The Worries of the Day

Scripture: Matthew 6:25-34

We worry.

If we peruse the writings of many of history's great thinkers we find that they tell us not to do so. Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, the Buddha, Santideva, Confucius, Rumi--all say don't worry. Even the Vikings--a crew not fabled for their nuanced sensitivities--declared in an Old Norse poem: "Foolish is he who frets at night / And lies awake to worry."

We hear the same message in the words of more contemporary moral teachers, like Gandhi and the Dalai Lama: Don't. Worry.

And we get it. At a purely rational level we understand that worry is unproductive. As sages have observed for a few thousand years, if a problem is fixable then there is no need to worry; if a problem is not fixable then there is no point in worrying. The logic of this argument is unassailable.

Some of us manage to live with these realities in mind. My father was like that. He had a rough life: raised in poverty; sent off to fight on two continents in World War II; a man who met with success and then lost everything; convicted of a crime and imprisoned; bedeviled by ulcers and arthritis and heart problems; death an imminent and spectral presence throughout most of his later years. But every night he slept like a baby.

This drove my mother nuts. She struggled mightily with insomnia, prodded awake by a seemingly endless inventory of anxieties. One morning I heard her say to my father, almost in anger, certainly in resentment: "How is it that every night you fall asleep so easily and rest so peacefully?" He looked up from his breakfast and said: "Well, when I start to worry I ask myself: 'Am I going to do anything about that right now, tonight?' The answer is always 'no.' And then I doze off." With that, he shrugged and returned to his corn flakes.

As I say: the logical of it is unassailable. 

But many of us worry anyway.

The problem is that many of us do not find it as easy to "cease and desist" from worrying as the advice implies we should. "Don't worry" means "stop doing that thing," the sort of direct and simple command we might give to a toddler who is building a tower from his mashed potatoes at dinner. For many of us the directive meets with the same success as the injunction issued toward the child: little or none.

The advice seems inadequate and incomplete. It oversimplifies the problem. For many of us, anxiety is not so easily extinguished.

So we may bristle a bit when we come to the end of Chapter 6 of Matthew's gospel and find these words: "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life ... [C]an any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?"

We say to ourselves: "And here it is again, some profoundly wise voice telling me not to worry. Right. I'm on that."

We might find a little more help at the very end of the chapter, where Jesus declares: "So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today's trouble is sufficient for today." Corrie ten Boom may have been getting at the same idea when she said: "Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength."

I'll confess to a deep personal fondness for this verse. I'm particularly keen on the poetry of the King James version of it: "Take therefore no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." Sufficient, indeed; sometimes more than sufficient; sometimes a day can seriously overachieve in the evil department.

Still, this advice, too, may feel inadequate and incomplete. We may think that saying "don't spend today worrying about tomorrow" doesn't solve the problem. It just temporally relocates it.

Perhaps, from a mental health perspective, this has something to recommend it. It is, after all, the sort of thinking that helped my father go to sleep every night: "Well, if I'm not going to do anything about it now, then why worry about it now?"

But I remain concerned. It feels to me like a bit of a shell game, as though we're saying to ourselves: "Hey, if I keep moving the anxiety around then I'll lose track of where it is." And, while postponement is sometimes wise and useful, I am unpersuaded that it brings to the challenge the sort of moral force we need if we want to do combat with so robust an opponent as worry.

That's why I believe that the key passage toward the end of the sixth chapter of Matthew is this: "But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness." If you do that, the gospel says, then all the things that are worrying you will be addressed.

The genius of this passage is that it does not tell us to stop the energy flow that drives our anxiety. Rather, it tells us to direct that energy toward something else. I'm sure you can see why this distinction makes a huge difference. If you can't, then imagine standing at the bottom of a rushing river; now ask yourself whether you have a better chance of stopping it altogether or of making it go in a new direction.

Also, I think the word "first" is doing some real work here. Before you get about the business of worrying, the passage says, send your energy in this different direction. Before you feed your anxieties, the passage says, feed your sense of the sacred. What is the easiest way to stop worrying? Don't start. What is the easiest way to keep from starting? By occupying your whole spirit with something else. What activity could possibly require the commitment of all your energy? The work of God. The work of God into which each of us is called. The work of faith and hope and love.

It is perhaps in the same spirit that Confucius declared that "the man of benevolence never worries." Why would this be true? Because benevolence, properly done, wholly occupies us; it takes us out of ourselves; it focuses us on something else, on somewhere else, on someone else. So occupied, we have little time or opportunity to indulge in pointless worry.

I do not mean--and I think this passage does not mean--to substitute one piece of overly simplistic advice for another. Trying to stay ahead of our worries requires vigilance; repurposing their energy if they show up anyway demands focus and discipline; we will struggle to do these things; we will not always succeed. But we may find that these strategies make a life of diminished worry possible where others fail us.

After all, there is One through whom everything is possible. And, in the holy endeavor described in this verse, He is before us, and behind us, and beside us.

He whispers into our ears: "Do this."

He does not even bother to add: "And do not worry."

Amen.  

Blessed Imperfection

Scripture: Matthew 5

Chapter 5 of Matthew's gospel is a remarkable document.

