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Our Anxious Days; or What, Me Worry? by Rev. Gregory Turner 17 August 2003 TEXT: Matthew 6:25-34 © 2003 Gregory Turner

First in America fifty years ago, and then around the world, many of us can still see the innocuously devilish face of Alfred E. Newman, looking out from the cover of MAD magazine, and asking: “What? Me Worry?” Well, sure we do. We know it doesn’t help, that it’s silly to worry – like paying the interest on trouble before it comes due. Our sleeping pill generation can’t sleep because it’s worried about insomnia. Many conscience-stricken folks are like Austin O’Malley’s “Irishman who’s worried by the consciousness that there is nothing to worry about.” Playwright Noel Coward is reputed to have sent notes to the twenty most prominent men in London. Each note read, “All is discovered! Escape while you can!” Within twenty-four hours all twenty had left town.

The fact that we worry is obvious. Why we do so is not so obvious. t doesn’t work, of course, because, when you think of it, we only worry about what we can’t help, and that’s useless; or what we can help, and that’s stupid. But what a burden our worry can be. Arthur Somers Roche wrote; “Worry is a thin stream of fear, and if encouraged it cuts a channel into which all our thoughts are drained.” Or, as one wise observer put it:

Worry is an old man with bended head
Carrying a load of feathers, which he thinks is lead.

Worry we do, but why do we?

I believe Roche is right: “Worry is a thin stream of fear…” So let’s begin there. Many of our fears are completely legitimate, even helpful when we need to take action in order to avoid injury. Being no spinner of utopian fancies, Jesus does not question our need to be prudent, to plan for the future, to guard our health and safety. That old translation of Mathew’s text, “Take no thought for the marrow,” is wrong. What Jesus questions is not prudence but anxiety, the fancy word for worry. For the true emotion behind our worry is “Fear.” It is fear for what we are to eat or drink, fear for our very lives.

God answers Solomon’s prayer today by noting, among other things, that when the young king asked for God’s blessing and gifts, he did not ask for longer life. In the lectionary passage from John, assigned for today but not read, Jesus tells his opponents that he is the Living Bread, “not like that which our ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.” These passages are among thousands in the scared texts of the world teaching us that death is what we most fear. Harold Bloom, the great literary critic and student of the earliest Hebrew texts in our Bible, reflects the conviction of many scholars when he writes:

Religion…rises from our apprehension of death. To give meaning to meaninglessness is the endless quest of religion… Clearly we possess religion, if we want to, precisely to obscure the truth of our perishing… When death becomes the center, then religion begins.

Our faith seeks to overcome this fear – but it has long since learned that it does not do so by pretending death is not real, that it is not necessary. It is very real, and quite necessary. In our faith death does not have the last word, but the effect it does have can be overwhelming. Until we grasp that death is real, powerful - mostly an enemy until it becomes a friend – until we integrate that knowledge into our life attitudes and behavior, our religion and the lives it shapes will be increasingly elaborate fantasies constructed to suppress our fear. Fantasies may be nice places to visit, but you don’t want to live there.

Freud said it long ago. Our over-sophisticated attitude toward death shows we are living beyond our psychological means; we must reform and give death its due openly, not by suppressing its power. Ernest Becker was one of the most provocative writers of the last generation. No more important work on this issue can be found than his The Denial of Death, where he argues that “behind the sense of insecurity in the face of danger, behind the sense of discouragement and depression, there are always lurks the basic fear of death…” That is the great but unspoken point behind Jesus’ Sermons on the Mount and on the Plain. Both contain long sections on not being anxious. Allow me to summarize.

Jesus reminds us that God gives us life, and if life, then surely God can be trusted for lesser things. “Is not life more than food, the body more than clothing?” Here Jesus turns our positive endowments against the negative fears we hold. Or, as Sir Walter Scott wrote, “Many of our cares are but morbid ways of looking at our privileges.” Think of that. Anxiety is often – not always, but often – a negative way at looking at our strengths: like the Olympic champion who worries about the color of her track shoes.

For illustration Jesus offers the example of the birds. God knows anxiety is not a matter of less work. Birds work harder than any human, what with their hyper metabolism to keep going. The point is they don’t worry about it. There is no aviarial attempt to control the future. They are too busy, and they evolved knowing worry is like a rocking chair; it gives you something to do, but it gets you nowhere.

Anxiety about the future never changes anything, and fear of this sort adds not one minute to our span of life. In fact, with what we now know about stress, the reverse is true; worry is both useless and harmful to our health. We have too much to do to spend our time fretting. Jesus’ focus is that in God’s care for us, whatever is coming can be handled. We might even discover how little we feared would happen actually does. Emerson said it:

Some of your hurts you have cured

And the sharpest you still have survived,

But what torments of grief you endured

From evils that never arrived!

Sometimes the torments or grief are from sheer envy of others. If that causes you anxiety, remember American comedian Fred Allen’s great one-liner: “If the grass is greener in the other guy’s yard, let him worry about mowing it.”

Jesus suggests that anxiety is characteristic of those Gentiles who do not know what God’s covenant of love if all about the way his own Jewish people should. Gentiles see God as some capricious, jealous, even wrathful deity. Against such untrustworthy providence one must fret enough to make every possible provision, but not so for us as children of a loving God. So, what is worry if not fear, and what is fear – said one wise bishop – if not a pre-occupation with ourselves, a denial of the giving, sharing love of God? And we all know what Jesus said about that. Cut it out! (So much for non-directive counseling.)

