“Be not anxious about your life”
“Be not anxious,” Jesus tells us three times; the word itself appears six times in in today’s Gospel. Anxious about what? About our life, about “what we shall eat, what we shall drink, or wherewithal shall we be clothed.” These are all the things about which our humanity has always worried. Thus these anxieties or “cares,” to be more precise, belong to the long, long story of what it means to be human.
Our anxieties, ancient and modern, are about how we think about ourselves and our world. What Jesus says in this Gospel belongs to that story and offers a fuller view of what it means to be human. If we are anxious about our life, as Jesus says, it is because we have become disconnected from the very source of life itself. Yet this is all part of the biblical story of creation, fall and redemption, of our being restored to the truth and purpose of our humanity as made for God and for one another, made in God’s image. Our anxieties are us in our separation from ourselves, from creation and above all, from God. Our anxieties are us in the disorder and disarray of ourselves.
To be not anxious is to be recalled to ourselves. Why? Because in Christ Jesus we are “a new creation,” as Paul puts it in Galatians. This is wonderfully illustrated for us in the baptisms of Samuel and Mary this morning. They make visible for us in “large letters,” as it were, who we are in Christ. They remind us of our own calling and vocation that is the true antidote to the pressing anxieties of our anxious age. How? By being born again, as John makes clear in the Gospel reading for the Holy Baptism for those of Riper Years, namely those who can answer for themselves in the vows that express the true nature of human agency in responding to God’s grace received.
To be born again is to be born anew, born upward into the things of God; literally, born from above (γεννηθη ανωθεν). That being born anew is the counter to all our anxieties and concerns. Why? Because it is about ourselves in Christ and Christ in us and that makes all the difference. We are given a new way to look at life by being gathered back to the source and end of all life in God. It means death and resurrection; the radical new life in Christ. This is given to us through revelation in the witness of the Scriptures and the life of the apostolic Church. It does not negate or destroy nature and human experience but perfects and restores all that belongs to our humanity.
It belongs to the theological task of the recapitulation or gathering of all things back to God from whom all things come. Baptism is the sign and the thing signified of that gathering of ourselves to God. The Gospel teaches us that this is cosmic in its scope; it concerns the whole created order and our place in it, a strong reminder of our connection to everything in the good order of God’s creation and, above all, to our place in that order. And what is that? It is about how we are loved by God as being uniquely and especially made in his image as rational and spiritual beings.
Our anxieties turn on our thinking and doing. Ours is very much the culture of anxiety. T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” written shortly after the devastations of the First World War, describes the wilderness of modernity. “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” he says, while clinging desperately to the fragments of the civilisation we have destroyed, the broken bits and pieces of human lives in a world where we confront the harsh reality of so many deaths. “I had not thought death had undone so many,” he says, echoing Dante’s vision in the Inferno. Such is the Unreal City of our doing, an image perhaps of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
W.H. Auden’s verse poem “The Age of Anxiety” is set in the time of the Second World War and on the night of All Souls’. In the prologue he observes that “in wartime … everybody is reduced to the anxious status of a shady character or a displaced person,” clinging to the hopes and illusions of some sort of cozy comfort against “the universal disorder of the world outside.” It is about finding some sort of solace in the company of others to deal with our fears and doubts through a kind of shared misery and sympathy. Auden notes the disconnect between our social and economic lives and our private mental life. All this sturm und drang, storm and stress, this anxiety is really about us.
For the ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia, there was a fearful uncertainty about the natural world, a sense that chaos was perhaps greater than the order of things in nature, in the form of storm, famine and flood. The gods themselves were divided and in conflict. For modernity, the fearful uncertainty is about ourselves in a culture of moral nihilism. We are uncertain and unclear about what is good and right to do and be. We are afraid of ourselves and afraid of one another.
Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation” calls attention to the impact of the smart phone and social media on our culture. This points to our obsessions with technology which is really about an over-extension of a certain kind of thinking: a knowing how to do things kind of reasoning but with no clue about why or what, the absence of a knowing what and what-for kind of reasoning. Iain McGilchrist identifies this in terms of too much left-brain thinking, unbalanced and disconnected from the right-brain, focusing on this and that without any sense of the whole within which the parts find their place and meaning. How paradoxical is our technological optimism in thinking that the solution to all our problems is to be found in what we create when they are the very things that unmake us and contribute to our misery and anxiety.
Aristotle argued that the life of the gods is supremely good and that it is the life of contemplation; thus for us our highest happiness must be found “among human activities which [are] most akin to the life of the gods.” Yet the problem is that the life of the gods is too high for us; there is no possibility of friendship between human beings and the gods. This is the tragic vision of Greek antiquity: to seek a good which is beyond us and unattainable by us.
All this is part of the human story about self-understanding to which the Scriptures speak about what it means to be human. “What is man that thou are mindful of him?”, the Psalmist asks, recalling us to the wonder of creation and to our place within it and in relation to God himself and the angels. This is the wonder of today’s Gospel in the strong verbs that awaken us to who we are in the sight of God: behold, consider, seek. Somehow we can learn from observing the things of nature understood as the gifts of God in creation. We can learn from the birds of the air and from the lilies of the field but only as belonging to the kingdom of God. We can learn, in other words, from natural reason and supernatural revelation because both are from God. We can learn in the face of the evil of our day, the evil that negates the very truth upon which it depends.
Michaelmas reminds us that “there was war in heaven and that Michael and his angels fought against the dragon,” “that old serpent, called the devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world;” a kind of summary of all that opposes and denies God and the goodness of creation. Yet “they overcame him” not by any power angelical or technological but “by the blood of the Lamb,” Jesus Christ. That is what we receive in holy Baptism; the grace of Christ overcomes all sin and evil, all fear and death, and all our anxieties. Such is death and resurrection. The challenge of our lives is to live what we receive by Word and Sacrament, by faith, hope and charity. For that is the life of Christ in us and for us. Dignity and grace are bestowed upon us as members of Christ, as the children of God, and the inheritors of the kingdom of heaven. God seeks something more and greater for our humanity and he is faithful in spite of all our shortcomings and follies and anxieties.
Here is the beginning and the continuing of our life in Christ, the beginning in Holy Baptism, its continuing in Holy Communion. The pilgrimage of our souls in grace is about learning what belongs to who we are in God’s eternal knowing and loving of us. Be not anxious because you are born anew and upward into what God has given to us. “Be not anxious about your life” because Christ is your life.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 15 (Eve of Michaelmas)
September 28th, 2025