Matthew 6:25-33 “Don’t Worry About Tomorrow”
A slight disclaimer: What follows is the basic text (minus the occasional digressions) of a sermon that I preached at Comox United Church, Comox, B.C. on October 10, 2021. It is not an essay. It is written to be spoken and in a manner that reflects my preaching style, which I suspect might be described as “informal.” Nor does it have the full assortment of citations, acknowledgements, and footnotes normally (and quite reasonably) expected in a more formal work. Please forgive the grammatical peculiarities!
Blessings
Phil Spencer
I usually spend a portion of my day online: reading, communicating, seeking information and more often than I usually like to admit, checking sports scores. Little is more chilling than those occasional reminders that pop up, completely unbidden on my preferred device—phone, tablet, and computer—telling me that my screen time was 12% higher that it was last week! When I see that it always makes me feel like I’ve failed somehow. Another thing that makes me a little anxious is the awareness that a whole bunch of what I do isn’t private—it’s like someone is watching over my shoulder. And no, it’s not that I do anything especially shameful online, and it’s not some creeping paranoia, but it’s the awareness that the internet sites we visit and the various platforms we use track what we’re doing because it’s in their best interest to know what we’re best interested in. This is how they can make money off us. They hope to sell us more stuff, or they can sell what they know about us to others, who will in in turn use it to their advantage by tracking your and my interests. To be fair—while we weren’t doing it for monetary advantage—at my previous church we’d do some analysis of who was using the congregational website and for what purposes, largely so we could make it easier for our users. Perhaps you do the same thing here. If, for example, we discovered that most of our website visits are for service times and location, then we’d be wise to make sure that those things are really prominent and near the top of the first page that you see when you look at the website. Or, if there’s lots of traffic to the weekly devotional, maybe you want to increase its frequency to a few times a week, or even to a daily devotional. Or, if we saw that most of our website visitors were located in Reykjavik, Iceland … well … I’d really have no clue what that was about, other than, I suppose to alerting us that God might be doing a new thing!
You may’ve done this too, but every once in a while I check on one of the search engines I use to see what people are looking for—it’s really interesting. It’s not hard to find out what’s interesting people—and it’s predictably about current events, scandals, the media, and entertainment. But I repeat myself. What’s really mind-bending is the thought that if lots and lots of people did that search, then searching for what people are searching for would be on that list of what people are searching for! Circular … but cool (and yes, I’m digressing). Online businesses and groups track stuff because it’s to their advantage to do so. Moreover—and this is quite unnerving I find (and you may’ve already noticed this, too)—but if you do a search for pretty much anything … let’s just pick something at random … say, lime-green dentures? If you search for that item you’ll soon be mysteriously encountering ads for lime-green dentures whenever you go online for any reason at all. This is just the way things work online at present.
Now, as some of you know, my wife and I are fond of travelling, and I’ve found that using my iPad for reading while on the road to be a great convenience—just download new books as you need them. On the other hand, a part of the price of that convenience is that if I were to electronically highlight something on a page, it’s observed and recorded by the good folks at the online retailer, Amazon, which is the source of many of my e-books. When you highlight something, they know. And yes, the Amazonians have a list of the most regularly highlighted, most popular passages in the electronic versions of the books it sells, which includes The Bible. Any guesses as to the most commonly highlighted passage in the Bible? Me? I’d figure it was something like the 23rd Psalm, or the creation story, or the Parable of the Prodigal Son, or some variation on John 3:16. As it turns out it’s Philippians 4:6-7:
Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
The fact that it’s, “Don’t worry about anything .…” suggests to me that people are worrying, and that this passage is regularly visited, to remind us of the folly in doing so.
Certainly, as we heard in our Gospel reading this morning, this issue of worry is on Jesus’ mind. This passage is located about midway through the Sermon on the Mount, that lengthy teaching of Jesus—a 3 full chapters worth!—that’s found in the first third of Matthew’s Gospel. The Sermon on the Mount’s the longest continuous teaching of Jesus recorded in any of the Gospel accounts—and so there’s lots to chew on. The writer Matthew places it early on in Jesus’ ministry, and it contains some of Jesus’ most famous teachings about the life of the disciple, such as how to pray and the Beatitudes (that list of intriguing “Blessed are …” statements), and much, much more. Do you want to know what life in the Kingdom of God looks like? This sermon of Jesus offers us a glimpse.
