“Do not worry,” says Jesus, “about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear.” Do not worry.
Great words, but I wonder how many of us might be thinking – that’s all very well, but I’ve got a family to feed and care for, and plenty to be worried about.
I wonder too, how his words might be heard by some of the people that we’ll be helping through our contributions to the Diocesan Poverty and Hope appeal, which we collect for at every harvest, people like Esperance Gakobwa, a 30 year old widow and mother of six, who lives in Burundi, one of the poorest nations on earth. She’s a member of the Batwa people, a group which is often discriminated against. The Batwa used to rely on selling clay pots to make an income, but the government has restricted the extraction of clay, so people like Esperance, who were only just surviving, now have no way of making a living.
Or there’s Deborah, who lives in Zimbabwe, and has HIV. There is real stigma around HIV and AIDS in Zimbabwe, which is a precarious place to live at the best of times. Access to the drugs that would suppress the virus are way out of reach of many sufferers like Deborah in Zimbabwe.
Or there are the children who have been affected by war in Syria, and those who are being exploited in Sri Lanka who also feature in this year’s appeal.
“Do not worry” says Jesus, but I am sure that they are worried. And we are worried too, when we look around at our world, or if we’re not, we probably should be. Time is rapidly running out to do anything about the climate crisis. In fact it already has run out for some people in communities where they are losing their homes to rising floodwaters or the increasingly strong and frequent storms , or their livelihoods as previously fertile land becomes desert, or the forests on which they depended are felled.
“Do not worry?” It would be understandable if our response was to say “Come off it Jesus. Of course we are worried. These are worrying times!”
So why does Jesus say this? After all, the people he was talking to faced difficulties too. His disciples were ordinary fishermen, peasant farmers – not well off members of the elite. The crowds that came to him were disproportionately made up of those in extreme need – vulnerable, poor, disabled. Just being told not to worry wasn’t going to help them. Of course they were worried. Their lives were worrying.
It’s important that we remember, as we grapple with this passage, that Jesus wasn’t a man given to pie in the sky, cloud-cuckoo-land thinking. He didn’t peddle false hope. He faced his own crucifixion with a courage that most of us couldn’t even dream of, so we can be fairly sure that when he said “don’t worry” he must have had good reason to do so. Perhaps the clue to understanding his words comes later in the reading, when he tells people why they shouldn’t worry. “Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?” He tells us not to worry because worry doesn’t work. There’s nothing wrong with the kind of concern that leads us into action; what he is talking about here is the kind of crippling anxiety which paralyses us, about things we often can’t do anything about. That kind of anxiety is worse than useless. Not only is it miserable to endure. It prevents us doing anything to change what we are worrying about. It stops us reaching out for help, or taking some other action that will make a real difference, whether that is in ourselves or in the world around us.
So what did Jesus tell his disciples to do when they found themselves worrying? He wasn’t, obviously, able to offer them anti anxiety medication, or professional counselling, both of which can help if we suffer from deep anxiety disorders, but he did have a very good prescription to help with the everyday worrying which we all fall prey to sometimes, and it’s one which is available to all of us.
He told his disciples to look around them. “Consider the ravens, consider the lilies,” he said. He invited them to connect not only with the problems of the world around them, but also with its delights, and most importantly with the God who had given them those delights.
At our Messy Church a few weeks ago we tried to do just that. We prepared for Harvest by exploring our five senses and the way they helped us to perceive the world. We made colorful pictures. We made (and ate) fruit kebabs. We made musical instruments, and played them with gusto in our closing worship. We played with scented playdough, and we made the pew ends you can see decorating the church, exploring the different textures of the grasses and seed heads and beech mast – and the glue – with our fingers. We literally got in touch with the world around us, and in taste, smell, sight and hearing of it too. We didn’t have any ravens or lilies to consider, but we did what we could with what we had. And in doing so, we found, as we always tend to, that it took us out of ourselves. I watched children and adults, spend ages pouring out gloopy, golden glue and selecting with care the things they stuck to it. I watched babies discovering that, actually, watermelon and kiwi fruit and pineapple are wonderful, extraordinary tastes – perhaps tasting some of them for the first time. And as we made, we chatted, remembering autumn walks we taken, or beautiful sights we’d seen. It did us all a power of good. However terrible the problems of the world, or our own problems, there was also this, this array of delights, this reminder of good things, these good gifts given by God whose love and faithfulness were bigger than our worries.
