A Reflection for Ninth Sunday After Pentecost

I have a cartoon taped on our kitchen cabinet that pictures a man in bed late at night. He's sitting up, scribbling on a note pad, and talking on the phone. In the caption he tells his friend, "When I can't sleep, I find that it sometimes helps to get up and jot down my anxieties." Every square centimeter of the bedroom walls is covered with dozens of scribbled worries — war, recession, killer bees, aging, calories, sex, sickness, and so on.

           As a natural born worrier, I love these characters with their exaggerated sense of responsibility. I make lists, then mark things off after I do them. I'd rather be an hour early than five minutes late. Brooding and internal soliloquies come naturally to me. My exterior demeanor is calm, but my internal engines are always racing, and at night when it's time to sleep I can't find the "off" switch. Truly relaxing is a challenge. Overcompensation? That's my specialty. Obsessing about a trivial detail? I've perfected the art. As the cartoon puts it, just think of all the bad stuff that will happen if I don't worry enough.

           I try not to be too hard on myself…

           Not all worries are merely imagined or artificial; some are genuinely real. There are legitimate reasons to worry. Among my friends and family are divorce, unemployment, eating disorders, bad mortgages, chemotherapy treatments, sleep disorders and struggling kids (who have great parents). And when you look at the larger world there are environmental disasters on an unprecedented scale, financial stresses and across the international landscape wars and rumors of wars… Although we manufacture some worries by projecting our anxiety onto the world, other worries are sane responses to an insane world.

           The gospel for this week anticipates our personal neuroses and our legitimate anxieties, but not in the way that we might want or expect. Jesus, observes Diarmaid MacCulloch in his book Christianity, plays by a different set of rules. In the gospels, observes MacCulloch, "Jesus is his own authority." The coming kingdom that Jesus announced "produced outrageous inversions of normality," like paying a laborer who worked only one hour an entire day's wages. Jesus subverts our cultural conventions and natural intuitions with a sense of relish. And such is his advice to us about anxiety.

           "Don't worry about your life," says Jesus.

           "Don't be afraid."

 Instead of hoarding money, give it away. Instead of worrying about yourself, care for others. Beyond all your prudent planning for the cares of life, abandon yourself to a fatherly God who is all-powerful and intimately personal. After you've hedged every bet and calculated every contingency, enjoy the beauty of the morning birdsong and the glory of a field of flowers. Having fretted over a life of worries, whether artificial or genuine, consider an act of faith. Live like what you believe is actually true. After you've run yourself ragged like a godless "pagan" (12:30), says Jesus, rest in the knowledge of a benevolent Being.

           How so?

           "Your Father knows what you need" (Luke 12:22, 30, 32).

I'm not sure how to live free from worry, anxiety and fear, but I did recently appreciate the wisdom of the over 90-year-old Huston Smith in his book Tales of Wonder, Adventures Chasing the Divine: An Autobiography. Born to Methodist missionary parents in rural China in 1920, Smith began as a Methodist pastor and went on to enjoy a distinguished career as a scholar of world religions at Washington University, MIT, Syracuse, and Berkeley. His book The World's Religions, first published in 1958, has sold 2.5 million copies as an introductory university textbook on the subject.

Smith was married to his beloved Kendra for over seventy years. They lost an adult child to cancer and a grand-daughter to a mysterious murder. He recounts his encounters with Huxley, the Dali Lama, and his decades of globetrotting. In the second half of the book he describes his personal Christian faith, and how he "never saw a religion I didn't like." As he approached the end of his long life, Smith says that he was absolutely convinced of at least one thing: "We are All in good hands."

Adapted from “Don’t Worry About Your Life” by Daniel B. Clendenin, in Journey with Jesus

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GOD BLESS US TO GROW AND THRIVE – IN 2025!

May God Bless you and yours as we journey together through this Pentecost Season…

May God Awaken, Inspire and Challenge you with the Surprises of The Spirit!

As we see, appreciate and embrace the Great Gift of God with us

May God’s Spirit empower us to

“expect great things from God and to attempt great things for God”…

and

May God Continue to Bless Union Church!

-Pastor Mark