Hilton Head Island, SC – August 27, 2017
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 10:38-42; Matthew 6:24-34
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Therefore, do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own troubles be sufficient for the day. – Matthew 6:34 (RSV)
WORLD-CHANGING SAYINGS OF JESUS: 3. Do Not Be Anxious.
The Sermon on the Mount is a collection of mostly un-related topics. Scholars are almost universally agreed that the disciple named Matthew did not write the Gospel of Matthew, in which the Sermon on the Mount is found. Someone else wrote it around 70 AD or so. But that “someone,” the experts say, never knew or heard Jesus. Instead, they assume, the author of the Gospel of Matthew was told stories about Jesus by an individual or individuals who were actual contemporary eyewitnesses to Jesus and his ministry.
The Gospel writer took these stories and put them into what seemed to him to be a reasonably logical order. If so, at the end of Matthew, chapter 6, Jesus was thinking about having enough money to pay for the bare necessities of life . He spent his life among a peasant population who, as we would say, hardly had two nickels to rub together.
A few verses before where our scripture reading for today began, said “Matthew,” Jesus told his listeners that they should not lay up treasures on earth, but that they should lay up treasures in heaven. I suspect very few of Jesus’ listeners were able to lay up many if any treasures on earth. Most of them were subsistence farmers and small town artisans who were barely able to scratch out a meager existence from their labors.
I’ll be candid with you. Anxiety about finances is my most persistent form of anxiety. If I wake up in the middle of the night and foolishly start thinking immediately about money, I am likely to lie awake for a long, purposeless amount of time. And late-hour fretting about finances has never once changed whatever it was I was fretting about. It’s possible my fiscal fears are prompted by having given away too much money over the years, but I don’t think so. However, two people in my life begged to differ with me about that on a fairly predictable basis, depending on the last line in our monthly bank statements. I think my financial headaches were not the result of giving away too much, but of spending too much and saving too little.
With that thought in his mind, Jesus reminded the people who heard these sayings that they could not serve two masters. Either they would serve God, or they would serve mammon. They couldn’t serve both. “Mammon” is another word for wealth or money or assets. If we are too consumed with having more money, we cannot serve God with full devotion, and if we are fully devoted to God, we shouldn’t be worried about having enough money.
Actually that was excellent advice for people who probably were destined to struggle just to stay alive. People who have a lot of money are more likely to worry about keeping what they have or adding to it than are people who have almost nothing. If Jesus preached primarily to peasants, which increasing numbers of contemporary scholars believe, then it was very practical to tell them not to be concerned about money. They weren’t ever going to have very much anyway. They should concentrate on their relationship with God. That would be the thing which would sustain them through their inevitably difficult lives.
But what about us? None of us is a subsistence farmer. None of us ever made a living by selling small necessities to people who were dirt poor. Residents who live in a place like Hilton Head Island were required to have earned a fair amount of money, or they couldn’t afford to move here in the first place. We are anxious about our lives! We do give considerable thought to what we eat and drink and wear! If we are older, which many of us are, we wonder whether which will give out first - - - our assets, or us? If we had plenty of nothing, we would know that nothing would always have plenty of itself for us, as Porgy sang. But we’re not in that category. Relatively speaking, we all have from “enough” to “plenty.”
But let us come back to the peasants of Galilee to whom Jesus presumably delivered the Sermon on the Mount. As was noted previously in this series of sermons, Jesus almost certainly did not say everything Matthew said he said all at once in the Sermon on the Mount. Furthermore, it likely was not the disciple Matthew who wrote the Gospel of Matthew. Instead, it was somebody else who affixed Matthew’s name to what he wrote in order to give it more credibility.
We can tell that the writer of the Gospel had heard sayings and actions of Jesus from people who actually knew Jesus. The writer of the Gospel put the actions and sayings together in what he considered was a plausible chronological order. But we can observe by a close inspection of the Sermon on the Mount that some of the things Jesus is purported to have said there seem totally unrelated to what precedes and what follows these sayings.
