Don't Worry?

(Scriptures: Isaiah 49:8-16a, Psalm 131, I Corinthians 4:1-5, Matthew 6:7-15, 19-34)

This Sunday’s Gospel reading is the last we’ll hear for a while from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. While we may have been comforted three weeks ago by the Beatitudes, for the past two Sundays Jesus has offered some very difficult sayings, telling us not only not to commit adultery and kill, but also not even to entertain lust or anger in our minds, not even to allow lust and anger to linger in our thoughts, but to let go of them without hesitation. Last Sunday we heard Jesus tell us to overcome our instincts for survival so that God can give us the gift of a love that will go the 2nd mile, a love that will extend beyond our friends to our enemies, a love willing to do good unto all. By now, we may feel that Jesus have gone from preaching to meddling, as the saying goes.

With this Sunday’s reading, we may think that Jesus has completely taken leave of his senses, that he’s gone from asking the impossible to ranting nonsense. After all, in this awful economy, when people are being fired left and right while the rich just get richer, how can we possibly take Jesus seriously when he tells us not to worry where our next meal is coming from? It may seem that Jesus has lost touch with reality. But I’m here to say that the opposite is true – Jesus is, figuratively speaking, jumping up and down trying to draw our attention from the distractions of our daily lives to the ultimate reality of the Kingdom of God.

I began the Gospel reading a bit earlier in Matthew 6 than the lectionary reading indicated, in order to include the Lord’s Prayer. We will pray the Lord’s Prayer following the sermon, as we do every Sunday when we worship here. It’s such a familiar prayer that it’s tempting to just recite it by rote, as if we were talking in our sleep, not unlike school children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance as nothing more than a jumble of syllables, with no real meaning. When treated like this, it becomes background noise, losing its power to transform our lives. But in our reading, Jesus lifted up several thoughts in connection with the Lord’s Prayer. First of all, it’s quite short and simple. Jesus specifically taught his followers not to heap up long, empty prayers full of flowery words, as if to try to impress God. But Jesus also says, in this connection, that our heavenly Father knows what we need before we ask. The prayer “give us this day our daily bread” is not intended to remind an absent-minded, forgetful, fumbling God: "Yo, don’t forget to feed us!" Rather, it’s to remind us of our utter daily dependency before God. At the end of the prayer, Jesus lifts up the necessity of forgiving the offenses of others, as we have been forgiven by God.

And then Jesus goes on to speak of what we do with the blessings with which God has blessed us. Do we, in our greed and our anxiety about tomorrow, hang onto them with a deathgrip, or do we make our blessings available to others. Jesus’ talk about “treasures in heaven” is his way of speaking of almsgiving, or sharing our treasure with the poor. When Jesus contrasts treasures on earth with treasures in heaven, he’s contrasting the behavior of hanging onto our wealth, vs sharing it with others.

And then Jesus speaks of the frustration of serving of trying to serve two masters who would pull us in opposite directions: inevitably we’ll love one and reject the other. Inevitably one master is not going to be happy with us. In the same way, serving Mammon – figuratively, the god of money, that which for many represents prosperity and comfort – will lead us to neglect our relationship with God, just as serving God will inevitably lead us not to be invested in our own prosperity and comfort.

Fortunately Jesus does not leave us, in the words of the old Mary McGregor song, “torn between two lovers, feeling like a fool…..” – he gives us a definite shove in the direction of serving God, and letting the other stuff happen as it happens. Just as Jesus said in his lead-in to the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus again reminds us that God already knows we need food and clothing and shelter, and that if God lovingly provides for lilies and sparrows that are here today and gone tomorrow or next week, how much more so will God lovingly provide for our needs. Jesus knows that if we’re freed up from our obsessive focuses on ourselves, our own needs, our own wants, our own wants that pretend to be needs, we’ll be liberated to love God and neighbor. In a society that’s obsessed with looking out for number one – and that describes the society of Jesus’ day, as well as our society and pretty much every human society on the planet before or since – Jesus is trying to build an alternative society in which, with the real number one, God, already looking out for us, we can care for the welfare of others.

