A sermon for New Year's Day 2023: Letting go of anxieties

St Matthew's Oxford, 1st January 2023

Readings: Isaiah 49: 8-15 and Matthew 6: 24-34.   

Today is New Year’s Day - a day when we traditionally review the past year and think about the coming year.   My sermon today is entitled, ‘Letting go of anxieties’.   It is by way of a follow up to a sermon I gave on Remembrance Day entitled, ‘Letting go of memories’.  That was about letting go of the past.   Today I want to talk to you about letting go of the future.   My sermon is a sort of antidote to the notion of New Year’s Resolutions.   And it is about being hopeful rather than anxious about the future.

Now anxiety is something we all suffer from to some degree and at some points in our lives.  Anxiety can be so extreme for some of us that we need to seek help from other people.  In this sermon, I don’t want to trivialise anxiety or suggest that I don’t think anxiety isn’t serious: far from it.   Our neighbours who feels anxious deserve our sympathy.  We who feel anxious need to be relieved of our anxieties, to be healed even.

Nor do I wish to suggest that anxiety is unnecessary.  Many of us have good cause to be anxious.  The causes of anxiety can be real enough.  The rising cost of living in the UK is having effects on all of us but particularly on those of us who don’t have much money in the first place.   When Jesus says, ‘Do not worry about tomorrow’, as we heard in our reading just now, he is not saying that there is no reason to worry about tomorrow.  Jesus’ listeners were living in much more precarious times than most of us here today.  He knew his listeners lived in times where ‘where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal’.  Jesus is not being unrealistic about his listeners’ lives nor our own.

However the causes of anxiety can also be imagined.  When we were young many of us were afraid of the dark – a fear which we grew out of.  I like to think that all anxieties are fears which we will eventually grow out of – if only at our deaths.

Anxieties can be about all sorts of different things, about how much money we have to live on, whether we are going to recover from an illness, what we are going to wear at a party.  We can worry about almost anything. 

Anxieties can be for the day after today or they can be for the more distant future, the wider meaning of tomorrow.  In saying, ‘Do not worry about tomorrow,’ Jesus was clearly talking about tomorrow in both senses.   We can predict with some certainty what we will be doing the day after today and therefore whether to anticipate that with pleasure or fear.  But we cannot be absolutely certain: the unexpected can happen without warning.   When it comes to the more distant future, things are even more uncertain, though we know, – in the words of Julian of Norwich - that eventually, ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.'

Even if, in theory, we know that eventually all will be well many of us feel anxious about the future: we fear the effects of the cost-of living crisis, the war in Ukraine, global warming, again not without reason.   What should we do about our anxieties?   Jesus says at the end of today’s reading, ‘Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.’   I think that this means we should let go of those anxieties about the future, live in the present, focus on the now.

Anxieties are, I think, quite difficult to talk about for most of us, because they relate to our identities, who we are.  Many people do not wish to share with others the fact they are running out of money, are feeling progressively insecure.  Anxieties, not ‘just’ about our physical well-being but about our mental health, our gender, our sexuality may be even harder to share.  And when we hear that Jesus has told us not to worry, it may seem like a failure on our part to do so.  We may even be ashamed of our anxieties– perhaps thinking that people will feel the less of us if we were to reveal our worries to them.

 

What do we do with our anxieties?    One way we are naturally inclined to, is to seek to deal with them ourselves, to pull ourselves together as it were.  This can take the form of preparations for the future.  Jesus seems to say that:  on the contrary, ‘Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth…but rather store up for yourselves treasures in heaven…for where you treasure is your heart will be also.’   By storing up treasures on earth Jesus means accumulating material wealth and the supposed security that brings whereas by treasures in heaven he means our good deeds.   He tells us at the beginning of our reading that ‘No one can serve two masters…You cannot Serve God and Mammon.’   Mammon is an Aramaic word for wealth and not just possessions.   Jesus is saying you cannot rely on your wealth and on God.

Rather than rely on our own resources, or indeed our abilities to accumulate the resources which would seemingly make our lives more secure, Jesus says we should be more like the birds who neither ‘sow, nor reap, nor gather into barns and yet have enough to eat’. 

