Be Not Anxious

Not because you have you have lots of reserves.

Photo by Joice Kelly on Unsplash

A diminutive philosopher giving a talk or two several years ago startled me by saying,

If you had been born in another time, another place.

He did not mean across town, in a different hospital. Instead, he laid out that our interpretation of the world around us is rooted in the time and place of our existence. Had we, had I been born in a different century, to a different family, in another country, with a distinct religious, social, and/or economic context, I would read the world differently.

We privilege our place in the world above all others.

The exercise also works at the micro level. In our world today, in our country, in whatever state, city, or community we are in, our place becomes the lens through which we adjudicate the world. It is how we read the world.

I don’t know why that person is so upset about . . ..

It is disingenuous to interpret the world for others when we do not know their place, even when we share what we think is a similar space.

Many of us woke this morning with a different read of the world based on the place in our country. A variety of emotions always accompany the aftermath of an election. Some of us, for example, grew up thinking the only way to express political support was to shame and disparage the other Party and those who support it. The time and place of our birth may have contributed to that response.

I have mentioned from time to time that I read or listen to a sermon most days. This morning, I opened a collection of sermons from a preacher who gave them more than 100 years ago, from another country—literally another time, another place.

The title of the sermon caught my attention - Be Not Anxious.

Here are some excerpts that caught my attention.

“Be not anxious!” - Jesus simply says this without giving a reason for it. For his allusion to the lily and the bird is not a reason. Therefore, His word is all the more perplexing. How are we to go about living as a flower and blooms, as a bird sings and flies? So self-evident, so responsive to the innermost law of life, so unquestioningly simple, as if it could not be otherwise? To be sure it would be marvelous, if something of the necessity and freedom there to come to us which we observe, on the outside even before our window, pervading the life of creation, the life of the beasts and plants, and working in everything! . . .

[I am the Lord thy God!] . . . This word is as a hand extended to us of which we, blind in the midst of our anxieties, can take hold, may take hold, if we have the courage to do s. This extended and incomprehensible hand of God is, in the main, the whole content of this, as of every word of Jesus.

It is not natural, of course, for one to grasp this hand. It is easier, or so much easier, to be anxious as men are anxious, that to look upon the lilies and birds and not be anxious. Against it is to be said: this is fully understood only by the afflicted and the oppressed, who themselves are in the midst of anxieties. He, who had come through more or less anxiety, also may speak of not worrying; but since he does not know aught of anxiety that involves the whole life, he knows nothing of the venture of not worrying about all the things that give us anxiety. He mistakes his going, by his own strength, through moderate worriment for the “Be not anxious!” of Jesus. He is like the man who, in his own way, trusts in God; but who at heart is glad to have in addition a reserve of gold upon which in cases of need he may depend. So long as a man has not learnt the deceitfulness of all reserves, he is not yet in the trial of fire into which the word of Jesus is spoken and in which alone it can unfold the fullness of its truth. . . .

Is He not of all trouble-laden men the most trouble laden? . . . Is there anything that provokes more anxious care than the end which Jesus suffered? And yet He, even He, says to us, “Be not anxious!” - Yes, He says it, He! He tells us that we are children of God and that therefore nothing is left for us than with unbounded trust to permit God to care for us. And because He says it, we can accept it. Because He speaks to us from such immeasurable depths of trouble, we cannot take it otherwise than the word of God. We cannot take His word as well-meant human comfort, such as, for example, we give one another: “It is not so bad as you think! Do not worry! It will come out all right!”

For where He stands, it does not become better; on the contrary it always becomes worse; here the cross and death break in. He did not say, “Be not anxious”! and at the same time think only of a human way of facing and overcoming trouble. He thought really and truly of God, of God‘s counsel and God’s help, and of nothing else. “God will preserve thee wonderfully in all need and sorrow” - that is what is meant here. . . .

“Be anxious”! Now only do we understand the final meaning of this word, understand wholly what it promises and what it does not promise. It does not promise a sudden transporting of ourselves into a world in which nothing troubles us; we remain in the world in which we are, but in the midst of the burden and care and anxiety we shall have the incomprehensible freedom from worry in spite of this burden. This is promised us. . . .