The worry test
Commentary
Object:
Remember when the most popular song around the world was Bobby McFerrin's little
ditty "Don't Worry; Be Happy"? People hummed it everywhere and radio stations of all
varieties played its catchy, optimistic message. No matter what happens in life, one
should never worry. One should just live and be happy.
Since millions of people bought recordings of that song, you would think that no one would be anxious anymore. Unfortunately, even with all that airplay, Bobbie McFerrin's song failed to chase the worrywarts from our souls.
One man tells of sitting next to a fellow Christian on a flight. The novice was obviously ill at ease, squirming in his seat, looking out the window to see if the wings were still there, and gripping the armrests in a knuckle lock. Every little bump or jolt would bring a gasp and a prayer and a hand nervously fingering rosary beads.
The experienced traveler grinned a bit and thought he might calm his seatmate's nerves with some religious psychology. "What are you so worried about?" he asked. "Didn't Jesus say in the Bible, 'I am with you always, even to the ends of the earth?' "
"No!" the other passenger shouted. "You've got it wrong! Jesus said, 'Lo, I am with you always.' I'm not sure what happens when you get way up here!"
High or low, worry is part of human life. Jesus understands that. In fact, the Bible seems to indicate that Jesus worried, at times, right along with the rest of us. In John 12, we read of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem at the start of the week that would bring his death. The crowds surrounded him, and he was well aware of the troubles that would come in the next few days. When he arrived at the temple to pray, Jesus shouted a note of worry to the skies. "Now my heart is troubled!" he said. The word he used, as it comes to us in the Greek text, is one that echoes our fears. It means agitated, unsettled, anxious, frightened, or disturbed.
Jesus sounds like one of us, doesn't he? He worried, too. But when you think about that, should it be so unusual? Jesus was fully human, just as we are. He was as normal, during his time on earth, as the person sitting next to him. The only difference, according to the Bible, is that in his worries Jesus never stepped across the line that would have led him to sin. His teaching in the gospel lesson for today is one we need to hear again and again. It is reflected, as well, in the words of God filtered through Isaiah, as well as Paul's instructions to the Corinthians.
Isaiah 49:8-16a
In the spring of 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. sparked a Birmingham, Alabama, campaign to end discriminatory hiring practices and racial segregation in restaurants. The drama gained worldwide attention when police attacked the participants with dogs and fire hoses. Many were arrested, including hundreds of schoolchildren.
A coalition of white clergy issued a public denunciation of such activities and called on blacks to boycott the demonstrations. Twenty men sent a letter to King, who was being held in the Birmingham jail, begging him to be more cautious, less troublesome. His reply carried the famous line: "Peace is not the absence of tension but the presence of justice."
Generations ago, the philosopher, Spinoza, said it, too: "Peace is not an absence of war; it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice." And in Isaiah 49, the word of God shouts of justice and peace through the pen of the prophet. One day soon, God's people who are on the run from their enemies, a homeless vagabond crowd surrounded by enemies, will be able to lie down again and sleep in peace in their own homes. Even though they despair of God's care after the horrors of alienation and exile (v. 14), God says, "Can a mother forget...?"
Some hospitals have ingeniously stimulated a peaceful environment on maternity wards. Where the cry of a single baby once stirred others into a chorus of wailing, a tape recording is piped in over the speakers above. Is it a quiet lullaby? A meditative classical work? The soothing sounds of winds and waves?
No. These babies are surrounded with the gentle thumping of a human heartbeat. It is the echo of a mother's breast, a parent's pervasive caring. It is the heartbeat of love. And the young children, challenged by a bright and noisy world, sleep in peace.
C. S. Lewis, in The Screwtape Letters, pictures a devil banishing both music and silence from the world, filling it instead with noise. It is "noise which alone defends us from silly qualms," he declares. "We will make the whole universe a noise in the end."
But the Prince of Peace, the suffering servant promised through Isaiah, will never allow it. As an anonymous fifteenth-century poet once put it:
Thou shalt know him when he comes,
Not by any din of drums ...
But his presence known shall be,
By the holy harmony
Which his coming makes in thee.
