Luke 12:22-34 / 11 Pentecost C / 12 August 2007 / Holy Trinity - Hacienda Heights, CA
In Nomine Iesu
“Do not be anxious about your life,” Jesus says to us. He would free us from the ultimate tyranny - anxiety. It keeps us up at night, it distracts us during our day, it chews at our digestive tract. “Don’t be anxious - about your food, your body, your clothing, your life.” Anxiety robs you of the joy of life, the joy of being, the joy of living as a child of God receiving everything as a gift from the hand of a loving Father. Jesus would spare you such distractions.
“Life is more than food, and the body more than clothing.” You wouldn’t know that if you looked around you, would you? From our obsessions with calories, fat grams, and trans fat to our fetishes with nouvelle cuisine and fine cooking life seems to be all about food. We can’t go anywhere without there being food. You pump your car with gas, and there’s a Subway on the premises just in case you need a 6-inch sub. And clothing? The devil may not wear Prada, but we sure are aware of what we put on our feet and what we wouldn’t be caught dead wearing. Life in southern California is defined by food and clothing, along with endless entertainment, which is one big reason our lives are so disordered. Disordered eating, disordered priorities, disordered lives of which Linday, Paris, Britney, and Nicole are simply the most tragically visible.
Anxiety. It eats away at us hour by hour, minute by minute. It’s like rust, corrosion of the soul, chewing us up from the inside out, until we are nothing more than a shell, a rusted out hulk in a junkyard.
Don’t be anxious. To our ears, that’s like saying, “Don’t yawn.” Anxiety rises. The housing market is tanking, stocks are a roller coaster, my retirement fund is in shambles, they’re laying off people at work, the kids need new shoes (and not just any new shoes, mind you). And Jesus says, “Don’t worry.” Hey, Jesus. Have you taken a look at the stock market recently? How about the price of a gallon of gas or a gallon of milk? Don’t be anxious?
That’s right. He’s the Lord who died and rose. Listen to Him. He knows a thing or two about anxiety. Or don’t you think that being crucified for the sins of the world doesn’t involve an anxious moment or two? Look at the birds and the lilies. You’re going to have to get away from the mall to do that, and that’s part of our problem right there. We basically covered all the dirt with manmade asphalt and concrete so its hard to learn anything from the creation any more. Our first article textbook has been paved shut.
Look at the birds. They don’t sow or reap or store stuff, yet God feeds them. Now I know what you’re thinking. Yeah, right. They fly around all day looking for food, and they work their feathered tails off building nests. But you’re missing the point. They can’t control their world. They can only play the hand they’re dealt. We build air-conditioned malls and freeways; they can’t do that. They can only fly around and grab whatever God is giving them at the moment. And here’s the clincher - you are more valuable to God than a bird. God gave His Son to die for you. That’s what you’re worth.
Incidentally - do you think that anxiety lengthens life? Can you add a day, a month, a year by being anxious? No. The opposite. It shortens life, and it makes life miserable.
Consider the lilies. Those are flowers that grow in fields. We’re talking wildflowers here. Again, you may have to take a fieldtrip. They don’t weave, spin, or go shopping, yet even Solomon with all his bling was not arrayed like this. What do we do when we want things to look pretty? We put flowers on it. There is nothing more beautiful than flowers. God at His outrageously lavishly creative best. And you know what happens to flowers in a few days. Dried up, rotten, brown, compost, gone. So work from lesser to greater: If God expends all that creative energy on flowers, which are here today and are compost tomorrow, what about you, creature destined for eternal life? Do you think He might not care just a little bit more about you for whom He’s invested the life blood of His Son?
“Little faith ones,” He calls His disciples, and us. That’s better than “unbeliever,” which would be “no faith ones.” Little faith. Puny, limited, myopic, narrow faith. We trust God with the big stuff - sin, death, salvation. But the little stuff? The details, the day to day things. Well, that’s another matter. That’s under our control, we think. We’re in charge of that, we think. The anxiety builds and the birds and flowers start to look pretty smart, if not downright faithful.
Fr. Kenneth Korby, who was known for his little aphorisms, said this: Anxiety is the liturgy we offer to our false gods. Idols always consume their communicants. You want to know where your idols are? Follow the anxiety trail. It will lead you straight to your false gods who promise everything and deliver nothing. And you know where that anxious road is going to point? Straight into the idolatrous heart that beats to the rhythm that says “God doesn’t know what He’s doing. I need to help Him. Better yet, I need to be god in place of God.” You want anxiety? There is nothing more anxious-making than trying to be God.
Here’s the deal, which is really no deal at all. Your Father in heaven knows what you need, even before you ask Him. All that stuff the pagans of the world run after with all their heart, soul, and mind - clothing, shoes, food, drink, house, home, spouse, children, land, animals, government, weather, health, protection - your Father in heaven knows that you need them. And He knows best how and when and in what proportion to give it. You are died for, baptized, a child of the heavenly Father, an heir of eternal life.
