HIGH ANXIETY
A sermon preached by
Rev. Dr. Randle R. (Rick) Mixon
First Baptist Church, Palo Alto, CA
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Text: Matthew 6:24-34
“Don’t worry, be happy.” “Don’t sweat the small stuff and it’s all small stuff.” “One day at a time.” These and other popular slogans from contemporary life echo the ancient Jewish wisdom that Jesus underscores in this familiar, lovely and challenging passage from Matthew’s “Sermon on the Mount.” Whether or not Jesus actually uttered these words and in this fashion we will probably never know this side of heaven. But clearly they fit well into our understanding of Jesus’ enterprise to fulfill the ancient Jewish law while proclaiming the in-breaking reign of God. Here in ten short verses we find enough material for a dozen sermons, though I promise only one today. Here we encounter the power of God, the providence of God and the promise of the presence of God in our lives. Here the importance of our relationship to God is lifted up and underscored for its importance to whole and healthy living. In the face of such proclamation from the Son of God, how can we give ourselves over to worry, to anxiety, to any belief that we need to or can somehow control the future?
I must confess that I blatantly stole the title of this sermon from Mel Brooks, whose 1977 movie by the same name was a zany tribute to the films of Alfred Hitchcock. I actually thought I would watch the film again to mine it for sermon illustrations, but, perhaps fortunately for you and for the seriousness of our enterprise, I was not able to lay my hands on a copy. Suffice it to say that among the performances of Mel Brooks, Cloris Leachmann, Harvey Korman, Madeline Kahn and company, the whole concept of anxiety is highly inflated and then skewered in a frenzy of comic madness. However, there is one salient line, which may still serve our purposes today. It comes when the ancient Dr. Lilloman diagnoses Mel Brooks’s Dr. Thorndyke with high anxiety. He says of the ailment, “These things do not let go. High anxiety can be a very dangerous enemy. It could cost you your life.” Of course, this fits neatly into the madcap mystery to follow, but there is also truth in the utterances of madmen and clowns. Indeed, “High anxiety can be a very dangerous enemy. It could cost you your life.” I think this is close to what Jesus is saying about anxiety as he teaches his followers from the side of a Galilean hill.
The line of thought in today’s text actually begins in verse 19 in which Jesus exhorts his listeners, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is,” he says, “there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6:19-21.) The lessons which are etched most deeply on the tablets of our hearts are those that shape and control our lives. This exhortation comes immediately on the heels of the Jesus’ Prayer in which he teaches his followers to ask both that God’s “kingdom come” and God’s “will be done on earth, as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10.) The solid foundation to all this teaching by Jesus is that our lives need to be rooted and grounded in God who made us, loves us and desires to be in communion with us.
It would be easy to make the argument that it is only human to worry. Worry, anxiety, fear are emotions included in our human make-up. But what I think Jesus is trying to teach us is how to live beyond the limitations that our feelings impose when we let them. In today’s words of preparation, Thomas Merton observes that “Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it so.” He says that “Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves” (Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, p. 82.) And, I would add that we impose it on ourselves.
Granted, slogans like “Don’t worry, be happy” are more easily sung than practiced for many of us. We tend to problematize life and then analyze it and try finally to fix it, without allowing ourselves to remember that ultimately creation is not ours to control. As we sang last week, “We cannot own the sunlit sky, the moon, the wildflow’rs growing” (Ruth Duck, We Cannot Own the Sunlit Sky.) “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world and those who live in it…” (Psalm 24:1) “Be ye sure that Lord he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves. We are his people and the sheep of his pasture” (Psalm 100:3, KJV.)
Though we may not be in ultimate control of our destiny, we do make choices in life. In fact, living is often learning how to choose wisely, how to make choices that support both the coming of God’s reign and God’s will being done on earth. We cannot serve two masters. That is, we cannot offer our allegiance, our hearts, our lives to more than one god at a time. Either our devotion will be to the living God who has made us and desires to be in close relationship with us, or it will be to some other source, some lesser god, in whose service we will experience uncertainty and anxiety and who will fail us in the end. Whether that god be material wealth or self serving pride or isolating commitments to our own kind or eternal youth and beauty or military might and secure borders or…feel free to name the gods you know only too well for yourselves…serving them will only lead to worry, frustration and disappointment. “For where [our] treasure is, there our heart[s] will be also.” David Bartlett puts it this way, “Here Jesus says, ‘Here’s how it is. You can’t serve two masters because to do so would be to divide your heart, and the broken heart won’t long endure’” (David Bartlett, New Proclamation Commentary on the Gospels: Matthew, p. 28.) The question is, will we let our hearts reside in places where they can only be broken, or will we turn them to God who will care for them with all the tender affection of the Mother who gave them life?