Harvest time literally brings us down to earth. It grounds us. Harvest isn’t an idea or a theory. It is an apple, or a bunch of grapes or a pumpkin. It is the soil which grew them, the water which nourished them, the sun which ripened them. Harvest reminds us that we are part of all this too, each one of us is a creation of God, a gift of God. We are linked to the earth. We come from the earth. We return to the earth. We are connected to each other.
Christian faith, like the Jewish faith from which it grew, isn’t about wispy spirits floating about in an ethereal heaven. The Bible starts with God making stuff, trees and hills and antelopes – and us – and calling them all good. It continues, for Christians, with Jesus, the Word made flesh, God with us, properly human, earthy, eating and drinking and suffering and dying, telling us to see God in him, and in one another too. Christian faith is all about getting down to earth, because that’s what God did in Jesus.
And it’s what he calls us to do too, to consider the lilies and the ravens, and one another, to see that these are all God’s gifts. Because when we do that, when we learn to see God at work around us, even if it is in a weed which grows up and dies in a few days, but looks beautiful in its moment, we will realise that we are not alone, that God is with us.
“Don’t worry”, said Jesus to people who had every reason to be worried. It wasn’t that nothing bad would happen to them – he knew that there was all sorts of suffering ahead – but they would never be abandoned or forsaken. God was with them and in them, at work.
That’s what Esperance has discovered – remember Esperance, the Batwa widow with six children to support. She discovered God at work in the form of the Christian Aid project our collection is going to support. This project helped her learn to grow her own food, to feed her family and have some to sell.
Deborah, the lady from Zimbabwe, discovered it in the local support and savings group she joined, established by the Anglican Church in Zimbabwe. It enabled her to buy a garden to grow the fresh food she needs to be healthy, but also brought her into contact with others with HIV and AIDS. “The church has helped us to get our dignity back,” she said.
The projects in Sri Lanka and with Syrian refugees are showing the children they help, in very practical tangible ways, that they are not forgotten either. And Bore Place here in Kent, engages with our worried children, who see with clearer eyes than many adults the challenges that lie ahead for our world. Bore Place works to give them the tools they need to begin cope with them. “Don’t agonise, organize” said a postcard I used to have on my wall. It’s great advice, but you can only do it, I think, if you know you are loved by someone, held by hands which are bigger than yours. Considering the world around us, its landscapes, plants, creatures – including one another – reminds us of the hands which made them all, hands which are big enough to hold anything and everything.
So today, I wonder what your five senses will tell you that will give you hope and remind you of God’s presence. Perhaps it will be the intricacy of a flower, or the spots on a ladybirds back, or one of the scarecrows in our Scarecrow Safari cheering you up and reminding you that this is a good place to live,! Perhaps it will be the sound of a friend’s voice asking how you are, or the sound of rain on the windowpanes – not always a welcome sound, perhaps, but we can’t live without it! Perhaps it will be the feeling of a hug from someone who cares about you. Perhaps it will be the smells and tastes of our Harvest Lunch. Whatever it is, the real things we see, hear, taste, touch and smell are all reminders of a God who created the stuff of life, and blessed it and called it good, and will not abandon it.
“Don’t worry”, says Jesus, but of course we are all worried, all of us, sometimes, yet God calls us to seem him at work, to put our worries into his hands. If we can do that we may find we are released from our anxious paralysis, so we can play our part in caring for his world.
Amen
No comments:
Post a Comment