Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri
The Worship of God · August 8, 2010
Litany of Praise
From Psalm 50
The Lord of creation summons the earth from the rising of the sun to the setting.
Our God comes and does not keep silence.
“Call on me in the day of your trouble and I will deliver you.”
Those who bring thanksgiving as their sacrifice know the salvation of God.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost;
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,
World without end. Amen. Amen.
Pastoral Prayer
Jacob Thorne
O God of our creation, God of every time and every season, we give thanks for the rhythms of work and rest, for places that mark our years. For the eternal waves of the ocean, for the steadfast presence of the mountains, for the special vacation spots, summer camps, favorite restaurants, for trips that are made, and the homecomings when we return, we give thanks.
We are grateful for blessings discovered, for answers when we didn’t even know the questions to ask. For those who return to us and those who leave, we are grateful. Teach us, O God, that your presence is woven into the coming and the goings of our lives. And having gone sometimes to our own lonely places, call us to return with you to live and work, to worship and play, to serve and love.
Hear us now as we say together the prayer your Son taught us…
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: for thine is the kingdom, the power, and glory, forever. Amen.
New Testament Lesson
Luke 12:22:31
He said to his disciples, “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds! And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? If then you are not able to do so small a thing as that, why do you worry about the rest? Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you—you of little faith? And do not keep striving for what you are to eat and what you are to drink, and do not keep worrying. For it is the nations of the world that strive after all these things, and your Father knows that you need them. Instead, strive for his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well.
Message
Consider the Lilies
Tim Carson
Therefore. That’s a big word, therefore is. It points to what you should do in light of what preceded it. And what preceded it was the text we plunged into last week, the story of the man who built his bigger barns only to discover that his life was required of him. And in our exploration of that parable of Jesus, we discovered several things.
For one, we were reminded that life does not consist in the abundance of our possessions. And more importantly, we dove deep into the purpose for life, the discovery of our true self created in the image of God. When we abide there, we sense that we have enough, that the grace of God is truly sufficient for us. We are free of grasping after illusions.
All that preceded the “therefore” of today’s reading. Therefore…since you are not compelled to grasp after all these things you believe will complete and fulfill you … therefore … “Do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, or what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing.”
I really appreciate that one word, “therefore,” especially in light of what Jesus lays on us after that, because it really, really matters that we have enough to eat, a place to stay, and have something to wear. Without those and other essentials, life is exceedingly tough, and some people know that very, very personally.
But Jesus is not saying that we don’t need those things; indeed, we do, and later in the passage, he recognizes that: In the same way that God provides for the lilies that neither toil nor spin, so God will also provide for you. The point is rather about trust. Do you trust that God will provide, and affirm God’s abundance rather than being preoccupied with scarcity? The same Jesus taught us the prayer that includes the petition, “Give us our daily bread.”
And the prescription for this mindset, this attitude of faith, is a very simple one. Rather than pouring all our energy into worry about what we don’t have or might not have – because that anxiety won’t add a day to our lives – we are to focus instead on God’s kingdom that is among us, within us, and then all these other things will fall into place in their own time and way. Consider the lilies. In fact, we know from all the research that worry will take away from the time of our life. It will make it worse. So worry will not add to anything.
You know how we have the ability to focus our mind’s eye and heart on things? We have this ability to focus and get preoccupied with things. To use a gosh example, when it is time for me to buy a new car, which I do very seldom because I just run the thing until the wheels fall off, but if I ever get to that point… Have you noticed that when you are shopping for a new car, you are watching every car on the road? Or perhaps you are getting shrubs for the front of your house. “I wonder which shrub we should get to put by the door?” You are looking at every shrub in the neighborhood. Your whole life becomes a shrub. It is your mind’s eye, and we have that unusual ability, sometimes a curse because we get preoccupied with things and can’t get our minds off that one thing. But we can also redirect our attention of mind and heart and focus. When you do, other things are put into perspective. Jesus said, “Seek first the kingdom of God and its righteousness, and then all these other things will come into their right perspective, their right place.”
“Consider the lilies. They neither toil nor spin, yet your heavenly Father provides for them.”
Last week I talked about the Gospel of Thomas and how that collection of Jesus sayings includes many of the sayings and parables we find in our canonical gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John). That says the Thomas Christians in Egypt were consuming the same teachings that were in other parts of the Mediterranean. They were just floating around the Mediterranean world. And here is another one that is found in the Gospel of Thomas that parallels the saying we have before us today from Luke and Matthew.
Jesus said, "Do not be concerned from morning until evening and from evening until morning about what you will wear.” (36)
Have you ever seen the movie The Devil Wears Prada? That is all they are preoccupied with from morning to evening and evening to morning.
I had some good time to think deeply this week about the anxiety and worry that plagues us in this time. I was at junior-high church camp. Kathy and I were there with 50 of our closest junior-high friends plus their counselors. It was great. During the course of our time, we experienced the normal cases of homesickness on the part of several of our campers. But one case was unique, intense, and fairly inconsolable. A young man, who lives in another part of the state, is just now going into the 7th grade. He is the youngest of three children, very close to his parents, and this was the first time that he was away from home for any length of time. He was suffering! He was inconsolable. We made it through after about 24-hours of working with him and surrounding him with love, support, and encouragement. By the end of the week, he couldn’t imagine leaving camp. That’s the way it always is.
