Sermons

Sunday 23rd February 2014, 2 before Lent, morning

Romans 8:18-25; Matthew 6:25-34

by Revd Chris Palmer


‘Do not worry’. Jesus says it three times in today’s reading, as if to drive the point home. ‘Do not worry’.

Well, it’s all very well for Jesus to say this, but it’s easier said than done, we might think. We say, ‘but I’m not in control of my worries. They just are. They control us, not the other way round.’

It might be easy to for me to turn this sermon into some quasi therapy session about techniques to control anxiety disorder. But I’d be a fraud if I tried to do that, as it’s not an area of expertise for me – and not the subject for a sermon.

Instead, I want to start somewhere different – with a quotation from a Scottish philosopher, John Macmurray, that I think I’ve used before: ‘The maxim of illusory religion runs: “Fear not; trust in God and he will see that none of the things you fear will happen to you.”; that of real religion, on contrary, is “Fear not; the things that you are afraid of are quite likely to happen to you, but they are nothing to be afraid of.”

It seems that me that Paul is making a similar point in our first reading: ‘the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us…’ It’s not that there won’t be suffering, but set alongside the glory God gives it is not all consuming. He goes on a bit later – just after the reading we heard – to spell it out more: ‘Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship of distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or sword… No… nothing… in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ…’

And the reading offers an image of suffering which gives us perspective on the distress we face. It’s like labour pains: they hurt terribly, but they are pains filled with hope and the promise of new life.

All this helps us see what Jesus means when he says, ‘don’t worry’. The danger is we think he means bear life without emotion, with a stiff upper lip. But Jesus isn’t calling us to be machines. Jesus himself wept at Lazarus’s tomb; in Gethsemane, he cried and begged God with agony in his heart that he wouldn’t have to suffer death.  He suffered on the cross, though the Gospels don’t emphasise his physical suffering, unlike some Christian preachers; instead they talk about the spiritual suffering the sense of being abandoned by God: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me’.

Rather the call of Jesus is that the fear, the anxiety, the worry we experience shouldn’t control us or divert us from our primary course of action. Women throughout history have had children despite the pain; Jesus went to the cross despite his anguish. In a similar way people have stood up to terror or opposed injustice although they’ve known it might lead to imprisonment, persecution, or execution. They are not automatons without feelings, but their fear is trumped by a truer instinct for God, rather than other way round.

We should not wish to suffer. That is unrealistic and silly, a sign of mental imbalance; it becomes a form of self-hatred. After all, Jesus said, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’; in other words, you cannot love your neighbour unless the love yourself. But it is possible to submit the desire not to suffer to a greater desire for God. So that that question always controlling our instincts should be, what will lead me to know God’s love more, and love God more? Other desires and anxieties may jostle with each for room in our hearts and minds, but, if this desire for God is foremost, then our worries won’t be in control of us.

This desire for God is at the centre of Christian faith. I think it’s what Jesus means when he says ‘strive first for God’s kingdom and his righteousness, his justice’, in today’s Gospel. Or the psalmist says, ‘As the deer longs for the water brooks, so my soul longs for you, O God’.

I’ve often reflected that there are two kinds of such longing or striving. There’s the longing of not feeling God is close, and rather anxiously or desperately wanting him. But there’s also the longing that comes from having an experience of God and wanting more. This is not a selfish longing; it comes from grace: God has given us a taste for himself, and we desire more.

Now the danger of knowing that this desire for God comes from grace, is thinking we need to do nothing. It’s like a woman I knew who wouldn’t go to the doctor for her bad leg, because she thought it showed a lack of faith in God’s healing! I was rather tearing my hair out with her. I thought God had made the doctor too! Living out a desire for God and his kingdom means discerning the areas of life where we do have responsibility and room for manoeuvre and acting in it, and not being overwhelmed by our lack of control or influence in other areas. As the old prayer says: ‘grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.’

And related to this, Jesus gives us a second instruction around anxiety: to live in the moment. ‘Do not worry about tomorrow…’ The old translation said, ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’ In other words, ‘today’s got enough problems of its own.’ Yes, lots of our worries aren’t about what is happening, but what might happen. This ‘what if’ mentality infects our spirituality, and leads us to greed, and making excuses for our lack of generosity or lack of time given to people now; it leads to workaholism, thinking we’ve never done enough, or a failure to appreciate the beauty of the moment. It means we don’t receive what have now as a gift.

God called the Israelites in the desert to live in the moment without worrying about the future. He gave them manna from heaven, but only allowed them to collect enough for today. If they collected more than they needed, it got maggots in it. Or there’s the Lord’s Prayer, where we pray, ‘give us today our daily bread’: not bread for all the future, but today! For those without food this is a real and important plea for food, but, for us with enough for days to come, it’s a reminder that if we have enough for today that is enough.

Jesus’ instructions about anxiety are not just a tactic for navigating the difficulties of life – in  this sense they are not therapy; they are good even for when life’s going well. This is important. At the moments of life when we feel confident and unassailed by problems, we’re tempted to let down our guard and forget God. But these are moments for humility, remembering again that all our good comes from God, and for nurturing the same practice of seeking God that we feel at good times.

This way there is no situation in life, whether hard or easy, which can separate us from God. There are no circumstances that can’t lead us deeper into relationship with our creator.