No Worries

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
May 25, 2008

No Worries
Psalm 131
Matthew 6:24-34

The gospel reading is probably as familiar to you
as the reading we heard last week,
the reading from Ecclesiastes:
“for everything there is a season
and a time for everything under heaven.”
Jesus is speaking;
Jesus is teaching.
His lesson is clear:
no parables to try to decipher,
no riddles, no rules, no laws.
Simply: don’t worry.
Don’t worry about anything;
trust in the Lord.
God will look after you,
and watch over you.
So do not worry.
This sounds so wonderful,
so comforting.
To know that we can go through life
without a worry.

The problem is, we don’t buy it.
We don’t buy it for a number of reasons.

First and foremost, there is something about us that makes us
quick to worry, quick to be anxious.
Go back more than 3,000 years
to the time of Moses,
the time when Moses led the children of Israel
out of Egypt, out of slavery,
away from more than 400 years of bondage,
off to freedom in the promised land.
Did the children rejoice in God’s goodness?
No: they were barely past the gates of the city
when they began to worry,
began to be concerned about their safety,
their welfare, their comfort.
Time and time again God provided for them,
but nothing seemed to chase worry from their minds,
anxious words from their lips.
They spent the next 40 years worrying their way
to the promised the land.

In book after book in the Bible
we find that Worry and Anxiety
continued to be constant companions
for virtually all God’s children.
And now, more than 3,000 year later,
we still worry, still find anxiety gnawing at us
in countless ways.

Who doesn’t worry?
I have racked up lots of worry-hours over the years.
When I was in college, I worried about my grades,
in the same way our young folks do now.
When I finally finished all my post-graduate work,
I worried about getting a job;
and once I got my first job,
I worried about whether I’d be any good at it.
And of course, I always worried about money.

But Jesus is teaching us such a wonderfully simple lesson:
If you put your trust in the Lord,
then you will have nothing to worry about.
Trust in the Lord;
Have faith in the Lord;
Do not worry;
Fear not.

We hear those words,
we know them,
and we are quick to proclaim,
“we are men and women of faith,
and we do put our trust in the Lord.”
But then we are just as quick to give words to worry
about rising gas prices, and falling home values;
the economy and jobs;
the health and wellbeing of our children;
how to look after aging parents;
whether we will have enough for retirement;
We don’t deny; we can’t deny:
We worry.

And still, Jesus responds,
“Don’t worry;
Fear not.”
We are inclined to say to Jesus,
“that’s so easy for you to say;
you didn’t have a mortgage;
you weren’t the one trying to raise a family,
or look after elderly parents,
or find a new job.”

And Jesus still says, “don’t worry;
Fear not.
God is with you.”

Jesus sounds almost naïve in saying this,
as though he did not have a clue as to how the world works.
In our Confessions, we say with confidence
that Jesus was fully human and fully divine,
but here it does seem that
the human side of him has gone soft
and failed to grasp just how stressful life can be.

But Jesus is right,
we should not worry;
we should trust in the Lord,
put our faith in God.
Where we struggle with this
is that we think a life free of worries,
means a life free of problems.
But Jesus never makes any such promise.

Life comes at us with all its ups and downs;
illness, financial concerns, marriages that fall apart;
jobs that are lost, tree limbs that fall on cars,
these things happen;
life happens.
God doesn’t make a promise
that there will be no tornadoes
nor floods,
nor earthquakes.

What God does promise is the he will be with us always,
walking with us,
in bad times as well as the good,
especially in the bad times.
That’s the very essence of the most well-known Psalm,
Psalm 23:
“even though I walk through
the Valley of the shadow of Death,
you are with me.”
The Psalmist, even in the most dire of situations
feels such a strong sense of intimacy with God,
such a powerful sense of assurance,
that he didn’t say, “God is with me,”
or “He is with me.”
No, it is so much more intimate,
so much more assured: “you are with me.”
The Psalmist was still in the Valley of the Shadow of Death,
surely a place he did not want to be in,
a place that he was eager as can be to get out of.
But he had a quiet sense of assurance
that God was with him,
even there.

The psalmist in our First Lesson learned the same lesson.
He had calmed and quieted himself,
and put his hope and trust in the Lord,
“from this time on and forevermore.”
Come what may.
He had no worries.

Both Psalmists understood that there is no such thing
anywhere on the earth,
anywhere in life,
that could be called a “God-forsaken place”,
for God forsakes no place and no person.