For example, Mt. 6:19-21 has Jesus telling his listeners that they shouldn’t amass treasures on earth, but rather they should gather heavenly treasures. That seems to suggest that eternal or godly values are preferable to temporal or human values. That thought has at least tangential relevance to Jesus’ statement about anxiety that was read a few minutes ago.
Immediately after that, however, Matthew has Jesus telling us that the eye is the lamp of the body. That has no connection whatever to what precedes and what follows those brief observations about the eye. I have probably already belabored this point too much. Therefore, suffice it say that it appears Jesus made three “clumps” of statements that clearly do relate to the subject of anxiety: 1) Save up heavenly values over earthly values, 2) never try to give allegiance to both God and mammon (which means money or wealth or assets), 3) and then the longer saying about anxiety which was most of our reading from Matthew 6.
I would guess that from the time the human race emerged from the caves of southwest Africa a hundred thousand years ago, having enough food or resources to live on has always been close to the top of the Things-That-Produce-Anxiety List. If we truly don’t know where our next meal is coming from, we live with what Mel Brooks would call High Anxiety. I suspect people who are near starvation think about starvation for most of their waking hours.
Therefore, why would Jesus command his listeners not to be anxious about what they would eat or drink that day, or about what they would wear? They were constantly hungry! They were constantly thirsty! They were dressed in rags!
In all its depictions of Jesus and his followers, Hollywood always has Jesus in a glistening white linen robe, and everyone else looks like they just purchased their clothes off the rack yesterday at the first-century equivalent of Saks Fifth Avenue or Brooks Brothers. Surely those folks really looked pretty grungy. Jesus almost certainly also looked grungy. Neither he nor they had two nickels to rub together.
Then why would Jesus even bother to command such people not to be anxious? This isn’t a mere suggestion; it is virtually a commandment. Don’t be anxious! Stop allowing anxiety to govern your life! But why would he say that to people who were understandably anxious nearly every moment of every day?
He did it because being anxious about anything doesn’t change anything! It only makes the problem worse, whether the problem is a severely depleted bank account, or a child whose marriage is falling apart, or a diagnosis last week that you or someone close to you has stage three pancreatic cancer. Anxiety changes none of those things, and it is certain to make it worse for how we deal with them. There is no point in becoming unstrung by what we cannot change if we can’t change it. And if we can change it, we need to figure out how to do that rather than throw ourselves into an even deeper hole by obsessing about it rather than changing it.
For most of the forty-plus years that Peanuts has appeared in the newspaper comic strips, Lucy has had a booth that advertises psychiatric help for a fee of five cents. The cost of this service has never gone up. Because Charles Shulz, the creator of the Peanuts gang, died several years ago, the cartoons since then have all been repeats. That may explain why the no-nonsense psychological helper’s fee has not advanced in recent years as one would otherwise expect.
A couple of weeks ago Lucy was observing of her patient Charlie Brown, “You’re much too passive. Your problem, Charlie Brown, is that you don’t really fight with life. You don’t dominate it. You have to take life by the throat and shake it! You have to kick it in the stomach! You have to punch it in the eye!” Without question, Lucy always does those things, and Charlie Brown almost never does any of them. So in his own defense, Charlie Brown suggests a compromise in the last frame for dealing with the vicissitudes of life: “Couldn’t I just yell at it?”
How we deal with anxiety is a spiritual issue for all of us. If we let anxiety get the best of us, we are of no benefit to ourselves, to others, or to God. We must get past whatever makes us anxious by putting anxiety behind us. “Therefore do not be anxious for tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.” Don’t obsess about what you can’t change. In fact, don’t obsess about anything. Focus on what you can change to overcome your troubles, and do what you can to overcome them. Then put it out of your mind.