There's a marvelous tale about a painting contest. Artists were encouraged to submit their most descriptive canvases portraying "peace." The offerings were as varied as the colors of the spectrum. One bright scene showed a pastoral countryside. Another found peace on the wide expanse of seacoast, drummed by the steadying rhythm of the waves. A third found its glow in the setting sun at day's end.
The winning painting, though, portrayed a chaotic and troubled scene. Torrents of water cascaded over jagged rocks. Black storm clouds reached down to earth with destructive claws of lightning. Fierce winds tore at the leafy clothing of trees. Hailstones mixed with rain punished the world with a sound beating.
But these were not the things that grabbed the viewer's attention. There, just to the right of center, in a nest supported by a gnarled old tree limb and sheltered by overhanging rocks, was a small bird -- singing -- peaceful.
That's the child of God, resting confident in the heartbeat of heaven. That's the picture of home that God speaks through Isaiah to call home God's distressed children. As Isaiah put it in another place: "You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast, because he trusts in you" (Isaiah 26:3).
1 Corinthians 4:1-5
Paul was living and working in Ephesus on his third mission journey (Acts 19). He had recently finished an extended church-planting stint in Corinth (Acts 18), and a vibrant congregation had taken root.
Once Paul moved on, however, the church became cantankerous and feisty. It split into competing cell groups aligned with differing charismatic leaders. More than that, it developed worship wars and intense social stratification. Some of Paul's friends sent messages that the church was in trouble. Paul may have gotten out of Corinth, but Corinth never got out of him. He wrote back a nasty letter, challenging the people to get with the program (1 Corinthians 5:9). That only seemed to make matters worse, and now three key leaders traveled from Corinth to Ephesus to speak personally to Paul about their worries (1 Corinthians 16:17). In response, Paul sent this letter, worried in part that the Corinthian Christians had forgotten his special ministry as an ambassador of Jesus Christ and a church-planting apostle. Yet in this short paragraph he reminds them and himself that above all their passions and arguments and worries and fears, God remains sovereign.
During his days in the Siberian labor camps, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had lost his family. His days stretched out in endless, backbreaking efforts. Then the doctors told him he had cancer. There was no cure. He would die soon.
The next day he could barely get out of his bunk. His heart was gone. His mind was numb. He had no energy as he left to join the others in the dawn work patrol. "What's the use?" he asked himself.
Solzhenitsyn wrote that when he got to the rock quarries, he dropped his shovel, sat down, resting his head on his tired, folded arms. He knew the guards would see him soon, but he didn't care. He hoped that they would shoot him. Then, at least, the pain would be over and the worries gone.
"But then," he wrote, "I felt someone standing near me. I looked up, and there was an old man. I'd never seen him before. I don't remember ever seeing him again. But he knelt over me, and he took a stick, and he drew a cross on the ground in front of me. That cross made me see things in a new way. There's a power in the universe that is bigger than any empire or any government. There's a God who experiences our pain and who dies our death and who came back from the tombs. There's a God who gives life meaning, who is life itself. That's what really matters here. That's why we exist. That's why Jesus came to earth for us."
Solzhenitsyn said that he sat there thinking about it all for a few more minutes. Then he stood up, picked up his shovel, and went back to work. Things wouldn't change around him for over a year, but inside he was a new person.
That incident put Solzhenitsyn's worries in their place. They didn't vanish or disappear suddenly. Instead, they were caught up into a larger perspective of concern. How could he share the life of the Master? How could his days be a reflection of God's kingdom, God's power, and God's glory?
This was the message Paul sought to communicate to his friends in Corinth. We need to hear it again as well.
Matthew 6:24-34
A newspaper columnist once wrote about the fears of a young fellow on his way to his first day as school: "My name is Donald, and I don't know anything! I have new underwear, a new sweater, a loose tooth, and I didn't sleep well last night; I worried. What if the school bus jerks after I get on, and I lose my balance and my pants rip and everyone laughs? What if a bell rings and a man yells, 'Where do you belong?' and I don't know? What if the thermos lid on my soup is on too tight, and when I try to open it, it breaks? What if I splash water on my name tag, and my name disappears and no one will know who I am? What if they send us out to play and all the swings are taken?"
Though she writes about a child, that columnist echoes our own everyday fears. We all worry. It's part of life. A reporter once asked G. K. Chesterton, "If you were a preacher and you had only one sermon to give, what would it be about?"
