Bless to Me: Daily Blessings
Luke 12:23-31
August 9, 2020
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
A recording of the service in which this sermon was preached may be accessed here https://youtu.be/O2tMwupAzBg
This week I read several sermons on our text. Sermons by other preachers within the past10 or 20 years. A number of them started by talking about stress and anxiety. One from 2008 cited a study from the American Psychological Association suggesting that stress levels were close to an all-time high, with people worried about job loss, lower incomes, and how they were going to pay their bills and feed their families. You might remember the world-wide financial crisis of 2007-2008. You might wonder, with me, if people are possibly more stressed and anxious now than we were then.
“Do not worry” Jesus said. And then, as I saw this week, preachers start sermons by listing all the stuff there is to worry about. It is as if those three words “do not worry” trigger some Baptist Defiance Disorder so that where there was calm, suddenly fear and anxiety erupt.
But it’s not only preachers. At Emmanuel’s Bible study on Wednesday, the conversation very quickly became about people who truly do not have enough to eat, and how unhelpful Jesus’ words can seem in the face of harsh realities. Over the last few months, I have heard from many of you and from others. You are concerned about friends who live with chronic pain, and about people in abusive relationships, especially those living in quarantine with them. About those stuck in ICE detention and people in places that were disasters before pandemic, like Venezuela and Syria and refugees in the Mediterranean. You worry about isolated older people and children with special needs and so many more. Some of these concerns were listed on Wednesday and pretty quickly, I was feeling anxious. This passage was not going to easily support a sermon on daily blessings. What had I been thinking?
“Do not worry,” Jesus says and immediately we start to worry. It’s a variation on what happens when an angel appears. You know that the first things angels say, at least in the Bible, is “do not be afraid.” And then immediately people get afraid.
Most of us take Jesus seriously. We try to follow his instructions. But not worrying is really hard sometimes. So we look for loopholes. We tell ourselves, that maybe Jesus meant “don’t worry about yourself, but it’s OK to worry about others.” Or maybe this only applied to his first followers and everyone knows that life was simpler back then.
But there aren’t really any loopholes. Luke indicates that Jesus is speaking to his disciples here. The men and women who left their homes and families, the ones who abandoned their jobs, to follow him. They are supported mostly by a few wealthy women and sometimes by the hospitality of those who receive them in the towns around Galilee. Jesus told them not to carry extra provisions, not even a change of tunic. At this point, they are on the road to Jerusalem where Jesus has already said he will be crucified. It seems like they might have some legitimate concerns about the days ahead, but to them and to us, Jesus says “do not worry.”
Preacher Barbara Brown Taylor says that it is a form of idolatry to give your fears and anxieties the power and authority to shape who you are and to drive your behavior. Most of us have more time and space now in which to worry. We have fewer places to go and people to meet. That quietness combined with a worldwide pandemic is making a whole lot of people anxious and worried. It is real and being measured in all kinds of ways.
We can allow that anxiety and worry to shape us, but nothing good will to come from it. We will likely just make ourselves sick. Or we can choose to use this time and space differently, to deepen awareness and gratitude.
“Instead of worrying,” Jesus says, “look at the birds and the lilies.” These are commandments, as strongly worded as his directions to love your enemy and not to judge. We recognize that those are hard things, but we still try to live them out. If we don’t already do so, perhaps we should try not worrying with the same degree of intention.
Presbyterian minister and scholar Tom Long writes “The verbs look at the birds of the air and consider the lilies of the field, are, in Greek, very strong verbs. They mean to suggest more than a casual glance; they invite us to study and to scrutinize the carefree world of nature. Jesus commands us to look, really look at a world where God provides freely and lavishly, a world where anxiety plays no part, where worry is not a reality. Jesus invites us to allow our imaginations to enter such a world, to compare this world with the world in which we must live out our lives.”[1]
We are not asked to stop worrying in order to become careless and happy-go-lucky, but in order to strive for the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is a new reality breaking in, a reality in which God’s will is done on earth as in heaven. Justo Gonzalez says that since it is God’s will that even the ravens are fed and the lilies clothed, to strive for the kingdom, is among other things, to make certain that all are fed and all are clothed.[2]
“Consider the ravens. Look at the lilies” Jesus says. This is spiritual practice. It offers us a way out of worrying, path to reconnecting with God. Biblical lilies are part of the genus allium. They come up from bulbs in the spring. Each tiny flower is symmetrical and comes together to form a globe. There are over 1200 kinds of allium. Some of them form globes which are a foot across, in reds and whites and purples and blues. They are beautiful. They inspire wonder. What kind of God takes the time to create such beauty in such variety across the seasons?
The ancient Celtic people offered loving attention to daily life, to the blessings of simple things found each moment. It is a spiritual practice in which gratitude and wonder can replace worry.
As the poet Wendell Berry writes,
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.
I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.[3]
We are not all poets. But we can all choose wonder over worry. We can choose prayer. In her older book, Traveling Mercies, Annie Lamott wrote about a woman who said for her morning prayer “whatever” and then in the evening she said, “oh well.”
Annie said the two best prayers she knew were “Help me, help me, help me” and “thank you, thank you, thank you.” Later she added the wow prayer, saying “Wow is the praise prayer. The prayer where we're finally speechless — which in my case is saying something. . . . When I don't know what else to do I go outside, and I see the sky and the trees and a bird flies by, and my mouth drops open again with wonder at the just sheer beauty of creation. And I say, 'Wow.' ... You say it when you see the fjords for the first time at dawn, or you say it when you first see the new baby, and you say, 'Wow. This is great.' Wow is the prayer of wonder."[4]
Some of you are great at praying. You don’t need any instruction. But for those of us who might need help, especially right now when we are tempted to idolize worry, I suggest that we might use these three simple prayers – help, thanks, wow – as often as we can through the day.
I am always helped to see blessings by the work of artists, poets and musicians. So I share with you, the work of Carrie Newcomer. Perhaps this musical video can offer us a consideration of the lilies and the birds and so many other examples of the holy in the ordinary.
Augustine said “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you, O God.” If we have restless worry about tomorrow, it might be a sign that we have not yet learned how to rest in God’s providence and care [5], just as we don’t always fully love our enemies -- to which we can say, several times a day, “help me, help me, help me.” It is God’s good pleasure to give us the kingdom -- to which we can say “thank you, thank you, thank you, and wow”. Amen.
[1] Tom Long, Matthew: Westminster Bible Companion (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997 ) pp.75-76.
[2] Justo Gonzalez, Luke in the Belief Commentary Series, (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2010), p. 161.
[3] https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/peace-wild-things-0/
[4] https://www.npr.org/2012/11/19/164814269/anne-lamott-distills-prayer-into-help-thanks-wow
[5] Tom Long, Matthew: Westminster Bible Companion (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997 ) p. 76