July 10 Sermon: Surrender the Anxiety*
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Holy Covenant UMC
Rev. Matthew Johnson, preaching
Matthew 6:25-34
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
I am enjoying, still, the adventure of being with you and in this marvelous city. It keeps me on my toes and observant as to how God is at work here and everywhere. I had coffee with Cassie M. over in Logan Square last week. As we concluded our conversation and walked out the door together, she asked me if I knew how to get back home.
“Of course,” I answered. I just needed to catch the east-bound bus. She was gracious and reminded me that both the east- and the west-bound buses stop in the same place at the Blue Line station there. “You want ‘Nature Center’,” she replied and concluded with something like “I got on the wrong one before, so be careful.”
You know what happened, right? I was not careful. I was certain that the stop opposite the one where I arrived would be going in a homeward direction. I was wrong. I was no worse for the wear, however. I just ended up with a 20 minute delay and this illustration that cost me two-and-a-quarter.
Now, I don’t know if it is a self-fulfilling prophecy or not, but it often happens that if I’m asked/ suggested/ begged not to do something, I will do it anyway. Sometimes it is out of stubbornness, but mostly it is out of some sort of hyper-awareness that inhibits me from doing anything but the contrary.
Does that ever happen to you? If it does, this word from Jesus this morning about worry, how we’re not supposed to do it … not about our life, what we will eat or what we will wear … probably jolted you with a rush of all the ways you do — in fact — worry about those things. And that may have worried you in and of itself. I know it does me every time I read it.
When I hear Jesus say don’t worry, I think “He is obviously talking about another world from this one!” How can he, realistically, tell us not to worry? The city, state and nation face shortfalls and are cutting services that promote community. Pension funds — both public and private — are drying up. Health care premiums are flying up. Jobs are difficult to come by; careers even more so. We have student loans to pay off. Home improvements we’ve been putting off. Credit card debit. Wedding plans. Family plans. Five-year plans. Ambitions and expectations.
I’m sure you can come up with your own, specific set of worries. Worries that haunt you in the night. Worries that poke at you with persistence. Worries that are relentless … that stand in the way of love and life itself. Can you think of any? Maybe they are rational. Maybe they are not.
Now, I know that some worries (at least the kind that pique in us a need to change) are a good thing. If we don’t worry, we can be seen as irresponsible or immature. Yet worrying too much can be just as deadly and irrational. Worry is a by-product of anxiety. Anxiety is like a magnifying glass to an ant on a sunny day. It has the ability to amplify and consume us.
It makes everything bigger, and the heat hotter. It makes us less tolerant of differences. It makes everything personal, leads to condemnation. Anxiety gives birth to scapegoats to carry the blame for our unhappiness. It empowers those who have to have it “their way.”
And, ultimately, as Jesus points out, it promotes a lack of trust in God. Anxiety is toxic and consuming. Scripture and history document how that has happened. Anxiety caused Abraham to twice deny that Sarah was his wife. The plague that preceded all the others in Egypt at the Exodus was anxiety … anxiety over what to do without slaves.
Anxiety over leadership led to 40 years of wandering. Anxiety gave birth to the desire for a king like the other nations. Anxiety split the people of promise in two. Anxiety left them unprepared when the other nations ran through their houses.
It drove Nebuchadnezzar insane. It got Jonah swallowed by a fish.
It was anxiety over being exiled again that let the pharisees to such a rigid approach to the law that they left much of their nation behind. It was anxiety over the occupation — and the perceived slowness of Jesus to respond — that prompted Judas to betray him. It was anxiety about a relationship with Jesus that caused Peter to deny him.
It was anxiety over power that got John the Baptist executed, Jesus crucified and Paul imprisoned. Anxiety over change got Kennedy, King and Romero murdered.
Anxiety over shrinking profits has left union workers taking the blame and paying the price. Anxiety sends us to war. And anxiety has prohibited the recognition and blessing of love and commitment for all persons. Maybe Jesus knew what he was talking about after all when he told us not to worry.