Chesterton didn't think twice. He said, "I'd preach about worry." He knew what it was to be human. Worry is a part of life and something that drives a lot of our actions. Jesus knew that. That's why he focused on worry for such a large portion of the Sermon on the Mount.
Jesus' list of worries comes from the morning newspaper. We worry about food, he says, and about our health. We worry about the kinds of clothes we wear: Are they in fashion? Will people notice me? Do they respect me or laugh behind my back?
More than that, says Jesus, we worry about money. We worry about mortgages and interest rates. We worry about pensions and taxes.
Jesus knows us pretty well. Everything on his list of worries is important, isn't it? We should be concerned about our health. It is important to pay our bills. In fact, we get upset with people who don't pay their bills. Jesus can't be telling us to be careless about ourselves and our things. After all, he also teaches us to pray, "Father, give us today our daily bread." He expects us to be concerned about things that are close to us and a common part of life.
And that's what we worry about, isn't it? We worry about the things that are close to us, the things that are constantly with us, and the things that we carry around with us day after day. We worry about the things that have the most immediate value to us.
Maybe that's really the point of what Jesus is trying to say. Our worries are essentially the test of our values. We worry about things that are the most important to us in life.
That's why Jesus encourages us to take the worry test. What are you most anxious about? What troubles you the most? What keeps you awake at night, or disturbs your thoughts most often during the day? When we take the worry test we find out where our hearts are. The worry test teaches us the schedule of values in our lives.
It's like the story someone told of two men on a cross-country bike trip. They were traveling together on a tandem bike. For the first few miles the land was level and they pumped along with energy and style, enjoying this teamwork. But then the road began to rise, and they found themselves fighting a steep climb. Panting and puffing, they slowly worked their way to the top.
Reaching the summit, they stopped to catch their breath. "Whew!" said one, wiping the sweat off his face. "That was some hard climb!"
"Yeah!" agreed the other, "and if I hadn't kept the brake on, we probably would have slid back to the bottom!"
That's the worry test in action: One fellow had his mind on the heights. He was going to make it to the top if it took all of his energies and strength. Meanwhile, his partner had his mind on the bottom. He was worried about sliding back down the hill. They were both doing the same thing, riding the same bike on the same road up the same hill, but their values were at different places. Their worries set them apart.
So it is with us. We all worry, but our worries surround the things that we value most in life. List the concerns that bother you the most. When you read your list over, as Jesus said, you will find your heart.
So the challenge of Jesus is not to stop worrying altogether. To be human is to have worries and frets and cares. We are affected by life. The issue, according to Jesus, is to change our goals and values and treasures so that, in the end, our worries will take on a more godly character. "Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness," said Jesus, "and all these things that you need will come to you as well."
That's where Jesus is leading us as well. "Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness," he says.
But that is a hard lesson to learn. We are so good at taking control of our lives. We are very good at trying to play God, to the point that we don't want him to remind us of the real structures of life.
Application
It shouldn't be difficult to get to people's hearts today with the power of these passages. Use the Isaiah reading as a call to gather God's troubled people back to forgiving graces of divine love. Then tell about Paul's troubled relationship with the Corinthian congregation to raise up the specter of social ills and personal fears. Finally, turn to Jesus' fine words in the Sermon on the Mount to focus all on the things that really matter, reminding them that we can let go because God, in infinite care, holds onto us.
Alternative Application
Matthew 6:24-34. It is also possible to focus solely on Jesus' gospel words about our concerns and worries, and the power of the kingdom of God. This is a powerful passage. Many years ago, when Dick Shephard was the vicar of an Anglican parish in London, he had a dream. It was vivid and stayed with him after he awoke. His life was exceptionally busy in those days. He was constantly trying to meet the demands of the many people under his care in ministry.
One day he felt himself coming down with the flu, but he couldn't afford to get sick. He didn't have the time. There were too many things to do. There were sermons to write and classes to prepare and meetings to chair and people to visit. His congregation needed him. His family needed him. Even God needed him. He just couldn't afford to get sick right then.
That night, he had his terrible nightmare. He dreamed that he was standing in heaven near God's throne. An angelic telegram arrived, and the messenger handed the envelope to God. God tore it open and read these horrifying words: "Dick Shephard is about to be ill."
