What, Me Worry?

In his book, The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer carefully considers the content of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. This book was central to the development of my faith, and it suggested to me that we need to take these very challenging words of Jesus seriously if we are to find the good life that Jesus offers us as his disciples. I have long considered these chapters in Matthew's gospel to be central to the identity and teaching of Jesus.

When we read these chapters, however, it is easy to dismiss them as hyperbole offered by Jesus for the sake of presenting his truth in a dramatic way. After all, if we go around loving our enemies, or cutting off our hands if they cause us to sin, or giving to everyone who asks anything of us, or waiting for God to provide us with food and drink and clothing, what kind of a life will we have?

I certainly don't think that we should follow these teachings of Jesus in a legalistic fashion. But neither am I willing to say that they are pure hyperbole or exaggeration. I think these teachings of Jesus are meant to expose the unholy and unproductive attitudes we have toward life and to discover that there are alternative ways to live.

So if we take the text for today (Matthew 6:24-34) to mean that we should absolutely decline to be concerned about or even to plan for our future, and that we should simply trust God to provide what we need, I think we will end up looking less like Jesus and more like Mad Magazine's cartoonish simpleton, Alfred E. Neumann - what, me worry? Still, Jesus is very serious when he suggests that our anxiety about tomorrow is finally counterproductive.

I have always believed that God expects us to accept a certain amount of responsibility for our own lives. And I have never been one who puts a lot of stock in the idea that God is directly providing all the good things that happen to us, especially when it comes to our excessively comfortable lifestyles.

William Loader, Research Professor at Murdoch University in Australia, seems to agree. He says (http://wwwstaff.murdoch.edu.au/~loader/MtPentecost2.htm), "If your image of God is of one who will guarantee you blessing, here or beyond, so that you can do better than others, then your God is in close alliance with mammon. They are mates. It matters little whether your satisfaction is to be at peace in this world with possessions while others go without or to have peace in the life to come knowing that others face pain and oblivion. They are both versions of non-love."

This, I think, gets at the heart of what Jesus means to say. It is all about what we focus on in life. If we are consumed with our desire to secure what we need and want, then we cannot possibly be loving disciples of a loving God. And notice that, although we often refer to ourselves as consumers in our culture, it may be more accurate to say that we do not consume so much as we are consumed with anxiety, with an endless desire for more, and with the fear of losing what we have.

Even more to the point, when we get caught up in the desire for more and more things, for better and better things, and for the status that comes with such possessions, we cannot ever be satisfied. We cannot ever be at peace. We cannot ever know the good life God invites us to have in Jesus.

That is not to say that having possessions is an evil thing. It is not to say that we must divest ourselves of all our possessions if we wish to find the peace of Christ. But there is a sense in which, I think, it is like smoking. We may not be addicted to smoking, but if we are around people who do smoke, we may still get cancer from inhaling their smoke.

We may have considerable possessions and, in fact, not be consumed by them, but they may still eat away at our ability to enjoy the godly life in ways that we may not even recognize.

I think it is clear that this is what Jesus is warning us about. I don't think he is saying we should just sit around and wait for God to put food on the table. But he is saying that we need to be acutely aware of the dangers of letting our desires for the things of this world interfere with our desires for the more important things of God.

It is interesting that Jesus uses the birds as an example (6:26). "Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?" Right, but it's not as if birds sit around waiting for food to be put in their mouths. They work hard and they work all day long at finding and eating the food God has provided for them.

So, again, Jesus is not suggesting that what we need will just sort of appear on our kitchen table or in our closets. We must make the effort to take advantage of what God has provided for us. But we can make that effort in different ways.

Many people view the world as a place of scarcity and extreme competition. We are, both consciously and unconsciously - formally and informally, schooled from an early age to see the necessity to get out there and get ours. Most children get the message very early that people who are aggressive and possessive will end up better off than people who are laid back and who are too easily satisfied.

But that message is pretty much a complete contradiction to the way of Jesus. The word satisfaction is a word I do like to use a lot when talking about these things. I think one of God's primary desires for us is that we can enjoy satisfaction.

There are some who preach that God wants you to be satisfied only with great wealth and power. The prosperity gospel is very popular these days. And why not? What better world can you live in than a world ruled by a God who not only wants you to have as much as you want, but who will also help provide it for you?

That sounds like the perfect life, doesn't it? God wants you to have everything you have ever desired, and more! And if you just pray to God (and, incidentally, send two or three hundred dollars to this program), you will get returns on your investment such as you never dreamed were possible.

Actually, there is a reason we never dreamed that such a life was possible. We never dreamed such a life and such a faith were possible because such a life and such a faith are not of God. There is no doubt that people who live aggressively and possessively get ahead in this world when it comes to material possessions. There is also little doubt that many of those people are among the least happy and least satisfied people who live.

"Strive first for the kingdom of God and [God's] righteousness," Jesus says (6:33), "and all these things will be given to you as well." Doesn't that sound a little like the prosperity gospel? Doesn't it sound like Jesus is saying that, if you pay attention to God, God will provide for your every need?

