Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church

Texts: Matthew 6:24-34; Isaiah 49:8-16

I spent last week, all week, at one of the pre-eminent preaching conferences – this year it was in Minneapolis. Over two thousand clergy gathered there, and we heard nine sermons and thirteen lectures over four days, from some of the best preachers, professors of preaching, authors and scholars available today. So I arrived home Friday night with today's sermon looming, unwritten, before me. My routine is to study the passages early in the week, reflect on them and wrestle with them all week and write on Saturday.  And so, as I often do in such times (that is to say, what I do every Friday night), I went to sleep, reflecting on the lectionary passage: Therefore, 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....  And I awoke all too early, to my husband asking (at 5:40 a.m.) "Susan, where is the little car?  Did Corey come home last night?"  Yes, my weary and befuddled mind tells me, the new high school grad did come home Friday night...I remember talking to him as I was drifting off to sleep.  I remember noticing his new busboy's uniform shirt and thinking how handsome he might look if only I could focus my eyes.  So Corey did come home....and the little car, his oldest brother's car, is missing.  Therefore, 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....  I say: "Are you sure it's not there?"  Am I serious?  Whatever I imagine my husband's shortcomings might be, he usually can count to three when counting cars in a driveway.  Nonetheless, I get up to look out the front window for myself.  One....two...., one...two... the little car is not there.  Therefore, 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....  I should mention that among our three not-new cars, the little car - a 1991 Honda Civic with red tape over the rear taillight (where Corey backed his brother's car into his mother's car) and the most unforgiving clutch I have ever known - is the least new.  There was also in the driveway that night a 2000 Subaru Forester, and a 2003 Dodge minivan stuffed to the brim with the other brother's possessions freshly home from college [not yet unpacked as it is unclear where it all will go, and after all, Tyler just goes back to Minneapolis in two weeks - does he really need to unpack it all?  (yes.)] How is it possible that with these choices available, a thief or two came to our wooded cul-de-sac, off a non-through street, and chose to steal the little Honda beater, the least of these, among its auto-brethren?  So for the first time since Easter all five of us are together as a family, in the living room with Officer Pionke, filling out the police report.  And we learn that in Plover, in our neighborhood, there has been a rash (3 so far) of Honda Civics stolen from driveways over the last 36 hours.  The third one is called in as he is taking our report.  He believes the thieves have a limited skill set, and may only know how to jump start Honda Civics. Therefore, 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....  The officer leaves, advising us that the car (with its trunk full of my husband's umpiring equipment and Corey's cheap golf clubs) will likely be recovered, beaten and pillaged, before long.  He advises us to report it to our insurance company.  And then the Zencka posse (2 of the boys, with their retired cop father) heads out in the Subaru to look for the car. Therefore, 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....  And, in an hour, that the posse returns, with two cars, golf clubs, umpiring equipment, all unpillaged, undamaged.  It turns out that if your goods are bad enough, you don't really need to worry about them. Therefore, 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.... 

I think that today’s reading contains some of the hardest of all the hard sayings of Jesus. In our better moments, we are willing to love our enemies and pray for those who have injured us. Anyone who has observed either the Church today or throughout history knows that Jesus did indeed not come to bring peace, but a sword. For he did set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother…. The Church is full of division – not only between denominations but within denominations. Anyone who has taken their faith seriously knows that indeed as Jesus said, people of faith might be persecuted and reviled as were the prophets in an earlier time. And while we may find forgiveness difficult, most of us aspire to it. Some people place their own limitations on the nonviolent teachings of Jesus, but many Christians are committed to nonviolence, and most understand that Jesus blessed the peacemakers. But the teachings of Jesus around money are difficult indeed, and when you combine them with this teaching which says not to worry….well, most of us find this to be a real reach as we live in 21st century America. If the parents of our high school graduates saw any evidence that our children were following this teaching, even after we took them to Sunday School and church, and saw them through confirmation, even though nine parents and ten other family members of the nine graduates who are here today are deacons, elders, missionaries or clergy – if we thought these young adults were seriously not worrying about their lives, what they will eat or drink, or about their bodies…well, we would be very concerned.

Even those of us who are challenged to live lives of greater simplicity wrestle with these texts. Even when we find our culture’s fascination with stuff to be at least as much burden as it is blessing, we think it is prudent to plan, to be responsible. And, in these days of orange alerts, cancer diagnoses, winter-time air alerts, and gas prices grazing $4/gallon, heightened tornado activity, food crises, global climate change, wars, rumors of wars, possible pandemics, memories and fears of assassinations, airport near-misses, school shootings, the falling dollar, rising health care costs, and vanishing Social Security, to say nothing of sound bites, news cycles, and talking heads – these days it is hard not to worry.

Therefore, 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.... 

