27 February 2011

“Photosynthesis”
1 Corinthians 4:1-5 / Matthew 6:24-34
8th Sunday in Ordinary Time / Season of Epiphany
27 February 2011


Today … just like last week … we’re treated to a Gospel text which hasn’t rotated through our Sunday lectionary readings since 1984 – this time after Epiphany being so long this year, Lent and Easter coming so late – like the calendar seasons, the church seasons are slow to change as well.
Now, I say “treated” with some irony intended – for, also, like last week, these words are not easy ones. These are real seat-squirmers … difficult, challenging words from Jesus in these concluding sentences of this section of his Sermon on the Mount.
Unlike last week, though … Jesus’ words are not framed by his rhetorical tool, on the one hand “You have heard it said,” laying out the “word on the street,” the go along to get along word that the world lays out as “gospel truth” … and then, contrasting with Jesus’ charge, upping the ante for his disciples, those who hear and follow him, “But I say to you” …“turn the other cheek” … “give your enemy even your cloak” … “love your enemies” … “be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” … showing how Jesus emphasizes not just the letter of the law, but the Spirit behind it
No, here, today, the cruel joke comes on hard and fast ... not nuanced, but straight up: “Do not worry about your life … what will we eat … what will we drink … what will we wear?”
For if you are paying any attention to the world around you at all … not worrying seems at the very least, the airhead response … “what, me worry?” … and, at worst, callous, hard, insensitive.
Everywhere we turn … there is reason to worry.
A brief sampling of the news can surely bring us bushel baskets of worry.

“Mideast unrest may soon send the price of oil to over $220 a barrel, bringing $5 a gallon gasoline to the US as soon as this summer for the first time ever, and killing the fledgling economic recovery.”

“The price of clothing is set to rise this year at its highest rate since the 1970s.”

“World food supplies are at a tipping point; if bad weather in the US Midwest this year delays planting or harvest, food shortages may well affect not just the world’s poor countries, but the US as well.”

“The US budget deficit – at its highest point ever – may now be set to create an irreversible path of destruction … we could soon see spiraling hyperinflation, baby boomers’ retirement dollars erased, bankrupted Social Security and Medicare for our elderly … for America, an economic disaster worse than the Great Depression.”

And that’s the way it is …

As I said, you’d have to be either brainless, or have the insensitivity of Montgomery Burns – Homer’s tycoon boss on TV’s “The Simpsons,” to NOT be worried. We worry these days, and with good reason. Everything we’ve worked so hard for, everything we own, our livelihood, our very lives, is at risk, today, perhaps more so than at any time during most of our lifetimes.
And yet … for the next little while … I’m going to ask you to suspend that very real worry … and indulge me in one final Epiphanytide science lesson.

Today’s Science word is … another familiar one to us … “photosynthesis.”
It’s the process in plants through which, sunlight turns carbon dioxide into sugar, which turns sunlight into food, adding to their growth. Sunlight hits the leaves and begins the process, the end result of which is physical growth in the plant, and oxygen released into the atmosphere for humans and other animals to breathe … so we can live.
Without photosynthesis … there wouldn’t be any plants … nor would there be any humans. We’d soon enough use up all the oxygen.

