“Life Together: A Day Alone” Matthew 6: 1-6, 16-21

There are certain pieces of scripture that we reserve and only hear at very particular times of the year. We hear Jesus’s final words from the cross during Lent, usually on Good Friday. We hear the story of Jesus’s birth on Christmas Eve. And this particular text, a text where Jesus speaks about how to pray, we usually hear this on Ash Wednesday. In fact, this past Lent, Rev. Jim Hollister preached from this text on that exact day. However, this scripture has the power to echo through our lives year round, so we return to it this morning. 

For the last several weeks we have been talking about our life together as a community of faith through the lens of a book bearing the same name, Life Together, by Dietrich Bohnhoffer. So what in the word is a topic such as ‘the day alone’ doing in the midst of a book about community? Doing smack dab in the middle of a sermon series about being the body of Christ?

Bohnhoffer had the ability to speak Christian truths in such a way that they captured your heart and wouldn’t leave you alone. Two such truths lead us today in our exploration of this topic alongside Matthew, Chapter 6. “Let him who cannot be alone beware community” and “Let him who is not in community beware being alone.” Let that sink in for a moment. What exactly is Bohnhoffer saying? That all too often we misuse Christian fellowship in order to escape ourselves. Or we claim that our relationship to Christian community is pre-determined by our personality. 

An example from my own life. I am an introvert. Which means, as much as I love being around people, I prefer one on one to group settings, and that after a long time being with a lot of people, I need to recharge my batteries by being alone. Which is probably why some of the activities that I enjoy the most, reading, cross stitch, painting, are usually done in solitude. I was in a meeting with other pastors once when someone, very mistakenly, tried to claim that because I was an introvert I didn’t enjoy being around people and wasn’t rooted in community, and I lost it. For that simply isn’t true. At that time I was in a community doing a book study. I was very deeply grounded in a community of other pastors, sharing our lives together. He heard the word introvert and substituted the word loner, where I claimed the truth of being an introvert as a way of saying, this is how I need to recharge my batteries at the end of a long day. 

Unfortunately, that pastor, who later apologized to me, wasn’t the only one to make such distinctions. Too many people assume that those who seek out community are extroverted and those who want solitude are introverted. Bohnhoffer reminds us that we need both in our lives, no matter what our natural temperament. In fact, we should seek out that which may not come naturally to us as a spiritual discipline, and set aside any assumptions about who needs what in their lives. We all need community. We all need solitude. And we need them in balance. 

Just as we often misunderstand each other and what we need, so is this passage from Matthew, Chapter 6 often ripped from its context. Often when we hear this passage of scripture lifted up, it is done so with an admonishment to live our faith life in secret so that we don’t get sucked in to the temptation of living out our faith for show or for someone else. A great, straight forward interpretation. But what we miss out on, is that in the time of Jesus all faith life was public. This teaching of Jesus would have been radical. At that time keeping one’s religious practices to one self would have been completely counter cultural.

So I have to ask, what would be considered counter cultural today? I would venture to guess that the pendulum has swung pretty far to the other side. We hardly do anything to show our faith in public - so afraid of being called different in todays society, even though that is exactly who God is calling us to be. We don’t live our faith out in community, instead we focus so much on spiritual development in solitude that we sometimes forget the point. We think faith is something that isn’t to be discussed with other people, and as a result, even folks who deeply love Jesus don’t how to put words to what their faith means to them. Our religious doesn’t run the risk of becoming showy for most people, it runs the risk of not having meaning grounded in community. 

We need to seeking out a more balanced faith life - one where we pray both in public and in private. One where we don’t refuse to fast because we use this scripture to put down a meaningful and transformative spiritual practice, but instead fast regularly and with joy. One where we don’t give whats left over to God, but instead store up our treasure in heaven and give to God what God first gave us.

In this passage Jesus is essentially calling folks to examine why they do what they do. What internal inklings and convictions in their souls lead them to live their lives of faith. We run into trouble when we never take time to examine the heart behind our actions and beliefs, and instead just do what is comfortable or claim this is what we’ve always believed. Jesus is calling us to be just as countercultural in our faith actions today as he was calling the disciples two-thousand years ago - it just may look different. 

I have a dear friend who read Life Together around the same time I did in college. In fact, he read my copy, so the tattered pages bear both of our notes and markings, which has been enlightening to look back upon in preparing for this sermon series. My friend is just about as opposite from me as you can get. He is extroverted - drawing his energy from being around large groups of people and can draw large crowds into meaningful conversation, whereas I prefer small groups. After reading this book however, he challenged himself to spend more time in solitude as well, seeking the balance to this life that could come from drawing away from time to time into the silence. He wanted to bring checks and balances into his life so that he wasn’t misusing Christian community.

We misuse Christian community when we use it to escape ourselves or to give ourselves and excuse to leave our faith lives unexamined. Christian community is not meant to be a distraction from our lives, rather to usher us into the fullness of life. To come to a place where we can be fully known and speak words of life to one another, not simply idol chatter. 

But in order to be fully known we must first know ourselves. We must draw apart of silence, the mark of solitude, and let Jesus, the very Word of Life, speak into our hearts. We need times to draw apart, as Jesus instructs, not just to avoid hipcocracy, but to let God be the first one to speak a Word into our day and the last Word given to us at night. Silence in its very nature is waiting for God’s Word to come to us. Then when we know ourselves, we come back into community to ask what God is saying to us, both individually and corporately, through the words of Jesus. This model and quest of balancing the inner and the outer life, balancing solitude and community, is such a different endeavor, than coming into fellowship together, because we are so afraid to be alone or to get to know ourselves.

Matthew 6, asks us to be aware of the outward influences that come upon our inward life. It asks us to live a life of balance, a life of integrity where the inward and outward come together. May we take time this week to draw apart and simply listen to God speak into our lives, so that we can become counter-cultural again, fully known and fully alive. Amen.