Hilton Head Island, SC – August 25, 2019
The Chapel Without Walls
Matthew 6:19-24; Matthew 6:25-33
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?” – Matthew 6:25b
Our two readings this morning are from the Sermon on the Mount. Probably Jesus never preached all of these particular sayings at one time and in one place. Matthew had heard some eyewitnesses who told him what Jesus said, and Matthew decided to clump a lot of these things together in three long chapters of his Gospel.
Whatever may be the historical fact, the scriptural fact is that there are many unrelated topics of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. However, the essential topic of today’s two readings focus on the natural human tendency to become overly concerned about financial and food security. We all want “enough” money, however much “enough” means to each of us, and we all want enough food. Persistent hunger and especially starvation are not happy prospects for anyone.
The irony of this is that Jesus was likely preaching to people most of whom had almost no money, and many of whom also had too little food. First-century Judea was s subsistence society. Even subsistence was hard to come by in those straitened times. A very few Judeans, in our vernacular, “lived high off the hog,” but most were “poorer than church mice.”
So why would Jesus even bother to talk to very poor people about concentrating too much on having enough food to eat and enough clothes to wear? It was because that was precisely what virtually all of them did! If you don’t have enough to eat, and if you wear rags for years on end, I’m sure you tend to think a lot about life’s “bare necessities.” Jesus wasn’t talking about Swiss bank accounts or buying groceries from Whole Foods or the Fresh Market; he was talking to poor people about giving too much unwise and unnecessary mental and emotional attention to their poverty.
But doesn’t that seem almost cruel? How could desperately poor people not be painfully conscious of their poverty? Who wouldn’t ponder their unfortunate circumstances in such circumstances?
But from Jesus’ standpoint, that was just the point! Where did it get them to worry about having enough to eat or wear? It only sent them into even more of a tailspin than they were in already! He implied instead that they needed to concentrate on matters that really matter.
And what might that mean? Jesus gave them a ready answer. “Seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be yours as well.” (Mt. 6:33).
But wouldn’t that be an awfully easy thing to say if you knew you were the Son of God and the Savior of the world? If you knew everything, why wouldn’t you hint that everything would come out all right in the end, since it will come out all right? However, in the first few weeks or months of his ministry, Jesus maybe didn’t know that he was the Son of God and the Savior of the world. He didn’t feel he had divine foreknowledge of everything. He didn’t see himself as God Incarnate. Later he may have come to the conclusion that in some measure he was divine, but probably not in the first few months of his Galilean ministry.
In fact, frequently in the Gospels Jesus is called “the Son of man,” and he also refers to himself as “the Son of man.” To capitalize the word Son, as the Gospels do, suggests that Jesus was a unique sort of human being, but it still emphasizes that he was a human, and not the incarnation of the Creator of the world and the God of Israel. Both theology and especially Christology are constantly being debated and played out in the Gospels and in the rest of the New Testament, and no single view was or is accepted by all those who call themselves Christians.
In terms of the thrust of this sermon, Jesus was exactly like everyone he addressed in the Sermon on the Mount, if indeed it was a full-length sermon, and if it was preached somewhere on a mountain. In other words, he too did not have enough food to eat from time to time, and his clothes were pretty threadbare for all of his life. Nevertheless, he insisted, that wasn’t what life is truly all about. “Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?” he asked.
Twenty-first century people, particularly twenty-first century people in highly developed nations such as the United States of America, often put far too much emphasis on “stuff.” We acquire all kinds of stuff: houses that are bigger than we need. One glance at many of us tells that we have enjoyed an excess of food for years. We have so many clothes that if we were thirty years old and we never bought another thing, we would never wear out the stuff we had already purchased to wear. It might go out of style, but it wouldn’t be worn out. Most of us have more money saved than we really need, we buy adult toys that no child would ever even contemplate buying, and many of us also spend too much money on entertainment. There is no physical need for all these things. We want them, but we don’t need them.
Jesus did not preach the Sermon on the Mount and I am not preaching this sermon in the Cypress to try to make anyone feel guilty. Instead, we must learn to direct our thoughts and ourselves to matters that truly matter. That means the essence of the kingdom of God, not the trinkets of the kingdom of this world. It means, as Jesus said earlier in his sermon, not becoming angry with people who irritate us, not striking back at someone who has hurt us, walking the extra mile with people who need our assistance. We need food and clothing and shelter, but in God’s kingdom, they rank very low on the divine list.
Cell phones. Twenty years ago cell phones existed, but few people owned them. Ten years ago many people had cell phones, but far more people didn’t. Now, nearly everyone has a cell phone. There is a cell phone with its own unknowable number (except to telemarketers) for almost every resident in America. There are five-year-olds with their own cell phones. We got along without them before we met them, and we could get along without them now (the cell phones, not the kids) - - - except that apparently we can’t (ditto). Some people would not know the time of day or the kind of weather that is likely to come their way or who was the President before Harding if they didn’t have a smart phone. Smart phones are not making people stupid, but too many waste far too much precious time on them with few useful results. They think because they can Google information in twenty seconds that they are well informed. They aren’t. They just have nimble fingers. Whether they have nimble brains is another matter. Stuff can kill us, and it can shrivel our minds, if we let it.