Then, said Reverend Shephard, God began to wring his hands. A worried look clouded God's face, and he began to mumble, "Oh, no! Dick Shephard is about to be ill! Whatever shall I do? Whatever shall I do?"
When Pastor Shephard woke up in the morning, he had a good laugh. He decided that God could probably manage somehow without him, and he stopped living as if all the world depended on him.
That's the lesson that Jesus wants to teach us. It will change our values and redefine our goals and point us toward new treasures. "Your heavenly Father knows," said Jesus. And that is enough.
Preaching The Psalm
Psalm 131
Humility is at the core of faith. Nice statement, that. But what does it mean? Most assume that good humble Christians stay in their places and don't disturb the waters of the world in which they live. In the larger culture, humility means staying out of the way and keeping one's mouth closed -- be humble and be quiet.
This may be the view of the culture, or as Saint Paul would call it, "this world" (1 Corinthians 1:20), but it is not a biblical humility. Biblical humility is all about surrendering oneself to God. It has to do with laying down the narrow desires and wants of our own hearts so that God's desires can become our own. It has to do with laying down the ego so that the striving and accomplishments that drive us in this world can be given up in favor of God sitting in our driver's seat.
A humble Christian is not necessarily quiet. A spirit given over to God and God's way in the world might well become a strident voice for God. Martin Luther King Jr. was humble in that he accepted God's call and moved forward even though it put him and his family at risk. He was not quiet, but his soul was calm. He was not overly ambitious, but he had work to do. He was not occupied with "things too marvelous" for him. He was just pursuing God's call to justice.
A humble Christian is not necessarily without passion. Someone who has released spiritual baggage in their lives and claimed the power of God's Spirit can be singed with the flame of holy passion. Cesar Chavez burned with a passion for justice that comes from a depth of faith as he fought for the rights of migrant workers. Daniel Berrigan lit the fires of Pentecostal passion when he and brother, Philip, burned draft records in Catonsville, Maryland, during the Vietnam War. And these are humble Christians.
Christian humility, it turns out, is anything but quiet or passive. It is, however, a soul at rest because it is has given all worldly concerns over to God. Ego, achievement, acquisition, approval of the world; all surrendered in order to more perfectly follow the holy one, in whom we find our hope and our salvation.
Since millions of people bought recordings of that song, you would think that no one would be anxious anymore. Unfortunately, even with all that airplay, Bobbie McFerrin's song failed to chase the worrywarts from our souls.
One man tells of sitting next to a fellow Christian on a flight. The novice was obviously ill at ease, squirming in his seat, looking out the window to see if the wings were still there, and gripping the armrests in a knuckle lock. Every little bump or jolt would bring a gasp and a prayer and a hand nervously fingering rosary beads.
The experienced traveler grinned a bit and thought he might calm his seatmate's nerves with some religious psychology. "What are you so worried about?" he asked. "Didn't Jesus say in the Bible, 'I am with you always, even to the ends of the earth?' "
"No!" the other passenger shouted. "You've got it wrong! Jesus said, 'Lo, I am with you always.' I'm not sure what happens when you get way up here!"
High or low, worry is part of human life. Jesus understands that. In fact, the Bible seems to indicate that Jesus worried, at times, right along with the rest of us. In John 12, we read of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem at the start of the week that would bring his death. The crowds surrounded him, and he was well aware of the troubles that would come in the next few days. When he arrived at the temple to pray, Jesus shouted a note of worry to the skies. "Now my heart is troubled!" he said. The word he used, as it comes to us in the Greek text, is one that echoes our fears. It means agitated, unsettled, anxious, frightened, or disturbed.
Jesus sounds like one of us, doesn't he? He worried, too. But when you think about that, should it be so unusual? Jesus was fully human, just as we are. He was as normal, during his time on earth, as the person sitting next to him. The only difference, according to the Bible, is that in his worries Jesus never stepped across the line that would have led him to sin. His teaching in the gospel lesson for today is one we need to hear again and again. It is reflected, as well, in the words of God filtered through Isaiah, as well as Paul's instructions to the Corinthians.
Isaiah 49:8-16a
In the spring of 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. sparked a Birmingham, Alabama, campaign to end discriminatory hiring practices and racial segregation in restaurants. The drama gained worldwide attention when police attacked the participants with dogs and fire hoses. Many were arrested, including hundreds of schoolchildren.
