“Therefore I say unto you, Be not anxious”
Perhaps no words of Jesus in the Gospels speak more directly to us. We live in a world of fears and anxieties. Angst ‘r us, to borrow from the deeper sense of dread named by Kierkegaard in the 19th century at feeling rudderless and without direction in a world of choices and possibilities, on the one hand, and a world which seems to be falling apart all around us, on the other hand. This sense of ‘endism’ is crippling and paralyzing. But the point, as the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke reminds us, is that the problem is not with the world “for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors,” our fears, our anxieties.
It is really all about us, something which the initial chapters of Genesis go to great lengths to remind us. The world as opposed to God is evil but that is not the truth of creation; it is, after all, very good. We turn the world and ourselves as creatures within the good order of creation against God. The problem is with us but God is greater than our folly and confusion, greater than our fears and worries, greater than our sin and folly.
This gospel provides the antidote to our anxieties and fears about our life, about the things that worry us. It offers us a wee bit more than Bobby McFerrin’s famous lyrical song, “Don’t worry, be happy/In every life we have some trouble/ But when you worry you make it double” (1988). Which is true enough. But what Jesus says here is something deeper, something more profound. It speaks exactly to the meaning of Reece’s baptism, itself a reminder to us of our own baptisms, and as such a poignant reminder of the grace and goodness of God.
In our fears and anxieties, we pit the world against ourselves and God. We forget that this is God’s world and that we are his children, his dearly beloved. So much so that God gave his only-begotten son for us. The gospel recalls us to the wondrous pageant of creation and to the truth of ourselves as made in God’s image and called to act out of that image in terms of our care and respect for the created world and for one another. Jesus strongly suggests that we can learn from the birds of the air and from the lilies of the field; in short, from beholding the providence of God at work in nature and in human affairs.
We forget that this gospel reading belongs to the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus undertakes to set before us the great ethical teachings that belong to human freedom and dignity. They turn the world on its head; they turn us around to look at things in an entirely different light. It is, we might say, a kind of continual new birth, a renewing of the radical meaning of our baptisms. Incorporated into the death and life of Christ, we are made the children, named in God’s own naming of himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. New birth, new life means a constant renewing of that new life of the Spirit in us.
This is the point that frees us from our fears and anxieties. Not by being careless; not by being thoughtless. The King James Version of the Bible has the phrase “take no thought” for what in the 20th century has been changed to “be not anxious”. Tyndale, even earlier, had “be not careful”, meaning don’t be full of cares, full of worries and fears.
But the antidote for you and for me, for Reece and for those who have care for him, his mother and father, his grandfather and grandmother, and, of course, his ggmom, his great-grandmother, Dora, is not to be careless and thoughtless, but to think and care in the right way. And this is the power and truth of the Gospel and the Church’s witness and life in the Gospel. We are reminded of who we are in the sight of God and enter, as Reece does today, into the life-long process of knowing even as we are known in God’s all-embracing love.
And that makes all the difference. It frees us from our fears and anxieties because it frees us to God. And that is the whole point of baptism. We are freed to God and to one another and to the world as God’s world and ourselves as the children of God embraced in his all-sufficient love and care. Reece is the sermon of today
“Therefore I say unto you, Be not anxious”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 15, 2022
10:30am