Biblical scholars have said that it expresses Jesus's main ethical teachings. It includes the Beatitudes, in which Jesus declares the special blessings that fall upon the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those who suffer persecution for their faith. It commands us to forgive and to be generous. It instructs us not to hide our light but to let it shine before others.

Chapter 5 is a densely packed text. It is so rich and relentless in its moral authority that some scholars have suggested that Jesus probably did not say all of these things on the same occasion. They speculate that Chapter 5 is a compilation of teachings that Jesus offered at different times. And, indeed, it is difficult to imagine anyone absorbing all of this ethical instruction in one sitting.

But Chapter 5 is remarkable not just for its richness and complexity but also for the dizzyingly high expectations it sets for us. Jesus tells us that it is not enough for us to refrain from killing; we must not even get angry at our brothers and sisters. It is not enough for us to follow conventional notions of generosity; we must give to anyone who asks of us. It is not enough for us to put aside our desire for revenge; we must offer our right cheek to the one who slapped the left.

Then, as if these commands were not overwhelming enough, Chapter 5 ends with this daunting directive: "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect."

Some contemporary philosophers of ethics--such as Kwame Anthony Appiah--have argued that if we want to develop a workable moral theory then we have to pay attention to human psychology. It does us no good, they contend, to formulate ethical principles with which real people cannot comply. On reading Chapter 5, we might wonder whether Jesus has fallen into the exact error that those philosophers condemn. After all, who among us never gets angry, never thinks a lustful thought, always gives everything away on demand, consistently goes the extra mile, and so on and so on? Who among us is perfect--or holds out any hope of becoming so?

In light of our conspicuous imperfections, we might wonder whether this text, with its extraordinary demands and aspirations, has any relevance for us. I think that it does. Indeed, I believe that this text has embedded within it two profound insights into human behavior that are critical to the success of our efforts to lead better lives.

The first insight is that, left to our own devices, we will tend to aim low and then wallow in self-satisfaction over having hit the easy target we set for ourselves.

In this respect, it is helpful to remember that in Chapter 5 Jesus is not just promoting a morality of high aspirations; he is also rejecting another, different kind of morality because he finds it insufficient. 

To understand what Jesus is getting at, it may be helpful to bear in mind a distinction made by the legal scholar and philosopher, Lon Fuller. Fuller distinguished what he called "the morality of duty" from what he called "the morality of aspiration."

The morality of duty, Fuller said, sets the minimum standards for behavior below which we may not fall. It tells us not to commit murder or to steal or to bear false witness. It is the ethics of the lowest common denominator, of regulatory compliance.

The morality of aspiration, in contrast, relates to the ideal behaviors toward which we should all strive. We might think of this as the morality of the Good Samaritan, who stops to help a stranger not because the law requires it but because his conscience compels him to do so. This is the ethics of the "better angels of our nature," to use Lincoln's words; it is the ethics of our farthest and most ambitious reach.

In Chapter 5, Jesus rejects the morality of duty as an adequate standard for behavior. Of course, satisfying the morality of duty matters and we should honor its prescriptions. But compliance with those expectations is a pretty modest demand to make upon ourselves. None of us hopes to have the eulogist at our funeral say, "He was a good man; he never killed or robbed anybody." We'd like to aim a bit higher than that.

In Chapter 5, Jesus draws us away from that legalistic, minimalistic, lowest-common-denominator, compliance-driven ethos and toward the ethos of God Himself. He calls out our complacency and self-satisfaction and unflinchingly tells us that they are not good enough. He pushes hard against the natural gravity of our hearts that pulls us down toward that comforting place called "the least we can do."  

Still, this leaves us with a problem. We might agree that we should try to exceed the basic requirements of the morality of duty. But why do we have to strive for perfection? Surely, some space exists between the extremes of "I never murdered anyone" and "I never even got angry at anyone." And isn't that the space where most of us spend most of our lives? In other words, wouldn't we do better to set our goals high but well short of perfection, where we're likely to meet with failure?

This brings us to the second great insight of Chapter 5, which is that the text does not appear to entertain the possibility that we will not succeed. Throughout Chapter 5, Jesus simply says "be these things" and "do these things," never accounting for the fact that we may fall short. Permit me to correct that: Jesus does not here account for the certainty that we will fall short, perhaps frequently, perhaps spectacularly.

It seems to me that there are only two ways to make sense of Jesus's silence on this point. One is to assume that Jesus was a giddy optimist who thought we could do whatever we put our minds to--an early iteration of those ridiculously buoyant self-help authors who offer us recipes made up of equal parts saccharine and denial. We can reject this out of hand as wholly inconsistent with the Jesus that we otherwise meet throughout the gospels.

The other possibility is that Jesus thought that there is some meaningful sense in which we will succeed even if we fail in our aspiration toward perfection. And I think this is, indeed, precisely what he had in mind. After all, the continual experiment of striving toward perfection and coming up short teaches us some things that Jesus clearly wanted us to know:

that we are not God;

that we must love ourselves despite our limitations;

that we are in no position to judge others because of their imperfections;

that the central component of our collective striving toward better hearts and a better world is forgiveness;

that in our imperfection and brokenness we will find things that might otherwise elude us: humility; meekness; mercy; compassion;

that it is in this striving that we become a blessing to others;

that is is in this striving that we are blessed.

