CAREFREE CHRISTIANITY John M, Buchanan

Matthew 6: 24-34 Broad Street Presbyterian Church Ww

November 26, 1975 Columbus, Ohio yi a
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Sometimes we are so consumed by worrying about the future and planning for the
future, that the joys of the present moment go sailing by unexperienced and almosi
unnoticed, Ernest Campbell tells about the time he first attended a double heade
and how at the end of the first inning he began to worry about the fact that the
long-awaited experience was 1/13th over, Campbell unlocked a whole bank of simila
memories with that observation: my awakening to the esoteric joys of baseball, my
total absorption in the nuances of the game at the age of ten, the promise of a
train ride to Pittsburgh to see the then lowly Pirates and the Brooklyn Dodgers,
terrors of the National League, that remarkable assemblage of individuals eulogized
in Roger Kahn's The Boys of Summer, the incessant worrying about the possibility of
rain and the worthlessness of a raincheck when one lives a hundred miles away, And
finally the day arrived, and we were there, Forbes Field and my beloved Pirates,
and one of the sharpest memories is the anxiety of a small boy sensing that the came
was proceeding and soon would be over, Joy, but joy tarnished by the relentless
passing of time, joy tarnished by anxiety,

Human beings are worriers and planners, It is one way to define the difference
between us and the rest of the created order, The rest of the animal kingdom is
blissfully and marvelously unaware of past or future and thus incapable of anxiety.
If you are a dog everyday is forever, every meal a gift, every new moment an oppor-
tunity for joy. But we know - and we worry and we spend a lot of our time planning.
The preacher is always addressing himself in his sermons: I present a fairly large
target for this subject, I love to plan: I worry a lot: what's going to happen to-
morrow, next week, next year ~- occupies a lot of my imagination and thinking, Some-
times it drives my family to distraction,

There are two results of our inherent propensity to worry: one good, one not so
good, To worry about the future and to plan for it is at least to have a chance to
do with it what “one wants to do, Planners and worriers get things accomplished, The
other result is not so positive, Planners and worriers are so busy planning that
there is no space in life for spontaneity, serendipity, sudden and surprising joy.

I confess my sin, Unscheduled joy has to work hard to find time and space to sur-
face - but when it does I am always profoundly grateful, Worriers miss a lot and I
worry about that too, Many of us walk through life like that special breed of

tourist who is so busy snapping pictures of the Grand Canyon to show the neighbors
next February, that he misses entirely the experience of the Grand Canyon, Langdon
Gilkey, one of my favorite theologians writes: "Western culture has so emphasized
work for the future as the center of meaning in life that the value of being in the
present has almost totally vanishec, The great middle class, especially its execu-
tive and professicnal leaders - even those Who comment tearnedty of this theme- find
it almost impossible just to 'be' and merely enjoy some aspect of their present being:
food, talk, Seauty, sleep, rest or love, For many of us all meaning involves activity
that builds something to be enjoyed at some future time." (Naming the Whirlwind,
p.-338), Once Jcsus said, "Do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or
what you shall drink,,,Look at the birds of the air.,,consider the lilies,..,do not

be anxious about tomorrow,"

That sounds like a pleasant but essentially harmless platitude, doesn't it? - read
by the preacher on occasion, from the pulpit which is to say six feet off the ground
and twenty-five miles from the realities of life in this world, It is, I would
suggest, - given its hallowed status as part of the Sermon on the Mount, - one of

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the most ditficuls texts for middle-class Americans to handle honestly, without any
fingers crossed, Surely He_was kidding, or at least speaking metaphorically, Surely
He can't have meant it literally.