A coalition of white clergy issued a public denunciation of such activities and called on blacks to boycott the demonstrations. Twenty men sent a letter to King, who was being held in the Birmingham jail, begging him to be more cautious, less troublesome. His reply carried the famous line: "Peace is not the absence of tension but the presence of justice."
Generations ago, the philosopher, Spinoza, said it, too: "Peace is not an absence of war; it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice." And in Isaiah 49, the word of God shouts of justice and peace through the pen of the prophet. One day soon, God's people who are on the run from their enemies, a homeless vagabond crowd surrounded by enemies, will be able to lie down again and sleep in peace in their own homes. Even though they despair of God's care after the horrors of alienation and exile (v. 14), God says, "Can a mother forget...?"
Some hospitals have ingeniously stimulated a peaceful environment on maternity wards. Where the cry of a single baby once stirred others into a chorus of wailing, a tape recording is piped in over the speakers above. Is it a quiet lullaby? A meditative classical work? The soothing sounds of winds and waves?
No. These babies are surrounded with the gentle thumping of a human heartbeat. It is the echo of a mother's breast, a parent's pervasive caring. It is the heartbeat of love. And the young children, challenged by a bright and noisy world, sleep in peace.
C. S. Lewis, in The Screwtape Letters, pictures a devil banishing both music and silence from the world, filling it instead with noise. It is "noise which alone defends us from silly qualms," he declares. "We will make the whole universe a noise in the end."
But the Prince of Peace, the suffering servant promised through Isaiah, will never allow it. As an anonymous fifteenth-century poet once put it:
Thou shalt know him when he comes,
Not by any din of drums ...
But his presence known shall be,
By the holy harmony
Which his coming makes in thee.
There's a marvelous tale about a painting contest. Artists were encouraged to submit their most descriptive canvases portraying "peace." The offerings were as varied as the colors of the spectrum. One bright scene showed a pastoral countryside. Another found peace on the wide expanse of seacoast, drummed by the steadying rhythm of the waves. A third found its glow in the setting sun at day's end.
The winning painting, though, portrayed a chaotic and troubled scene. Torrents of water cascaded over jagged rocks. Black storm clouds reached down to earth with destructive claws of lightning. Fierce winds tore at the leafy clothing of trees. Hailstones mixed with rain punished the world with a sound beating.
But these were not the things that grabbed the viewer's attention. There, just to the right of center, in a nest supported by a gnarled old tree limb and sheltered by overhanging rocks, was a small bird -- singing -- peaceful.
That's the child of God, resting confident in the heartbeat of heaven. That's the picture of home that God speaks through Isaiah to call home God's distressed children. As Isaiah put it in another place: "You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast, because he trusts in you" (Isaiah 26:3).
1 Corinthians 4:1-5
Paul was living and working in Ephesus on his third mission journey (Acts 19). He had recently finished an extended church-planting stint in Corinth (Acts 18), and a vibrant congregation had taken root.
Once Paul moved on, however, the church became cantankerous and feisty. It split into competing cell groups aligned with differing charismatic leaders. More than that, it developed worship wars and intense social stratification. Some of Paul's friends sent messages that the church was in trouble. Paul may have gotten out of Corinth, but Corinth never got out of him. He wrote back a nasty letter, challenging the people to get with the program (1 Corinthians 5:9). That only seemed to make matters worse, and now three key leaders traveled from Corinth to Ephesus to speak personally to Paul about their worries (1 Corinthians 16:17). In response, Paul sent this letter, worried in part that the Corinthian Christians had forgotten his special ministry as an ambassador of Jesus Christ and a church-planting apostle. Yet in this short paragraph he reminds them and himself that above all their passions and arguments and worries and fears, God remains sovereign.
During his days in the Siberian labor camps, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had lost his family. His days stretched out in endless, backbreaking efforts. Then the doctors told him he had cancer. There was no cure. He would die soon.
The next day he could barely get out of his bunk. His heart was gone. His mind was numb. He had no energy as he left to join the others in the dawn work patrol. "What's the use?" he asked himself.
