Don’t Worry: God Is Blessing Your Neighbor

The Reverend Shirley Smith Graham

St. Martin’s Church, Williamsburg, VA, May 25, 2008

 

“Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear” (Matt. 6:25).  Do not worry.  That’s an instruction we’d all like to follow.

But it is also one of the teachings of Jesus that can make him seem disconnected from our reality.  Hearing Jesus say, “Don’t worry” is advice we might all like to follow, but we wonder if, when he said it, the world was a simpler place and it was easier not to worry.  We wonder whether, if he were sitting here now, in the third row back in the fourth seat over, whether he’d yet say, “Don’t worry.”  We might ourselves find it easy on a Sunday morning to follow his instruction, “Don’t worry.”  This peace and serenity might last for awhile, perhaps and an hour or two, before the things that we’d promised ourselves we wouldn’t worry about are looming over us again.  If common sense doesn’t remind us of life’s difficult things, then there are other signs in our world to evoke those things that cause us worry, the things that keep us up at night. 

Even on a joyous day such as this one, the day of the baptism of Patrick, Collin and Maxwell, we see the sign that there will be days when we confront less happy things.  Turn with me to p.  439 of the BCP.  You see there a service little used on Sundays but used more often in private homes after the birth of a child.  In this service, we give thanks for the child and the parents.  We ask for the parents wisdom and devotion in the ordering of their common life.  We ask for the child that his/her life would be preserved and that he/she would receive God in his/her heart.  Now, turn with me to p. 445 and look to the very last paragraph, where we see in the rubrics an important but often overlooked instruction:

“The Minister of the Congregation is directed to instruct the people, from time to time, about the duty of Christian parents to make prudent provision for the well-being of their families, and of all persons to make wills, while they are in health, arranging for the disposal of their temporal goods, not neglecting, if they are able, to leave bequests for religious and charitable uses” (BCP 445).

So here is the reminder, even in this most happy of moments, that there will be times of grief and loss, when children lose the earthly presence of their parents.  Here is the reality  that, even in the midst of life, we know death.  The “minister of the congregation” is directed to not let a congregation overlook the difficult things, even on a Sunday when we take to heart Jesus’ instruction: “Do not worry.”

This Memorial Day weekend, amid the grilled hot dogs and picnics and three days of weekend, our world may look like a jolly place.  But we don’t have to dig too deep to discover that the roots of Memorial Day lie in the horror of our nation’s worst conflict: the Civil War.  Even three years after that war had ended, the wounds between people yet had not healed.  This was a war not just of North against South, but industrialist against agriculturalist, brother against brother.  And its end in 1865, after over 600,000 lives lost, left not so much a sigh of relief but a pause in the pain.  So it was an act of bold hope for Major General John Logan to establish “Decoration Day” as a day when the graves of the war dead of both armies – the Union and the Confederacy – would be decorated, or honored.  Perhaps the general remembered St. Paul’s injunction, that hope is in things not yet seen.  General Logan did not yet see reconciliation in the faces of the citizens of this nation.  His plan to honor the war dead of both armies was a small action toward making what was not yet seen to be visible.

To make what was not yet seen visible: this was very much the agenda of Jesus.  In this season after Pentecost we turn our attention back to the earthly ministry of Jesus, a ministry that was all about bringing to earth the kingdom of heaven, or said another way bringing to earth the kind of conditions found in the reign of God; making God’s ways known on earth.  And we see a blueprint of this God-type world when we see the promise in our reading from Isaiah: “I will turn all my mountains into a road, and my highways shall be raised up.”  In other words, the places where you struggle (going steeply up or steeply down) shall be turned into places that are easy to travel.  And God knows the skepticism of the human heart and predicts our objection: you will say, “The Lord has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me.”  But God immediately dismisses this thought as temptation.  No, says the Lord, such is not my way.  To abandon you is not in me, says the Lord.  And hear then the intimate voice of the Almighty made tender:

“Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb?”  And the answer is, of course not.  Indeed, says the Lord, if you wish to see the proof that I will never leave you, see it here, written on my hands: “See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hand.”  And here we must hear also Thomas saying to Jesus, “Unless I see the mark of the nails on his hand .…”  Yes, here it is: we are inscribed on God’s hands.

It is this passage, where God claims us as a mother would claim her infant that we understand how seriously God takes this covenant-relationship he has made with us.  God will stop at nothing to keep covenant with us.  If the covenant is broken, it will be because we have turned away from God, not because God has turned away from us. 

So then Jesus is bringing in the kingdom of God; Jesus is bringing God’s ways back to become the norm on earth.  Jesus, God’s own Son, is the next and ultimate action of that mothering God who will not leave his children.  And here we see Jesus teaching the disciples how literally to acts in God’s ways: “strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness.”  Do not, says Jesus, get distracted by the troubling things: “What will we eat? What will we drink? What will we wear? … 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.”

If we have a heart like God’s motherly heart, we will strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness.  But I’d like, as you reflect on this verse, to substitute the word “righteousness” with justice for that is one of the translation options for the Greek word dikaiosyne: strive first for … God’s justice.  Ah, that opens up a whole new world of possibility and hope.  What is God’s justice?  To love without limit.  To give beyond what is deserved.  To have mercy on those needing mercy.  To bring comfort to those thrown to the margins of society.  God’s justice is not just to rebalance the scales but to change the regulatory measure from being weight to being compassion.  For with God, judgment and mercy are two sides of the same coin [mishpat].

Think with me of the implications of this teaching of Jesus.  What would happen if we put first priority always not on the satisfaction of our own needs but on God’s justice?  What if we spend as much time thinking about caring the way God cares for our neighbor as we do caring for our own needs?  What if I spend as much time washing the clothes of an elderly neighbor as I spent washing my own clothes?  What if I spend as much energy planning how to get kids equal education as I put into planning for my own child’s education?  What if I put as much money into local outreach as I do into the church collection plate?  And, what if everyone did the same?

Then, no one would worry what to eat or drink, because we will have ensured that they have bother food and drink.

Then, no one would worry about their body, what they would wear, because we will have ensured there are clothes for them to wear.

And we ourselves will not have these worries our needs will have been satisfied because others strove first for God’s justice and lavished their compassion on us.

God has chosen to rely on us to be agents of his justice, to be agents of that mothering love that never forsakes a child.  Will we chose to be agents of this kind of justice?  If we do, Jesus’ promise is clear: if we strive first for God’s justice, all these things will be given to us as well.

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