Our other scripture for today is probably better known than what Jesus said about anxiety in the Sermon on the Mount. It is the famous story of Mary and Martha. Mary and Martha aren’t mentioned often in the Gospels, but when they are, important things are being said. This time Jesus went to their house when he came to their village, which was the village of Bethany, just east of Jerusalem. When Jesus came in, Mary immediately dropped everything and went to listen to whatever he might have to say. But her sister Martha was preparing dinner, and since Jesus was there, it had to be a special dinner. In the last ten minutes, when everything had to come together very quickly, Martha started kvetching at Mary for not coming to help her. Jesus, without scolding but with an intention to teach something, which is what Jesus always did, he said to Martha, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things; only one thing is really necessary. Mary has chosen that thing, and it won’t be taken away from her” (Lk.10:41).
Whenever the preacher preached on Mary and Martha when I was growing up, I always looked forward to Sunday dinner at our house, because I knew our mother and father were going to have yet another “go-around” regarding the correct interpretation of this passage. Mom always took Martha’s side, because she saw her own vocation to be that of chief housekeeper and cook, like Martha, and Mom was excellent at it. Dad always took Mary’s side, because he said it was more important to listen to Jesus than to feed him perfectly prepared matzoh-ball soup, grilled shish kebob, and strawberry blintzes. (Actually he didn’t say that, because where we lived for most of my growing-up years, Dad couldn’t have known about those things.)
Our father and mother disputed about many things, which I suppose is why their four sons also disputed about many things. But it provided good ammunition for future disputations. In any event, even as a young boy I sided with Dad on the Mary-Martha issue, but on a majority of issues I suspect I sided with Mom, because she was softer and somewhat less doctrinaire.
Some anxiety is good. It even may be necessary, as the singular Dutch theologian and philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said, as quoted on the front of our bulletin. If we aren’t anxious about what we need to be anxious about, we might end up dying from our inattention to a pressing matter. However, as Kierkgaard also said, “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.”
If we’re going to be anxious, we should be anxious about doing what God wants, not what we want. As Jesus says in the summation of his sayings on anxiety, “Seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well” (Mt. 6:33).
In early July, Carol Zaleski had an article in Christian Century. Prof. Zaleski teaches at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and she frequently has columns in the Century. This one was entitled “Anxious about Anxiety.” She asked, “Should we be trying to overcome anxiety? As wise teachers have always recognized, ordinary anxiety is a rational response to life’s uncertainties, a side effect to the vigilance and forethought that set us apart from beasts, babies, and perhaps our hominid ancestors as well. It’s good to temper our anxiety, but there’s no use being anxious about it. We can be calm when we’re dead.”
Those are very practical observations about what Jesus was talking about in the Sermon on the Mount. Carol Zaleski continues. “(W)e should allow the undercurrent of anxiety to surface long enough to awaken humility, repentance, and awe in the face of the divine mystery.” In other words, some anxiety is not only inevitable, but necessary. Nevertheless, when we realize that anxiety, rather than God, has taken control of our lives, we should sit back and allow God to regain control. Prof. Zaleski quotes an 1840 journal entry by Kierkegaard, “To Thee, O God, we turn for peace…but grant us too the blessed assurance that nothing shall deprive us that peace, neither ourselves, nor our foolish, earthly desires, nor my wild longings, nor the anxious cravings of my heart.”
People who say they are never anxious are either kidding themselves or they deliberately choose to ignore real problems that enter their lives on a depressingly regular basis. But there is an answer to anxiety, an antidote, if you will. The answer and the antidote to persistent anxiety is God. If we trust that God is always present in our lives, then we shall move through whatever crises come our way. And you may be certain of this: the problems we have are as nothing compared to the poverty-stricken peasants who comprised the great majority of people who ever listened to anything said by Jesus of Nazareth. But enough of those poor souls took to heart what Jesus said that they insured it would not die when Jesus died. Through the Gospel of Jesus Christ, it would live forever.
“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life.”