Staying focused on God

Transcribed from the sermon preached November 18, 2012

The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor

Scripture Readings: 1 Timothy 2:1-8, Matthew 6:24-34

USA Today consulted the advice of experts from various fields to chart how much time was needed for the daily necessities of life. They consulted experts in the area of sleep, physical fitness, vocational coaching, family life, etc. to see how much time you should spend in each of these areas. USA Today found that to do everything the experts said you were supposed to, for as long as they said you should, you would need 42 hours in a day. Just to get by, to do the bare minimum, to be adequate in each of these areas of life, you would need, according to the experts, 36 hours.

If we trust our whole life to God, live in the Holy Spirit, do you think we could stop worrying?

Yesterday as I contemplated this subject, I took a moment to think about a few of the things that I worried about this week. We worry about a lot of things – some big things and some small things, and some small things that are a part of bigger things.

For instance, I worry about whether or not the 49rs will get it together in time for the playoffs. I worry about work: This week I worried about four lights being out in Hunter Hall, about coming up with a budget that is balanced. I worry whether St. John’s is focused enough on the work and will of God. I worry about just pay for staff, about balancing staff gifts with the tasks we want and need to accomplish, I worry about being a loving and welcoming place for all people, especially the outcast and homeless, and at the same time keeping a safe space for children. I pray for a woman with cancer, another with a broken arm, a man who has had a stroke, a woman who needs more care than her husband can provide, and a hundred year old who has stopped eating. I worry about your worries, about your marriage and your health, your children, and that you grow closer to God and know how important you are to this community. I worry about whether there will be enough cookies at the Thanksgiving service, about whether I will offend someone or some church by leaving them out or not recognizing them or putting them before or after someone else. I worry that the service is not diverse enough, or that in my desire to create a diverse service it has become too long. I worry about getting a nurse for the clinic in Guatemala. I worry about my dad, his health and well being, about getting along with my sister, about whether my two teenage boys will do well in school and work, and get home at night without hurting the car, themselves or someone else, or find themselves on the wrong side of the law or the well being of a girl. I worry that we will find a way to pay for their college and that the power of the Gospel message will stay with them even as they claim their independence from mom and dad. I worry that I don’t spend enough time with my wife, or for my wife. I worry about making her feel good, about whether or not I am reading her mind correctly, and where in the world she gets the idea that men are supposed to be able to read minds. I worry about her thin blood and my tight back. I worry about her family about whether they were hurt in the earthquake. I worry about the leak on the corner of our house, and the locks that need fixing, and that the giant cedar tree branches will break during a storm and come crashing into the house, or the neighbor’s house. I worry that every time I try to fix something in the house it takes me three trips to the hardware store before I give up and call someone else to help. I worry that hateful people and propaganda will dominate politics, that that the desire for money in business will tempt even good people to drive our culture, society and economy in the wrong direction. I worry about whether the President and Congress will work together to keep us from running off the fiscal cliff. I worry that my political and religious beliefs are wrong. I worry that the check engine light just came on in my car. I worry about traffic; about when I drive somewhere and how much time it will take. I don’t worry that the driver in front of me likes to drive slow, but I want them to get into the slow lane. I worry that I didn’t change lanes in time and will get stuck behind the left hand turn guy at this light, or the right hand turn lady waiting for people in the cross walk at the next light.

Now this is just a snap shot of one week of worry. And the thing about it is, I have a pretty darn good life. These are just garden-variety worries that most of us have. I am blessed to have most of these things to worry about, and I know many people, including many of you who have more and greater worries. For instance the fact that I get paid to pray for you is pretty cool. This Thanksgiving we can thank God for all the good things we have to worry about. It is strange how giving thanks knocks a bunch of stuff out of the worry category. What is clear is that there are enough things to worry about in life that we can easily spend most of our time worrying. Apparently worry is not new, for it seems Jesus is speaking right to us when he says, "Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? " Karl Barth, the great Swiss theologian, wrote, “ A being is free only when it can determine and limit its activity.”

What if in each area of our life our lead idea was how to live into the blessings of God? Now if we are perfectionists or workaholics, or self-critical, then such a project may at first appear to be another thing to worry about. I mean if we need 36 hours in a day just to be adequate and we feel we need to be perfect to please God, we are likely to fall at least twelve hours short. Yet, can any of us by worrying add a single hour to our life span?