“Don’t worry about your life, what you will eat or drink or wear…” – that would pretty much put out business the advertising industry, which succeeds precisely by getting us to worry about just those things, and more. Meanwhile, it’s a measure of how utterly co-opted by American materialism, how utterly sucked into the world’s way of doing things, much of our country’s religious establishment is that, by and large, most churches aren’t even trying to create that alternative society of which Jesus spoke. By and large, conservative churches and religious leaders support political leaders who are trying to shred what remains of our country’s social safety net, trying to destroy whatever ability those on the margins of our society have to better themselves. Exhibit A is what’s happening in Wisconsin, with the newly-elected governor and legislature engaging in union-busting tactics. And this trend has spread to other states, with the enthusiastic support of many in the church, who try to let themselves off the hook of their guilty consciences by handing out a few food baskets at Christmas. What are folks supposed to live on the rest of the year? The wealthy of our time, have increased their wealth by distracting folks like us, by setting up state workers and union members as scapegoats and telling us that these scapegoats have life too easy, meanwhile the wealthy are picking our back pockets while our attention is diverted. America today has the greatest inequality of wealth that we’ve had in nearly 100 years – and it’s growing. Talk about powers and principalities, and spiritual wickedness in high places!! And many TV and radio preachers, rather than combating this spiritual wickedness, instead work to get their share of the action, leading their supporters to send in whatever little money they have left, mopping up anything their listeners may have left over. All of this blatant greed is million miles away from anything Jesus preached. While many of our conservative churches try to make morality all about sex, certain kinds of sex, anyway – under the title of “family values” – but are strangely silent on the topic of wealth and the greed that comes with it – Jesus seldom spoke about sex, but was an absolute pain in the neck on the subject of money, going on and on about the spiritual danger of greed. The United Church of Christ, for our part, has echoed Jesus’ message about the need to overcome greed, to share our treasure with the poor, but we’re a voice crying in the wilderness, heard by few, ignored by most. As has been said in various ways by many different people – from Gandhi to German Christian martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Pearl S. Buck to Hubert H Humphrey – “A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members.” By that measure, I’d have to say our American society is failing that test, miserably. Not only are we as a society failing, we’re not even trying to get it right.

Having reminded his listeners that as God cares for the grass of the fields and the birds of the air, God will care for us – having told us what we shouldn’t obsess over, Jesus tells us what we should focus on – and it’s what we sang about during the offering: Seek first the kingdom of God, and God’s righteousness, and all this other stuff will be added to us. Now the kingdom of God is not just some ethereal realm, pie in the sky by and by when we die. Seek first the kingdom of God – where the last, the least, and the lost are cared for, where nobody is left to drop out of the bottom of society, where love of God is inseparable from love of neighbor, even those neighbors we may not like very much, who make us uncomfortable, who make our skin crawl – those are the neighbors God has commanded us to love. Remember the words of our reading from Isaiah, which tell us what our purpose is: “I have kept you and given you as a covenant to the people, to establish the land, to apportion the desolate heritages; saying to the prisoners, "Come out," to those who are in darkness, "Show yourselves." They shall feed along the ways, on all the bare heights shall be their pasture; they shall not hunger or thirst, neither scorching wind nor sun shall strike them down, for he who has pity on them will lead them, and by springs of water will guide them.” This is a picture of how God wants us to live, and how God wants us to act toward those on the margins of our society. This is a picture of the Kingdom of God, which will be fully realized at the end of time – but which we begin to experience here and now as followers of Jesus, as disciples of Christ.

Seek first the kingdom of God, and God’s righteousness. Seek first the Kingdom of God, and not our own comfort and convenience. Seek first the kingdom of God, not just when the sun is shining and the birds are singing – Jesus has no need of fair weather friends – but when it’s stormy weather, when we have to plod through puddles and slog through snowdrifts to seek it. May we at Emanuel Church not be fair weather friends to Jesus, but seek first God’s kingdom, that our neighbors here in Bridesburg and our neighbors far away may receive the blessings of God….and that in being a blessing to others, we too may be blessed. Amen.
**************
Please join us at Emanuel United Church of Christ on Sunday mornings at 10 a.m. We're on Fillmore Street (off Thompson) in Bridesburg. www.emanuelphila.org