Hebrew Scriptures – Isaiah 49: 8-16a
8 Thus says the LORD:
“In a time of favor I have answered you, on a day of salvation I have helped you; I have kept you and given you as a covenant to the people, to establish the land, to apportion the desolate heritages; 9 saying to the prisoners, “Come out,” to those who are in darkness, “Show yourselves.”
They shall feed along the ways, on all the bare heights shall be their pasture; 10 they shall not hunger or thirst, neither scorching wind nor sun shall strike them down, for he who has pity on them will lead them, and by springs of water will guide them. 11 And I will turn all my mountains into a road, and my highways shall be raised up. 12 Lo, these shall come from far away, and lo, these from the north and from the west, and these from the land of Syene.
13 Sing for joy, O heavens, and exult, O earth; break forth, O mountains, into singing! For the LORD has comforted his people, and will have compassion on his suffering ones.
14 But Zion said, “The LORD has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me.”
15 Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. 16 See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands….
Gospel Lesson – Matthew 6: 24-34
24“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.
25“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26Look 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? 27And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? 28And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, 29yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. 30But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? 31Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ 32For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. 33But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.
34“So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.
“Do Not Worry about Your Life.”
“I have kept you and given you as a covenant to the people…. Sing for joy…! For the Lord has comforted his people, and will have compassion on his suffering ones.”
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life….”
Today’s readings all touch on the celebration of life. They speak of knowing and giving thanks for our blessings, of honoring our covenant with God, of not allowing ourselves to be crippled by the helplessness of worrying about tomorrow. This day holds enough for us – in fact more than enough – to be the people we’ve been created to be. “Show yourselves,” cries out the word from Deutero-Isaiah,1 “Come out” of the darkness into the light of this new day. Coupled with Jesus’ invitation to “Consider the lilies of the field,” we’re invited to embrace all that we know about life and its blessings, and to not be crushed by its pain and tragedies – those will come soon enough, but “today’s trouble is enough for today.”
I’m reminded of a telephone conversation that I had with someone just this past Wednesday. She was wondering how she and her friends were to care for a woman who’d just given birth to twins, but one of her two boys did not live. How does a mother grieve the loss of a child, gripped by the awful agony of those moments, and yet still turn to embrace with joy and love the one who is alive and in her arms? At some point in our lives all of us will be asked to do both. I was reminded, yet again, of that benediction from the Book of Deuteronomy that speaks to the reality of our existence – one that recognizes the terrible devastation and premature deaths wrought by cyclones and earthquakes, by wars, famine and disease – and yet tells us that we still have a choice of how we can react to such a reality:
I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live….2
Choosing life isn’t the same thing as denying death; choosing life may involve letting it go3 – the greatest exemplar of this might be Jesus himself. It’s the message found in that ancient Christ-hymn of Philippians which sings:
Let
the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though
he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a servant….
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death
–
even death on a cross.4
Even so, no wonder we sing, “God help us!” this morning – as Lou Magor (our guest conductor for today) suggested to us on Wednesday is the more blunt meaning of the Latin Agnus Dei and Kyrie.5 Ultimately, choosing life isn’t hoarding as many moments of life as we can – “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die!”6 It means listening to and following the word of God as we’ve come to experience it in one Jesus of Nazareth – in spite of the cost.
And when faced with another person’s anguish – like that young mother of twins – we don’t always have to offer an explicit counterpoint of hope for her despair. Sometimes we simply stand alongside of her at the foot of the cross. Sometimes we help carry spices to the tomb. Sometimes we sit with those who wait in a room behind locked doors. And sometimes we sit with those who sit just outside that room in the hospital next to the ICU – not knowing if, in the very next moment, it’s to be life or dying into yet another kind of mysterious new beginning.
There’s a compelling scene in Robertson Davies’ novel, Fifth Business, where one Dunstan Ramsey, a young schoolmaster, is traveling by train with an elderly, flamboyant Jesuit, Padre Blazón. They strike up a conversation about religion and it leads to talk about saints, miracles and Jesus. At one point the priest says to Dunstan:
My own idea is that when [Christ] comes again it will be to continue his ministry as an old man. I am an old man and my life has been spent as a soldier of Christ, and I tell you that the older I grow the less Christ’s teaching says to me. I am sometimes very conscious that I am following the path of a leader who died when he was less than half as old as I am now. I see and feel things He never saw or felt. I know things He seems never to have known. Everybody wants a Christ for himself and those who think like him.7
The padre may be right. If we turn to the scriptures for a blueprint on how to live our lives, inevitably, we will be disappointed. After all, Jesus didn’t have a clue what living in 21st century America would be like – he lived in a totally different world. We don’t know a thing about his youth. He never made it to his midlife crisis. He never had to look for a job. He never got fired. He never was married or (as far as we know) had children. He never retired. He never was a woman in a sexist society. He never was black in a racist society. He never was gay in a homophobic society. He never had to pay off a mortgage or put children through college. He never drove a car, watched T.V., or used a computer. He never dreamed of nuclear weapons, biotechnology or communications by Blackberry or You Tube.8 How are we supposed to imitate this Jesus? After all, “Everybody wants a Christ for himself and those who think like him.”9
So it would be wrong for us to pull out this sweet little gospel story and sit on our hands in a field of lilies expecting somebody else to clothe and feed us. The Bible just does not contain an ethical system – or even an ethical role model – for us for every situation, for every place in our lives, and for all time. Jesus didn’t come up with yet another new set of rules for us to live by; and he didn’t expect us to copy his every move. Instead, he said don’t worry so much about your life – live it! And the best way to do that is to cultivate an intimate and personal relationship with God. If we must turn to the ethical teachings of Jesus, we ought to contemplate with all seriousness why it is we do what we do, and to know a better way when we see it. It means relating to real situations with real people, but in ways in which the one inescapable and over-riding fact is that we participate – with God – in the ongoing creation, liberation, and blessing of the world. In the end I think that’s what Isaiah had in mind when he so poetically envisions God as saying, “…I will not forget you. See I have inscribed you on the [very] palms of my hands.”10
Suppose we really did stop worrying about everything, and allowed ourselves to embrace the fact that this day is a gift from God, period? It’s not at all the empty-headed and slap-happy disregard represented by that Mad magazine character of the 1950s (Some of you may remember him.), Alfred E. Neuman, who simply stared with unquestioning stupidity at the world and asked, “What, me worry?”11 Since his initial unsuccessful run for President of the United States in 1956, he has periodically been re-offered as a candidate with the slogan, “You could do worse...and always have!”