What if we trusted that God knows who we are and how long a day is? What if God knows how limited our time is and what our strengths and weaknesses are but loves us anyway. If we need not worry about the judgment of God we are therefore free to dedicate our lives, each and every part of it to the truth, love, peace and abundant life of God. We are free to be thankful. We are free to dedicate all of our real lives, not just parts of it here or there, not our dream lives, our lives tomorrow after we catch up or figure things out, not the life we think we should have or the person we think we should be, not the life we will have when other people stop complicating it and messing things up, but the life and person we are right now, today.

I think most of our worry tends to isolate us. Or maybe a sense of isolation leads us to worry. We feel we are all alone with all these tasks and hours. They are ours alone to worry about. To some degree I think this happens because we have compartmentalized and organized our lives too well. We break it into areas like work, family, marriage, bills, exercise and spirituality, and then we need to be experts or hire experts to deal with each area. And since our friends and family and even or spouse can’t live our life for us or with us everywhere at all time, we carry the whole of our worries around alone, in our own mind. And it can get lonely, especially when our spiritual life with God is just another one of those compartments that we check in with when we get the time.

I love our adult forum series called Faith at Work, where a member of the Church shares about how their work life and faith life connect. For one it is nice to get to know more about you, about what you have dedicated your life to, about how God has called you to be in the world. I love to hear about how you struggle to think about how God has been at work in your life, and I like the confidence it brings you. Knowing not only that you are in this church, but also, in this world with me makes me worry less and gives me hope that God is indeed at work in the world. It makes me smile how many times people have expressed to me on the side, before their presentation, how you worry that your faith is not orthodox enough for the congregation including me. If you only knew how many other people feel the same way, perhaps you wouldn’t feel so strange or worry about whether your faith is adequate.

Now our faith tradition is important, and you should find a way to learn about it as an adult, for though on the children’s Sunday school level doctrine can appear a little childish, over two thousand years of History, there have been a number of very intelligent minds who have wrestled with theology to come up with these ideas. As I am telling my kids as they enter into adult thought and a humanist education, it is not fair to put a Children’s Sunday school understanding of faith up against Nietzsche and every atheist scholar who thinks because Lincoln was unorthodox that he wasn’t a Christian with profound faith who honestly went to his knees in prayer to give his worries to God.

It is part of our tradition that God cannot be stuck in an orthodox box. We don’t find a way to fit into the box of orthodoxy and only then get the chance to meet God. Sure, we think this church is a good place to meet God. Barbara Brown Taylor shares how the churches she worshipped in were foundational for her spirituality as she grew up and into an adult.

“Engaging in ancient rituals with people as ordinary as I was, I watched their faces open to reveal night skies full of stars. Who would ever have imagined they carried so much around with them? Turning aside from everything else we could have been doing, we did things together in those sacred spaces that we did nowhere else in our lives: we named babies, we buried the dead, we sang psalms, we praised God for our lives. When we did, it was as if we were building a fire together, each of us adding something to the blaze so that the light and heat in our midst grew. Yet the light exceeded our fire, just as the warmth did. We did our parts, and then there was more. There was more.” (An Altar in the World. P. 11)

Giving time and energy to God gives us more still, even as Jesus spent plenty of time at the temple, but when he really wanted to get a fundamental truth about God across, he went out in the midst of people’s lives and spoke about common, simple things. The notion behind the doctrine of the incarnation, the idea that Jesus is both fully human and fully God, is to communicate the truth that God does not leave us isolated down here, with all these things to worry about, but come to us in the flesh in the mix of our lives. And with the Holy Spirit within him, while the ruling elites work to consolidate material wealth and power, and display wild extravagance while the poor suffer injustice, and the Romans wreak havoc with terror and violence, and he is pretty sure he will be nailed to one of their crosses, he is still as cool as the other side of the pillow, and finds the Word of God in the birds of the air and the lilies of the field.

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, ²⁹yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. The Spirit of the living God is here, with us, within us, loving us, guiding us, wherever we are. ^30. If God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? ³¹Therefore do not worry.³³But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. ³⁴“So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.