So you, dear disciple of you Jesus, you focus your seeking on the kingdom, on Christ and His cross, on the gifts of Baptism, the forgiveness of your sin (including your self-idolatry and all its anxieties), on the bread that is His Body and the wine that is His Blood. That’s the kingdom stuff. The place of promise where God is there for you for sure. Let that be the center of your visual field, and all those peripheral things, will be added to you as well. Oh, it may Ked’s instead of Prada, but shoes are shoes - you walk on them and then they wear out. It may be Goodwill instead of Gucci, but clothing is still clothing. It may be a simple spaghetti dinner cooked at home instead of the Spaghetti Factory, but you get the idea.
Faith clings to God’s promise in Jesus. The Father is giving you the kingdom; the rest is just paperwork. God promised Abraham a family, a nation, a land, an offspring through whom the world would be blessed. At 99 years of age, when his strength was dried up, his wife was as barren as the desert, and his closest heir was some deadbeat relative named Eliezer of Damascus. Abraham believed God, over and against all that he saw and knew, he trust the promise of God, and God credited this trust as righteousness. The justified live by faith.
Hebrews reminds us that faith is the promise of something hoped for but not yet seen. If you can see it, you don’t have to believe it. Last Sunday, I was dozing in front of the TV, which is about all you can do in front of a TV, and I was watching one of those really popular preachers out of Texas with tons of mousse in his hair who shall otherwise remain nameless. His message was that you are in God’s favor. Now in the Scriptures, the favor of God is His undeserved kindness toward sinners for Jesus’ sake, meaning that God doesn’t crush you like a bug on a windshield and send you to a well-deserved hell together with the devil and demons not because you’re so lovable but solely because Jesus, the Son of God in the flesh, suffered and died as your Substitute.
Now this moussed-up guy on TV interpreted the “favor of God” as God wants to give you favors, so if you really believe, the traffic jam in front of you will part like the Red Sea before the Israelites, you’ll get the best parking place at Disneyland, your kids will get the best grades and get into the best schools, that sort of thing. I was alternately fascinated and mortified - like watching a slow motion train wreck. Every single Bible passage he cited was either distorted or chopped off to exclude the part about Jesus dying for you.
That’s not faith! That’s religious nonsense, and this self-absorbed culture of ours that believes it is “special” and deserves “favors” from God eats this stuff up and can’t seem to get enough of it. Thousands of well-dressed suburbanite bobble heads lapping this garbage up about how God wants to do favors for them and has rigged the divine casino to make every roll of their dice a winner. What a pile of dung in the holy name of God!
Tell that to Abraham, who left his comfortable home in the affluent suburbs of Ur to wander around in tents like a homeless person and the best he got was a grave in the promised land. Or look at that whole hall of fame of faith in Hebrews, where it says, “These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.”
Here’s the Gospel, good news you can bank on: It is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Forgiveness of yours sins, eternal life, salvation in Christ. It’s all yours. And the rest of that stuff that causes all sorts of anxiety, just hold that with a nicely dead hand. Give it away, do your banking in heaven where thieves and moths and interest rates and taxes don’t chisel away at your treasure. Rejoice and be glad in this - you have a million bucks worth of forgiveness, life, and salvation stored up for you that you can draw on, use, live in, and enjoy through faith in Christ.
And if that means hand me down clothes, spaghetti dinners, cheap chianti, and less than designer shoes so be it. The kingdom ours remaineth.
Posted On: August 15th, 2007 at 11:41am by dtp[ + ]
Osteen, and the WoF manics look for relief from anxiety by God negating the symptoms, poverty the problem - God gives you wealth. Family the problem, with enough faith God turns them into a 1950's television family. Car repairs the problem, here comes the mercedes, wrapped up in a bow - fish symbol already there in place, stations pre-tuned to TBN or the CCRN (Calvary Chapel Radio Network)
How different the normal folk of the faith in Hebrews 11. They walked in a relationship, knowing their God was faithful enough to trust.
That whether they were the ones from last Sunday, like Abel Enoch, Noah and Sarah, or the ones this week who are sawn in two, beaten and tortured.
Who wait for us to finish the race, knowing that our trust is not in our finishing ahead, but trusting Christ to complete our faith, for He himself authored it.
Posted On: August 22nd, 2007 at 11:17pm by FW SONNEK
Not sure i agree completely about osteen and the rest.
It seems to me that if they professional movivators at large corporations selling things, they would seem utterly normal and companies would pay them big bucks to come and give the troops a positive lift and motivation. sadly... very very few of their words would need to be changed to move to that forum.
What they say really DOES work. a virtue that hitler. amway, family values sermons preached from some LCMS pulpits, the boyscouts, AA, pharisaic morality , and liquid drano all have in common.
While I, in view of a dead Jew on a cross happen to be very suspicious of anything that claims to ``work`` in church, it is this very practicality that makes what they say in context so very seductive and evil.
True evil usually wears a rather benign face it seems.
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