How often might you have echoed the words of Zion? “The Lord has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me.” That line resonates the lament of many people throughout history yet Isaiah is quick to come to God’s defense, using the example of a mother and her child. Can you imagine anything or any reason that would cause the average mother to forget her baby? Nor can I. God’s love for Zion, the chosen people, is even more passionate than any mother’s love.
God will never forget us. More likely we have forgotten God when we are ill at ease for any reason. No wonder Jesus tells us, “…do not worry about your life…” yet isn’t that what we do so often? We fret about our budget, our livelihood, our future. Jesus knows our mindset so he cautions us, “You cannot serve God and mammon.” Now that’s a word we don’t hear often. Mammon is an ancient word that means money. We cannot live without that so what does he mean?
Serving mammon means making money and owning possessions, but Jesus cautions us not to make them the most important things in our lives, our primary goal for living. For many people, that is their top priority. Their pursuit of riches, pleasure and power leaves no room for God in their busy agenda but Jesus isn’t being so black and white here.
Many people believe in God but choose to live their lives according to their own standards. They see a place for God in their lives but the God they acknowledge is a convenient God who makes no inconvenient demands of them. Theirs is a God who pardons all our faults and lets us continue in our selfish ways. Such a God makes possible a religion that disturbs nothing and imposes no obligations but that isn’t the God or religion of Jesus Christ. What Jesus proposes in this gospel passage, the end of his Sermon on the Mount, is that God should matter more than anything else in our lives.
Serving God means carrying out his will, obeying his commandments, and seeking his kingdom. Making God primary means making a radical commitment to live as Jesus lived. Obviously, this does not mean excluding our material needs, human satisfactions or positions of power but they should be subordinate to God and our quest for his kingdom. In other words, Jesus wants us to prefer God to any other human desire.
So what do we get in return? For starters, may I suggest peace of mind? If Jesus could add one more line to his Sermon on the Mount, I can hear him saying, “…let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself…nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
Franklin Roosevelt said those words 84 years ago at his first inauguration but it seems to me they have been forgotten. How many of our decisions are driven by fear? Fear pushes into a primary position something that we ordinarily would not assign much value. Fear of another country occupying ours has driven us into giving first priority in the federal budget to weapons for national defense rather than to programs for educating, housing, and healing our citizens, or rebuilding our crumbling highways and bridges. Fear of losing our desired standard of living can drive us into giving priority to work over family, and to hard heartedness over concern for human needs. Fear of the potential misconduct of some immigrants have prompted us to close our borders to countless other would-be immigrants who have much to offer our country just as many migrants have in the past.
Jesus asks, “Can any of you by worrying add a single moment to your life-span?” Worry is both useless and potentially harmful to one’s health. Worrying results from serving the wrong master and having misguided priorities. We can reduce the power worry has over us when we concentrate on doing the will of God.
When we put God first and have faith in Him, our happiness is no longer dependent on the contents of our closets, our bookshelves, our cars, or houses, or even the people who move in and out of our lives. When we put God first, our happiness flows from the experience of the presence of God’s love in our lives. When we put God first we have the time, no, more than that, we have the ability to look at the birds of the sky and flowers of the fields and say, “God, how beautiful they are. How good and caring you are.”
When Jesus tells us not to worry about tomorrow, He is not telling us to be imprudent or unprepared for the future; nor is he telling us that it is OK to procrastinate. Rather he is telling us to live each day as if it were the only day in our lives. Yesterday is gone and tomorrow may never come. Today will not come around again, ever. We must not let this day slip through our hands without doing at least one act of mercy. Each day is the one that we must fill with love for God and others for that is what God expects us to do as disciples of his son. Doing so demonstrates that we are indeed seeking his kingdom and allowing his will to be done.
This Wednesday we turn a new page on our faith journey. We will receive ashes to remind us of the shortness of life. Things we worry about – including these malfunctioning bodies – will turn to dust. Repent and believe in the Gospel. Seek first the kingdom of God. Do not worry about tomorrow:
As we heard in today’s psalm, “Only in God be at rest, my soul, for from him comes my hope. He is my rock and my salvation, my stronghold; I shall not be disturbed.” Hopefully you won’t be either despite what we read in the headlines.