Outfitted in Faith
Matthew 6:25-34
November 18, 2012
A long time ago I saw a New Yorker cartoon about the bookends of life. I’ve never been able to find it again, but that’s OK because it got burned into my memory. On the left was a newborn baby, pink-cheeked and expectant, and on the right was an old, old man, bent over his walker and none too happy about it. The caption was simple:
“Before and after,” it said.
The point being, this is what life will do to you. But more directly it spoke to me about how fast it all goes. There’s an old Russian quote that has found new life on the
Internet recently. It says, “The days are long, but the years are short.” That is, we get up and go to work or tend to the kids or do whatever we do, get groceries, watch TV, do all the stuff we do in a day, and sometimes it seems like it’s forever before our head hits the pillow. Then, as the Pink Floyd song says, one day you find ten years have got behind you. It’s a paradox, the way we perceive time.
And I have to say, the older I get, the worse it gets. Anybody else astonished at how quickly time passes?
We have that experience of time. But as Jesus says, consider the lilies of the field.
How does this work for them?
I know, they’re not thinking much of anything. But Jesus raises them up as an object lesson here. We can imagine him standing beside a field of these wildflowers, the vibrant reds and purples and oranges of wild lilies, the way they form patterns in the field even though no one has designed this garden, the way they make the breeze visible by moving with it. And Jesus points into this field and says, in essence, there’s nothing more beautiful in this world, and these lilies haven’t invested a drop of blood, sweat or tears in the project. They are what they are because God made them that way.
And if those lilies could think, they wouldn’t be thinking about the future. That’s the key here, the punch line of Jesus’ little story. “Do not worry about tomorrow,” he says. The lilies aren’t worried. They are beautiful, they’re out in the sun, and just for today they are the lilies that God wants them to be. Tomorrow – who knows? Being their
God-given selves today is what they’re about.
This scripture is often read as Jesus’ counsel against worry
. And that’s good advice, I suppose – “Don’t worry about it, whatever it is.” Sometimes you hear it expressed as a bumper sticker: “Let go and let God.”
But I have to acknowledge that’s not so easy to do. Some of us are born worriers; the rest of us pick up the habit pretty quickly. And maybe we beat ourselves up over it.
We tell ourselves that if we were faithful enough Christians, we wouldn’t be such worriers – we could trust God more.
But Jesus isn’t beating us up. He’s saying something more positive, more affirmative. He recognizes that worry is a habit that is oriented to the future. Our worries are about what might happen. If those lilies had prefrontal cortexes and could imagine that tomorrow a guy with a mower might be coming through their field, they’d be worried, too.
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But Jesus is moving us toward a today orientation instead. When he says, “Do not worry about tomorrow,” he wants us to be experiencing our lives in the moment, or rather in the series of moments that make up our waking hours. He wants us to be present to the hours in which we spend our lives. Because that’s where the life is! Not in the future; not in the past; in the eternal now. That’s where we meet God.
There’s an old Buddhist term for the opposite of this kind of presence. The term is
“monkey mind.” When you have monkey mind, your attention is all over the place.
You’re a little ADHD, easily distractible, find it hard to stay on a single train of thought or stay with a piece of work until it’s done. Something in your brain is always hinting,
Shouldn’t you be looking over there or doing this other thing?
Have you experienced monkey mind? It may be endemic to the times in which we live. If you spend any time on the Internet, you know that everywhere you go there are hyperlinks trying to pull your attention away from the page you’re on. You may be soberly trying to read up on the Greek debt crisis, but it’s so hard not to click on that link to a story about Rihanna’s new belly button piercing. Monkey mind. Even the local television news broadcasts have added a crawl at the bottom of the screen, so that if you’re bored with the weather or the sports, you can look down there for diversion.
One cause, or maybe it’s a symptom, of monkey mind is the phenomenon of multitasking. You can see this at work in teenagers – they’re doing homework, they’re on the phone, they’re texting, they’re on Facebook, all at the same time. Lots of grown-ups multitask, too, even though research has shown that when you try to do a couple of things at once, you do them less well. But it’s so hard for us to do one thing at a time. It’s so hard to be present to the moment we’re in.
Anne Lamott tells a story about this, from one of her book tours. “Last night in a huge church outside Decatur, Ga.,” she writes, “where I was having a reading, some people asked me if I could go out with them for coffee and birthday cake. Temporarily unable to remember what city I was in, I said, ‘I just want to go back to wherever it is that
I am.’ Then I realized that this was possibly the most brilliant thing I have ever said. All I have to do for a shot at salvation is to go back to where I am, and that means wherever my feet are, not my poor old pinball head.”
Be where you are. Be , not even necessarily do. In this week when the government and the Turkey Farmers of America say we should give thanks for our blessings, maybe it’s worthwhile to remind ourselves of that. Take a look at a flower in the sunshine. Look at a baby, if there’s one handy, and notice how rapt she is when she looks at her mother’s face.
That sense of being fully present to the moment can break in on us when we least expect it. A writer named Dean Sluyter tells about one such time for him, an encounter at a train station.
“One morning,” he writes, “I found myself running through the Newark, N.J., train station, trying to make a connection to New York, dodging frantically through the crowd as complex scenarios of missed appointments flashed through my mind. I reached the steep stairway to the platform and ran up, two steps at a time.
“Blocking my path at the top was a heavy swinging door with a large grimy window set into it; on the other side an old man in faded work clothes was washing the glass with a spray bottle and rag. Out of the middle of the grime he had just wiped a clean
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circle about a foot across, through which, our noses inches apart, we now faced each other.
“Suddenly all the worry and hurry in which I had been caught up seemed to be illuminated in the morning light breaking through the circle, and then to drop away. It was as if the window were my clouded mind and the old man with his rag had made a clear space for me to see, once again, that everything was light, everything was fine, and it always would be.
“Am I making too much of a simple encounter? I don’t know ... maybe ... yes and no. All I know is that the old man smiled broadly, and in that moment I could have sworn he knew exactly what he had done. Then he opened the door for me and stepped aside as the train pulled into the station.”
“Do not worry about tomorrow,” Jesus says. Instead, be here now – here in your one wild and precious life. Here in this hour, this moment. Here where God meets us and loves us. The present is holy ground. Right here, right now, is where it all happens.
Thanks be to God! Amen.
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