Our problems with the text begin with a bit of a mistranslation. Most of us were
brought up with the King James Version, and no matter how long we read and hear
recent translations the older words are burned into our minds, "Take no thought for
tomorrow" is how we learned it and remember it: uncompromisinz, unlikely, unrealistic
and inaccurate, The Greek is better translated: "Do not be anxious," There is, it
seems to me, a sicnificant difference between not thinking about tomorrow and not
being anxious, The sense of it is, "do not be distracted by your anxieties: do not
become the slaves of your worrying and planning," The key is in the short paragraph
which precedes it: "you can't serve God and mammom,"" For now, understand that we're
dealing with deep, obsessive anxiety, not the normal concern about what's for dinner
tonight,

Oversimplification is a danser here} Jesus was not describinz God's providence
as a daily basket of food delivered at the doorstep, He was not inveighing against
owning property or working hard, His father owned a carpenter shop - He was the
heir and in all propabittry owned it and worked in it. "Look at the birds"', He said,
and if we do that empirically, objectively, several observations ought to jump out
at us, For one thing, birds are rather busy little creatures, devoting every waking
hour to providins for themselves, They may not be fretting about paying the gas vill
next month, but they are not unconcerned about dinner and a place to spend the nicht,
For another thine, a lot of them starve and freeze to death precisely because they're

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“not smart enough to plan ahead, For a final thing, we are not birds, We can't

control the fact that we know a secret they don't; namely, that there will be a
tomorrow,

What the text does say, loudiy and clearly, is that life as a follower of Jesus
Christ is a new and different life, What it does say is that we don't have to be
slaves of our anxieties: that full life is freedom from a deep anxiety about the
future which can, and does, rob every present moment of meaning and joy, What it
suggests is that while we may not bow down to stone idols any longer, we have a way
of shoving God out of the center of life and replacing Him with a pagan image - like
security of money or power, (That's what mammon is). What the text says is that
we rob ourselves of our own humanity when that happens - and that Jesus Christ
offers to give it back if we'll take Him a little seriously,

Anxiety, which Webster defines as "painful uneasiness over an impending or
anticipated ill" is a very_real thing; Anxiety 18 tear that doesn't know what to
be afraid of, Wc are anyious because time is passing: we are anxious about the

ought of death: we are anxious vecause there is a lot about life that tells us we
don't amount to much, that we are insignificant, that there is not lasting meaning
to our lives,

To be anxious is part of what it means to be human, but it seems that anxiety in
our day has become epidemic, In literature, the writers whose insights have punc-
tuated the middle of tw EheNG SEY have concluded that anxiety is the primary
reality of our age, en.Wrote a poem entitled "The Age of Anxiety,"Listen
to a few lines: _

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" Vic move on
As the Wheel wills; one revolution
Registers all things, the rise and fall
In pay and prices,,..

",,.this stupid world where

Gadeets are gods and we co on talking,
Many about much, but remain alone,
Alive but alone, belongings - where? -
Unattached as tumbievned,"'

Anxiety about nonbeing entered human consciousness with a new reality after
Hiroshima and Nacasaki, And, in the meantime, the individual caught up and was
reduced to nothing by the very bisness and depersonalizat structures he
had created, Frans Kafka wrote a vrilliant novel called( The Castle, in which the
main character spends his whole life trying to contact th vties in the castle
who control life in the villase - and fails,

We have learned to live with a lot of amorphous, unfocused anxicty., We have
learned to live with threats to our lives, the older threats of hunger and cold, and
the newer threats of nuclear warfare, depersonalization and lencliness, We have
elevated security to the throne of grace! the intensely significant task of nailing
down once and for all the guarantee that there will be a comfortable tomorrow for
ourselves and our families,

We are privileced, in this nation, in this generation, never to have known the
threat of mass starvation, or invasion by an enemy, But anyone who lived through the
great depression, or knows any thios avout it, nee a name for the enemy at the gate,
The name is "financial instability", Anc now we're talking about mammon, Mammon is

whatever we will sive our lives to, in order to guara cr future urity,

"hen E,F,Hutton speaks everybody listens,'' And when the market behaves erratically
and the dollar loses more ground to the yen we experience something more than nervous-
ness, something akin to existential dread, All our tomorrows, the totality of our
warfare against the passing of time, our concern for food and drink and clothing and
the whole future is tied up right there, And when there are hints that whole struc-
ture might come crashing down we feel deep and profound anxiety,