I think Jesus understood that, to be intentional about seeking God, we have to surrender anxiety. Of course, this is not an easy thing to do. Those worries that many of you have hold a great deal of power. Yet when we expose them to the community of grace, their power fades.
Some of my most amazing experiences of God … and seeing the power of anxiety fade … have come in my trips to work and assist with the formation of the United Methodist Church in Lithuania. There is something really powerful that comes in hearing and experiencing the good news of Jesus in another culture and context. It gives light to the spaces between the words we take for granted.
In preparing for my travels to this nation on the Baltic Sea between Poland and Latvia, I studied their history. In doing so I discovered how they had been a people caught in the middle of war and conquest since the end of the middle ages. The flat farmland made it a perfect marching ground on the path from Moscow to the Atlantic Ocean.
Being occupied again and again — by the French, the Russians, the Prussians, the Germans and finally the Soviets; and being nation that lost more of its population to the concentration camps and the gulags than any other per-capita, I expected upon my first visit that I would find a cultural ethos overrun with worry, suspicion and doubt.
And while there was still some there, it was an overwhelmingly positive place … full of people who had plenty of reason to worry, yet their focus was not on those things. For every iconic Soviet-apartment building, there were 100 stories of how they quietly revolted. For every mention of the old breadlines and restricted movement, there were 100 stories about how they resisted.
They could have succumb to the anxiety. But they didn’t. Frankly, this was baffling to me — a guy who comes from a culture wrought with anxiety. Because, while they were free, there were still many huge problems.The economy was struggling after an initial boom, migration had taken away nearly one-third of their population (mostly the educated and the young), the suicide rate was huge and the number of orphaned and abandoned children was heartbreaking. They’ve had plenty of reasons to be anxious … to shut down, argue, give up or blame, but they didn’t.
I asked aloud “How are you still so positive? You’ve not had the life you should as a nation.” And their response was always something like “we knew that we would overcome the occupation. So we know we will overcome our current struggles. We trust that God will not abandon us. Because God has not yet.”
Less anxiety equals a more resilient people. Do not worry about your life.
Mind you when Jesus shares this word that I believe the Lithuanians learned to embody, it is part of that tome we call the “sermon on the mount” … a sermon that was not just for his closest disciples, or they and the assembled team of cursory leaders. This was a word for everyone who could hear.
The thing they all had in common was that they needed liberating from the occupation of a foreign rule that forced them to be concerned about secondary things so they wouldn’t have time to focus on God’s aim of justice and redemption. Jesus tells them not to worry so they will be liberated to focus on what matters. Not what their occupiers give or take.
There was a reason that the Soviets tried to take control of religion. And there is a reason the Lithuanians still are and the USSR is not. Yet what ultimately turned the tide for the Lithuanians was that they did not splinter into individual factions and causes. The search for freedom and liberation was a nearly universal one. It was central to their community. And community was central to their search. In my mind, this is where the power lies in Jesus’ words. When Jesus says don’t worry — instead focus on God; when he says desire God and everything will be seen through the lens of God’s grace — he says it to a people united in a covenant of blessing. For us, that covenant is baptism.
While the worry may not go away, when it is taken on by the community of faith through our commonality in baptism, it loses its power. When we speak it aloud in prayer, it loses its power to control us. When we expose it to the light of love, we see it as fractured and incomplete. When we hand it over to our sisters and brothers to be seen in graceful truth, its hold on us is severed.
No the anxiety doesn’t go away, but it does get consumed in the immensity of the “together life” God has given to us in our creation. There may be safety in numbers, but there is also salvation in relationship; a salvation that is embodied on the other side of the anxious moments where there is endless possibility for beauty, relationship and redemption.
So, bring your fears to the waters. Bring your worry to the waters and watch them fade. I hope your perspective can change as you do, so that we might realize how resilient we are by God’s grace. Because we have more important things to do than worry. We have been charged to: seek God, love all people, and change the world.
*With gratitude to Rev. Bill Obalil whose sermon inspired this one.
Tags: Matthew
