|
“Don’t Worry, Be What?” (The Gospel lesson for this sermon is found in the book of John Chapter 6: verses 24-34)
Pastor Stan Larson Central Presbyterian Church, Russellville, Arkansas Sunday, May 25, 2008
|
|
If we go back a few years, maybe 20 or 25, not less than that, there was a very popular song that was sung by Bobby McFerrin, called “Don’t Worry, Be Happy. Now it was a good song, it was very popular and supposedly it was a compilation of the heart and soul of Christianity and some other religions. Now as you heard in the Gospel reading today, we have no problem with the first part. Jesus keeps telling you, “Don’t worry”. Do not worry. Now, I won’t ask you to raise your hands; but how many of you do not worry? If you’re normal, everyone worries from time to time. You worry about the price of gas, the price of food, what’s happening in the housing market, what’s happening on the stock market, your own health.
There are all kinds of things that we can worry about; but Jesus says, “Does it do us any good?” You know maybe, in a day and time when there was a lack of food; but when we take a look around here, we may not have as much as we would like, but none of us is going short. There is no shortage of food in the grocery stores or in the convenience stores or the restaurants. We can go and get food any time; we can get what we want to drink. We don’t have problems with the clothes that we wear either. You can go from the inexpensive to the expensive; but the magazines will tell you that you should be wearing the “right” things, which should be all the name clothes. And you hear the stories about kids in school, if they’re not wearing the right clothes, they can really be ostracized. But we shouldn’t have to worry about what we wear. It should be fairly standard. But we like to worry. We worry about all kinds of things. We worry about what’s going on in the church, what’s going on in the world, what’s going on in the lives of other people. Jesus says we have enough worries. We have enough troubles. We have to trust God. We have to trust that God knows what we need. Just as any good parent knows and provides what the children need, God is going to provide; maybe not exactly what we want, maybe not in the abundance we want, maybe not to the point where we feel ecstatically happy, but God will provide if we trust Him.
Now, it means that we have to do our own part as well. Where my sister lives in Tulsa, in Broken Arrow where she used to live, there is a place called Rhema Bible College, and a few years ago, the college had to step in because they had some students coming there saying, “Well, we’ve rented an apartment, and we’re going to school, and God will provide”. And when their landlord said, “Well, you need to pay your rent and utilities”, and when the school said, “You need to pay your tuition and book fees” they said, “God will provide”. And the school had to come back to the students and tell them, “God provided you with the ability to have a job. God has already provided; you have to provide your help as well.” There are some things such as giving over too much to God; you know, God has given us some wondrous gifts and we can do some wonderful things with the gifts God has given us. We are not supposed to just sit back like we’re in a movie about the Middle East, in a harem situation where the guy is being fed grapes, and just lie there and take it easy. That’s never what Jesus says that we are to be about. But we are not supposed to be spending our lives worrying about these things.
When Jesus went to see Mary and Martha, what did he tell Martha? “Martha, you know you are just distracted and worried and upset about all of these little things; you are trying to get it perfect because you have a house full of guests. And you’re running around trying to get your sister to help you and get other people to help you and you’re not enjoying the fact that you have guests”. She is not enjoying the fact that Jesus was in her midst, and talking to her and teaching. And here’s Mary, you know, sitting at the feet of Jesus, maybe not doing as much as she could have; but Jesus says that she has chosen the better part. When you are in the presence of God, you should be focusing on God instead of all these other things that we can definitely spend a lot time on.
There’s no lack of things that we can worry about and spend our time on. Now we have computer games, and all kinds of other things that take our attention; and we spend all kinds of time on them. Jesus says we don’t have to worry about it; God will provide, God will take care of it. As the 2 nd hymn was telling us, His eye is on the sparrow. He provides for the least of those. But we think it all up to us. This month on our satellite program for Turner Classic Movies, they showed a couple of weeks ago, “Lilies of the Field”. How many remember seeing that one long ago? Sidney Poitier was having car trouble and stopped and ended up with a group of nuns; and they were praying to God to provide. They thought God had provided Sidney Poitier to build their church, their chapel. And when he started building their chapel, he said, Well, yes, God has provided me and I’m gonna’ build it all—by—myself! Now, just how quickly do you think he built that chapel all—by—himself? Not very. And there’s this one scene where they have these Hispanics, and they are chuckling and laughing at him because as he’s doing it all himself, he is going up the ladder and put the brick down, then back down the ladder and all this kind of thing. And slowly one of the guys comes in and says, “Look, I’ll put the brick on the level where you’re at; you don’t have to walk down the ladder and then over here….and eventually, they end up taking all of his jobs away from him. He’s supposed to be the one planning it and supervising it, and not doing all of the work; but he got so worried, and he wanted this to be his chapel. We get so caught up in the “it has to be our thing” that we don’t realize we are doing God’s work. And God says, I will provide helpers; I will provide all the things that we need; we just have to seek God and what he wants for us. Then we will have more than enough.