And this is why I do not think we should make New Year’s Resolutions.  I don’t think that it is heretical to say so.   The Bible does not command us to make New Year’s Resolutions.   I find in my files the text of a sermon I gave at St Matthew’s exactly 10 years go entitled ‘New Year resolutions: a type of prayer?’   At least there was a question at the end of the title.   I would like to say, contrary to what I said 10 years ago, that New Year’s resolutions are not a type of prayer.  Resolutions encourage us to believe that all we need to do for our lives to be better is to make one more effort.  

In saying, ‘Do not worry about tomorrow’ Jesus is not saying we should not make plans.   Plans are important and helpful, for by looking ahead to what we want to accomplish in the future, we direct our energies as we work with what we have to hand.   After all even birds make plans for having their young by building nests.  Jesus tells us that all that we need has already been given to us.   Just as the grass is already adorned with flowers without making any effort itself, so too are we have been given all that we really need.  But whatever plans we make have should be applied to the resources we have at the present time.

This switches our attention away from the future to the present moment.  A meditation on eating a satsuma might seemingly have little to do with anxieties for the future but it too focuses our minds, if only for a few minutes, on the present moment and in doing so we forget the future.   Ultimately we do not know what we will be doing tomorrow, we can, though it is perhaps easier said than done, let go of our anxieties by living in the present where we do know where we are.

In our passage from Isaiah this morning the people of Judah find it impossible to believe the prophet’s assurance that the days of their exile have come to an end, not just will come to end, have in fact already done so.  Isaiah says that God has told him to say to the exiles ‘Come out’ from Babylon and return to Judah because this is the ’time of favour’ and the ‘day of salvation.

‘Sing for joy,’ Isaiah says to the heavens,’ and exult, O earth; …For the Lord has comforted his people, and will have compassion on his suffering ones’.  But the people say ‘‘The Lord has forsaken us, our Lord has forgotten us.’  They feel the prophet’s message is too good to be true.  The job of the prophet is to persuade the people of God of God’s gracious activity in their lives at that point in time and it is my task today.

Jesus, like Isaiah, announces a new beginning in the shape of the Kingdom of God.  And his teaching about this Kingdom is supremely relevant to our thinking about the future.   At the beginning of Mark’s gospel Jesus announces that, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand.’ [Mark 1: 15].  In other words the Kingdom of God is now.   When the Pharisees ask Jesus about when the Kingdom of God was coming he says, ‘In fact the Kingdom of God is among you’ [Luke 17:20-21].   In some paradoxical way for Jesus the Kingdom of God was both still to come and yet among us, both present and future, both already and not yet.

I think most Christians have concluded that what Jesus of meant was that the future kingdom is the full and final reality, whereas right now we have it partially in ways that are promised rather than actual.   This assures us that the Kingdom is certainly going to arrive, but like a child waiting for Christmas we just have to be patient and wait.  But I don’t think Jesus would have said the Kingdom of God is among us if that was all he meant.  I have come to suspect that we Christians have so stressed the not yet of this announcement of the Kingdom that we have lost touch with the already.   We do of course have the promise of Jesus’ return to console us but in that consolation that things will in the end be better we have miss his assurance that ‘things can be better now.  ’

And of course because we know that all will be well in the end, we slip into an attitude that the mess of the moment has to be put up with and find ourselves thinking and even saying ‘You can’t change human nature’, ‘You can’t change the system’, ‘Politics will always be a dirty business’.  And so we take it for granted that transformation is not here yet.   But if Jesus is right and the Kingdom is already with us, transformation is possible now.

It might seem almost impossible for us humans to let go of our fears for the future, to let God deal with our anxieties.   We hold our anxieties close as if they are part of our identities.    But let go we must.   Just as we are to let go of the past – not to forget it – but to let go of the conflict and suffering it causes us in our present, so we are to let go of the future.   This doesn’t mean that we stop making plans, but that we should let go of our fears for that future .

When I talked about letting go of the past last Remembrance Day I reminded you that Jesus says, in John’s gospel, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.’   That is the we are to let go of ourselves if we are to have a new identity in Christ .  And again, in Luke’s gospel ‘So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple’.   It is in dying to self – and in that I would include our letting go of our anxieties – were we find new life.   In this new life focused on the present we find hope for the future rather than fear.

