Epiphany 8

Year A
Sunday 27 February 2011
St. John’s Church in the Village
New York City
The Rev’d Lloyd Prator

Most of us worry. I certainly do. I worry about money, about my health; I worry about whether I have got all my work done. Many of us worry about meeting just the right person, or keeping a job in these troubled times. I worry about war in the middle east and whether the current troubles in Egypt, Libya, Afghanistan, and Tunisia might lead to nuclear war.

I even worry in my dreams. I think most of us who went to college have a recurring dream. You know the one. You have studied hard all semester, and then at the last minute, you realize that you signed up for a course you forgot about, and now, you are in a panic. Great. I can even worry about thing in my distant past, like college, and things which did not even happen back there when they might have happened.

My mother used to have a description for people who fretted. She called them “worry warts.” Hmm, guess she knew one right up and personal.

Today’s gospel gives us Jesus’ word about worry. He first announced you cannot serve both God and mammon, as the traditional language used to put it. Mammon is a Hebrew word which means all worldly affairs and material possessions. And, even in the church, we spend a lot of time talking about material matters. We had a vestry meeting last week, and we talked about raising money for a Lenten project in Africa. We talked about buying a memorial for Father Whipple, whose estate was generous to the parish. We talked about the costs of repairing the music and business office.

And yet, there are Jesus’ words, “you cannot serve God and mammon.” What is the answer to the problem?

Part of it lies in the meaning of the word serve. The actual word used here means to be a slave to. So, what Jesus actually means is that we cannot be a slave to worldly goods and affairs; it is like being a slave of two masters, holding down two 24-hour-a-day jobs. Trying to be the slave of two masters leads to one being totally consumed with anxiety and that is the root problem of worry, the point of Jesus in today’s gospel.

I think that there are two things to say about the phenomenon of worry as it relates to Christianity. First, fasten on reasonable worry over against pathological worry. If you occasionally worry about things that are real—like not having enough money, or if you are carrying a lot of credit card debts, or if you are concerned with retirement plans—that is not unreasonable, not at all.

Especially if your worry leads to something. If it leads to your taking some steps to help yourself, it is not necessarily bad worry. Remember Abraham whom we remember today in the Eucharistic prayer. Abraham was worried aoub his future and he turned to God. God took him on a journey. He took God along on his journey and built a strong bond with him. If your worry leads to action and leads to a deeper dependence on God, so much the better.

Second, one of the worst worries any of us has is being left alone. Worry is strongly related to the idea of loneliness. Sharing your worries with a friend can help. Others may have the same issues you have and you may find that you are actually doing better on the hbig issues than they are.

And, there is a religious issue about being left alone. We Christians believe in the incarnation, that God lives with us, got so close to us, for example, that he became one of us and walked the streets of with us. He lives with all we live with, and he dies with us, too. And his death leads to new life, and ours will too.