Text: Matthew 6:25-33
There may be no reading in all of scripture that holds together multiple viewpoints better than
today’s Gospel from Matthew. So it is particularly appropriate for Matthew 6 to
be our Gospel reading today; not only because it is a word of thanksgiving but
also because it is the kind of text that can bring together Presbyterians and
Pentecostals and Catholics and Lutherans, because it is about something very
near the core of all of our faiths, by which, of course, I’m referring to food. But food is also only the
starting point. This has to do with the birds and the lilies and the grass; it
has to do with ecology and the land, and it has to do with who is over the land
and who shepherds its resources.
Human beings are
worriers. We have in our heads this command—maybe you know the one; it’s very
early on in the Bible, when Adam and Eve are still in the Garden of Eden—God tells
them to “subdue” the earth (Genesis 1:28). It’s one of the few Old Testament
commands that Christians have done a spectacular job of following; in fact, we
have often been a bit overzealous in our subduing. In focusing so much on how
we can force nature to do our will we have vilified the world and made it into
something out to get us—something to worry about. So, in order to make the
world out there less scary we domesticated it. We assigned value only to those
things that have immediate use for us. Everything became about eating and
drinking and clothing. The problem is that in simplifying things we became
selfish.
At the root of our
worry about life and not having enough is our, often subconscious,
understanding that we cannot control the world. We are not God, even if we act
as if we are. The more we inflate our egos, the greater our fall when the world
turns against us. When that happens “the world” becomes a bad place—not us, but
some imagined evil out there. “Do not worry,” says Jesus, because worry isn’t
so much about doubt as it is about ego; it is about putting our needs before
the needs of our neighbors.
“Do not worry,” says
Jesus, because we do not deserve what we have been given, and yet, it is
promised to us. God has promised to take care of us—not because we are the best
of all possible peoples and certainly not because we never put ourselves before
God. God has given us a promise because God is about radical, incredible grace.
However, God also sets before us examples of how we should treat the gifts we
have been given. In fact, because we are so clearly unworthy of the gifts of
land and resources—food and clothing—our thanksgiving must not be hollow. We
have to demonstrate that God’s promise is actually lived out in our words and
actions.
My Lutheran
friends are now thinking I’ve flown the coop. The big joke in the Lutheran
church is that we are so allergic to justification by works that what we
believe is not so much justification by grace as it is justification by coma.
But here’s the thing—and this is why I think this works great for an ecumenical
service—whatever your views are about eternal salvation this is a text about
salvation in the present. The Latin root of salvation is the word “salve” which
is actually the way of greeting one another in Latin; it’s like the Roman
“Hello” or “Aloha,” but what it really means is “Health.” In Latin, you greet
one another: “Salve”… To your health! And so, salvation is about not just
something that happens out in eternity; it is also about what happens here and
now. To be saved is to be in right relationship—with God, yes, but also with
the world and your neighbors.
So, how do we show
our worthiness of these gifts God has given us? Wendell Berry says that there
are three ways we demonstrate our worthiness: the first is to be faithful,
grateful and humble; the second is to be neighborly, and the third is to
practice good husbandry—by which he means to treat what we are given with respect
and careful management.[1] This
applies to the land and our resources, but it also applies to all of our lives
broadly. It’s all well and good for Jesus to tell us not to worry, but most of
you won’t hear that, or you might hear it now but you’ll forget it later.
Christmas shopping will come along, an unexpected expense will appear out of
nowhere; you will feel as if you don’t have enough and you will worry. Some of
you will have a perfectly great holiday season and still figure out ways to
worry. Worry is the great Scandinavian gift that keeps on giving.
So, you of all people,
need this promise. You will be OK. But honestly, the best cure for worry isn’t
to hear that. The best cure for worry is to practice being worthy. Be faithful,
grateful, humble; be a good neighbor, and care for what God has given you; and
guess what? You won’t worry. Not because you will have become more worthy of
God’s grace, but because you will have been living out salvation in your daily
lives. Salvation is eternal, but you know that. What you don’t remember is that
it’s also here and now; and when you are ungrateful or a braggart, when you treat
your neighbor with disdain, when you treat the resources God has given you as
yours to waste, then you will find a world filled with not-enoughs and worries,
and you will seek to escape this world in order to find salvation. That’s not
the life God has called us to live; it’s not how to be a steward of God’s
gifts; it’s not how to be a Christian—no matter your denomination or spiritual
gifts.
We are, each of
us, called to these simple tasks: faithfulness, gratefulness, humility,
neighborliness, and husbandry. You see, worry isn’t about letting things go; it’s
not a Buddhist-sounding philosophy of doing nothing in order to let Christ
purge us of our self-doubt. Instead, as Wendell Berry writes, “The ability to
be good is not the ability to do nothing…It is the ability to do something
well.”[2] To be
free from worry is to fill our lives with the things that matter.
May your lives be
filled this Thanksgiving with all the things that matter, and may God’s gift to
you be humility, service, and care for all that you have been given.
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