Don't worry? Yeah, right!

Don’t Worry? Yeah, right!                          The Dover Church

November 18, 2012                                   Scripture: Matthew 6: 19-33    

“Don’t worry! Don’t worry about money. There are more important things in life. Don’t worry about what you’re going to eat or wear.” The lilies and the birds. A soothing, idyllic, bucolic image. We can see ourselves strolling through a meadow full of flowers and song birds, floating along without a worry in the world. It’s nice, isn’t it? We’d all like that, some of that, a little more of that, wouldn’t we? Good old Jesus!

But let’s be honest. Maybe some of us can pull off not worrying while we're in church, but what about most of the rest of the hours of most of the rest of our days? Don’t worry? "Are you serious?" We think. "It’s easy for Jesus to say don’t worry. Jesus didn’t have two nickles to rub together. Don’t worry? My worries got me to where I am in the world. Worry is my edge. Worry keeps me striving and one step ahead of the competition."

Don’t worry about money? Do you think money grows on trees or falls from the sky? Come on. If I didn’t worry about money, I probably wouldn't have any. If I didn’t worry about money, I would have never been able to afford to live in Dover in the first place and my overhead would swamp me. Think about all the money talk during the elections and the looming FISCAL CLIFF? Isn’t worry about money what it’s all about? Don’t worry about money, Jesus? What a pipe dream!n

And then Jesus moves on to food. Has this guy turned on the TV or read the news lately? Worrying about food is the American pastime. When we’re not being encouraged to buy this new supersized 30% more free item or try that new delicasee, we are thinking about how to lose the pounds we put on eating too many supersized thises and trying too much of those delicasees. The food industry is one of the prime movers of our economy and one of the hallmarks of our way of life. Not worrying about food seems un-American!

And clothes? Don’t worry about looking good? Is this guy for real? Looking good is the other American obsession: diet, exercise, fashion, cosmetics, miraculous rejuvenating creams, washboard abs in three weeks, looking like your 18 when your 50. Just tell me that this will make me look good because Brad Pitt and Angelie Jolie use it or wear it, and I’ll buy it!

One of the most remarkable things being marketed these days is that faith will remove our worries. If we just believe in Jesus enough, whatever that means, our worries, fears and anxieties will vanish. The irony is that so many faithful people want to believe this gimmick, even though we know that it’s just not true. All of you who have lived faithful lives and come to church all the time, do you still worry, worry about money, your life, looking good? Faith is a journey. It’s a struggle with lots of ambiguity and doubt. Faith isn't certainty that you’ve arrived. Faith is confidence in your direction. Faith does not provide endless worry free euphoria. If you want that, go to Higgins and buy some whiskey. Go to CVS and get some Xanax. Or if you can wait until the New Year, go to the new medical marijuana dispensary nearest you. Those things will give you worry free euphoria in short order.

I find it quite interesting that Jesus picks out money, food, and clothing as objects of worry in our lesson this morning. In another place, when Jesus is talking about who will enter into the kingdom of God, he likens it to the separation of the sheep from the goats. Do you remember that passage? ‘When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. Then the king will say to those at his right hand, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me...When did we do that? Whenever you did it to the least of these, you did it to me” (Mt 25:31-35). It’s not an exact correlation, but there you have it: food and drink and clothing, and probably money too as taking care of the sick does incur expense. The antidote to our worry about ourselves is available in our search for salvation, which depends upon our worry for those who are least in this world: the hungry, the thirsty, the strangers and lonely, the sick and imprisoned.

The irony is that we don’t really need Jesus to tell us something we already know is true. Who among has not felt his or her personal concerns either disappear altogether or at least seem less daunting while helping someone else whose need was truly desperate? Have any of you gone into a soup kitchen angry about the operating system in your smartphone not being all that it should be and then quickly forgot all about it when you saw the holes in one man’s only pair of worn out sneakers, and it is winter, and you can see his socks, and they have holes in them too? I have. Our care for others takes us out of ourselves. When we love and serve others, our outpouring love washes away our self focused fears and worries.

Just in case this is starting to smell of backhanded narcisscism, as in we help others to make ourselves feel good and the real function of the needy in our world is to help alleviate our self absorbed worry, so even when it’s about them it’s really all about us, let me get this straight.

Jesus says the eye is the lamp of the body. If your eye is light, your whole self will be filled with light. It's how you see things that makes all difference. We think that by serving money we will free ourselves, but we only enslave ourselves to that which we serve. We all have to earn money, but when we serve money it clouds our eye and our souls get cloudy. Serving money induces worry about scarcity: do I have enough? Serving money sees life as zero sum competition: If she gets more, will I have less? Serving money makes one needy: Couldn’t I look better? Eat better? Serving money feeds itself, so that we buy in, more, more, more, even though we have more than we could ever want or use and throw away more than most people in other countries consume in the first place. If we see life through the prism of scarcity, our eye becomes dark and we end up in darkness.

 Serving money leads us to believe that it says in the Bible: “The Lord helps those who help themselves.” I challenge you to try to find that in the Bible. It’s not in there, even though that is the first thing that comes to most American minds when asked for something from the Bible. “The Lord loves a cheerful giver.” Now that’s in there. "The one who sows bountifully will reap bountifully." That's in there as well. “The measure you give will be the measure you get, and then some.” That’s in there too. In serving God, we actually free ourselves from enslavement.

I am so excited by what is happening in our church. Because of our individual and communal ingenuity, hard work and good fortune, we are in a position to do serve the least of these. I see the Holy Spirit moving more and more people every month to propose initiatives to do just that, whether it is Haiti or through local food banks, through book drives or through the United Church of Christ's disaster relief efforts, right in Kraft Hall with our participation in Family Promise, or on the roof of Kraft Hall with our solar panel ministry. We have much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving as the people of God in this place.