Matthew 6:24-34
A few years back, there was a cartoon
which showed a man curled up on the floor while his wife sat in a
chair looking horrified. There was a bomb on the floor and the fuse
was lit. Shards of glass from the broken window were all around.
The man was saying, “I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I didn't worry enough
about this happening!” Do you know anyone like that?
Someone did a study once. 40% of what
people worry about never happens; 35% involve things that can't be
changed. 15% of the worries actually turned out better than expected.
And 8% had to do with small, insignificant things which the person
recognized as not worthy of worrying about, but did so anyway. But
still I worry.
So Jesus tells us not to worry? I
don't think so. We human beings are designed to worry. If it
weren't for our ancestors living in caves worrying about food and
shelter and how to keep away the wild animals, we wouldn't be here.
If it weren't for our ancestors who struggled every day to get enough
to eat – if they hadn't worried, we wouldn't be here. We have
inherited a strong tendency to worry. But Jesus couldn't be more
clear.
So what if I stopped worrying? If I
didn't worry about food, God would see to it that the Big Y would
deliver a package every day, right? If I didn't worry about shelter,
God would send a check to the town of Longmeadow to pay my property
taxes, right? Isn't that what Jesus is saying?
And when you think about it, the birds
of the air who never worry seldom live through a year or two before
they become someone's dinner or freeze to death because they forgot
to fly south. And yes, the flowers are beautiful, but only for a
little while and then they dry up and turn brown and what good are
they?
So what is Jesus getting at?
When I was very young I had every
intention of becoming a cowboy. My parents got me a cap pistol and a
pair of cowboy boots and I was all set. However, that didn't work
out. When I was in high school, I wanted to learn all I could about
mathematics, and thought I would become a professor. But that didn't
work out. In college I decided to become a missionary, and wanted to
have a medical degree, so I majored in biology. But after I had the
medical degree a few years later, I also had a family and my impulse
was long gone. And here I am in the tail end of my life and I look
back and see that everything I planned to do never happened. And
everything I worried about never happened. And yet, somehow, God led
me down a path which I probably wouldn't have taken if I had made all
the decisions. And I'm really very happy with the way things turned
out, even though I had very little to do with it, except go along
with the flow.
And I can see how during the course of
my life the rough edges of my personality have been ground off, (God
isn't quite done with that, my wife tells me) and the selfishness and
self-centeredness have been partly removed; and my ability to
empathize with other people has increased somewhat. God has been at
work in my life.
And I think, what if I had learned not
to worry a long time ago? What if I learned not to worry right now?
How much more could God do if I didn't constantly stand in his way
because of worry? Because worry presumes that I can actually
influence my future. But all I have to do to disabuse myself of that
notion is look back on my life. And how many times did I start down
the wrong path because I worried about the future?
Jesus is, after all, not saying we
shouldn't be prudent. There's nothing wrong with saving for
retirement or your kid's education. But tomorrow you could have a
heart attack. Or some terrorist could decide to blow himself up a
few feet away from you. Or you could begin that long slide into
Alzheimer's disease that you can't do anything about. Everything is
contingent.
What Jesus wants us to remember is
that for us Christians, God has our back. Do you remember how Jesus
told his apostles that he had to go to Jerusalem and be tried and
crucified? Jesus knew, as a human being, that if he went to
Jerusalem, it was extremely likely that he would be killed. He
didn't have to go. If he had worried, he would be headed in the
other direction. And on the cross, he cried out “My God, why have
you forsaken me?” But in the end, he said, “Into your hands I
commend my spirit.” Jesus as a human being did not know what would
happen beyond death. If he knew that he would rise again in glory,
his suffering would be a sham. But Jesus knew what you and I know –
God has our back. He proved it when he raised up his Son.
Many translations of this passage tell
us that we cannot serve God and money. But the original word was
“Mammon” which was a Greek word that reflected the Aramaic word
Jesus used. We aren't sure what that word means; it is the only
place in the bible that we find it. Some of the semetic peoples who
were not Jewish had a word like that. It seemed to mean something
like “The Wealth that I can trust”. And that is why Jesus
contrasts God with Mammon. Where do we put our trust. We can't have
it both ways. And only by trusting in God, which means fighting to
get rid of all those chronic worries which kind of imply that I am in
control, can we let God into our lives so that he can transform them.
Whenever you worry, remember, God has
your back. Then stop worrying and invite God to take over. I'm
still working at it, but that's the point; don't give up.