How else to comprehend the unspeakable tragedy in Guyana last week? Demented anc
tortured people found a kind of sick security in the rigid authorizationism of
Jonesville, And when the structure began to shake and come apart at the seams they
showed themselves capable cf murder and mass suicide, All the meaning their poor
lives ever had was siven oy that structure, and without it, there was nothing left,
Whatever else it is, that terrible sequence of events is an illustration of the
intensity of t..c human need for security,

For most of us, however, security is frankly, a materialistic, financial phenom-
enon, It is our fortress against tune threats of hunger and cold, As such it makes
sense: it_is not evil in itself, But at some—petint it becomes mammon - the deity
in whose service we gladly sive our lives. Gilkey/surprised me by suggesting that
most human behavior is an actin out of our anxiety, He writes: le seek the power

to guarantee for the infinite future the job or the status that gives us that
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security, and so our search for power takes on the strange character of infinity," wet
(ob,cit,, p. 322),

Politicians and soldiers are free to do it openly, Hitler promised a "Thousand
Year Reich" and if you want to sce it in battle dress watch Patton next week, Gilkey
observes that business men, clezsy and professors all engage in political maneuver-
ing to defend our job, career, or at least our name - the source of our meaning,
our guarantee of security,

But it doesn't work, Idolatry never does, Because the threat is ultimate, our
need for security is infinite, The wealthy man always needs more, The materialist
will always need the latest gadret, The professor, one more monograph for his

shelf, and the clergyman one more sermon to end all sermons, And the nation?
ad

How many nucl suarantee our security? Does anyone
seriously propose is éver possiple’ fFhere anyone who seriously believes
that another several billion dollars will do it? Of course not. It doesn't work
that way, The sod of security is infinitely demanding. He will not be satisiied,
You cannot serve God and mamman,

And so we come finally to a point of decision - which is where Jesus wanted us
to be in the first place, You can't ve a free person and a slave at the same time,
You must choose - who and what you will be,

Thanksgiving is sevecal days gone but the best part of the Pilgrim story is here,
They worried and planned, and it's a good thing that they did, But had their
ultimate concern been security they would never have left England, They trusted God,
In a way so simple that we have trouble comprehending it, they believed that God
would stand with them and provide for them, Not without their energy and work and
planning, to be sure, But at some point each one of those intrepid souls had a
moment of decision - God or mammon: the future of freedom or the security of the
present,

~ The Gospel of Jesus Christ, God's word for us today, is that in Him we are
already safe, Our future is secure, Ue are free - from the anxicty about time,
free from the thieat of death or nonbeins, Free to live our lives, this moment,
this glorious day, for its own sake and none other, We are free in Jesus Christ to
enjoy being human and alive in 1978; free to enjoy the fruit of our labor; free to
live joyfully and openly because we are safe,

Having heard me say the words, wouldn't you give anything to be that way - to be
that free? Isn't there somethings ceep within each one of us that longs to be that
kind of men and wowen? ji.cll, the news is that it's right in front of us: for the
taking, But we can't have it both ways, We can't compromise at this point, We
can't serve two masters, We can't keep living out of our anxiety and then turn
to God once a week or so and expect everything to feel all right, We can't devote
every waking moment to making time stand still, or to accumulating, symbols of our
immortality and expect an occasional hour in worship to transform us into
carefree Christians,

~5-

That happens deaply, profoundly ~ when we put everything in perspective of the
God who created us and redecmed us and promised to cere for us: that is to say,
when we accept the Lordship of Jesus Christ and receive from Hi the life He wants
us. to live: when we seek, first, His kinedom and He becomes master of our lives,
our possessions, our time,

"Seok first his kingdom and his richteousness, and all these things shall
be yours as well,"

That is the promise - and that, I vould suggest, is very 300d news indeed,
Amen,

Qur Father, ve confess that ve have tried very hard to nail down our security,
We confess thac it has been illusive and that we haven't succeeded, Open us nov,
to the sugvestion that You are the onl: security we need, And give us,each, the
courage to decite this day to leve You and sarve You and seek your Kingdom,
Through Jesus Christ our Lord,
Amen,