VIII Epiphany – February 27, 2011 – Year A
“So do not worry about tomorrow,” we hear Jesus say to his disciples (and maybe a crowd that has begun to gather).
Ironic, isn’t it, that Lucy and I should have recently returned from a clergy seminar hosted by the national Church called “Planning for Tomorrow”!
Actually, I made it a point to listen closely yesterday because the reading for Noonday Prayer was taken from this morning’s lesson from Matthew, but it ended with “…strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well”, stopping just short of the sentence about not worrying about tomorrow.
Nothing like a little judicious editing!
Still, I guess that just goes to show that clergy are human, too—very much so.
After all, if we human beings didn’t spend a great deal of time worrying about tomorrow, Jesus wouldn’t have bothered to bring up the subject in the first place.
So, since he seems to have been a pretty good judge of human nature, what might he have been getting at, when he said what he did?
Was he hoping for some improvement?
He had already said that no one could serve two masters—that no one could serve God and wealth, and I take it by “serve” Jesus meant “worship”.
So I guess what he might have been suggesting was that “worrying” or at least “worrying too much” about tomorrow—specifically, about what you were going to eat or drink or wear—instead of making the kingdom of God your main priority might just end up making an idol out of money—might just lead to worshiping the idea of acquiring wealth for its own sake.
Now you might expect this emphasis upon not being preoccupied with the pursuit of material wealth from an itinerant preacher who seems at least at times to have been dependent, along with his disciples, upon the generosity of friends, acquaintances, and even strangers for his day-to-day existence, but that’s still no reason not to take Jesus’ watchword seriously.
At what point does planning for tomorrow morph into forgetting about today, when today and the needs that today presents—not only our needs, but the needs of others—are first and foremost what calls for our faithful response?
The trouble with too much planning is that I can put off the doing.
For example, it’s one thing to say, either as individuals or as nations: “If we all were to commit a certain percentage of our resources to it, we could eliminate world hunger.”
It’s quite another to say: “I am committing a certain percentage of my resources to it. If you do it, too, we will eliminate world hunger.”
One of the reasons why the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals is still so far away is that planning too much can get you off the hook.
Am I implying that the Millennium Development Goals and achieving them are the same thing as the kingdom of God?
Hardly.
But I am suggesting that achieving things like the Millennium Development Goals has everything to do with the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness, or Jesus wouldn’t have taken the trouble to tell us to quit worrying about the things that conveniently keep us from attending to more important things—like not just: “Will I have enough for tomorrow?”, but: “Does my neighbor have enough for today?”
Is that the focus that Jesus was trying to achieve when he almost offhandedly remarked: “Today’s trouble is enough for today.”?
Is our need to attend to “today’s trouble”, whatever that may happen to be at a given moment, what Jesus meant when he urged his disciples to “strive first for…God’s righteousness”?
The word “righteousness” is a word we don’t use that much in everyday conversation, and rightly so; aside from the usage of such terms as “self-righteous” or “righteous indignation”, “righteous” and “righteousness” are pretty well confined to the realm of the religious, where, certainly, as far as the Christian religion is concerned, the righteousness of God might best be defined as the willing offering of God’s self in love and the kingdom of God, as the created world’s loving response to God’s loving offering, so perfectly revealed in the person of Jesus Christ.
“But strive first for the kingdom of God and [God’s] righteousness.”
I wager that every one of us has experienced the exhilaration of responding to the loving offering of God’s self by the offering of our own selves in love, often in unexpected ways that we could neither predict nor imagine, to borrow the words of St. Paul, “as servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries”.
Again, not that I would equate an institution as fragile as the Church with something as sublime as the kingdom of God, and yet it is as we willingly embrace the role of being “servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries” that we unfailingly sense the growing presence of the kingdom of God in us and among us.
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