Dying to self may be almost impossible for us to do by ourselves – and perhaps we need God to help.   But to let go of self is to let God.  To let God is to let God take responsibility for what is seemingly impossible for us.   But by letting go of our selves we open ourselves to the possibility of God’s loving, presence in our lives: his Kingdom of God.   A loving presence that will transform us, give us peace and help us bring peace and compassion to others.   

A sermon for Remembrance Day 2022

 Readings: Isaiah 2: 1-5; Romans 12: 9-21

I have been reading a book by a theologian called Paul Knitter - thanks to a recommendation from [X].  In that book Paul Knitter recounts this story of a meeting of something called the Inter-religious Peace Council in Israel/Palestine in 2000.   He writes:

“We had spent more than a week listening to the grievances, the fears, the angers of both Palestinians and Israelis.   We were gathered with students and teachers at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem, on Holocaust Memorial Day, after an emotionally wrenching ceremony remembering the victims of Nazi terror.  In our subsequent discussions we heard the Jewish participants talk of the ‘the need to remember,’ never to forget, so that ‘never’ again will such horrors occurs.   As the conversation flowed easily back and forth, Geshe Sopa, Tibetan monk and scholar, raised his hand then quietly but forthrightly asked the Dean of the Hebrew Union College, ‘But why do you have to remember’.

After an awkward, almost horrified moment of silence, Geshe continued, ‘What would happen if you let go of such memories of suffering?’   He went on to speak of the sufferings [that] the Tibetan people are enduring from the Chinese, adding that what is important now, in the moment, is not to cling to memories of the past but to understand that the Chinese are acting out of…ignorance… .  The reaction that follows such understanding is compassion for mistakes made.  We must feel compassion for all who are suffering, on both sides.  We [Tibetans] don’t look at the Chinese as evil, but try to find a peaceful solution and make them happy and peaceful.

Unfortunately, but also understandably, there was no further discussion of Geshe’s question and suggestion.  It was so different, so un-imagined, that it was, probably, not understood.   A similar silence was the response a few days later when Geshe made a similar statement to the director of the Dehieshe Camp for Palestinian refugees [in Bethlehem]."

Paul Knitter goes on to say “To let go of angers from the past [and fears for the future] in order to be free of them and so fully present to the moment is something very difficult for us Christians and Westerners to understand.  Or perhaps we are afraid to understand. "

This idea that we need to let go of our responses to suffering in and to the past is I think relevant to our act of remembrance just now.  Our Christian faith is a historical faith with a strong sense that God has intervened in history – in particular in the history of the people of Israel - and culminating in the death our founder – Jesus – on a particular Friday in around the year AD 33.   So we are bound to have the sense that history is important.   In a way we are a people defined by the past.   But we have a choice as how we remember that past.   I would like to suggest that there is a good and a bad remembering when it comes to Remembrance Day.  A bad remembering is in essence to hold on to the past: a good remembering is to let go of it.   To let go is to let God., as I will aim to explain later.

But what precisely are we remembering on Remembrance Day?   Our liturgy just now summarised this with the words, ‘We remember with thanksgiving and sorrow those whose lives, in world wars and conflicts past and present, have been given and taken away.’  This means, of course, not just the people who lost their lives in the First and Second World Wars but in all wars right up to current wars including that between Russia and Ukraine.  And, of course, Remembrance Day is not just about remembering lives lost but also the suffering and grief that is caused by war for those caught up in it – both combatants and non-combatants.  Perhaps there are even some here today who have suffered – and may continue to suffer - because of war.  If so we should remember them in our prayers and I am sure we will do so later in this service.

However a bad way of remembering wars and conflicts is to glorify them.  By that I mean to remember the lives lost in victories rather than in defeats, of those on our side rather than on theirs.  To glorify war is to see war as necessary, even as God’s will, instead of a mistake.  It is to view it as a series of courageous acts of bravery worthy of medals rather than of the much more mundane daily living in terror and fear, the loss of courage and of decent into despair.  It is I think worth remembering today that there were about 100,000 British soldiers who deserted during the Second World War whose stories are seldom told.

