by CCW | 9 September 2018 17:00
What could be more anxious making than talking about being anxious? Anxiety R’ us! Big time. And therein lies the problem. W.H. Auden in 1947 wrote a long and largely unread prose poem entitled “The Age of Anxiety” which provided a convenient image for our world and day, itself a culture of anxiety. The title more than the work itself has had considerable influence in capturing our uncertainties. To be fair, it is not easy to say what exactly Auden meant by anxiety. Yet it has become the default word for so many features of our contemporary culture. His solution, near as one might be able to discern, seems to be the idea of mutual sympathy or mutual love for one another even towards those who are really strangers. That is, I think, powerfully suggestive along with the ideas in the poem about the forms of modern self-consciousness which add to the anxiety, on the one hand, and to the antidote of sympathy, on the other hand, through a kind of toleration – not wanting to disappoint and as such being willing to go along with others.
While there may be something to this not wanting to disappoint others and simply being willing to go along in a kind of sympathy for one another, even the beginnings of a kind of care for one another, it seems to me to fall far short of the antidote to anxiety which today’s Gospel story presents. I have on occasion called it ‘the Gospel of Anxiety’ even though it is really the antidote to anxiety but in ways which are deeply challenging to our preoccupations and concerns.
The words anxious and anxiety are relatively modern, appearing first in English via the German in the 17th century and really only taking flight in the late 19th century before becoming rooted in our lexical imaginations in the 20th and going viral, as things only can, in the 21st century. Tyndale’s 16th century English translation of today’s Gospel does not use the word anxious or anxiety. He has rendered Jesus’ words as “be not careful”, an idea which is also found in Luke’s story about Martha and Mary where, as Tyndale puts it, Jesus says, “Martha Martha thou carest and arte troubled about many things”. Here his “be not careful” was changed in the King James Version of 1611 to “take no thought,” while it more or less keeps to Tyndale in the passage from Luke with “Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things.” It was only in the late 19th and 20th centuries, that the shift in today’s Gospel was made to “be not anxious” as in the Revised Version as well as other translations, only to be changed, yet again in the New Revised Versions to “do not worry.” Interesting shifts, to say the least.
Angst. It is hard not to see the influence of 19th century psychology through the figures of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Freud in terms of the weight of meaning given to the German word angst, a word which has entered into our own vocabulary. Regardless of the translations, what is more important is what Jesus says about a certain aspect, dare I say, an universal aspect of our humanity, and what he provides as the antidote. You see, the language we use to describe the human condition always reveals our assumptions about ourselves and about our thinking about our world.
Tyndale’s “be not careful” is quite faithful to the Greek of Matthew’s text. A moment’s reflection shows us exactly what this means. We are easily overcome and overburdened by a multitude of cares. Be not careful, however, does not mean be careless! It is always, as another poet, T.S. Eliot rightly noted, about caring in the right way: “teach us to care and not to care”!
What then is the right way? Well, I can only point you to what Jesus is saying here. Take thought to his words. What is he saying? He is, first of all, acknowledging that there are struggles and problems, suffering and hardship; in short, cares. But how we view those things goes to the issue of how we look at ourselves and our experiences. Jesus’ words recall us to the wonder of God’s Providence as applied especially to our humanity. And he does so, wonderfully, I think, by recalling us to our relationship to the natural world and to the dignity of our humanity in the eyes of God.
“Behold the fowls of the air,” he says. “Consider the lilies of the field,” he says. “But seek ye first,” he says, “the kingdom of God.” Wow. We are at once connected to everything else in the created order and established in our human dignity in relation to our life with God and in God. The counter to our being full of cares, full of preoccupations, full of worries, full of anxieties, is simply about beholding, considering, seeking what God sees, knows, and wants for us. There is, and can be no greater antidote. It is the one thing needful. It is really all about how we think about things: thinking with God or buried in our own confusions? Here in our liturgy we have a way of thinking and being with God in Christ, rejoicing “in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.” We don’t need to be defined by our worldly cares and concerns.
“Be not careful”? “Take no thought”? “Be not anxious”? “Don’t worry”? Well, it doesn’t mean “don’t worry; Be happy” exactly, but it means to look at things in an entirely new way that changes everything. What is that new way? Seeing everything in relation to God and to God’s care for our world and for our humanity. Forget the love of God for his creation and for his humanity and there can only be anxiety. “Be not anxious”, knowing the love of God for you and how that moves us to a profound and deep love of one another.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XV, 2018
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2018/09/09/sermon-for-the-fifteenth-sunday-after-trinity-8/
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