Henrietta United Church of Christ

Scripture: Matthew 6:25-33

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.

Sermon:

You know, I would like to be as free as the birds soaring overhead, and as carefree as the wild flowers waving in the breeze. But my life is more complicated than a bird’s or a flower’s. So I do sometimes concern myself with what I’ve got to do to put food on the table and pay the bills, both now and when I eventually retire. And, thanks to the HUCC PC police ( PC standing for Pastor’s Closet), I actually have acquired a taste for clothing that’s a little more up to date than my old bellbottom jeans and paisley shirts. So when I read these words of Jesus, I feel like a spiritual slacker. If I were a true follower of Jesus, I would offer my services for free and trust that someone here would think to deliver me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich now and then before I fainted from hunger. I would wear the same old clothes every day until you couldn’t even see the paisley print any more. I would walk, bicycle or hitch hike everywhere I needed to go.

This is kind of extreme, but I come from staunch Puritan stock, that taught that indulging the flesh and allowing yourself bodily comforts and physical pleasures meant the ruination of your soul. There’s a long strand in Christianity that required the faithful to punish, deprive and conquer the flesh as though it were their worst enemy. That attitude isn’t in fashion much today. Today you hear some Christians not worrying about the earth’s problems because they expect that they will be raptured up to heaven any day now. And you hear other spiritually-minded people saying the physical plane is an illusion, and our bodies are the locus of suffering, selfishness, conflict, and destructive emotions. If we want to be spiritual, we should detach from our bodies so that we can attune our minds to a higher spiritual plane.

All of these perspectives lock us into a pattern of denial of these bodies and this physical realm that are always going to be with us and needing our attention as long as we are in this world. Didn’t God put us in this material world and give us our physical bodies for a reason? Is there a way we can be unapologetically physical and faithfully spiritual at the same time?

First of all, let’s consider the birds of the air, as Jesus suggests. What are they doing in the air? Chances are they’re catching flying insects, or scanning the ground for prey, or winging their way to the next or road kill, or transporting a juicy worm to their nest. It’s true that they “neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns,” but God doesn’t deliver a bag of bird food to their branch every morning. They have to devote most of their time to bringing home the grub (or grubs) just like the rest of us physical creatures. Then their bodies convert the food they find into soaring through the air, beautiful bird songs, and fluffy hatchlings.

And those fluffy hatchlings make a lot of self-centered noise demanding food. Just like bald human hatchlings do. Human babies don’t care if you’ve had a long, hard day and it’s 2:00 AM and you’ve finally drifted off to sleep. “Waaaaahhh! Waaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh!!!” They are very rude!

Shouldn’t they be more spiritual? Shouldn’t they say to themselves, “My parents’ sleep is more important than my incessant needs. They certainly have more important things to do than bother with someone who isn’t contributing to the family except dirty diapers. I should just keep quiet and not ask for anything for myself any more.”

If we had been that “spiritual” as infants, I’d wager that instead of there being a sanctuary full of people today, there would be cemeteries with a lot of very small caskets. That wouldn’t have been a gift to our parents or to the world or God’s hope for our lives, would it?

Staying alive in the material world requires all living beings to take care of themselves by finding in materials from their environment, and using them as food or shelter, and in our case clothing and medicines and electric air fresheners. Well, maybe we do get a bit carried away at times. Maybe very carried away. But physical life in any form is a continual process of taking and using the materials of life, including doing clever things like sowing, reaping, and gathering into barns, so that we don’t all have to migrate to places like Florida every winter like birds just to find food. We just have to migrate to Florida to play golf or shuffleboard.

