Rev. Gusti Linnea Newquist
July 9, 2023
Based on Luke 12:22-26, in response to the question: How do I worry less and live more?
It was meant to be a gift.
All of it. This life, these bodies, the grass, the trees, the sky, the river, this church, our families, our friends, our communities of care and celebration.
All of it was meant to be pure gift.
Most of us, as children, are taught to give thanks for a gift. A verbal thank you directly to the giver. A hand-written note, or perhaps in today’s tech culture, a text. And then we use the gift, we celebrate the gift, we wear the gift, even if it is an ugly sweater that only comes out for the holidays.
A gift is a gift. And we respond with gratitude.
The lilies know how to do this. The ravens and the birds of the air. What a gift it is to simply BE, in this field, through this sky, with an alleluia on our lips and a song of praise in our heart!
We humans, however, have been gifted with something else: brains. And oh, our brains can do marvelous things! Like plan an incredible vacation or memorize great literature or figure out how to send hunks of metal filled with actual people into outer space. Our brains are filled with circuitry and connectivity and neuropathways that allow us to do all kinds of things, including conceive of concepts like past, present, and future. Including the capacity to fret about the future.
To be sure, there is all kind of reason to fret about the future. Will we have enough, will we be enough, will we do enough? And then once we have children, it’s all over, just worry, worry, worry all the time for their safety, for their security, for their well-being. That fear leads us to do some pretty awful things, like fight over resources and crush one another’s spirits in order to lift up our own and claim credit for our own prosperity no matter how much harm it might inflict - even unintentionally - on others. When the apostle Paul tells Timothy that the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil, this is what he is talking about.
But just telling ourselves to stop worrying doesn’t really do the trick, does it? These are natural instincts, after all, biologically driven needs to care for ourselves and our families in a world that can be uncertain at best and downright cruel at worst.
What Jesus is trying to do here, with his own closest companions - the ones who have made a commitment to a mission that is bigger than their own lives, even as it is also emphatically about their own lives - is to put their instincts back in their proper place. It’s not about simply deciding, hey, I’m not going to worry anymore. These instructions come within a context of daily commitment to a shared mission by actively engaging in ritualized practices connected to daily living on the one hand and the vision of Beloved Community on the other. Not unlike what you and I are doing right now in a Sunday morning service of worship, when we set aside one day a week for the sole purpose of placing our worries in the perspective of eternity.
As a rabbi, Jesus has been teaching his students to sing the Psalms, every day, multiple times a day. And then he adds his own prayer on top of it. As a eucharistic minister, Jesus has been teaching his students to see a lump of bread and a thimble full of juice as sufficient sustenance for all their needs. And then he adds his own life on top of it. As a parting instruction, Jesus teaches his students to bathe the entire world with a single drop of water. And then he adds his eternal Spirit on top of it. With each of these ritualized practices, Jesus is teaching us to say thank you to The Giver for every song, and every meal, and every community.
Jesus is teaching us to say thank you for every moment of life. The antidote for worry is gratitude.
Jesus teaches all of this even as he turns toward Jerusalem, facing the fears of his own death, and a painful one at that. In fact, it has been my experience as a pastor that those among us who have the least worry are those who have walked through the valley of the shadow of death and lived to tell the tale. Even Bob Marley, who who implores us not to worry about a thing, ‘cause every little thing is gonna be alright, does so only after surviving a politically-motivated assassination attempt.
At the end of the day, this all really does come to an end. It’s a gift. Don’t take it for granted, Jesus says.
This is why we teach our children to make a commitment to a mission that is bigger than their own lives, even as it is emphatically also about their own lives. This is why we pray, this is why we practice communion, this is why we sing and tell the stories of the Scriptures and sprinkle water on our foreheads.
Is it too self-promoting as a pastor to say the best way to worry less and live more is to go to church!? We are practicing, in this space of grace, how to eat, how to drink, how to share, how to laugh, how to cry, how to heal, how to love. So that when we start to worry, as we know we always will, we will have a touchstone of grace to grab hold of, a lyric in our minds, a prayer in our souls, a phone number in our contacts list to call, and a cultivated, hope-filled, compassionate trust that God is, indeed, always and forever, working all things together for good, for those who live in love and are called to love’s service.
Which is what it really means to be the church.
