Jun 17, 2022 |
Rector's Blog: What, Me Worry?
| The Rev. Philip DeVaul
Rector's Blog: What, Me Worry?
I have experienced both financial stability and instability. But you never really get over the instability. I’m in a stable place now, but I’ve seen the bottom fall out before. You get what I mean. Security doesn’t linger in my psyche quite the way insecurity does. I have experienced both, and of course I strongly prefer stability and security – however tenuous it can feel. That being said, it occurs to me that when I am in a state of financial insecurity, when I am wondering if I’ll be ok next month, I am much closer to the experience of the vast majority of humans past and present on this planet. My childhood was the outlier.
Of all the teachings of Jesus, there is one that is the most challenging, the most perplexing, and the most tempting to reject. It is not the command to love your enemies, or to turn the other cheek. It is not when he tells lustful men to pluck out their eyes. It’s not even when he tells people to eat his body and drink his blood: No, the most difficult, impossible lesson in Jesus’ repertoire is, “Do not worry.”
“Do not worry,” Jesus says, and I nod my head out of respect and deference and all the while I don’t believe him. Or at least I find myself tempted to think Jesus is just being idealistic or simplistic or impossible. But this is Jesus talking, so I keep listening anyway. Here’s what he says.
He says, “I tell 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? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?