On Remembrance Day we are sometimes urged to see lives lost in wars as acts of sacrifice – analogous to Jesus laying down his life for his friends.  I think we should be suspicious of such sacrifice language.  It is to give a meaning to war, even a justifiable purpose, which is to come close to glorifying it. 

Furthermore most of those who lost their lives in the First and Second World were conscripts - as a many of the Russian soldiers in the current Russia-Ukraine war.   These conscripts did not and do not voluntarily give up their lives, their lives were and are being taken.   Rather than sacrifices, most lives lost in war are reasonless slaughter or worse the results of orders from politicians and military leaders far from the fighting.

But there are good ways of remembering wars.  There are those that result in lessons learnt so that we might avoid wars in the future.   I also want to suggest that a good remembering helps people let go of their anger, their grief, their suffering as a result of the past as a step to resolving conflicts in the present (as Geshe Sopa suggests). To remember wars in a good way is the opposite of glorifying them.  It is to see them for what they are but then to let go of the memory.  

Our readings today, from the book of Isaiah and then from Paul’s Letter to the Romans, were about war and conflict – and of course the authors cannot but acknowledge their reality.  Neverless they do not dwell on past wars and conflicts.  The eyes of Isaiah are firmly on the future and of Paul are firmly on the present.

Isaiah, in his prophecy of the future, sees a time when there is no more war, when people ‘shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks [and] nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more’. 

Paul, in his epistle to the Romans, in the passage we heard today, talks about conflicts between neighbours rather than nations but what he says is relevant to all conflict..  Paul here, is echoing the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus tells us to ‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.’  Paul, similarly, urges the Roman Christians not just to bear with their enemies but ‘No, if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink.  He then rather spoils this, in my view, by claiming that by this means they will be heaping burning coals on their enemies’ heads.

Neither Isaiah nor Paul ignore the reality of past war and conflict.  But both recommend handing over the ultimate resolution of conflict to God. Isaiah says,‘He (God) shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples.’  Paul says, ‘Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’  In other words, if we have taken sides in a war or conflict, we are to cease our partisanship and let God decide who was or is right or wrong.  This is of course almost impossible when the conflict is current such as the China-Tibet conflict or the Russia-Ukraine war

Now it might seem paradoxical to suggest that remembrance should be linked to letting go.   Because to let go might seem to be to forget.   But I am not saying that letting go is to forget what happened – rather to let go of the feelings that those memories of what happened invoke.   

When I was a child there were still people who felt grief and sorrow for family and friends lost in the Second and even the First World War.   And indeed many people in Britain were still angry with the Germans and the Japanese.   But those of us left commemorating Remembrance Day in church today can have no memory of those who died in the Second World War – let alone the First World War.   However war and conflict are very much still with us and we may know people who have died or suffered in more recent wars: in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Ukraine.  

So are we to let go of our grief at those losses?  Yes I think so.   As the writer of the book of Ecclesiastes puts it: ‘There is a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.   More important perhaps is to let go of our anger: in particular that directed at our former or even current enemies. Letting go of our anger generates the possibility of forgiveness, of reconciliation and therefore of peace. 

Jesus says in John’s gospel ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.’  It is in dying to self – and in that I would include our letting go of our anger about and grief for the past – we find a new life, a new way of looking at death and suffering.

Letting go of anger and grief – indeed dying to self - may be almost impossible for us to do by ourselves and that is where God comes in.   To let go is to let God.  To let God is to let God take responsibility for what is seemingly impossible for us.  God has given us the final answer to war and conflict by dying on the cross.  His is the true and final sacrifice.  There is no need for any more.  

Paul says to the Galatians ‘I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.’  This is a remarkable text but I think Paul is saying here, amongst other things, that we to let go of self is to allow Christ to be Christ in us and that this new reality is something we should seek.

So to conclude.  By letting go of our anger and grief about past wars and conflicts, and even current wars and conflict, we open ourselves to the possibility of God’s loving, presence in our lives.  A loving presence which will transform us, give us peace and help us bring peace and compassion to others.   This is worth remembering not just for Remembrance Day but for all our lives.

 

 

 

 

 

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