Anxiety

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
02.27.11; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 6:24-34

If you are a practically minded person, the words from Jesus today can be a little frustrating.  Here we are in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount.  We’re in the midst of the heart of Christ’s teaching, the essence of the Gospel, where Jesus lays out for us the core teachings of the Bible.

This may, in fact be a teaching that Jesus delivered many times.  In the Gospel of Luke, Luke 6:17-49 contains many of the same teachings, in basically the same order.   That version is known, generally, as the Sermon on the Plain.  It’s only 30 verses, instead of the just-over 100 verses we find in Matthew.  So in Luke’s retelling, the essence and the heart of the teachings is there.  Just not the passage we heard this morning.   That gets taught elsewhere, in Luke 12:22-32.

But whether it’s in Matthew or in Luke, it’s most certainly from Jesus...and it makes us a bit crazy.  Just what is Jesus saying here?   Don’t worry, be happy?   Don’t worry about it?  Don’t worry about your life?  To the ears of folks who are out there working and organizing and planning for their lives, this slacker Jesus sounds way too much like the Dude from the Big Lebowski.  

“Like, dude, just, like, don’t sweat it, man.  It’ll, like, take care of itself, if, you know, you just, like, abide.”  

If you’re a practical person, this kind of thinking makes you crazy.  You know that things need to be planned.  You need to work hard.  You need to keep your eyes on the prize.  You need to constantly be thinking ahead.   You need to get ready for tomorrow.  The food doesn’t just buy itself.  The mortgage doesn’t just pay itself.  People who don’t plan and don’t prepare end up eating out of dumpsters.  And not even the nice dumpsters.

But what Jesus is talking about here is not being practical and prepared and prudent.  Life requires those things.  He’s talking about anxiety. 

There are few things that can tear apart a life more completely and totally than anxiety.  Please note...we’re not talking about being stressed here.  Being anxious is a very different thing than being stressed. 

Stress is when you have ten million things demanding your attention.  The house is a mess, and the laundry is piled up like the Rockies, only stinkier, and you’ve got a test tomorrow for school, and the baby is crying, and your boss just sent you a text saying that you’ve got to meet with a client in Uzbekistan next Thursday.

That’s stress.  It’s the Washingtonian way, and it’s a problem if you want to live a sane and balanced life.  But it’s not anxiety. 

Anxiety is different.   Anxiety has very little to do with what is real, and a whole bunch to do with the things that are not real.  Not yet.  Anxiety is the gnawing uncertainty about the future, the fear of those things that are not, but may be.  It’s that sense of consuming, all encompassing panic about “what if.”

Those “what if’s” can consume our personal lives.  We all feel them.

What if I don’t get little Tyler into the right tutoring program and he/she doesn’t get into college and ends up living in the basement until he/she is forty seven?  What if someone steals little Tyler and sells their body parts, just like they’re always on about on the tee-vee?  What if I tell him I love him, and he just laughs?  What if she falls in love with someone else and leaves me?    What if that isn’t a zit, but a rare form of cancer? What if I can’t get another job here and I end up hungry, strung-out, and preaching semicoherent fire and brimstone out of the back of a beat-up 1972 Chevy pickup to a bunch of bikers in some small Alabama town?

That last one is probably just me.

We obsess about the what ifs, and not just in our personal lives.  Spend a few moments watching the fevered panic on CNBC and CNN.

What if the government shuts down and they stop paying their contractors and the whole national economy grinds to a halt?    What if the uprising in Egypt and Libya spreads to Saudi Arabia?  That could drive up gas prices to five or six bucks a gallon, which would mean we’d have to drive less and conserve more and do all the things we know we’re supposed to do to be good stewards of God’s creation that we can’t quite get around to now.

Oh, the horror!

Fear of what the future might bring is absolutely paralyzing.  It can consume us.  It will, if we let us destroy us.  Why?  Because a life lived without hope goes nowhere, and anxiety is the precise and exact opposite of hope.   Just as hope is the anticipation of something better, anxiety is the fear that the future brings with it something far worse.

That anxiety, within the context of Christ’s teachings, comes from focusing so much on your needs and your desires that the whole world revolves around you.    If all you think about is what you need and what you desire, then of course you’ll be anxious.  Focusing on the things of this world is a sure way to be sure that you’ll be filled with worry.  If your whole live revolves around material things, you’ll find that they give you no ground, no foundation, no basis for anything other than fretting about existence. 

If we let ourselves be grounded in the day-to-day, then we’re grounded in nothing.  We’re grounded in endless, cycling change.  Yeah, every day is same-ol’, same-ol’, but the truth of it is that every day brings it’s own needs, it’s own worries, it’s own new and different concerns.

What Jesus tells us to do instead is to move beyond our own desires for self.  Self seeking leads to anxiety.  Instead, we are told to seek first the Kingdom of God and it’s righteousness.  That means...in case y’all have somehow missed it...loving God with all our hearts and all our minds and pretty much everything we’ve got, and loving our neighbors as ourselves.

That means a couple of things, practically speaking.

First, as we move through our day to day lives, we have to take a hard look at what it is we’re focusing on and thinking about.  Take a look at, oh, I don’t know, yesterday.  Or the day before.  How much of your energy, your time, your passion, and your effort was put into making this world a teensy bit more like the Kingdom Jesus proclaimed?  How much of your thought yesterday revolved around the ways you could...right in that moment...make your life and the lives of those around you more gracious.  More just.  Compare that with how much thought went into picking out your outfit. Or prepping for your taxes.  Or modding your car.  Or wishing you had another job.  Or just a job.

Are you focused on the things that matter to God?  Or just the thousand trivial anxieties that consume us?  It makes a difference.  If so, be aware, and change.

Second, as we together, meaning all of us here in this particular room, call ourselves some sort of church...how much of our energies and passions are focused on the anxieties of churchy life?  Do we worry about how many people are here?  Or, rather, are not here?  Do we fret about how much time and energy and effort are required to keep this huge honking mess of a building going?   Do we figure out what it is that someone else is doing wrong, and use that as an excuse to wring our hands and shake our heads sadly and not do what it is that God wants us to do right now?

Then we are distracted.  Then we are not focusing on what needs to be focused on.

If you have your priorities straight, then your actions are what they need to be, and things will take care of themselves.  If you seek first what you need to be seeking, anxiety dies, and hope abides.  Let it be so.  AMEN.