Now, living communally – eating, sleeping, and breathing community with relative strangers – is a challenge for anyone. But when you multiply that by the insecurities of this age, the deep feelings that one has been separated from the source of your comfort, that you are free-floating, without anchor and connection, it can be a fearsome thing.
As this young man openly wept, I thought back to the times when I was his age. They are times I do not want to repeat. Once is enough. How very insecure we were then! It is a very hard transitional time, adolescence is, and none of us is prepared to pass through it. It is like we are improvising most of the time. So many changes are taking place, and even with other siblings in the family who have gone through it before us, it seems as though we are making it up as we go. Who am I? Am I acceptable? Am I lovable? Will I fit in? Will anyone like me?
There is such a chasm between the child who is so very reliant on parental love and support and the emerging young adult who is striving toward some autonomy, some independence, and a life out from under the parental wings. When you’re in the nest, the world outside the nest looks absolutely thrilling. But when you are tumbling out of the nest – through your own volition or with encouragement – the old familiar places and routines and people begin to seem very attractive. Dorothy is thrilled to be in Oz with her odd collection of new friends, but there is, after all, no place like home.
And so here is a young man, so very much like I was, extending himself, his independence, spreading what wings he has as an intrepid explorer into the world. But he experiences the terrible anxiety at the intersection of wanting to leave and the gravity toward staying. He is not ready for this separation, as none of us seems to be. And as I heard the little voice that dwells under adolescent bravado saying, “I want to go home…I just want to see my mother,” I knew that he was speaking for every person who ever was, not only passing through some developmental phase, but the voice of our existence itself.
There is a terror we have about being in the world, and it goes something like this: Do I have a place to belong, one that is safe and where I belong and am loved? That, I think, is at the root of Jesus’ wisdom about the lilies. It’s not just that we clamor after food, drink, and clothing, asking, “What shall we eat, what shall we wear?” It is the reality beneath that questing and grasping that matters. Jesus knows that our grasping, our gathering these things to ourselves has to do with our anxiety about our fragile and precarious position in life.
We are sick for home, for the home that was, or the home we wish we could have had, or the home we would like even now. Like birds, we circle above the fields, searching for rest, the place to land, to roost, to be connected, somehow tethered to this planet so we don’t spin off into infinite space.
How envious we might be of the birds, the flowers, not to be anxious about such things! They simply exist in the moment, reaching for sunshine, for rain, for bugs, or for seeds. But human beings? We are different. We are at the same time blessed and cursed. We have the rare ability and perspective to remember a past, and therefore be regretful, and to imagine a future, and thus be anxious. What other creature has that? The anxious creature is the one who is preoccupied with an unknown future, with what is not yet or what could be. This includes, among other things, our own death, which is the greatest threat and the greatest unknown. What other creature is so mindful of its own death?
If we could only be a lily or a raven - such a relief! But we are neither flowers nor birds. We bear the burden and blessing of human consciousness, the voice within that says, “I wish I could find home, I wish could ever be safe.” If only I could step outside the burden of my aloneness and limits.
And then, right in the midst of the homesickness of our humanity, the wisdom of Jesus speaks and says, “You are already home; you just don’t know it.”
But what sort of home is this? This is not the home with which you and I might be familiar, with steady coordinates of either place or persons. “Seek you first the kingdom of God,” he says, “and all these things will be yours as well.” And the home you seek is the home within. It is the portable home you carry with you. When everything else is at loose ends, this is the anchor. This is the eternal place where the center of our being is connected to the ground of our being, to the life of God. It is the eternal home.
Once we plunge into that kingdom, that reign that is spread upon the earth and upon our lives, the home we seek is the home we carry so that wherever we are, it is. And once we start dwelling in that, we will stop worrying about, stop grasping for the things outside, because we’re living inside of what we already have.
There is another, deeper symbolism to the text, and that is that none of us plunges very deep into the life of God unless we present ourselves as spiritually hungry and spiritually naked before God. Rather than filling ourselves with substitutes for God, or, like the Adam and Eve story, attempting to cover ourselves from God, it is our spiritual hunger and spiritual transparency that draw us into closer union with the sacred.
And so, what is the take away? Any one of Jesus’ sayings and parables has dozens, hundreds of takeaways. But I am going to give you three, just because we need a few. Do you know how when you are in a restaurant, and you get an idea in your mind that you don’t want to lose? You take the napkin and write on it. Some of the most important things started out on napkins. I think Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was first written on a napkin. I want you to imagine the napkin in your mind. I am going to give you three things to jot down on your napkin to take with you. Do you see your napkin? It’s right there for you to use. So…
- My worrying won’t add one more day to my life.
- God will provide what I need (and I will help God provide that for others).
- The more I focus on the kingdom of God within, the less I will feel compelled to seek those unimportant things in the first place.
1. 2. 3.
“Consider the lilies…”
Let us pray.
We would fly like birds. We would grow like lilies. And know that you care for us. But with these legs, we walk. With these arms, we serve. With these minds with vision and imagination, we trust. For we do not worry, O God. Each day will take care of that day. In Christ, we pray. Amen.
Benediction
This my song through endless ages, Jesus led me all the way. Jesus leads us all the way. Fear not, little flock, it is God’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Amen.