The second part of that song, “Be Happy”…I have problems with that, because happiness, although we talk about that in America, like “life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, happiness is a feeling. What the Bible talks about and what is mentioned as one of the fruits of the Spirit, is Love, and what’s that second one---Joy! And goes on with Peace, Patience and so on. But it talks about Joy, Joy which is a state of being. Now the difference there can be illustrated by this story I have heard. A co-worker went to one of the people in the office with him and said, “You know, you are the happiest person that I know”. And the guy said, “No, I am the unhappiest person in this office because I’ve had this go wrong and that go wrong, and I have this health problem and these other things; but I am the most joyful person in this office because I have a relationship with God, and I know that God is watching over me and taking care of all of those things in my life. I can be joyful but not happy. Everything is not right with my life, but I have a right relationship with God and I can found my life on knowing that I am God’s child. Then I can live out of that joy, out of that wonder, even though everything else, at times, is falling apart. We don’t get everything that we want, but we have that relationship with God, that foundation in our lives that says, I am God’s child; I am loved.
Those of you who have taught or have taken care of children know the child that comes to your classroom or to your house, that is loved and cared for. They may not have all the possessions in the world, but there is a self-confidence and a self-assurance in the child that knows he is loved. And they are joyful, even when they don’t have everything.
We’re called to be children of God, to realize that as God has called us into the Kingdom, God has said, “I will be there with you; I will love you; I will care for you; I will give you the things that you need, and many things you don’t even think or know that you’ll need. But first of all, get off of ourselves, because we are worrying about things that we think we can control, and that we think we need instead of worrying about, and working on the things that are part of God’s Kingdom, that tells us to seek first the Kingdom of God, and all of those other things will come our way. But we don’t have to worry about them, to strive after them in the sense that we think that’s the goal in our lives.
Our goal, as children of God, is to be part of God’s Kingdom, part of God’s ministry, here and now, founded on God’s love and the joy that it brings to our lives so that we can go out into the world, so that we can deal with one another even when we are unhappy, even when we don’t have everything we want, even when we’re dealing with people who are unhappy and crabby and terrible to get along with; and being able to say, “They’re not mad at me; they’re not even mad at God, they’re just mad at their life situation”, and to say, “God has called me to help, and to be there.”
One of those examples that I always use is that of my Grandma Larson. She spent probably the last ten years of her life in a nursing home because of rheumatoid arthritis, totally crippled up, glaucoma in her eye so that she couldn’t see; but she was one of the people that the staff loved to come to see. She said, “What I have is time and experience. You tell me your problems and your troubles, and what’s going on in your life and I will bring my years of life experience, my years of dealing with children in my own family, and I will give you the best of my advice, and the best of my love and concern.” At the end of the day, she said, “They took too good of care of me”. She lived longer than she ever expected at the nursing home because they wanted to come in and be there with her. This is what we are called to do, even when we have nothing seemingly going right in our lives, we can still be a fountain of joy and of God’s care and God’s presence where we are.
So the word for us is, “Don’t worry—be what?…Be joyful!” Be a child of God. Be all that God has called us to be, because we have to live out that relationship as one of God’s children, and to realize all that we already have and all that God wants for us, instead of worrying about what we don’t have, or what we don’t as much of as another person, or that we don’t have quite the style of another person. We can spend all of our time worrying about all of the little things, and never get on to the things that God has for us, of caring for one another, of reaching out to all of God’s people, especially to those who are hurting, those who think that they have been abandoned where nothing is going right in their lives; and realize and help them to realize, that God cares for them, and they too are a child of God called to “Don’t worry, be joyful”, to realize that God will provide all the things we need, friends, family relationships, and all those minor things that we need for life itself. God is that One who will provide all that we need if we turn our lives over to Him and found our life in that relationship, then everything else follows, if we don’t spend all of our time fretting, all of our time away trying to do it all ourselves.
God provides for our gifts and the gifts of others, to mesh together to be the Body of Christ, to be the Church, to be the ones carrying the good news to all of those people out there, so they too can hear about that, and say, “We want to be a part of that—they don’t seem to worry as much as we do. They seem to be joyful; but they have no reason to be”. That was what marked out the early church. They cared for one another; they cared for people who weren’t even part of the Church. Even when they are being persecuted, there’s just something about them that you want to be with them. This is what God calls us to be about. This is what Jesus was talking about in the Sermon on the Mount. He says time and time again, “Don’t worry”. Then he says, “Seek first the Kingdom of God.
Realize that God knows all of our needs, as God watches over the grass of the field, the lilies of the field, the birds and all those, that if God cares for them, how much more does God care for us and know what we need. God will provide; but God calls us to use our gifts and our lives for the furtherance of God’s Kingdom, meshing those together in witness and in service and in mission. So “Don’t worry, be what”--be what God has called us to be, a joyful caring people. Amen
God calls us to do that in word and deed by gathering together, when we have no other reason, when everybody else is out at the lake, when everybody else is saying, This is the beginning of summer and it feels like it, and we want to be outside doing things, yet we gather for worship, to be nourished, to be strengthened and witness together.
And now let us affirm our faith together using the words of the Apostle’s Creed.
I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried. He descended into Hell. The third day He rose again from the dead and ascended into Heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God, the Father Almighty, from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. I believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen
|