a couple of days, maybe a week, nobody even remembers that you got it.  When we lived in Wessington Springs, Wanda and I got a volunteer of the year award once.  You think anybody remembers that we got that award now?  Of course not.  That’s yesterday’s news.  In fact, it’s worse than yesterday’s news—one of these days it’ll be in that news from years ago column that they put in the paper.  Again, it was nice at the time, but nobody remembers it now.  They’ve moved on.
            But when we do things secretly, when we do things quietly, they do get remembered.  They get remembered by God.  Because God sees everything.  God notices everything.  And God remembers everything.  We cannot hide anything from God.  God sees every good thing we do.  Of course, God sees every bad thing we do, too.  And God understands who we are and why we do what we do, the good and the bad.
            Now, I want to make one thing clear.  When we say that God will remember our good deeds and God will reward us for them, we are not saying that we can somehow earn our way into heaven.  We get into heaven by faith, not by good deeds.  But if we truly have faith, that faith needs to show up in some tangible way.  If we truly love the Lord, we’ll try to serve the Lord.  And God will appreciate our efforts to serve.
            You know what else is paradoxical about this statement?  A lot of times, we think that if everyone notices and appreciates all the things we do, if everyone talks about how great we are, it’ll change our life in some way.  And it won’t.  Not in any way that’s meaningful, anyway.  But when we do things for no other reason than that we love the Lord and want to serve the Lord, that will change our lives.  It will change our lives in awesome and incredible ways.
            Because the more we serve the Lord, the closer we feel to the Lord.  The more we feel God’s presence with us.  And the more we feel God’s presence with us, the more we want to serve God.  That’s one of the best things about the reward we get, really.  We eventually build a cycle that feeds on itself and builds on itself.  The more we serve God, the closer we are to God, and the closer we are to God, the more we want to serve God.  And after a while, we get to where we really don’t care if anyone notices the good things we do or not.  Because we feel God’s presence.  We know God is with us.  And feeling God with us is the most incredible feeling in the world.  Once we’ve felt the presence of God with us, we never want to be without that feeling again.
            And once we’ve felt the presence of God with us, we really don’t care that much about human applause any more.  It’s still nice, we still appreciate it if we get it, but it no longer has any hold over us.  We no longer get frustrated if we don’t get that human applause.  Because we know that human applause, no matter how much we get and no matter how sincere it is, can never come anywhere near the incredible feeling of being in the presence of God.
            So, if you’re feeling frustrated today because you did something good and nobody noticed or nobody cared, know this:  God noticed.  And God cared.  And God will never forget.  God knows exactly what you did and God knows exactly how well you did.  God knows, and God cares, and God will reward you for what you did.  And part of that reward will be to feel the joy and love that comes from feeling God’s presence with us.
            “The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.  Do good anyway.”  Sure, it’s always nice to get human applause, but human applause never lasts.  It’s here today and gone tomorrow.  But God is forever.  When our goal is to serve God by doing good, we will feel God with us always.  And that is the greatest feeling there is.

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