The short portion that we’ve heard today seems—on the face of it, anyway—to be straightforward. It’s nearly, but not quite, the “Bobby McFerrin gospel”: don’t worry, be happy! … minus the happy part. No, it’s simply this: don’t worry. The Bible I normally use begins the passage with the line, “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life …” and that Greek word translated as “worry” referring to being fretful, about being anxious. Hence, a fair reading of that opening verse is “Listen to me: don’t be anxious about your life …” though I find this to be sometimes easier said than done. What I’m referring to here is this: if you’re someone who's been identified by your physician as someone having a disorder called “anxiety,” if it’s a diagnosed medical problem, this can be a truly burdensome and debilitating condition. A friend of mine had an especially acute case of anxiety and he described it as existing in a constant state of alarm, quite literally being awash in adrenaline. Anxiety as a diagnosis can be hard and debilitating and it’s something that probably will take more than a teaching, a caution, to fix … but then I don’t think that’s what Jesus was talking about here. No, he’s not talking about the medical condition in this passage, but rather he’s talking about that not uncommon propensity we have for letting our minds endlessly dwell on the all-too-real difficulties in our lives, all those potential troubles, those deadly “Yeah, but what if’s …?” that can crush us.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t consider the future. Living a healthy way, retirement planning, keeping an eye on the old bank account, simply checking the weather report before embarking on that hike—planning for the future is just smart. In fact, in Luke 14, Jesus himself asked, “… can you imagine a king going into battle against another king without first deciding whether it is possible with his ten thousand troops to face the twenty thousand troops of the other?” In other words, plan! Think ahead! It’s not that there’s a shortage of reasons to look at the future and have at least some level of concern. The world is a dangerous place, and what justice we have is rough at best. We’re living in a time of—and hopefully on our way out of—a time of pandemic, where we’ve been cautioned about some of our most basic human interactions. Climate change is real and happening—what’s a faithful approach for us? Our country’s decreasing interest in organized religion might trigger a little concern about where this work we’re about together might be going. At a congregational level, I know of no church that doesn’t have at least some trepidation about the future. We do need to keep our eyes up on the horizon, and engaging the present by looking to the future is practical and wise. Nonetheless, there’s a line, isn’t there? It’s not always easy to discern—that’s why being in a church community where we can figure this out together is so important—but there’s a point where concern can become unhealthy, can slip into
anxiety and fear, where we’re compromising our call to follow Jesus, which has so much to do with choosing, with electing to trust. Jesus is teaching his people and he says to them, “Don’t you be worrying about your lives, what you eat or drink or what you wear. There’s more to what we’re about than what’s on your plate and on your back.” And then he points to the natural world— specifically to the birds—and surely God’s doing a pretty good job of looking after them, right? And how about those wildflowers? Gorgeous, yet, it’s here today and gone tomorrow. Then again, doesn’t God love you even more than the flowers? Do you think God’s not going to care for you even more? “So, choose to trust God,” Jesus is saying, “Try not to get focused on the wrong things.” Keep your eye on the Kingdom of God— live into the Kingdom of God and things will be fine, though it’s important to note that he doesn’t say there won’t be pain, doesn’t say that there isn’t a cost. At the end of the day, all of us experience loss, all of us will know suffering, all of us will have tough days— and as of this morning, the mortality rate is still 100%—we’re not getting out of this alive, are we? But don’t be anxious, don’t worry: trust God. As Jesus reminded his friends the night before he was crucified—yes, with knowledge of what the following day would indeed bring—“Don’t let your hearts be troubled. Have faith in God. Have faith in me.” (John 14:1) Keep your eyes on the prize—this does end well.
It’s Thanksgiving tomorrow, and I know that when I stop to think about it, I’ve got lots to be thankful for. My guess is that you’re probably in a much similar place. And as I think of the lives of those who’ve gone before me, it’s overwhelming for me to consider how my life has been especially blessed. We by no means live in a perfect society—we can spend a lot of time pointing to the social ills around us, and they’re truly there, and require our attention. But there’s also no doubt that in terms of physical needs, we live longer and better than anyone in human history. There’s that, isn’t there? In Canada our celebration of Thanksgiving is very much connected to the notion of the harvest festival, which long predates the Christian faith, but certainly for us it’s very much a fall harvest festival, hence the decorating we do and see with those autumn harvest symbols: wheat sheaves and squash and cornucopias and the like. Like many, if not all festivals, there’s a lot of different ways it’s celebrated, but in the Church we have a particular clarity about our celebration of Thanksgiving. While we’re not unappreciative of how we’ve been blessed and that can be in the form of the harvest, can be in thanksgiving for health or wealth, thanks for opportunity or security, and in all those other ways that we’ve been blessed, but, for us, those things are really symbols of something else, things that point beyond themselves. For us Thanksgiving is about being thankful that God is God.
Here’s the thing: God is God when times are good and God’s God when times are bad. Our thankfulness is not contingent upon our situation, but on our God. One way you can see that lived out is in doing a little digging into some of the great hymns of the Church, reflecting on some of the songs of praise we sing. You’ll sometimes find that the circumstances behind the writing are quite difficult, not necessarily written against a backdrop of riches, or of abundance, or of victory. Joseph Scriven, who wrote the lyrics to the hymn, What a Friend We Have in Jesus did so within a setting of great personal loss: the deaths of two people he loved. It is Well With My Soul was written by Horatio Spafford after the loss at sea of he and his wife’s 4 daughters. Yet, despite that, it positively radiates confidence in Christ—“It is well with my soul.” As we close this morning we’ll sing Now Thank We All Our God and the writer— Martin Rinkart—lived and ministered in Germany some 400 years ago. Those of you who are keen on European history of that era may recognize that this puts him in the midst of an outbreak of the plague and the 30 Years War, which has been considered to have been one of the more terrible and destructive conflicts ever. Millions of people died, and most of the dead were non-combatants, civilians. In fact, the story goes that in one year alone Rinkart presided at 4,500 funerals, better than a dozen a day. Yet, here’s the first verse of that hymn:
Now thank we all our God, with heart, and hands, and voices,
who wondrous things has done, in whom this world rejoices;
who from our mother's arms has blessed us on our way
with countless gifts of love, and still is ours today.
God’s God, even in the tough times, and so we, the latest batch of disciples of Jesus, give thanks. I can guess about some, but I don’t pretend to know about all your worries—your concerns about the past, present, or future—but if you’re like me you’ve surely got some. Some of those concerns are very real—health decisions, relationships, direction in an uncertain future—it’s the stuff of living. Into that complicated and real world we all live in, Jesus is inviting us to step more fully into the Kingdom of God, to place our anxieties in the hands of a God whose love for you and for me is demonstrated in our every heartbeat. Every single heartbeat has been a pure gift. Don’t worry, don’t be anxious—it won’t add an hour to your life. Trust and be thankful. The future is secure, for God is God … and that is enough. Amen.