A Sermon for Proper 20 A
Let us pray:
Grant us, Lord, not to
be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now,
while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those
that shall endure; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things… Well, if that isn’t a prayer for our times, I don’t know what is. In case you hadn’t noticed, anxiety is all around us. There are the daily gyrations on Wall Street and the ever-changing government plans to stabilize financial markets; the people who have lost savings in the midst of this financial meltdown; the folks who’ve lost homes to foreclosures and jobs to an ailing economy. Looking south and east, we see the people of Haiti, Louisiana and Texas, hit again by powerful hurricanes and wondering when, if ever, they will be able to rebuild their lives; in Iraq and Afghanistan war continues and some of us have loved ones at risk; Oh, and aren’t we in the middle of an historic presidential campaign in which the future direction of the country is at stake in a once-in-a generation way?
For you, perhaps, anxiety is closer to home -- illness; challenges in your family; uncertainty about your future. There are certainly more than enough earthly things to be anxious about in our time.
Yet we have no monopoly on
anxiety. Consider the anxiety of the
people of
Anxiety is a universal human phenomenon down the ages. We worry; we’re anxious; fearful – sometimes, it seems, for good reason; sometimes over trivial matters. Whatever the cause, anxiety is familiar ground to us all. It is good then to ask God’s help with anxiety as we do in today’s collect: Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things… Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure.
But what might it mean to love things heavenly? What are [the things] that shall endure to which we should hold fast? These words could mean that we should escape earthly anxiety by focusing on a heavenly future. Thinking that life in this world doesn’t really matter and looking for pie in the sky bye and bye is one way of lessening daily stress - but not a way that God has much interest in. The world we live in with all its anxieties is the world God created and loves. The people facing the myriad challenges around us are the people Jesus died for. The folks suffering pain and loss are the people whom God calls us to love and serve. Writing off life in this world as a way out of earthly anxiety is not a faithful Christian option.
What then? What are [those
things] that shall endure that we should hold fast to in an anxious-making
world? In his famous hymn to love in I
Corinthians 13,
Consider faith. Faith is not believing a set of ideas about God. Faith, rather, is a relationship with God – a relationship of trust such as we have with the people we trust our lives, too -- only more so. We can trust God with our souls, our lives, our sorrows, our joys and the uncertainties of our lives – and when we do, our fear and anxiety lessen.
But it is important to be clear
about what trust in God promises and what it does not. I’d like to tell you that trusting God means
that everything in our lives will turn out how we want; that all of our
anxieties will resolve themselves quickly in the ways we most desire. I’d like to tell you this -- but I can’t,
because it’s not true. To trust God with
the anxious-making realities of our lives does not mean that the challenges we
face will work out in the way we would like. Experience teaches that life is full “change
and chance,” and that things sometimes don’t go the way we want them to. God does not control the course of the world
like a puppet master pulling strings. God
has given creation freedom, and God will not take that freedom away. Nor does trusting God mean there will be no
uncertainty or pain or loss or death in the lives of God’s people. We need only look to Jesus’ agony in the
What then does trust in God mean? It means that we do not live in our situations of fear and anxiety alone. We have been given the Holy Spirit, and we have been given each other. In the midst of our insecurities and uncertainties, we are sustained by the loving presence of God and God’s people.
I recall a friend telling me about a time when the future course of her life was quite uncertain and in many ways out of her control. She had a dear hope for a certain vocational path in life, but moving forward on the road she desired depended in large measure on the decisions of other people. The uncertainty and lack of control over her future made her very anxious.
She said that two things helped her through the anxiety of that time -- the prayer, encouragement, challenge, and support of the Christian community she was part of and God’s promise to be with her – no matter what happened. She told me about one particular time of prayer when she was wakeful with anxiety in the middle of the night. She sensed Jesus present with her offering a promise -- that whatever happened, it would finally be OK. She wasn’t promised that her life would turn out as she wished, but rather that whatever happened in her life, God would be with her. That promise of God’s abiding presence is the basis of faith. The God who is with us in all circumstances of life is the God whom we can trust.
Hope is related to faithful trust – it is, if you will, the future dimension of trusting our lives to the God who is with us now and always. As I’ve already said of trust, hope does not mean an assurance that the future will turn out as we wish. Hope in God is not the same thing as optimism that the future will be all rosy.
Christian hope is actually
something much more profound and, well – hopeful. It is the conviction that the God who created
the universe out of nothing is always in the businesses of creating new and
unexpected futures of brining life into being where there was no reasonable
expectation for any such thing.
Again and again in the Scriptures,
God creates a new future beyond hope and beyond expectation. Who could ever have expected that God would
enter the world as a little baby, would welcome sinners and outcasts to God’s
banquet table, would willingly submit to a slave’s shameful death -- and in
that seemingly hopeless act, to triumph over death itself?
The God of creative, unexpected
newness offers hope for a new future new life when we are living in anxiety. What that new reality will be, when or how it
will emerge, we cannot know, for its very nature is to be unexpected. But we do know it will come, and that knowledge
gives us hope.
In fact, it is precisely the unpredictable character of God’s acts in creating a new future that gives us hope. Christian hope is rooted not in what we on our own can make of our lives, but in what we make of our lives in and with God’s acts of creative newness, acts that are as unpredictable as the creation itself, acts as astounding as the raising of the dead. Our hope rests in the God who creates out of nothing, who “gives life to the dead and brings into existence the things that do not exist.” (Romans 4:17) When we hope in such a God we are less anxious about earthly things.
Finally, there is love, or rather Love with a capital “L.” The God to whom we trust our lives; the God in whom we hope is none other than Love. Love is the divine faithfulness that stays with us through thick and thin. Love is the creative energy which brought the universe into being and defeated death in Jesus’ resurrection. Love is the overflowing Life that is always bringing new and unexpected futures into being. Love is the abundant generosity of which we heard in today’s Gospel; the graciousness that gives to everyone in full whether they’ve worked a long day or a short hour. Love is the open arms of Jesus stretched wide on the cross to embrace and hold us fast, no matter what.
Faith, hope, love abide, these three. These are what endure. They are what we can hold fast to in times of anxiety.
Christian tradition calls faith, hope, and love the three theological virtues. One thing that means is that these three are not so much human choices as heavenly gifts. We cannot will ourselves into having faith, hope and love in anxious times. But we can ask God to give us what God wants us to have. We can pray for these gifts. We can ask God to give us these heavenly virtues and help us to hold fast to them in the midst of our anxious world – and we can trust that God will respond.
Let us pray:
Grant us, Lord, not to
be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while
we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to faith, hope
and love, the three virtues that shall endure; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
The Rev. Jack Zamboni
September 21, 2008