To follow in the footsteps of Jesus, finally, has more to do with a way of being than it does a way of believing. We live as Jesus lived, not by making one-to-one correlations between his life and ours, but by letting ourselves be nurtured by the same kind of relationship with God as he had, and then acting on the basis of that relationship. Don’t worry about your life, not just because it’s crippling and unproductive to do so, but because worry drives out joy and makes choosing life – along with all of its blessings – impossible.
* * *
1 Biblical scholars have long agreed that the author of this part of the book, attributed to the prophet Isaiah, in fact, was not Isaiah himself, but someone who lived during the exile in Babylon and worked among the people there (“Deutero-Isaiah” meaning “second-Isaiah”). He speaks of a time between the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 and the downfall of the Babylonian empire in 539 – a time in the future that the first Isaiah clearly may have envisioned, but a time in which he was no longer alive.
2 Deuteronomy 30: 19.
3 I write this during the same moments as Dianne Mahler (our Office Manager) and her family agonize over the choices that they must make concerning her father: in either maintaining him on the “life-support systems” provided by every modern-day hospital ICU, or by letting him leave this life with some grace, dignity and comfort. Given the advances of medical technology in this day and age, we’re forced into facing more and more of these kinds of decisions; but they’re never easy.
4 The Letter of Paul to the Philippians 2: 5-8.
5 Joined by members of the Wallingford United Methodist Church choir visiting from Seattle, our own choir sang portions of the Latin mass, Messe, written by Johannes Brahms – the translations of which go something like this:
Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us (from the Agnus Dei), Lord, have mercy; Christ, have mercy (from the Kyrie),
Holy, Holy, Holy Lord, God of Hosts, Heaven and earth are full of your glory (from the Sanctus),
Hosanna [literally, “Lord, save us!”] in the highest! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the
Lord (from the Hosanna and Benedictus), and finally…
Grant us peace (Dona Nobis Pacem).
6 In ancient Rome, the phrase is said to have been used on the occasions when a Roman general was parading through the streets of Rome during the victory celebration known as a triumph. Standing behind the victorious general was a slave, and he had the task of reminding the general that, though he was up on the mountaintop today, tomorrow was another day. The servant did this by telling the general that he should remember that he was mortal: “Memento mori.” It’s also possible (Okay, test your high school Latin from here on out!) that the servant said, “Respice post te! Hominem te esse memento!” – “Look behind you! Remember that you are but a man!” as Tertullian noted in his Apologeticus.
The concept, in the art of classical antiquity however, was more frequently embodied in the phrase carpe diem, or “seize the day.” This does carry the echo of the admonishment to “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die” which, ironically enough, at least is recognized by that “first” Isaiah himself in 22: 13, where we read:
“…but instead there was joy and festivity, killing oxen and slaughtering sheep, eating meat and drinking wine. ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die’”
The thought, not surprisingly (given Bacchus, or Dionysus, and his boys), also appears in Roman literature: Horace’s Odes include the other often-quoted line, Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero pulsanda tellus (“Now is the time to drink, now the time to dance footloose upon the earth.”). Horace goes on to explain that now is the time because there will be no drinking or dancing in the afterlife, a classic example of the carpe diem theme. Just to show you how well-traveled this theme really is, though, it’s even repeated in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: “…‘While you live, / ‘Drink! – for, once dead, you never shall return’” (stanza XXXV). And this popularized theme – used by the early church quite effectively, I might add – later became: Timor mortis conturbat me, quilla inferno nulla est redemption, which means, “The fear of death torments me because in Hell there is no redemption.”
Whew! It’s enough to “scare the hell out of me!”
7 Robertson Davies, in The Deptford Trilogy (New York: Penguin Books, 1983), p. 180.
8 Go there, if you dare: http://www.youtube.com/.
9 Op. cit.
10 Isaiah 49: 15c-16a.
11 See one commentary on him at http://www.leconcombre.com/concpost/us/postcard4/alfred_e_neuman.html; but the quote actually comes from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_E._Neuman.