“Look at these little birds,” says Jesus. “See that field of wildflowers? Do you think God, who made and cares for them, will not also take care of you? You don’t have much faith if you don’t believe that God will take care of you, too.” How many of you have ever laid in bed, listening to the mockingbird’s midnight song? Have you ever sat on your porch and watched in wonder the work of a hummingbird? Have you ever come out of the dark woods into an amazing meadow thick with wildflowers? I will never forget driving down to Los Angeles one spring mesmerized by miles and miles of California poppies and lupine blending their gold and purple into a robe of unbelievable color to cover the hillsides. Old Solomon in all his splendor never had a coat like that. Trust me!
“Don’t worry, be happy” Jesus seems to say. “What will we eat? What will drink? What will we wear?” I hear you ask. “Is God going to leave baskets of wine and cheese and fresh fruit on our doorsteps? Is she going to slip the latest Armani or Vera Wang into the closet while you’re sleeping (preferably with shoes to match)?” Of course not, Jesus is not talking about imprudence here when he urges his hearers not to worry. He’s saying don’t let worry about the past or the present or the future come to dominate your lives in such a way that you actually can’t live them. Holly Hearon says, “What the Gospel cautions us against is letting our anxiety…so dominate our lives that it consumes all our energy, becoming the driving force of our behavior and ultimately claiming our loyalty” (Holly Hearon, New Proclamation, Year A, 2008, Easter to Christ the King, p. 87.)
I don’t know what Jesus would have to say about insurance policies and pensions and long term maintenance contracts. But I do not think he would condemn anyone who makes an honest wage for honest work, that he would deny anyone the necessities of life, that he would want his friends to go hungry and thirsty, unclothed and unsheltered. Bartlett comments that “Taken seriously the words about the birds and the lilies push us away from anxiety to what is very nearly its opposite – trust” (Bartlett, p. 28.) Jesus himself seemed to trust that God would provide for him. Much of that provision came from the friends and followers who surrounded him, caring for him, and for each other. Could it be that this is one of the principle ways in which God’s providence operates, in the life and work of faith communities?
In Jesus’ teaching, the birds and the flowers serve the functions for which they were created. They do their work without worry. Sometimes disaster strikes and death surely comes as one dimension of life; yet they are not anxious about those things that they cannot control. Jesus invites his hearers and us to live like that. In Bible study Tuesday, Sachiko asked us to consider how this passage might read for a survivor of the cyclone in Myanmar or the earthquake in China? How might it read for the man I saw digging through the trash yesterday looking for recyclables he might sell for a few cents or the refugees crowded into camps in Darfur and South Africa? How might it be interpreted in some parts of East Palo Alto or a poor village in El Salvdor? I can’t honestly say I know how to answer those hard questions. I want to believe that individuals and communities within those traumatized and impoverished environments can still find themselves centered in God, crying out to God when necessary, maybe even shaking their fists at God on occasion, and still finding faith in the midst of suffering and disaster. I don’t want to assume that glibly, but I do believe that there can be hope and love and even joy in the most dire circumstances, that people much worse off than we have ever known might put us to shame with their faith and devotion to God who holds the future in her hands.
I also believe that part of God’s will for us who are so privileged is to bring compassion and care to our sisters and brothers everywhere. Indeed, I believe that, because of our privileges, we have a special responsibility to work with God in care for the whole creation. “…strive first for the kingdom of God, and [God’s] righteousness,” Jesus says, “and all these things [you need] will be given to you.” In the same passage from Thoughts in Solitude, Merton goes on to argue that “Sanctity in such an age [as ours] means, no doubt, traveling from the area of anxiety to the area in which there is no anxiety or perhaps it may mean learning, from God, to be without anxiety in the midst of anxiety” (Merton, pp. 82-83.) Orient yourselves fully toward God’s reign and God’s sense of what is right and you will find your lives so full you will have no time for anxiety.
This question of whether or not to practice anxiety is serious business. Yet, Jesus closes this passage with a bit of humor that perhaps gets lost in translation. There is a kind of playful spirit at work here when he tells the crowd not to worry about “tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Don’t you see that today’s trouble is enough for today. What can you know or predict about tomorrow? Nothing that will happen can actually match the things your imagination has conjured up. Don’t worry, be happy.” And so, in this spirit of humor I offer the following poem by Joy Cowley as a closing antidote for high anxiety. Maybe it will loosen our dependence on worry and draw us closer to living in the reign of God:
A Hymn to Imperfection |
|
Hey! Let’s celebrate weakness! |
And while we’re at it, Joy Cowley, Psalms for the Road |