Well - yes and no. Jesus is talking here about not worrying whether we will have food to eat and clothes to wear because God knows we need these things. And these are the things Jesus says God provides to those who make God's kingdom a priority. That's hardly the message of the prosperity gospel which promises much more than the basic needs of life.

We also need to understand what it means to "strive first for the kingdom of God and [God's] righteousness." Even though Jesus called a certain number of people to literally go with him as he went about preaching and teaching, and even though he and those who followed him depended on the generosity of others to provide for them, it doesn't seem to me that Jesus is calling for everyone to do that.

If everyone is out wandering around spreading the good news, no one is sowing the fields and there will be no excess grain for people to glean from the harvested fields. If everyone is out doing the work of spreading God's good news, then no one is spinning and sewing and making clothes for people to wear. And I really don't believe that Jesus was suggesting that God will just sort of make these things appear if only we all abandon doing it ourselves.

Putting God's kingdom first and seeking God's righteousness above all else, for most of us, means doing whatever we do in a different way than we would otherwise do it. In some ways, and as individuals, that can be rather straightforward. We try to do whatever it is we do with compassion, with generosity, and with justice.

It gets more complicated when we begin to talk about certain societal issues - health care, for instance. How do we, as a society largely made up of people who claim to be Christian, put God's kingdom first and seek God's righteousness above all else when it comes to health care?

Consider the issue of health insurance. If I insure my car or my house or my possessions, and something happens, and the insurance company refuses to pay and is more concerned about its profits than about my loss, that is certainly a justice issue, but it is not generally a life and death issue. Or if I cannot afford to insure my car, I may have to adjust my lifestyle and use public transportation. If I cannot afford to insure a house, then I may need to rent rather than buy, at least for a time.

But health insurance is different. When we have health insurance companies putting profit over compassion and the health of their company above the health of its clients, that often becomes a life and death issue. I heard the congressional testimony of one doctor who admitted that she was promoted and quickly rose in position and salary within her company, precisely because she had gained a reputation for denying benefits to the company's customers and thereby saved the company millions of dollars.

That flies directly in the face of God's desires. There are certain things, like health care, that simply cannot be driven by profit alone. As a society, we need to discover ways to allow compassion to overcome the injustices that uncontrolled profit motives frequently produce. There may be a variety of ways to accomplish this, and I don't even know if there is one best way. But so far we have failed miserably to apply God's righteousness to this critical area of life.

"No one can serve two masters;" says Jesus (6:24) "for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth."

In many ways, capitalism has shown itself to be an effective economic system. The desire for profit and wealth drives productivity and creativity. But the kind of total devotion to capitalism which is required in our society in order to be considered reasonable and patriotic is precisely the kind of mammon worship Jesus was talking about.

As effective as capitalism is, it fails in two major areas. First, it often fails to produce the most effective results. As long as it is profitable for the oil companies to stick with oil, there is no incentive for them to develop alternative sources of energy.

So, some are predicting, we may be paying as much as 10-12 dollars a gallon in the not too distant future. The oil companies will look seriously at alternatives only when it gets to the point where so many people cannot afford gasoline that it is no longer profitable to produce it. As frustrating as this is, I'm not sure God cares much whether we can afford to fill our Hummers with gas.

What I think God does care about is capitalism's second flaw, which is its lack of compassion. My Dad used to say that profit was the only incentive that will motivate people to do anything constructive. The truth is that profit too often motivates people to do things that are not constructive and ultimately not helpful.

I'm not someone who thinks that everyone should have the same amount of everything, although I do think everyone should have the same basic opportunities to do what they wish to do with their lives. But, for the most part, I have no gripe with capitalism's profit motive and with people's desire to accumulate wealth or possessions. That's not my priority, but that's a choice each one of us has to make for ourselves.

But when the profit motive fails to allow for compassion and for the most basic needs of life, then I believe we need to correct its flaws and balance the compassion deficit. That, for me, is a big part of what it means to seek God's kingdom and God's righteousness above all else.

There is a sense in which my goal in life is to be able to say - what, me worry? Not in the irresponsible sense that we associate with Alfred E. Neumann. And not as an abandonment of my responsibility to provide for myself and for those around me.

But I do want to be able to face today and tomorrow without anxiety. I do want to be able to experience a considerable level of satisfaction with life, not because I have an overabundance of possessions, but because I am not driven to acquire more and more stuff.

I want to be able to look at the world as a place of abundance, not of scarcity, so that I can be generous with what I have without worrying that helping others have more might mean that I must go without. I want my life to reflect compassion more than it reflects any desire to enjoy my abundance while others go without. And I want any anxiety I do experience to be about my concern for those who have no abundance and who have no peace, not about a fear of losing my own wealth of possessions.

I want to know the peace that passes all understanding and the joy that overcomes all sorrow. That is what truly makes life good. And no amount of wealth or possessions can ever provide that. Only God and God's ways can. God help us to choose wisely how we will live our lives.

Thanks be to God. Amen.