OK … Pastor Bob … you might be saying … well and good, we all know photosynthesis is a good thing … and it was nice to have our minds diverted for a few minutes on Sunday morning … but can we please get back to our worrying?
Fair enough … but first, hear the word that photosynthesis has everything to do with our Gospel text today.
Huh?
Why sure it does. This section of Gospel text actually begins back in verse 21 – three lines before our printed text today – as Jesus admonishes his hearers, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” And then he expands on this in the verse which begins today’s reading, “No one can serve (literally, be enslaved to) two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other … you cannot serve (again, be enslaved to) both God and wealth.”
Once again, Jesus goes back … back in time, back in word, back to the beginning, asking that question, “who’s your God?”
What is it, who is it, that your entire living revolves around … without which, your life is empty, worthless …without meaning???
Is it God … or is it wealth … mammon … stuff … possessions … things?
In the language of photosynthesis, which sun do you revolve around … which sun provides your growth … gives you true food for living … God’s Son … or some other one?
Now, Jesus doesn’t go to a Word of judgment here … because he knows that people of every time and every place have problems with worry.
What he does … is to go into a series of comparisons … much like he did in last Sunday’s Gospel … just without using his rhetorical “you have heard it said … but I say to 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?”
That sentence … it’s no mistake that it’s disjointed … disparate … divided into several different pieces. Literally, that word Jesus uses that our Bibles translate as “worry,” it means “being distracted, or being divided into pieces.”
And indeed … that is what worry does to us … it distracts us, and divides us … divides our attention … divides up our lives, if we worry enough about enough different things.
Granted … there is a lot to worry about these days … and I don’t want to lessen the importance of that. Maybe the basics of life … food and clothing, home, shelter … those might not be on our worry list, those of us gathered here today … but then, we US residents are wealthy people … maybe we don’t feel like it, but compared to the rest of the world, we really are.
Maybe some of you have heard that story about “if the world were shrunk down to 100 people” … you know the one, 60 would be Asian, 12 European, 14 Africans, 8 Latin Americans, 5 Americans. Of those 100, 5 would control over 30% of the world’s wealth and … yep … all 5 are Americans.
Still, even here, some of us have, and some of us don’t, and it’s a lot easier to not worry about food and clothing if you have some means, some money, some wealth.
But then, there’s always something to worry about, isn’t there … if it’s not food and clothing, it might be “… are we going to be able to save up enough money for the kids’ college education … or have enough for retirement … or even pay our medical bills?”
And that’s what Jesus means here. Worry divides and distracts … it takes us away from the whole, complete life of God’s shalom to which Jesus is calling us when he says, at the end of last week’s Gospel reading, “be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
That life of shalom, of wholeness, in which we hear Christ’s call to love our enemies, to not plot revenge, to be generous to others … the life of shalom for which Jesus goes all the way to the Cross … to give to us … in our repentance and his forgiveness, our falling short and his restoration.
And Jesus has even more to say to us about this. Though others might strive for the stuff that we worry about … what Jesus sees here is more than just “working for stuff,” working for that which causes worry … Jesus calls us to strive after … literally, to find our answer, to our quest, our search for meaning … that quintessential human question, “what does it all mean,”…
Jesus says, encourages, admonishes us, not to look for the answer to that question in “what will we eat” or “what will we drink” or “what will we wear?”
Because he knows we’ll be disappointed.
And yet again, that’s a tough answer. It’s easier for a person who has the means of life, some assurance of a safe future, a secure job or retirement, to go searching for meaning outside of stuff … than it is for someone who lives hand to mouth, paycheck to paycheck, month after month after month.
And that’s why the final Word Jesus has for us here is just that … “Therefore, I tell you” …
Yes, that’s right … YOU … a big, collective, plural YOU.
Jesus knows that, separate and separated, we’ll most certainly worry. Remember that worry’s root meaning is division and distraction. Alone, by ourselves, it’s always easier to worry about things, stuff, the future, whatever.
That’s why this passage of the Sermon on the Mount is, finally, a call for us to be together … for us who follow Jesus to come together and be together … rich and poor, have and have not … to come together in our striving, our searching for meaning, to be together as a body, Christ’s body, in the world.
A body, Christ’s body in the world, where together, as community, we can and will bear each other’s burdens.
A body, Christ’s body in the world, where together, as community, we can and will gather around Christ’s Word, in water and in forgiveness, in bread and wine.
A body’ Christ’s body in the world, in and through which, in and through each other … Jesus’ light and love shining into our worrisome lives through our gathering together, through our presence together, here, for each other … out there, for others, growing in and through the light of the Son … this is how we find true meaning for this life.
Yes, there will still be troubling, worrisome things happening around us. The stock market, the national debt, jobs coming and going … Jesus never said, “believe in me and *poof* everything gets better”… what he did say is “tomorrow will, indeed, bring worries of its own.”
What Jesus does offer us is food for the journey … traveling companions for the journey … wholeness and healing, forgiveness and grace, mercy and peace for this life … so that we can live this life as he intends it for us.
Much better than the future a hamburger, a bottle of beer or pop, a pair of Levis can offer us.
For Jesus’ much better is … enough.
And always, for us.
Amen.