2023-10-16
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text...
October 15, 2023 Hamilton Coe Throckmorton
Philippians 4:1-9 The Federated Church, UCC
OK, so there’s unlikely, and there’s absurd. Unlikely is “The Browns are going to win the Super Bowl.” Unlikely is “Hamilton is going to solve his Wordle game every single day from now on .” Unlikely is “This worship service is going to conclude at precisely 11:00.”
Absurd, though? The apostle Paul has the market cornered on that. “Do not worry about anything,” he writes to the church at Philippi (4:6). And if we know anything at all, we know Paul is totally blowing smoke. Not worry about anything? Really? If you’d like, we can compare notes after today’s worship to see who has the longest list of things about which we worry. Is the lump benign? Is my child going to be OK? Is my parent going to survive this illness? Will I have enough money in retirement? Is my business going to make it? Am I going to blow it at this week’s work presentation? Will I do well enough on the SATs? Is my basement going to flood in the next storm? Will I be able to sell my house? Will I ever be forgiven? And the list goes on and on.
Not to mention what’s going on in the wider world. Will Russia ever stop its war against Ukraine? Will we ever face the climate crisis and deal with it? And top of mind for us in these fraught days: Is the Middle East on the verge of imploding? Last week’s terrorist attack on Israel and Israelis by Hamas shatters and unnerves us. We worry about whether Iran will be drawn into the fighting, whether the violence will spread far beyond the borders of Israel and Gaza, whether the tension will ever end. We worry about the well-being of our Jewish friends and siblings in faith. Are they safe? What can we do for and with them? We worry about innocent Palestinians in the wake of Israel’s response to the terrorism. “Do not worry about anything”? Who are you kidding? That’s absurd!
Dan DeWeese, my former colleague in ministry here at Federated, tongue firmly planted in cheek, used to say something like, “Don’t tell me not to worry! Ninety-eight percent of the things I worry about never come to pass!” So our worry serves an excellent purpose—it’s a deterrent to bad things happening, right?
And even as we joke about it, we wonder what kind of world the apostle is living in in daring to suggest that we needn’t worry. What a Pollyanna he must have been, totally out of touch with the real-world concerns that make us fret during the day and keep us awake at night. He was clearly in la-la land.
Except that he wasn’t. Paul writes this letter to this church he adores. He knows the Philippians well, and they know him. Far from trying to get away with too-easy clichés with people he doesn’t know, he’s writing to people he loves. And he writes this letter not from his suburban study or the bench in the local park, but, of all places, from prison. Where he’s been sentenced to death. Far from oblivious to the stress and strain of life, Paul is intimately acquainted with suffering and the threat of death. And still he writes these seemingly absurd words telling us we shouldn’t worry.
We can’t know what’s in Paul’s mind as he writes these words, of course. I suspect, though, that he doesn’t mean literally what the words say. I’m guessing he knew it’s not possible to totally avoid worry. We human beings were created, after all, with a fight-or-flight reflex that means, if the plane bounces around excessively, we’re going to worry. If our toddler starts running toward the street, we’re going to worry. Or, in the extreme case we see being lived out in the Middle East, if someone fires a mortar, we’re going to worry. That instantaneous reaction is not something we can control. It just happens. And it would be a shame if we went into a spiral of self-doubt every time we worried, as if that anxious response showed unequivocally that our faith was inadequate, that we had failed to trust and find peace. Worry is so often a spontaneous reflex.
My own sense is that worry is, in some sense, good. It’s an indicator of how much we care about life and those we love. If we worry that we might die if the plane hits severe turbulence, or that our toddler might get run over by a car, or that missiles might harm those dear to us or other innocent people, that’s a sign that life matters, that relationships are dear, that each moment is precious. We rightly worry about something that might end any of that.
When our children were small, Mary’s parents came for a visit one weekend. Mary’s father needed to do some work on a car in the driveway. He was using a screwdriver to pry something loose. As he did, the screwdriver snapped back and he accidentally hit our older son Alex in the eye with it. Everything turned out fine, but I remember being petrified at the time that Alex would lose an eye. An understandable worry, it seems to me.
In the same way, and with far more dire consequences, I can’t imagine what it would be like to have mortars coming at you, or to be beaten by a supposed loved one, or to witness someone you love kidnapped. Isn’t it totally inevitable that you’re going to worry if any of these, or a million other, things occur? I confess I don’t know how to get around that sort of worry. It seems to me it’s just going to happen, no matter how spiritually mature we may be.
I suspect, though, that Paul is saying something else entirely when he says, “Do not worry about anything.” I suspect, at its heart, what he’s saying is something much more like, ‘Don’t be consumed by worry. Don’t fall into such a pit of worry that it rules your entire life. Don’t let worry run roughshod over your days—your life is too full of wonder for it to be imprisoned by worry.’
Paul suggests a way of approaching these understandable concerns of ours so that we don’t get inundated by worry. Here’s the context of Paul’s words about worry: “Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (4:6-7). For Paul, prayer, peace, and gratitude are the ways to counteract persistent and lingering worry.
