St Matthew's Oxford, 1st January 2023
Readings: Isaiah 49: 8-15 and Matthew 6: 24-34.
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.
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