Second Sunday After Pentecost
Year A, RCL
May 25, 2008
All Saints’, Bentonville
Gospel:
Jesus said, "No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.
"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you-- you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, `What will we eat?' or `What will we drink?' or `What will we wear?' For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.
"So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today's trouble is enough for today."
It is awfully easy to dismiss today’s gospel reading. Birds of the air, lilies of the field…These are serious examples of how we are to live? Jesus obviously wasn’t paying $3.85 a gallon for gasoline. If we stopped worrying about what we would eat and drink and wear, our lives and the lives of our families would be thrown into turmoil and the U.S. economy would surely fall apart.
We are more likely to listen to the wisdom of Solomon – as in this verse from Proverbs.
Proverbs 6:6-11 6 Go to the ant, you lazybones; consider its ways, and be wise. 7 Without having any chief or officer or ruler, 8 it prepares its food in summer, and gathers its sustenance in harvest. 9 How long will you lie there, O lazybones? When will you rise from your sleep? 10 A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, 11 and poverty will come upon you like a robber, and want, like an armed warrior.
What a conundrum this is. Are we to busy ourselves like Solomon’s ant? Or simply grow like lilies of the field, or feed on whatever comes along, like the birds of the air?
When the advice of Jesus seems to run counter to the wisdom teachings of the Old Testament, we Christians tend to give more weight to Jesus’ admonitions. Unless, of course, what Jesus is teaching isn’t what we want to hear. The Sermon on the Mount, from which today’s gospel reading was taken, is full of instructions from Jesus that alter or radicalize the law. Over and over again Jesus would say “You have heard it said,” but I say…and then Jesus would shock his listeners with his outlandish interpretation of ancient wisdom.
And surely today’s readings must be among the most outlandish. Don’t worry about our livelihood? Jesus has to be kidding. Hasn’t he read the economic news? The U.S. economy is sinking. We don’t know if we will keep our homes, or our jobs. We have mouths to feed. Don’t worry about tomorrow? Clearly Jesus didn’t face the demands that we experience.
Just thinking about our weighty responsibilities makes us want to scurry about like Solomon’s industrious ant.
But Jesus is presenting the vision of how to live that he always presents – a vision that enables us to live into our highest calling, our true selves.
The world would tell us, “Don’t worry, be happy, but keep your nose to the grindstone. That’s the copout answer – the kind of answer that preachers have been preaching from pulpits since the Romans. It’s our tendency to want to tie the really hard sayings of Jesus up in a neat little package, so we can live easily with them. Work really hard, but don’t worry about it. The captains of industry would certainly have us accept this interpretation. It insures that we will keep the wheels of commerce turning. Make sure you work your 60 hour weeks, but don’t worry, because worry might cause your blood pressure to rise and raise your health insurance premiums.
It would be insane to really follow Jesus advice. But as Reinhold Niebuhr once said, “It is almost impossible to be sane and Christian at the same time, and on the whole we have been more sane than Christian.”
Jesus tells us to strive first for the Kingdom of God and his righteousness. It is important to recognize that righteousness is not simply goodness, it is rightness. Righteousness occurs when everything is put right and rightly related to everything else. When our priorities are properly ordered. And some measure of justice, for all, prevails.
We are asked to breathe deeply of the love of God. We are asked not to be slaves to the demands of the world or to our worry over those demands. Jesus’ call is a call to freedom. Perhaps freedom from a job that enslaves us. Perhaps freedom from a way of live that leaves us perpetually chained.
We can’t always change the circumstances we face. But Jesus is teaching us that we can look at the world in a different way, a way that lets us off the treadmill. This picture of the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, presents to us a simpler path, but not necessarily an easy one.
The Benedictine monk Bruno Barnhart has written, “We humans prefer a manageable complexity to an unmanageable simplicity.” Jesus’ path was exactly that - a radically unmanageable simplicity. It is a path that is simple, but far from easy. Our tendency is to take the sayings of Jesus and make them manageable. We want to pretend that we really can serve two masters – that we can manage that kind of complexity. When in fact the path toward which Jesus directs us, a path of utter simplicity, of no more worries than the lilies of the field, is available to each of us.
We are asked to take seriously Jesus’ call that we not be slaves to wealth. A big part of our reluctance to throw away our chains has to do with our fear. And Jesus’ urgings for us to consider the lilies of the field and the birds of the air is mostly about letting go of that fear.
It’s not that we don’t have anything to lose. If you don’t get up and go to work tomorrow morning, and for a few mornings thereafter, you’ll likely lose your job. And you don’t have to spend too much time hanging out at the Salvation Army to learn that many of the people staying there are just like most of us - people for whom the margin between living in a comfortable house and living in the Sally is just a couple of missed paychecks.
So how can we let go of that fear? The fear of not getting ahead, the fear of not keeping up with the neighbors, the fear of whatever it is that compels us to take on a lifestyle that enslaves us.
I sometimes envy the disciples. They had Jesus’ living, breathing presence with them. They didn’t have just these remnants of his words passed down to us, filtered through the Romans and sanitized by the church. When Jesus told them, don’t worry…they could see the peace within his countenance, could sense the regularity of his breathing, know the calmness of his demeanor and realize that what he was offering wasn’t an empty proverb. He lived his words.
There is some temporary comfort in hearing Jesus’ admonition not to worry, but my worry is that as soon as we walk out these doors, the power of the comforting words dissolves, and we willingly slap on our shackles and chains and return to slavery.
The disciples had Jesus’ presence to alleviate their fears, to bring them back on track. To reorient them away from the world and onto a deeper, more compelling reality. We don’t have that. What we have are our practices – the Eucharist to remind us of the physical body and blood of Christ – a recognition that Jesus is still with us. We have music and liturgy that are designed to reconnect us the Divine.
I’ve repeatedly urged the practice of meditation. Within the practice of meditation there is the opportunity to experience the stillness of the Divine that moves us into the present and away, for a time, from the worries that tomorrow will bring.
It is said that ultimately all fear is fear of death – that all the losses that we fear, are based on our fear of the ultimate loss. Letting go of that fear has a way of making the fear of lost income, failure, humiliation - our usual fears -lose their power over us.
Jesus said, “No one can serve two masters.” However, we tend to think that we can manage the pursuit of wealth and serve God at the same time. This kind of dual quest is a way of giving into our fear. And what we sacrifice …is our serenity, our peace.
Earlier in this Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure in spirit. Purity is about oneness - unity. Our chasing after wealth moves us away from that purity of spirit, away from the realization that we are all one. We fail to see the unity of all creation, and our fear remains.
Our compulsion to manage a complexity removes us from the simplest of truths: When our heart is not divided, we see God.