Amen.

Gradually, Then Suddenly

Scripture: Matthew 4:18-22

It is the beginning of Jesus's ministry. He finds four fishermen at their work. He asks them to follow him. They "immediately" drop everything and do so. "Immediately," the text pointedly says. "Immediately."

It doesn't seem very plausible, does it?

There is no evidence that the fishermen knew Jesus. He had nothing of material value to offer them. And these were not dreamy-eyed seminary students waiting around for some holy mendicant to happen along and offer up a little enlightenment. These were fishermen, practical guys who worked for a living and who had no time to waste. And, having been invited, they didn't think about it or talk about it or delay.

They just went with him, the story says, immediately.

You might think that the story doesn't make much sense and so is probably untrue. That's a dangerous line of reasoning in light of the senselessness that constantly surrounds us. As Mark Twain said: "It's no wonder truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense."

Well, if the story is true, then why would they do it?

That question is often answered by focusing entirely upon the person of Jesus. This scene, the argument goes, tells us something important about what it must have been like to stand in his presence. Those who encountered him must have been overtaken by his radiant holiness, his overwhelming grace, his divine light, his irresistible charisma, and so on and so on.

I do not doubt for an instant that encountering Jesus must have been an experience beyond anything that I can imagine. But the argument that the fishermen went along with him because no one could resist his sacred pull seems to me deeply problematic for at least two reasons.

First, many people did resist Jesus's influence. Indeed, in this very scene we also meet the often neglected Zebedee, father of two of these fishermen, who decided to stay home with the boats. Also, the disciples themselves went through periods where they pulled away from Jesus. And, of course, whole crowds of people wanted nothing to do with him but to crucify him.

Second, this argument deprives the fishermen of their human agency. It turns them into automatons who threw down their nets and followed Jesus because he pushed the right button. And, by making them less than human, this argument misses a profound truth about human behavior that is embedded in the story and that can help us understand how major changes in our life often occur.

So let's shift our focus a bit and imagine ourselves in the skin of one of these fishermen.    

These were not recreational fishermen--they fished for a living. That cannot have been an easy life. The hours were almost certainly long and tiring. The work was probably often tedious. Every day, they hauled the heavy nets out to the sea and then hauled the heavier, wet, burdened nets back into the boats and to shore. They were at the mercy of the elements. And, of course, the catch could be disappointing. As my father used to say to me when we'd have an unproductive day on our boat, "there's a reason they call it 'fishing' and not 'eating.'"

If you want to talk about something implausible, try this: it seems to me completely implausible that these men never questioned how they were spending their hours on planet earth. Surely, as human beings, they must from time to time have asked themselves the same questions we ask ourselves: Is this what my life is to be made of? Is this all there is for me? Is there nothing more, nothing greater, nothing more meaningful to come?

Of course, these are not just questions that a fisherman might ask himself. Over the years, I have heard the same questions from the lips of doctors, lawyers, judges, professors, teachers, successful businessmen ... indeed, just about everyone.

And then there comes a moment. Some turning point presents itself in life and we take it. And we do so because we have been spending most of our life getting ready for its arrival--whether we knew it or not.

There is a wonderful scene in Ernest Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises where one of the characters asks another how he went bankrupt. He replies: "gradually, then suddenly."

I have come to believe that these are some of the wisest words ever written. They perfectly describe how many of the worst things in life happen to us: financial ruin; alcoholism; drug abuse; the slow descent and ultimate crashing of a relationship. Gradually. Then suddenly.

But they also perfectly describe how many of the best things in life happen to us. Many of us fall in love gradually, then suddenly. We come to insight gradually, then suddenly. We find happiness gradually, then suddenly. We discover meaning in our lives gradually, then suddenly.

Paradoxically, these words also describe how we often transform some of our hardest experiences into some of our most powerful. We are working toward finding greater meaning in life; a terrible illness comes along; we suddenly move to a place of higher enlightenment. We are striving to have a more generous heart and to resist petty squabbles; we lose a loved one; our capacity to focus on what matters suddenly improves. I suspect that all of us have either had this experience or know someone who has.

There is, of course, no way to know for sure how to understand the story in this scripture. The text does not expressly tell us why the fishermen followed Jesus. But it is in the nature of the mysteries of sacred texts that they invite us not only into their words, but into the human heart, into our own hearts.

Why did the fishermen follow Jesus? No one knows for certain. But I suspect that it is because they had become ready for him before he ever appeared on the shore.

Perhaps you are at a time in your life when you are asking those hard questions I mentioned earlier. If so, then I think this passage has an important, if subtle, message that may help.

This passage tells you that those questions should not, must not, leave you in despair. Those questions are the process of preparing for the thing that comes along that changes everything.

Those questions, and the introspection they inspire, are the gradually.

Now, watch, my friends, for the suddenly.

Watch.

And watch.

And watch.

And, when it comes, throw down your nets.

"Immediately."

Amen.