One way to put this is to say that, in order to deal with worry, we’re invited to turn our gaze in another direction. While there are nearly limitless dimensions of life over which we have no control, one of the facets of life that we do, in truth, have some control over is what we’re paying attention to. A friend of mine suffers from tinnitus, a ringing or roaring or buzzing in the ears for which there’s no real cure. When my friend asked the doctor how to deal with it, the doctor told him, “Just concentrate on something else.” My friend was immediately skeptical when he heard that as a solution. Yet over time, to his surprise, he has discovered that an intentional focus on other things has made a significant difference in his symptoms.
Prayer is essentially turning our attention to something other than the concern of the moment. Or maybe we could say that it’s bringing that concern into a new light. It’s lifting it into the hand of the One in whom we live and move and have our being. So then the worry gets put in its proper, lesser, place: “Yes, I worry about this or that, but I worry in the context of having my life in God.”
Think about what it’s like to be head-over-heels in love with someone. If you’re in a swoon because you’ve just met the person of your dreams, nothing else is very important. If you have a big presentation tomorrow, so what—you’re in love! If you have a disease or a job that’s hanging by a thread or a child who never calls you, all those worries take a back seat to that feeling of being immersed in a love that transforms your whole life. The concerns are still there, but they’re secondary. They don’t have the same power over you. So in faith what we’re invited to is to remember that God is always in love with us, and that we can elect to be in love with God, and that that love affair with God makes every worry of ours fall to a distant second place.
A woman I know has lately been undergoing some serious health challenges. She’s had a stroke which has greatly limited her mobility and her speech. One day recently, as she was struggling to say something, anything, and she was clearly frustrated and anxious, her husband leaned over her bed and put his hand softly on her head and said, “Imagine yourself in your herb garden.” And she immediately understood and her face relaxed and she smiled. She changed her attention from her anxiety to the garden where she has found such peace over these many years. And we can let God be our figurative herb garden, where we go to find that peace.
Another woman I know has a grandson who’s a toddler. She has just learned that he needs hearing aids. She’s acutely aware that this will make his life noticeably more difficult. He may not be as attuned to conversations, may not learn to speak as well, may be ostracized because he’s “different.” So she’s not without worry about her grandson. But it’s also the case that, when she heard the news, she was suddenly overwhelmed by the sense that he will be incredibly and beautifully loved as he makes this adjustment. He’ll be loved by his parents. He’ll be treasured by my friend, his grandmother. And at the heart of it all, he will be adored by God. Yes, his life will likely be a challenge, and with that will come worry. At the same time, though, he will be loved beyond belief. And with that comes immense gratitude. She can focus on the loss. Or she can focus on the blessing. Worry? Certainly. At the same time, though, with her prayer and gratitude comes God’s gift of deep and life-changing peace. In trusting that we live in God, everything gets reframed.
Decades ago, Orel Hershiser was a great pitcher with the Los Angeles Dodgers. He set several records and pitched the Dodgers to a World Series title. The day after they won the Series, in 1988, Hershiser was invited to appear on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. During the Series, the TV cameras had caught a glimpse of Hershiser in the dugout, evidently talking to himself. Carson asked Hershiser what he was saying when his lips were moving in the dugout. Hershiser said he was singing. And what was he singing, asked Carson. And there on the Tonight Show, after a slight hesitation, Hershiser started to sing: “Praise God, from whom all blessings flow.” In the heat and tension of that World Series pressure cooker, Hershiser turned to God. Worry? Undoubtedly. But for Hershiser there was something else even more crucial, and that’s where he turned his attention—to the peace that surpasses all understanding.
One of the most well-known of all prayers is the Serenity Prayer. Penned by the great UCC theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, it goes like this (and if you’re in a 12-step program, you surely know it): “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” What the apostle Paul is talking about is that serenity that comes from knowing that something is beyond our ability to change it and yet, even when we can’t do anything about the circumstances, finding God’s deep peace that surpasses all understanding. The situation may still be grim, and I still may not like it. But nothing I do is going to change it. So my only option is to find some peace in it. And Paul says that peace is available to us always, at every moment. It’s God’s unending gift to us.
Of course, these suggestions for finding that peace may not be applicable in the same way if you’re under assault or being bombed. It would be a travesty if we said to people in the midst of violence and war, “Just think about something else. Everything will be fine if you just focus on God.” In such a situation, it’s not as simple as just turning your attention elsewhere. As human beings with agency and responsibility, we’re asked by God not just to pray, but also to marshal our efforts against such forces. Life is full of times when evil or cruelty must be countered.
At the same time, though, it’s also true that, even in such dire circumstances, there is wisdom in seeking God’s deep peace, there is grace and hope in reframing the moment and perhaps seeing it with fresh eyes.
I have a Jewish friend who has a four-and-a-half-year-old grandson. This woman has struggled in trying to explain to the boy about what is going on now in Israel, and how rage and animosity have exploded in terrorism and war. The boy could not understand why things had gotten so bad. So, earnestly and intently, he said to his grandmother, “Why don’t they just call each other? And if they don’t answer, call again.”
When worry overtakes us, we’re invited to confront the problems and, where possible, to make our own peace—to “call and call again.” And at every point, and maybe especially when everything seems lost, we’re invited to turn to God. For it’s there, in the midst of our perch in the heart of the Holy One, that we find again and again the peace that surpasses all understanding. Turns out it’s not so absurd, after all. In truth, that deep peace is one of God’s sublime gifts. May it always be so.