Solzhenitsyn wrote that when he got to the rock quarries, he dropped his shovel, sat down, resting his head on his tired, folded arms. He knew the guards would see him soon, but he didn't care. He hoped that they would shoot him. Then, at least, the pain would be over and the worries gone.
"But then," he wrote, "I felt someone standing near me. I looked up, and there was an old man. I'd never seen him before. I don't remember ever seeing him again. But he knelt over me, and he took a stick, and he drew a cross on the ground in front of me. That cross made me see things in a new way. There's a power in the universe that is bigger than any empire or any government. There's a God who experiences our pain and who dies our death and who came back from the tombs. There's a God who gives life meaning, who is life itself. That's what really matters here. That's why we exist. That's why Jesus came to earth for us."
Solzhenitsyn said that he sat there thinking about it all for a few more minutes. Then he stood up, picked up his shovel, and went back to work. Things wouldn't change around him for over a year, but inside he was a new person.
That incident put Solzhenitsyn's worries in their place. They didn't vanish or disappear suddenly. Instead, they were caught up into a larger perspective of concern. How could he share the life of the Master? How could his days be a reflection of God's kingdom, God's power, and God's glory?
This was the message Paul sought to communicate to his friends in Corinth. We need to hear it again as well.
Matthew 6:24-34
A newspaper columnist once wrote about the fears of a young fellow on his way to his first day as school: "My name is Donald, and I don't know anything! I have new underwear, a new sweater, a loose tooth, and I didn't sleep well last night; I worried. What if the school bus jerks after I get on, and I lose my balance and my pants rip and everyone laughs? What if a bell rings and a man yells, 'Where do you belong?' and I don't know? What if the thermos lid on my soup is on too tight, and when I try to open it, it breaks? What if I splash water on my name tag, and my name disappears and no one will know who I am? What if they send us out to play and all the swings are taken?"
Though she writes about a child, that columnist echoes our own everyday fears. We all worry. It's part of life. A reporter once asked G. K. Chesterton, "If you were a preacher and you had only one sermon to give, what would it be about?"
Chesterton didn't think twice. He said, "I'd preach about worry." He knew what it was to be human. Worry is a part of life and something that drives a lot of our actions. Jesus knew that. That's why he focused on worry for such a large portion of the Sermon on the Mount.
Jesus' list of worries comes from the morning newspaper. We worry about food, he says, and about our health. We worry about the kinds of clothes we wear: Are they in fashion? Will people notice me? Do they respect me or laugh behind my back?
More than that, says Jesus, we worry about money. We worry about mortgages and interest rates. We worry about pensions and taxes.
Jesus knows us pretty well. Everything on his list of worries is important, isn't it? We should be concerned about our health. It is important to pay our bills. In fact, we get upset with people who don't pay their bills. Jesus can't be telling us to be careless about ourselves and our things. After all, he also teaches us to pray, "Father, give us today our daily bread." He expects us to be concerned about things that are close to us and a common part of life.
And that's what we worry about, isn't it? We worry about the things that are close to us, the things that are constantly with us, and the things that we carry around with us day after day. We worry about the things that have the most immediate value to us.
Maybe that's really the point of what Jesus is trying to say. Our worries are essentially the test of our values. We worry about things that are the most important to us in life.
That's why Jesus encourages us to take the worry test. What are you most anxious about? What troubles you the most? What keeps you awake at night, or disturbs your thoughts most often during the day? When we take the worry test we find out where our hearts are. The worry test teaches us the schedule of values in our lives.
It's like the story someone told of two men on a cross-country bike trip. They were traveling together on a tandem bike. For the first few miles the land was level and they pumped along with energy and style, enjoying this teamwork. But then the road began to rise, and they found themselves fighting a steep climb. Panting and puffing, they slowly worked their way to the top.
Reaching the summit, they stopped to catch their breath. "Whew!" said one, wiping the sweat off his face. "That was some hard climb!"
"Yeah!" agreed the other, "and if I hadn't kept the brake on, we probably would have slid back to the bottom!"
That's the worry test in action: One fellow had his mind on the heights. He was going to make it to the top if it took all of his energies and strength. Meanwhile, his partner had his mind on the bottom. He was worried about sliding back down the hill. They were both doing the same thing, riding the same bike on the same road up the same hill, but their values were at different places. Their worries set them apart.
