"BE NOT ANXIOUS, BE BELOVED" May 25, 2008

Isaiah 49:8-33
Matthew 6:24-34
There are some passages that preachers read, which strike a little close to home, because they are passages the preacher knows the preacher more than anyone needs. BE NOT ANXIOUS! Easier said than done! ... When Gas is $4/gallon, on Memorial Day in a time of war, when the Market is skittish and home prices feel like Monopoly money.
As parents, you watch over your children, like a brood of puppies, recognizing this is the sensitive one, the flirt, this one is the courageous. I was the WORRIER. But if I don't get the intro classes I want, How can I take the upper level when I need, so as to get into college, and grad school. BE NOT ANXIOUS! THE LORD LOVES YOU.
The latter part of that is the vital. Not simply a dangling participle but a statement of faith. BE NOT ANXIOUS, FOR THE LORD GOD ALMIGHTY LOVES YOU.
We have to shift emphasis, from guilt and responsibilities of our control, from our possession of our life, to believing God cares. Not simply that we GLORIFY GOD, not philosophy, theory, ancient history, but that God might actually care about you and me.

I recall our first years together, as your new pastor walking into an existing series of Building Projects and Capital Funding Campaigns. And meeting after meeting, you could see people's anxiety level rise, as first the PROJECT MANAGER spent hours creating a spread sheet and timetable; the next week it was the FINANCE CHAIR, then STEWARDSHIP, as each in turn came to worry about escalating debt, my favorite was a projection that based on INFLATION and COMPOUNDED INTEREST we would pay for this work for fifty years and still not be out of debt. While in the Church Office we hoped and believed, and simultaneously five years after the first campaign and three years after the second everything including INTEREST and a MISSION GIFT were fully repaid. My own anxiety came later.
As the Congregation anticipated the Session going from 24 members to 12, my shoulders began to rise with tension as if pulled by a marionettes strings. Creating Personnel Policies and Unnamed Anxieties, we edged toward a future, different than we as a Church had ever known.
How impossible it seemed at the time, that there would come a future, where the Session would gather early to visit together, and stay afterward, not for PARKING LOT debriefing, but for the sheer joy and wonder of talking together about the Church and Community and one another's lives. How impossible it seemed we would ever again find a time where Session was actually fun.

This is a day, we have dreamed of and anticipated for so many different reasons, a day many worried would never come, or would be far different. We need to hear the mantra recited by the SUFFERING SERVANT of 2nd ISAIAH to Israel: BE NOT ANXIOUS GOD LOVES YOU, GOD CARES. And from the lips of the Savior, in Matthew's sermon about possessions, whether to Love God, or serve MAMMON, “Remember the birds of the air, the lilies of the field”, Be Not Afraid, God Loves You, God Cares.

NOT Four Score and Seven Years, but ALL of 7 years ago, three refugees came to live among us, we thought like so many before. There was to have been a fourth from Sudan but he had problems with paperwork and could not arrive with the first. Late in the summer, we learned that Santino was going to be coming and we were given a date of the 11th of September. I doubt any of the rest of us, can imagine what it was to have survived the war and refugee camps, to learn you were coming to America, then on September 11th 2001 having all the planes in the world turned back and grounded indefinitely. But in December, SANTINO ATAK arrived. And now, to have graduated with a degree in Business and experience in banking. BE NOT ANXIOUS GOD LOVES US, GOD CARES.
Naming that this is a day, we dreamed would come, a day we worried over and were not certain what to expect... Almost a year ago, last Memorial day, I received a call from a couple, whom we had married, and baptized their first born child. Pregnancies and child birth can be risky, had been for this couple, so trying to be optimistic and hopeful, they planned the date for the baby yet to be born's baptism, a year in the future. They were not certain if this one would be a girl or boy, but they had names for each, so I wrote on my calendar “Andrew and Caroline's Special Day”. Weeks and Months went by, suddenly I looked at my calendar and worried ANDREW and CAROLINE, Who are ANDREW and CAROLINE, do we have a wedding? An Anniversary? How could we forget? We worry about the silliest things, as if we could control our lives, possess and make life different, as if we were God.

BE NOT ANXIOUS, GOD ALMIGHTY LOVES US, GOD CARES.

We live in a time of miracles of medicine and modern science. Before a fetus is the size of your heart, we can diagnose circumstances in the baby's own heart. When used as a tool for planning and preparation, that knowledge can be a powerful thing, making certain hospital and surgeons are prepared, work and insurance and family all know to be supportive and to pray. But nothing can prepare you as parents for all that is to come. Knowledge of ALL we do KNOW, and that might BE, can also be a source of worry.

All the platitudes of “God never gives you more than you can bear”, “If you had faith, if you really believed...” should be removed from Human language. The fact of the matter is, that circumstances like these, CALL US TO LET GO EVERYTHING WE HAVE EVER KNOWN or BELIEVED. It is as if our old self, our knowledge of life and the world around us ALL must be let go, as if those were DEAD. We must bury and grieve what we used to be, in order to BE NOT ANXIOUS, in order to TRUST AND BELIEVE in Resurrected Life, a different Reality, where we are not as we were or used to be, but where we can come to be “BELOVED”.

Henri Nouwen used this description to explain the most basic truth of what it is to be truly HUMAN. Not simply to be biologically alive, a flower is that, a raccoon or fish. But to be truly HUMAN is to let go anxieties, to let go the past, to let go all we used to know, and to believe that we are BELOVED OF GOD.

So much in life, beats us down and forces to compete just to survive. Old tapes that say “You are no good, not the same as your brother, not pretty, not strong, not able.” Words like those fester in us like infection. FILLED WITH FEARS WE BECOME LIMITED, WE LET OUR ANXIETIES RULE US, and feeling hollow, empty, afraid, we try to fill the void with stuff. Buying possessions, comfort foods filled with starch and sugar, that dull us but cannot truly satisfy.

What is required is a Conscious Choice, we cannot remain in one world reaching, searching for another. We have taken other arguments out of context, as if to say “RENDER UNTO MONEY the things to be bought with money, to possess, to own, AND
RENDER UNTO GOD the things that belong to God, an hour on Sunday mornings when the weather is not great and we don't have thirty other things to do”.
There is a difference between MANAGERS who look at all they possess in life, and debate what is the least I have to commit, what is the best deal; VERSUS BEING BELOVED where we see a circumstance and give ourselves, without restraint, without regret, giving ourselves to love.

Choosing to be BELOVED, is a choice TO BE NOT ANXIOUS, BECAUSE YOU KNOW YOU ARE LOVED, GOD DOES CARE. GOD CAN/WILL CHANGE THE WORLD.
Current circumstance may be overwhelming. Mothers do die in childbirth, as do infants. War is a horrible human reality, that does not make heroes, only survivors and refugees. Getting behind a wheel when you have been drinking is playing Russian Roulette, a fools game of probabilities with a lethal weapon. WE MUST CHOOSE to try to manage what we can control, living safely in an insecure reality; or to know we are BELOVED.

The POINT of AFFIRMING YOUR FAITH in this way is as ABRAHAM GIFTING THE PROMISE to GOD. Be NOT ANXIOUS. Trust that this child of God is BELOVED. So we give to God, what God has given, we claim as “beloved” that which God has loved. This day, we celebrate this SACRAMENT with a slight difference. Instead of asking whether you will love these Children of God, we already know them, they have been known since long before they were born, yet in their mother's wombs. SO AS THE CHURCH when asked if we will pray for them and for their families in all the circumstances of life, the honest answer is “WE HAVE AND WE WILL.”