Sermon for the Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity
“Be not anxious”
What is Jesus saying here? He wants us to look at the world with new eyes. “Behold, the fowls of the air”. “Consider the lilies of the field”. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God”. It makes a difference for us in our lives. To behold what he wants us to behold, to consider what he wants us to consider, to seek what he wants us to seek counters the paralysis of our fears, the terror of our anxieties and even our anxieties about our anxieties.
Jesus says “be not anxious” more than once in this gospel. He knows our anxieties and how prone we are to being anxious, quite literally, about “a multitude of things”. It is what we might call “The Martha Syndrome” as diagnosed elsewhere by Jesus: “Martha, Martha, thou art anxious and troubled about a multitude of things” (Luke 10.41). We all have our fears and our worries, our troubles and our concerns, our heart-aches and our despairs. And we can worry ourselves, quite literally, to death about them. What are we anxious about? What are our anxieties? Quite simply, they are our cares, the things which, quite literally, occupy our thoughts; indeed, they can actually possess us.
Our anxieties are the cares which choke and oppress us, the cares which give us great anguish of soul. Our problem, it seems, and the cause of our anxiety is that we are often too careful, quite literally, too full of cares about the wrong things and/or in the wrong way. The cares of this world beset us and overwhelm us. Jesus would have us view the world and its cares in a new way.