Worry is lessened when we stop centering on our needs, already provided for, and focus instead on the Kingdom of God, on bringing our wills into line with God’s will. It’s a matter of motivations and priorities. It’s about getting first things first, when our fears always want to pull them down into third or fourth place. Seek ye first God’s kingdom. That’s a goal we pursue and try continually to expand upon: to discover and live God’s will. But we had better be careful here, because the idea of “God’s Will” is often thrown around in outrageous and damaging ways. God’s will is for love and justice, grace and generosity, gentleness and peace among peoples. Hebrew tradition warns us to exercise caution whenever we make statements about God and what God desires. I can’t believe it is helpful to anyone caught in a moment of great loss and anxiety to hear someone piously pronounce, “Now dear, it is all God’s will.”

Who said? And who gives us the right to turn off our brains (because we think we have to open our mouths) and suggest that when some great loss confronts another person that God wills it? That’s not helpful…and that’s not true. When disaster befalls us or oppression overcomes us, it’s never God’s Will. Let me recommend Leslie Weatherhead’s fine little book called The Will of God, for an intelligent treatment of this important topic. (I will deal at length it his arguments next week.) What we do know is that God wills life and love and deals with us with grace and mercy. When that conviction takes root in our hearts, anxiety is defeated. Try as it may, and it will try, it will not conquer us.

Bishop William Quayle made the point well. One night he recalls lying awake unable to sleep due to the intrusion of so many problems that seemed to have no solution. Then, sitting by the window and staring out into the darkness, he heard the voice of God: “Quayle, you go to bed. I’ll sit up all night.”

Seek first God’s Kingdom in the here and now, Jesus advises. Let tomorrow be anxious for itself. The mark of a disciple is to center on today, and we counter the terror of death best by doing that. In recent decades both Alcohol’s Anonymous and the Hospice movement have taught this truth in moving ways. AA counters the slow death of alcoholism. Hospice teaches the art dying well, surrounded by care. Both have helped untold numbers of people, and for both the key learning is to “live one day at a time.” That way we live fully no matter when death chooses to come. Why does it take such honest looks at death to learn how to avoid its terror? Surely, because both the alcoholic hitting bottom and the terminally ill person know how precious life is.

Here is one of life’s great lessons. The root of all our fears is the fear of death, but that very fact - when handled rightly - can be helpful. Someone once said: “Never worry about growing older, for when you stop growing older you’re dead.” Funny, but not quite right. We’re dead when we stop growing… period, when we stop living and loving in the moment for the sake of some supposed future or some crippling past. I wonder how many of us buy the point Leo Buscaglia made so often: “Those who fear death, who cry and fret and scream, are those who have never really lived”? That’s probably an overstatement, but a good one. At the root of most anxiety is a fear of death because we have feared to live anywhere near our full potential.

How true that is in our relationships with other people! With the privilege human care and contact all around us for the asking, we hold back on the sharing of ourselves, putting off for some vague tomorrow our engaging in the intimacy we so desperately need, fearful we will be rejected. Then, suddenly, there are no more tomorrows. To warn us about this, Buscaglia shared a very sad poem. A young woman writes:

Remember the day I borrowed your brand new car and I dented it?

I thought you’d kill me, but you didn’t.

And remember the time I dragged you to the beach, and you said it would rain and it did?

I thought you’d say, “I told you so.” But you didn’t.

Do you remember the time I flirted with all the guys to make you jealous, and you were?

I thought you’d leave me, but you didn’t.

Do you remember the time I spilled strawberry pie all over your car rug?

I thought you’d hit me, but you didn’t.

And remember the time I forgot to tell you the dance was formal and you showed up in jeans?

I thought you’d drop me, but you didn’t.

Yes, there were lots of things you didn’t do. But you put up with me, and you loved me,

and you protected me.

There were lots of things I wanted to make up to you when you returned from Viet Nam,

but you didn’t.

Edwin Markham said many wonderful things, among them this: “Sorrow comes to stretch out spaces in the heart for joy.” The person who has not known sorrow can hardly recognize joy. And the only way to live is to risk the loss and rejection that can cause sorrow. Well, the only way to live is to accept death too. Far from fearing death, the one who lives fully can see it as a potential friend. It is death that forces us to accept limits to life: that time is short, that people come and go, and if we are to live, we’ve got to let go our fear and share with them. What are we waiting for? What are we holding onto? None of us will get out of this world alive. John Dryden wrote it in familiar words over 300 years ago:

The fact that we will die, our root fear and perhaps the prime mover of religion, is not so fearful for those who see it as part of life, part of God’s plan, part of God’s love. Like nothing else it can teach us what life and love are: open arms, freedom to care, the ability to share and thus to be all you can be.

What? Me Worry? You bet I do. But like all of us I hope to see that beneath my anxiety is the fear of death, which is a fear of life, which is a denial of God. Having confessed that, we can see life aright and get on with a fuller living of it. Then, perhaps we legions of worrywarts can say with Matthew Arnold:

Amen.