The notion that things of “the flesh” and “the world” are inherently anti-spiritual came from the Greeks, not from Jesus or the Jewish religion out of which he came (though this Greek way of thinking did influence Paul’s letters). The Bible says very clearly that God has been deeply, intimately, creatively involved in this material world from the beginning of Creation, and God always will be. We can see God’s creative intelligence and love at work in creating the natural laws that give the physical world coherence and order; in bringing forth life out of the basic elements of matter; in awakening us physical creatures to consciousness and self awareness, thought and wisdom, free will and the awareness of right and wrong, creativity and generosity, compassion and altruism; and in inspiring us to use all of these qualities to create higher orders of cooperation, harmony and balance in our relationships with each other. God doesn’t seem to have any problem at all with getting involved in the world.

As John 3:16 says, “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.” Jesus’ life was a dynamic synthesis of the spiritual and the material. Jesus didn’t say, “Eeeuuw, selfish humans struggling to survive. Eeeuuw, sickness and poverty. Eeeuuw, bodies and sensations and pleasures and pain. I’m going to invent monasteries where we can escape from all of this physicality and just be “spiritual”, while we wait for our ultimate escape into heaven.” No, Jesus made his entry into the world by way of a smelly stable; he taught about God through down-to-earth stories about farming and fishing and feasting: he reached out and touched humans in their misery, and he was even accused of being a glutton and a drunkard because he freely ate and drank with very earthy people.

Jesus sought to bring God’s realm into the earth realm, not by being “airy fairy,” denying his physicality or escaping from earth’s trials, but by releasing the spiritual forces of love, wisdom, truth, forgiveness, healing, hope and compassion into very real human bodies, human relationships, and human society.

He didn’t teach us to pray that we be carried up to heaven as quickly as possible. He taught us to pray that God’s kingdom would come on earth as it is in heaven, and he taught us to live in such a way that we could be partners with God in helping that happen.

We best prepare our spirits for our entry into the next world by investing ourselves fully in this one, by loving our fellow mortal creatures as we love ourselves, by creating beauty where there is ugliness, by creating higher unity where there is division, by spreading love where there is hatred and by transmuting the struggles and messiness and mistakes of mortal life into wisdom.

So, let’s go back and listen again to Jesus’ teaching about our physical existence. “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear.”

As long as we have bodies, we will need to devote some of our attention to taking care of our physical needs. But worrying about these things takes over when we make our physical security, comfort and pleasure our main purpose. When we put most of our time, attention and income into what promises to make us feel physically secure, into what keeps us pampered and comfortable, into what gives us pleasure and excitement and gratification, we begin losing track of why we are here and what we are called to make of our lives. And because security, comfort and pleasure are always fleeting, we can never get enough to keep us satisfied.

As long as this is what our life is about, we are guaranteed to live in anxiety. Because the bad news is that half of all the material things in your life right now won’t last as long as you do. And the worse news is the other half will last longer than you do! One way or another, you’ll end up losing them all.

But Jesus reminds us, “Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?” He didn’t say we shouldn’t enjoy eating when we’re hungry and we shouldn’t wear comfortable clothes that don’t make people talk about us behind our back. Jesus is just reminding us to keep the main thing the main thing. Don’t let material things be your life purpose; let them serve as the raw materials for your life purpose of bringing more of heaven’s order, beauty, hope, truth, love, and peace into the world.

That’s what Jesus meant by seeking God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness first. Keep the main thing the main thing. And if we do that, Jesus promises that everything that we’re looking for will be given us as well.

This is good news for us creatures who need some measure of security, comfort and pleasure. When we seek God’s kingdom first, we’re grounded in the security of being instruments of God’s ongoing process of creation, life growth, healing and redemption, and that this process will continue in us and we in it all the way through eternity. There is no higher security than that. When we dedicate our lives in service to the good of all, we experience the incomparable comfort of our deep connectedness to God, to our highest selves, and to other people. And we know the satisfying pleasure of our human hands and feet and hearts and voices being used to fulfill the divine purpose of bringing something of God’s kingdom into the world around us.

Jesus tells us, “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear....But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” As we do this, our physical bodies become the temples where God lives and works. Our mortal lives become instruments of God’s redeeming peace, hope and love. And our material world begins to give us a taste of heaven. Thanks be to God that this is already happening, even today, in our very midst!