We need never worry because our trust is in the Lord,
our faith is in the Lord,
our hope is in the Lord,
Hope is the very foundation of the gospel,
the very foundation of the message
our Lord Jesus Christ teaches us.
Think of how life would be if we had no hope:
no hope.
Dante Alighieri, the great 13th century Italian poet,
imagined that the sign over the portal
that led to Hell read,
“Abandon all hope, you who enter here.”
(Inferno, Canto 3.9)
Abandon all hope
because we’d be completely severed from God.

But with God, no situation is hopeless.
Which is why we need never worry.
For God is present.
That’s not a naïve statement,
it is statement grounded in the deepest faith.

Ever since Linda Lindamood,
the director of our Early Learning Center,
announced her intention step down from her post
so that she can go back to school in the Fall
parents, teachers, the ELC Board,
the Session and I have all been worried
and anxious about finding her successor.
And why wouldn’t we be: our Early Learning Center
has been a vital ministry of this church for 40 years,
and has an excellent reputation.
We want to continue our strong ministry
to the children of Manassas.
It is so easy to say, as I have been saying,
“Let’s not worry,
God will call a new person to that position.”
But that doesn’t answer the questions any of us have
here and now:
“yes, but will God let us know before September?
What if we don’t have a director in place before school starts?
Who will do all the work that comes with a new school year?”

Responding, “don’t worry” ends up sounding
a bit too much like a platitude --
and yet that is just what Jesus would say to us:
Don’t worry.
We still have to go through all the painstaking and
time-consuming work of doing the search for the new director.
That’s the only way we will be able to discern God’s will.
The harder part of our job will be to trust God,
to work on his timetable
and not to worry.

Ten years ago I worked as a staff chaplain at a hospital
in Somerville, New Jersey.
All of us who were new to the chaplaincy program
were filled with worry as we prepared to serve
patients, families, doctors, nurses and staff.
We worried that we’d find ourselves in a traumatic situation
and not have just the right Bible verse,
the well-crafted words of prayer to soothe and comfort.
What we learned was that the ministry
we were about to embark on
was not a ministry of prayer or the Word,
as much as it was simply a ministry of presence:
just being with someone,
our very presence as chaplains
a reminder that God was with them,
even in their pain and their trauma.

Do you remember how God answered Moses’ question,
as Moses stood by the Burning Bush and asked
by what name he should refer to God?
God responded, “I am who I am”
(Exodus 3:13)
God did not say,
“I am the great and powerful Yahweh,
who shall smite those who don’t bow down before me.”
God simply said, refer to me as “I am”
for God is and always will be,
And God’s self-revelation
and self-expression of love that is Jesus Christ
reinforced this teaching.
“I am”, the present God, always present.
In all our lives, fair weather or foul.

Rabbi Harold Kushner, the author of the classic book
“When Bad Things Happen to Good People”,
wrote in a later book
that as we grow and mature in faith
we learn that God is not there to protect us from pain and loss,
but to keep pain and loss from defining our lives.
(Harold Kushner, The Lord is My Shepherd, 98)

That’s a subtle lesson and it often takes a long time
in our faith journeys for us to grow to the point
where we can accept and understand that.
God is love, not protection,
and, as Paul taught us,
“love bears all things,
hopes all things,
and endures all things.”
Look closely at Paul’s life:
he traveled constantly, often at great risk to himself;
frequently had no idea where his next meal would come from
or even where he would find fresh water.
he was often arrested, thrown into jail, and beaten;
it is likely that one beating was so severe
that it left him permanently disabled.
Still, Paul persevered,
never worrying,
his faith, hope and trust in the Lord.

Life is filled with problems,
from the small and the petty
to the overwhelming and even-life threatening.
But God is there with us, walking with us,
nurturing us,
guiding us if we give him the chance.
The promise that we read in Deuteronomy is true:
underneath us are the everlasting arms.

I find that with every passing year I worry less.
Part of that may be due simply to growing in age:
I hope I have grown
and will continue to grow in wisdom
and not sweat the small stuff.
But I think most of it is due to my faith:
my trust in the Lord.
Yes, I still worry about things:
but I know all I need to do
whenever I get myself worked up
is close my eyes and say,
“Lord, are you with me?”
And the answer will always be,
“I am”
AMEN