Sermon

The Second Sunday after Pentecost
May 25, 2008

The Reverend Michaela Johnson

In our liturgies, our hymns, our prayers, our Scripture, we take it as a given that God is faithful.

Do you ever wonder about that promise? That God is faithful?

Frederick Buechner wrote this:

“’Have no anxiety about anything,’” Paul writes to the Philippians. In one sense it is like telling a woman with a bad head cold not to sniffle and sneeze so much or a lame man to stop dragging his feet.”

On the one hand, the readings today are wonderfully inspiring and hopeful...

...the Collect, which gathers the themes of the day, speaks of God’s abiding love for us, which takes into itself our very human fears and anxieties, and can transform them into a faith that transforms us...

...Isaiah’s song of joy and promise to Israel -- “Exult, O earth; break forth, O mountains into singing...I have given you as a covenant to the people...You shall not hunger or thirst, for I will lead you by springs of water...I will not forget you. See I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands.”

...and the Gospel promise that we are as lovely as lilies and as free as flying birds, when we remember whom we belong to...

...That’s on the one hand. On the other hand, for me at least, the very hopefulness, the very promise of the readings can be daunting, because they challenge my experience and what I know of the world, and therefore can seem just...hollow.

In Isaiah, we hear Zion responding to those promises with that scepticism that echos what I sometimes feel: “The Lord has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me.” Sixty years of history for modern Israel could echo those words. For all the triumph, there has been so much suffering...God doesn’t seem so very kind to either Israelis or Palestinians.

And lilies die quickly (as the gospel itself notes) and birds work hard for their food, and many species fly thousands of miles to find a welcoming habitat (which is getting harder and harder for them).

What do we do with the discrepancy between what God in these readings seems to promise us and the harder and harsher experiences of daily life? And what do we do with the injunction not to worry, because we are in God’s hands, when worry itself seems at least as natural and intrinsic as sneezing...inevitable, and in fact sometimes useful. If I don’t worry about passing my exam, I won’t work on it and I may flunk.

Life is tough. Hard. Challenging. Disappointing. Frightening. Wearying. Sometimes terrible. The suffering in China and Burma overwhelms us with horror. What, in the face of all that, are these hopeful readings about? Are they just pie in the sky? Hollow words to cheer us up?

Or do they, in fact, point to a way of life that embraces both joy and sorrow, a way of life that allows us both to suffer and to rejoice -- sometimes even at the same time?

It’s a choice. It’s a real choice. Is there more to life than meets the eye, or isn’t there? Are we in the middle of a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing, as Macbeth avers? Or are we part of an enormous, mysterious adventure that stretches so far beyond our comprehension that our eyes are far too dim to see it, our minds far too small to encompass it -- and all we ever we get of it, most of the time, is just a glimpse, a murmur, a spark. Sometimes we get a vision.

We’re here -- at St. Mark’s, in this Christian community -- because we have made that choice. We’ve come down on the side of mystery. For some of us the mystery is embodied in a powerful concrete story -- a love story -- that we can talk about and shape our lives by. For others of us, perhaps it’s simply a flickering in the fog, and we’re here to pursue it.

In his letter to the Corinthians this morning, St. Paul tells us that, as God’s people in Christ, we are stewards of God’s mysteries, and that it is our work to be faithful to that trust...to be faithful to God’s mysteries, and to be faithful in God’s mysteries.

I take that to mean that you and I are keepers of the Christian tradition -- and that that means, not that we are supposed to keep it wrapped up and unchanged in a safe place, but that we are to keep it alive -- alive and healthy...by living it, praying it, testing it, growing in our understanding, and sharing what we learn, and even sharing our doubts and fears.

Someone said of the Catholic activist and 20th century saint, Dorothy Day, that she lived as though what she believed in was true.

She lived as though what she believed in was true.

That’s my goal. I have a ways to go. I have had my share of glimpses...murmurs...sparks -- even visions -- as have you. But life goes on, and if I’m not careful, I forget.

Living the faith, being true to the mystery -- remembering -- is the hard daily work we are given to do as God’s people in Christ. How do we do it? Not alone. That’s why we come here week after week, “to continue in the apostle’s teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers,” as we promise every time there’s a Baptism. To be inspired. To support each other. To remind each other, in word and deed, of what it is we are all about. And to learn more about how to live, as though what we believe in is true. To get help with the details.

Today the Gospel and the Collect are about worrying, anxiety, and its place in a faithful life. You can tell that it’s a confusing subject, because whoever put together the various parts of Matthew’s gospel didn’t let today’s main passage -- about not worrying -- stand alone. The last two sentences of the passage virtually contradict what has gone before: “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.” (So do worry about that.)

Whom is Jesis speaking to when he says “Do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat’ or ‘What will we drink’ or ‘What will we wear? Is he talking to people who really don’t know where their next meal is coming from or whether their children will have shoes to wear to school? If so, could he be saying something radical, like, don’t waste any more energy on your individual needs...come help me turn the world upside down, so that food and clothes won’t be an issue, because everyone will have enough?

Or is he talking to people who already have enough, and who are spending their time fretting about just which clothes to wear, just which wine to serve, just which meat to buy .. instead of doing God’s work of turning the world around?

Can’t you do both? Do God’s work and enjoy God’s gifts? At what point does enjoying good things segue into selfish preoccupation? What is enough? Those are the kinds of things Christian people need to...worry about. Worrying is not all bad. There are things in the world and things in our own lives that we should be troubled about and think about and spend time on...war, poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia, injustice -- and so on. Greed, gossip, alcoholism, depression, selfishness -- and so on.

We keep the faith here at St. Mark’s as we worry about the environment and talk about our energy use, and as we plan for Shrinemont, worrying about how to be God’s people together. We keep the faith whenever we struggle for the wholeness of the world -- the wide world out there, or the world at our fingertips, or even the world within us.

Going back to Jesus’s words in Matthew. I think there is something else there. I think that Jesus is saying, Don’t obsess about the ways you think you are inadequate or ineffective...(Paul, in Corinthians voices something similar when he says that he does not judge himself.) You are adequate. You are enough. You are as lovely as a lily, you are as strong as a bird’s wing. In the mystery of God’s economy, simply pay attention to who you are right now, and love that, and pay attention to what work of love or courage you are called to do -- and do it, right now.

And perhaps that begins to get at what it means not to worry, not to be anxious in God’s world. You are a strong, beautiful, important part of that world -- but only a part. The whole is God’s. The whole is mystery. We don’t know the beginning of the story and we don’t know the end of the story. All we know is that it is a love story, not a fairy tale. It doesn’t promise happiness, or success, or safety. It only promises love. Our job is to remember that...and our job is to live it.