LIVING IN ANXIETY RIDDEN TIMES

(Preached on Sunday, May 25, 2008)

Steep your life in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions.  Don=t worry about missing out.  You=ll find all your everyday human concerns will be met.   

-Matthew 6:33

 

Are you worried yet?  First it was the terrorists blowing up our buildings.  Then there was talk about global warming and what we were doing to our planet.

Are you worried yet?  Then there were the rumors of a growing debt and credit crisis and suddenly mortgages began to fail, and home sales stalled and grew stagnant, and then property values began to fall.  Foreclosure became a word that reentered our vocabulary.

Are you worried yet?  Then the dollar started to fall and oil prices began to rise, no sky rocket and suddenly we are looking at $4 a gallon gasoline.  But that is not all: grocery prices began to rise as corn became more valuable as a fuel product rather than a food product and more farms were converted from wheat to corn to cash in on the bounty.  In an effort to ease global warming and our dependence on foreign oil we seems to be generated a word-wide food crisis, with food riots actually taking place in some countries.  As the prices of bread, and beef, chicken and eggs, vegetables and fruit, everything rise, home budgets grow tighter.

Are you worried yet?  My daughter=s friends from her college graduation class are worried C many of them could not find jobs, have taken unpaid internships or decided to go on to graduate school.  The day laborers at the Worker=s Center are worried as they wait around all day and no one comes in to hire them.  Work is off, lay-offs and rumors of lay-offs are rampant, job security seems to be going the way of the dinosaur.

Are you worried yet?  The state of the church=s finances have never been stronger, but Al Silverglade, our Financial Secretary, has noticed the weekly donations people give starting to be scaled back.  Our summer camp enrollments are running low.  My annuity fund has just lost $20,000 the first quarter of this year, the largest drop I have every witnessed, and our Church Endowment must have dropped and just this past week the Stock Market fell off by about 800 points again. 

Are you worried yet?  Jeanne Solomon, chair of our Stewardship Campaign is worried as we must ask you for pledges to support the work of God through this Church in the 2008-2009 Financial Year and all the economic indicators are the worst they have been in years, make that decades.

 

We live in anxious times.  And so this teaching from Jesus, telling us not to worry, sounds just a little too trite, a bit too perky and cheerful.  Sort of like the mindless optimism of Bobby McFerrin=s bouncy tune from the 1980's, ADon=t Worry, Be Happy!@ 

 

But Jesus is not out of touch with reality.  When Jesus says, ADo not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or what you will wear,@ he doesn=t say don=t eat, don=t drink, don=t dress yourself (or your children).  He doesn=t say don=t Ado@; he says ADon=t worry.@  Jesus invites us to see in a different way and to act differently because of it.

 

Jesus understands that what is closest to us and what is most important to us is what we worry about.  Because that is what we value most.  That=s the point Jesus is trying to make.  Our worries are essentially the test of our values.  We worry about the things that are the most important to us in life. 

 

A great preacher of the last century, George Buttrick, said the world offers us peace in three characteristic forms.  The peace of the world, said Buttrick, is the peace of the fortress (power), the peace of the palace (wealth and possessions) or the peace of escape, of which there is no end in our culture.  The world tells us that the way to be truly worry-free is by amassing enough stuff C life insurance, property, stock options, more weapons, more power, more things.

 

But the peace of Christ is none of these.  The peace of Christ sends us, following him, into the world.  Those who heed this call shall not enjoy the distorted peace of overwhelming power, nor shall they possess the uneasy peace of accumulation and wealth, nor finally the illusory peace of escape, of getting away from it all.  But they shall have the peace of Christ, the peace which passes all human understanding, a peace that sends us into the world.

 

Jesus tells us that the way to deal with our worries is by redirecting our focus.  Shift the focus from ourselves and our own lives and focus on God and on God=s world.  Focus first on God, to remember that everything we have comes from God and that God will take care of us.  Look at God=s creatures all around, he says, and you will see the way God cares for God=s beloved.  Then focus on the world, on all the need, the pain, the suffering, the hurt, the agony, the loneliness, and you will not have time to worry about your life.  You will be consumed with sharing the love of God with a hurting world.

 

Jesus says, AYou can=t worship both God and money...@  Well, of course not!  That would be idolatry.   We all know idolatry is forbidden.  It=s one of the Ten Commandments!  What self-respecting Christian would bow down and worship money?  But our idolatry of money is not as explicit as prostrating ourselves before it or praying to it. Most apostasy is more subtle than that.  Perhaps that makes it more insidious.  Our allegiance, our worship, our time, our energy is slowly, almost imperceptibly, transferred from worshiping God to money.  Maybe that=s part of the reason somebody thought it a good idea to stamp a reminder on our money.  It=s in God we trust, not this green paper.

In God we trust, but there=s rent to pay, car payments to make, bills that are coming due, college tuition to think about.  Slowly and subtly we get distracted from seeking God=s reign and justice, and instead we get encumbered by worry over obtaining and maintaining our Astuff.@

 

I once heard the story of an old Navajo Indian in Arizona who became a very wealthy man when oil was discovered on his land.  But wealth did not change him.  He went on living just as he had before while the money piled up in the bank.  Every now and then, however, the old man would visit the bank and say to the banker, ACrops all dried up; sheep all dead; cattle all stolen.@  The banker knew exactly what to do.  He would take the old man into the vault, seat him at a table, and place several bags of silver dollars in front of him to count.  After a while the man would come out and say, ACrops fine; sheep all alive; cattle all back.@  Why the change?  He had simply reviewed his resources and reminded himself of what he had to fall back on. 

 

We are beginning our Stewardship Campaign, that time of year when we talk about money in the church.  Money is often a sore point in church life.  But often the sore point reveals where the real point lies.  Money talk leaves many givers anxious.  Our anxiety this year is already on overload.  As Jesus points out, giving is central to faith and the whole experience of living close to God.  The problem for most of us is not greediness or selfishness.   We want to do what is good and right.  The issue is anxiety and distrust.