So it is with us. We all worry, but our worries surround the things that we value most in life. List the concerns that bother you the most. When you read your list over, as Jesus said, you will find your heart.
So the challenge of Jesus is not to stop worrying altogether. To be human is to have worries and frets and cares. We are affected by life. The issue, according to Jesus, is to change our goals and values and treasures so that, in the end, our worries will take on a more godly character. "Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness," said Jesus, "and all these things that you need will come to you as well."
That's where Jesus is leading us as well. "Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness," he says.
But that is a hard lesson to learn. We are so good at taking control of our lives. We are very good at trying to play God, to the point that we don't want him to remind us of the real structures of life.
Application
It shouldn't be difficult to get to people's hearts today with the power of these passages. Use the Isaiah reading as a call to gather God's troubled people back to forgiving graces of divine love. Then tell about Paul's troubled relationship with the Corinthian congregation to raise up the specter of social ills and personal fears. Finally, turn to Jesus' fine words in the Sermon on the Mount to focus all on the things that really matter, reminding them that we can let go because God, in infinite care, holds onto us.
Alternative Application
Matthew 6:24-34. It is also possible to focus solely on Jesus' gospel words about our concerns and worries, and the power of the kingdom of God. This is a powerful passage. Many years ago, when Dick Shephard was the vicar of an Anglican parish in London, he had a dream. It was vivid and stayed with him after he awoke. His life was exceptionally busy in those days. He was constantly trying to meet the demands of the many people under his care in ministry.
One day he felt himself coming down with the flu, but he couldn't afford to get sick. He didn't have the time. There were too many things to do. There were sermons to write and classes to prepare and meetings to chair and people to visit. His congregation needed him. His family needed him. Even God needed him. He just couldn't afford to get sick right then.
That night, he had his terrible nightmare. He dreamed that he was standing in heaven near God's throne. An angelic telegram arrived, and the messenger handed the envelope to God. God tore it open and read these horrifying words: "Dick Shephard is about to be ill."
Then, said Reverend Shephard, God began to wring his hands. A worried look clouded God's face, and he began to mumble, "Oh, no! Dick Shephard is about to be ill! Whatever shall I do? Whatever shall I do?"
When Pastor Shephard woke up in the morning, he had a good laugh. He decided that God could probably manage somehow without him, and he stopped living as if all the world depended on him.
That's the lesson that Jesus wants to teach us. It will change our values and redefine our goals and point us toward new treasures. "Your heavenly Father knows," said Jesus. And that is enough.
Preaching The Psalm
Psalm 131
Humility is at the core of faith. Nice statement, that. But what does it mean? Most assume that good humble Christians stay in their places and don't disturb the waters of the world in which they live. In the larger culture, humility means staying out of the way and keeping one's mouth closed -- be humble and be quiet.
This may be the view of the culture, or as Saint Paul would call it, "this world" (1 Corinthians 1:20), but it is not a biblical humility. Biblical humility is all about surrendering oneself to God. It has to do with laying down the narrow desires and wants of our own hearts so that God's desires can become our own. It has to do with laying down the ego so that the striving and accomplishments that drive us in this world can be given up in favor of God sitting in our driver's seat.
A humble Christian is not necessarily quiet. A spirit given over to God and God's way in the world might well become a strident voice for God. Martin Luther King Jr. was humble in that he accepted God's call and moved forward even though it put him and his family at risk. He was not quiet, but his soul was calm. He was not overly ambitious, but he had work to do. He was not occupied with "things too marvelous" for him. He was just pursuing God's call to justice.
A humble Christian is not necessarily without passion. Someone who has released spiritual baggage in their lives and claimed the power of God's Spirit can be singed with the flame of holy passion. Cesar Chavez burned with a passion for justice that comes from a depth of faith as he fought for the rights of migrant workers. Daniel Berrigan lit the fires of Pentecostal passion when he and brother, Philip, burned draft records in Catonsville, Maryland, during the Vietnam War. And these are humble Christians.
Christian humility, it turns out, is anything but quiet or passive. It is, however, a soul at rest because it is has given all worldly concerns over to God. Ego, achievement, acquisition, approval of the world; all surrendered in order to more perfectly follow the holy one, in whom we find our hope and our salvation.
