Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing… so do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today's trouble is enough for today. Matthew 6:25,34
How do we relate the Gospel to the weight of concern upon us in our life as individuals, as a church and as a world? I think especially of how our continent, already shaken by war, is now being shaken by an earthquake.
Theologian Timothy Keller addresses the reaction to evil in human beings and more mysteriously in nature in these words: ‘If you have a God great and transcendent enough to be mad at because he hasn’t stopped evil and suffering in the world, you have a God great and transcendent enough to have good reasons for allowing it to continue that you can’t know - you can’t have it both ways’.
Getting mad at God over evil is natural and even biblical - it's found in the Psalms - but the Sermon on the Mount has another counsel. Our Lord points us to how God sustains the birds and the lilies and is always at hand to sustain us if we submit to his providence and work for his kingdom and righteousness.
Submitting to God, which is our life’s work as Christians, involves developing two virtues - detachment and expectancy.
Anthony De Mello, the late Indian Spiritual writer, has a three-line recipe for happiness true to today’s Gospel but distilled from Buddhism which has the basic ingredient of detachment. It runs: ‘The world is full of sorrow. The root of sorrow is attachment desire. The uprooting of sorrow is the dropping of attachment’ (repeat)
If we want to make an effective submission to God - to really mean to ‘offer our souls and bodies as a living sacrifice’ this morning we need to loosen the bonds of attachment to regret about the past, possessiveness and anxiety about the future.
Into our very different personal situations this morning the Lord may be issuing a challenge: Is there a regret or sorrow that is constantly about me? Is there a desire or a fear or wrong ambition pressing upon me? Is there a person or a possession or a threat in my situation that so attaches itself to me that I lack the freedom to be what God has made me to be? - for God has made me to be happy, detached, surrendered, humble, content with my lot. If you see such an attachment on your heart, break it as you offer this Eucharist - take courage and break your attachment so that you can go forward with Our Lord. Such detachment frees us from what holds us back in our relationship with God: ‘Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own’.
Submitting to God, our life’s work as Christians, involves developing two virtues, detachment from what’s unhelpful to our soul and then expectancy upon God.
Expectancy opens our lives to a future in which God's possibilities can break into our 'locked up situations' even the dismal scene we face of war and earthquake. Such an expectant attitude facilitates a more wholehearted ‘Yes to Tomorrow’.
Show Barbados Flying Fish swims at 15-20mph and 40mph in the air - a symbol of what it is to be a Christian today ('give me the wings of faith to rise…')
The difference between non-Christians and Christians is like the difference between fish in general and flying-fish - it's about having wings - wings of expectant faith that can lead us upwards and forwards into more of what God has in store for human beings.
Expectant faith shows itself in our attitude to answers to prayer. Truth is, if I have little expectancy about what God wants for me I am going to be surprised when he answers my prayers. If I grow to expect God to answer my prayers then I shall be less surprised when he does than when he doesn't. It is about the degree of trust there is in our relationship with God in Christ.
The Gospel reading reminds us how our spiritual well-being so easily gets crippled by anxiety. We are not allowed to live at peace within ourselves on account of a tendency to get extended from within ourselves into envisioning the future - living all too much 'for the next thing'. Of course, as we look to the future, planning is inevitable - and we want to do the best thing we can. Inevitably we should be concerned for the future, but not with the overdue concern we call 'anxiety'.
I was reading the other day of an Indian man who spent a whole night in fear of a snake on the floor of his room. When day came, the ‘snake’ was shown to be nothing more than a coil of rope.
The Holy Spirit doesn’t always remove our fears like that - but he does transform them. Dealing with our anxieties is all part and parcel of both our human and our spiritual development. It is a matter of deepening our trust, our readiness to take God at his Word.
Living as a Christian is about building the twin virtues of detachment from anxiety and expectant faith whereby we open ourselves to the possibilities of God breaking into our lives. Confidence about the future has its basis here.
There is no circumstance that can ultimately overcome us when our hands are grasped by the hand of God.
