Matthew 6:25-33
Bede Griffiths writes in his autobiography:
“One day during my last term at school I walked out alone in the evening and heard the birds singing in that full chorus of song, which can only be heard at that time of the year at dawn or at sunset. I remember now the shock of surprise with which the sound broke on my ears. It seemed to me that I had never heard the birds singing before and I wondered whether they sang like this all year round and I had never noticed it. As I walked I came upon some hawthorn trees in full bloom and again I thought that I had never seen such a sight or experienced such sweetness before. If I had been brought suddenly among the trees of the Garden of Paradise and heard a choir of angels singing I could not have been more surprised. I came then to where the sun was setting over the playing fields. A lark rose suddenly from the ground beside the tree where I was standing and poured out its song above my head, and then sank still singing to rest. Everything then grew still as the sunset faded and the veil of dusk began to cover the earth. I remember now the feeling of awe which came over me. I felt inclined to kneel on the ground, as though I had been standing in the presence of an angel; and I hardly dared to look on the face of the sky, because it seemed as though it was but a veil before the face of God.”#
There’s a way in which all around us God is trying to get our attention.
We read in the nineteenth Psalm,
The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.
We are being addressed yet we find ourselves too busy to hear. We are being shown signs, but we walk too fast to comprehend them. I’m reminded of a scene at the beginning of Ray Bradbury’s classic novel, Fahrenheit 451:
"Have you ever watched the jet cars racing on the boulevards down that way?"
"You're changing the subject!"
"I sometimes think drivers don't know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly," she said. "If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! he'd say, that's grass! A pink blur? That's a rose garden! White blurs are houses. Brown blurs are cows. My uncle drove slowly on a highway once. He drove forty miles an hour and they jailed him for two days. Isn't that funny, and sad, too?"
"You think too many things," said Montag, uneasily.
"I rarely watch the 'parlor walls' or go to races or Fun Parks. So I've lots of time for crazy thoughts, I guess. Have you seen the two-hundred-foot-long billboards in the country beyond town? Did you know that once billboards were only twenty feet long? But cars started rushing by so quickly they had to stretch the advertising out so it would last."
"I didn't know that!" Montag laughed abruptly.
"Bet I know something else you don't. There's dew on the grass in the morning."
He suddenly couldn't remember if he had known this or not, and it made him quite irritable.
"And if you look" -- she nodded at the sky -- "there's a man in the moon."
He hadn't looked for a long time.
They walked the rest of the way in silence, hers thoughtful, his a kind of clenching and uncomfortable silence in which he shot her accusing glances.#
In Bradbury’s futuristic world, everything’s fast. the faster the better. It’s all about jumping from entertaining experience to another entertaining experience and if you have to linger between the two, you’re in luck because you can listen to your sea-shell radio with the earpiece you keep on all the time.
In this world of constant distraction, constant diversion, Montag can’t remember if he knows that the grass is wet with dew in the morning. Everything’s a fast, very fast blur.
We are addressed nonstop by the creation around us. But we’re too busy, we’re in too much of a rush, we’re worried, to hear and believe the good news that exudes from all of God’s good creation.
“THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God./ It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;”
And Jesus is trying to remind us of this fact.
“Do not worry about your life....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? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, 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.”
“Life is too short,” my Professor said this week. “Take a moment each day to find joy in the beauty of the world, the simple gifts of God all around us.
Too often the lilies are white, yellow, or orange blurs on our way to something else. Too often the birds of the air are brown, black, or blue blurs as we pass along our way to go and accomplish all that we have on our to-do list.
But Jesus calls us away from the vanity of allowing worry to control our lives. Jesus calls us to stop and look with eyes of faith upon all that already is. The gift of the air, the trees, the beauty of the sunrise, the sunset. Jesus calls us out of worry into the gratitude which comes from realizing our true relationship to God.
In the midst of our busyness, God is creating and renewing with grace, with beauty.
God is taking care of the details.
We find ourselves busy and worrying over what needs to get done, what hasn’t got done.
Jesus gets to the heart of this and says, “And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?”
“No one can serve two masters; 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.”
Or perhaps we could put it,
No one can serve two masters; for you will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot be thankful while being worried.
In fact, the difference between anxiety and fear is that anxiety is detached from real objects. Fear is when a bear comes out into the path on my morning walk (thankfully has never happened). Anxiety is when I hear that the economy is bad, that there are a lot of layoffs going on.”
Anxiety is fear detached from an object. It has the power of fear, but none of the limits. I can run away from the bear. I cannot escape the idea of poverty, of sickness.
Anxiety is a fight or flight response, but it has no end. And so we continue on being anxious and driven, or being peacefully distracted or diverted.
Jesus calls us to slow down. To take a look around and to remember how things really are. To give up enslaving ourselves to the rat race of trying to control our lives, our future, our well-being. And to lose ourselves in the gentle hands of God.
I won’t say that the only antidote to anxiety is thanksgiving. But I certainly think it goes a long way.
This Thursday when you celebrate Thanksgiving, take some time, not just at the table when everyone goes around sharing something they’re thankful for, but take some time and look around at the “lilies and sparrows” of your life. And give thanks.
Because it’s only in giving thanks that we can remember our true relationship to God and our true relationship to our own lives. It’s not as one who is in control, but as one who receives. Not as one who will earn well-being and peace-of-mind, but one who has all that they need now, in the present, the gift of God’s peace, God’s life in the lilies and sparrows.
Amen.
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