Sermon Text: Matthew 6:24-34
If you have ever stayed awake at night worrying about something that never happened….this is for you.
If you have ever worried about something that did happen….this is for you.
If you have ever worried….this is for you.
Matthew 6:24-34
24"You
can't worship two gods at once. Loving one god, you'll end up hating the other.
Adoration of one feeds contempt for the other. You can't worship God and Money both.
25"If you decide for God, living a life of
God-worship, it follows that you don't fuss about what's on the table at
mealtimes or whether the clothes in your closet are in fashion. There is far
more to your life than the food you put in your stomach, more to your outer
appearance than the clothes you hang on your body. 26Look
at the birds, free and unfettered, not tied down to a job description, careless
in the care of God. And you count far more to him than birds.
27"Has anyone by fussing in front of the mirror
ever gotten taller by so much as an inch? 28All this
time and money wasted on fashion--do you think it makes that much difference?
Instead of looking at the fashions, walk out into the fields and look at the
wildflowers. They never primp or shop, 29but have you
ever seen color and design quite like it? The ten best--dressed men and women
in the country look shabby alongside them.
30"If God gives such attention to the appearance
of wildflowers--most of which are never even seen--don't you think he'll attend
to you, take pride in you, do his best for you? 31What
I'm trying to do here is to get you to relax, to not be so preoccupied with
getting, so you can respond to God's giving. 32People
who don't know God and the way he works fuss over these things, but you know
both God and how he works. 33Steep your life in
God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions. Don't worry about missing out.
You'll find all your everyday human concerns will be met.
34"Give your entire attention to what God is
doing right now, and don't get worked up about what may or may not happen
tomorrow. God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up when the
time comes.”
You can learn a lot about Jesus from just the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew. Very quickly, Matthew takes us quickly from Jesus’ genealogy to his birth, the visit from the wisemen and the threat of death from King Herod. We learn that his parents escaped with him to Egypt to save his young life and that they later return to Nazareth where he grew up. Then Matthew fast-forwards to telling us about John the Baptist who baptized Jesus, his cousin. Then we have a sense that Jesus was immediately led into the desert where he entered seminary, as it were. This is where he was tempted, this is where he became aware of what lay ahead of him. This was a life-changing time for the carpenter from Nazareth.
After leaving the desert he began to talk about what he learned about the kingdom of God. As people heard what he had to say they were willing to follow him and he called men like Peter, Andrew, James and John to follow him and help light the fire in the people who would hear Jesus’ message.
Matthew 4:23-25 tell what
happened next –“Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues,
preaching the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness
among the people. News about him spread all over Syria, and people brought to
him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the
demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed, and he healed them.
Large crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea and the region
across the Jordan followed him.”
As the crowd sat around him, Jesus told them what it means to be blessed by God, then he began to talk about how they were to act and live in their world.
Can you imagine what folks thought when they heard this kind of teaching? This was the rabbi teaching about the kingdom of God, healing people of their illnesses and demons, not exactly like the rabbi who taught only in the synagogue and only to men. This man was different, very different.
This man Jesus talked to them about difficult things. In the Sermon on the Mount he even talked
about money, adultery, divorce, anger and revenge, among other things. But today we think about worry, our
priorities and what Jesus has in mind…for us….for today.
Every week I spend an hour and a half as an advocate at Lafayette Urban Ministries. We advocates meet with clients in need of assistance and try to solve some problems.
Most weeks during the school year I spend an hour and a half with four seminary students who are serving churches and in large part learning how to be ministers.
These are very different groups. The clients at LUM are worried about keeping the electricity on. The students are worrying about things going on in their churches or what is down the road for them. Their situations are different but their responses are often the same. They worry about the future.
You probably understand that as well. You have worried about illness, paying medical bills, finding the right job…or any job at all. You have worried about your children and their problems. You have worried about relationships. As much as we believe what we read in our scripture today about God caring more about us than the birds, we all know that just deciding to never worry again is not very realistic. We will not quit worrying about things. It just isn’t going to happen.
But it
doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. It
doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t put our worries into perspective. It means that we should first and foremost
seek to know what God wants from us and put our minds and hearts into doing
that first. Jesus is saying that if we
do that first, we can focus on the important things of today and often the
things that seemed important to us will pale in comparison to what is important
to God.
I have a friend who has been worrying a lot about the
future. She isn’t graduating from her
master’s program for another year but she is having trouble letting go of
worrying about what will happen next. I
keep mentioning that any decision is almost a year away but that isn’t helping
her very much. Then one day I asked her
if she had ever flown in a plane and had to sit in the back. Sure, hasn’t everyone? So, I said in one of those God-graced
moments, “think about this. The plane is coming to a stop and the flight
attendant says “Stay in your seats until the plane comes to a complete
stop.” Well, you know that the moment
the seatbelt sign goes off we are out of our seats and grabbing our stuff from
the overhead bins.
So, all of you in the back stand up, grab your stuff …just
to stand there waiting for 400 people to get off the plane. Your stuff is heavy; you want to put it down but
you can’t because there are too many people around you. Your head is bent in a weird angle because of
how you have to stand to fit into the small aisle. But instead of sitting down, you stand there,
holding an heavy suitcase…waiting and waiting.
And the bag gets heavier.
Here is my advice:
Put your suitcase back in the overhead bin, sit down, relax and enjoy
the moment. Standing up, holding a heavy
suitcase will just make the time seem longer.
Take those last few moments to breathe deeply.”
You see, there is worry and there is worry. There is worry when you are facing the
possibility of cancer. And there is
worry when you can’t decide what color to paint the living room. There is worry when you have to decide on the
treatment for the cancer and there is worry as to which Medicare insurance plan
to choose. There is worry when you have
to decide where to live because of health issues and there is worry over rising
gas prices.
Sometimes those things that worry us are things we can do
something about but are afraid to try.
Sometimes those things that worry us are things that we simply have no
control over. Sometimes we worry about
change – even good change.
You can buy a car that gives you better mileage but there
doesn’t seem to be much to do about the gas prices.
If you can’t find a job in your field, maybe it is time to
make a move or find a new field. But if
you are worried about needing a new job a year from now and you are doing
everything to put yourself in the position to be able to find that job, well,
worrying about it now is futile. In this
passage Jesus is telling us that God cares for us so much that we shouldn’t
worry ourselves into emotional messes worrying about things that are either out
of our control or fairly easily fixed.
The Joel passage I read earlier was a constant friend for
many years in my life. My bible even
falls open to the passage. “God will
repay you for the years that the locust have eaten.” That told me that even in the times when I
could not control things, God was present in my life and more importantly that
God cared about the things I cared about.
These verses often gave me the courage to set those worries aside and to
let God deal with them. Because I
believed Joel. I believed that the day
would come when I would feel repaid for the difficult times. And believe me, that has happened.
It comes to this:
the Contemporary English version of the Bible says: “But more than anything else, put God’s work
first and do what he wants. Then the
other things will be yours as well.”
It isn’t easy to quit worrying but when we give to God
those worries and focus on what God wants us to be doing, we can put worries
and concerns into perspective.
It takes practice to get this right, but we have to keep
trying.
In the trying, we become closer to God. In the trying we understand how much we are
loved. In the trying we understand that
God wants us to love others.
In the trying serving God first becomes our priority. “What does God want from you?” See ye first the kingdom of God so that
all these things will become yours.