It is hard for us to see the mistakes we ourselves make, but it is easy to grasp the errors of others. Take Members of Congress, for instance. They regularly attack one another, although with the most sophisticated and blunted of barbs, but they deliberately refrain from attacking issues that desperately need to be addressed. If they do, they might lose the next election, they reason. That might be a good thing, we reason. In the words of Jesus, but in a different context, they neglect the weightier matters of the law: tax laws that honestly attempt to lower the national debt, environmental laws that seriously attempt to slow climate change, immigration laws that face reality rather than flee from a reality which clearly is unacceptable to millions of Americans, but is reality, nonetheless.
Individually and collectively, we humans usually expend the most effort in fixing easy problems, and in avoiding hard problems. It is human nature to do that. But is it wise? Does it matter to do easy tasks, when it is the hard tasks that require the most effort and probably do the most good? Seek first the kingdom of God by addressing hard issues, and all the easy things will take care of themselves.
It seems more fulfilling to be popular in everything we do than to be right or correct or proper in everything we do. When someone makes a racist statement, it is right to point out the error of their ways, but we fear it may damage our friendship and popularity with them to say it, and it may. However, in such an instance it matters to speak up. Not to speak up also matters, but in a negative sense. When an organization of which we are members quietly discriminates against certain kinds of people, it matters to declare opposition to those policies. When a difficult personality is excluded because of that person’s obnoxious behavior, it matters to try to include such people. The kingdom of God is established in significant actions that are hard to undertake. We may choose to avoid such actions, because we don’t want to be the squeaky wheels that force grease to be applied to sticky social issues.
Let us suppose you play bridge in a regular group on Tuesday afternoons. And let us suppose that on Tuesday morning at 11:30 a neighbor calls who is very ill, and asks you to take her to the doctor or to the hospital. What matters more: to attend to your neighbor’s emergency needs, or to keep your regular commitment to your bridge partners? If you don’t keep the bridge date, you will break your trust with friends who count on you every Tuesday, but if you don’t help your neighbor, she may be in a very precarious spot. Which is a bigger kingdom builder, the bridge game or the trip to the hospital?
Or let us make such a choice ethically even more difficult. Suppose you are a volunteer for an organization which accomplishes a great deal for the community. And suppose you have become a close friend to a person older than yourself who counts on you for a number of things you do for this person on a regular basis. Further suppose you have concluded you have come to a stage in your own life where you are physically capable of continuing only with the volunteer organization or helping your friend, but you can’t do both. Which matters more, that group or that individual? It isn’t an easy choice, but you must choose.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus confronts us with numerous examples of what we might call “Kingdom Choices.” How, specifically, do you and I help construct the kingdom of God on earth? What we think matters most to God makes a difference in how we assist in making the kingdom visible around us.
T.S. Eliot wrote a famous poem called The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock. It was about a man who considered himself a bit of an English toff. But he was getting older, and he knew he didn’t look as sharp as he once did. So he said to himself, “I grow old, I grow old/ I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” Now there is a kingdom choice, if ever there was one! Imagine rolling up one’s pants legs if the pants have outgrown one’s shrunken size! There’s a matter that matters! Or there’s this: “And indeed there will be time/ To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’/ Time to turn back and descend the stair,/ With a bald spot in the middle of my hair-“
Or this: “Shall I part hair my behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?/ I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.”
J. Alfred Prufrock is a regular walking, talking compendium of “profound” moral choices, such as whether or not to wear the bottoms of his trousers rolled, or if he should part his hair on the back of his head, or if he might have the intestinal courage to eat a peach. But perhaps, just perhaps, the deeply devout Anglo-Catholic poet is telling us, Mr. Prufrock has never learned to concentrate on matters that matter. Instead, he fixates on minutiae that are so small it is painful to hear him tell us about them. But that is who this poetic moral midget is, and sadly he is incapable of rising above his muddled mundane world.
Do we all spend too much time on matters that don’t matter and too little time on matters that do matter? Jesus doesn’t give us much wiggle room, does he? True, he says, “My yoke is easy is easy and my burden is light” and he says that in Matthew (Mt. 11:30), but he also says, and also in Matthew, and later in the Sermon on the Mount, “Enter by the narrow gate, for the gate is wide and the way is easy, that leads to destruction, and those who enter it are many. For the gate is narrow, and the way is hard, that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (Mt. 7:13-14).
Life is so complicated! It is also so murky! How can we be certain of what does or does not really matter? And isn’t it natural that we are required to spend more time on mundane activities than on really important activities? No one can do only Really Big Things, can she? Everyone always has to take care of a multitude of Little Things - - - doesn’t he?
To view the world with Christian eyes is to seek to learn to discern the matters that matter from the matters that don’t much matter. Jesus of Nazareth is the guide who is the best teacher on deciding which is which. He offers us the vision, but we must open our eyes to see it.