It’s hard not to worry, but we can choose to not worry, not to let our lives be consumed by thinking about well…consuming. As renowned Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann said in Minneapolis this week, we don’t want to be bogged down in an endless rat-race, because if you win, after all, you’re just a rat. And God has greater dreams for you. God has greater dreams for all of us, and for God’s world, and we are part of God’s dream for God’s world.

God’s dream is told throughout the Bible – it’s ironic that we get bogged down in debating what may or may not be historically accurate in the Bible for that’s not the important part. The Bible tells us the truth about who we are – endlessly precious to God, significantly frail on our own, subject to enslavement by any of our own appetites, and some of each other’s as well. The stories of the past are not history – they are poetry that describes our identity. They tell us who we are so that we can learn to believe the deep truths about ourselves and the great hopes of God. The important questions are not whether the earth was created in six 24-hour days, but whether we can forgive one another, whether we are willing to love mercy, seek justice, and walk humbly with our God, whether we can share the dream of God for a time when swords will be beat into plowshares, the lion will lie down with the lamb, no one will hunger or thirst, and justice will roll down like a mighty river. And in today’s reading from Isaiah, we hear about God’s dream

The Bible tells us, to use Brueggemann’s words, about a God of exuberant generosity, who promises inexhaustible well-being. And this is the alternative vision to the nihilism, cynicism, autonomy and conformity that have always been peddled in the marketplace. And the question for us is not whether God is real, but into which reality we want to invest our own hopes, dreams, time and sweat.

Think of the last 200 years: the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, an end to child labor, the civil rights movement in the U.S., and the end of apartheid in South Africa. All of these were social movements that had their origin in the Church and when God’s people could see and describe the vision clearly enough, others joined in and unbelievable changes occurred. Not one social reform movement succeeded without people of faith. Nonetheless, despite these very significant outcomes, there are still real problems in our world today: poverty in our world is truly a moral scandal, when ½ the people in the world live on less than $2 a day and 30,000 children die each day from hunger. Human trafficking is increasing, and more women and children are in slavery now than in the nineteenth century. The degradation of the planet is a threat to all life, and as Jim Wallis, author of God’s Politics, said last week, the exclusive use of war to fight real evil has compromised our integrity and made all our children less safe. The war in Iraq is six years old now, longer than World War II. Whoever is elected president will not be able to change the world unless real people catch a vision of and energy for a changed reality. Over recent years in our fascination with celebrity, we have forgotten the importance of ordinary people. God believes in ordinary people, and in our capacity to be part of extraordinary transformation.

Earlier in the chapter in Isaiah, God told the prophet, “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” And God then described God’s own dream for the earth in our reading: “In a time of favor I have answered you, on a day of salvation I have helped you; I have kept you and given you as a covenant to the people, to establish the land, to apportion the desolate heritages; saying to the prisoners, "Come out," to those who are in darkness, "Show yourselves." They shall feed along the ways, on all the bare heights shall be their pasture; they shall not hunger or thirst, neither scorching wind nor sun shall strike them down, for he who has pity on them will lead them, and by springs of water will guide them. And I will turn all my mountains into a road, and my highways shall be raised up…
Sing for joy, O heavens, and exult, O earth; break forth, O mountains, into singing!”

God’s people are people of hope Jim Wallis also reminded us last week that the great choice before us is not between belief and secularism, but between hope and cynicism. Hope is a decision, a choice, not a feeling. It is the decision to believe in spite of the evidence, and then watch the evidence change.

Wallis told us last week about a visit to South Africa when there was a great gathering to hear Archbishop Desmond Tutu. And soldiers surrounded the crowd in an effort at intimidation. And Tutu looked at the soldiers, and said, “God will not be mocked. Since you have already lost, we invite you to join the winning side.” He believed in the reality that was coming to pass, even though it was not yet nearly visible to everyone. Quite the contrary – hope did not seam reasonable. Nonetheless, ten years later, Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as President of South Africa, ending apartheid, without war. God’s dream can come true.

You who are graduating have lived through a time of great uncertainty during your junior high and high school years – September 11 was at the beginning of your sixth grade year, and since then over 4,000 Americans have died in Iraq, along with thousands or perhaps 100’s of thousands Iraqis. Hundreds of thousands died in the tsunami when you were in your freshman year. And yet generations before you have faced similar traumas: your parents were likely in junior high when Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, and lived through the trauma of Vietnam and the unraveling of a presidency during high school. Your grandparents experienced Pearl Harbor at about the same age you experienced 9/11, and their teen years were during WWII. Each generation has reasons for and obstacles to hope.

Today’s’ readings tell us that it is too small a thing that we should worry about what we will eat or drink, about our bodies and what we will wear…we are called to declare freedom to the prisoners, including perhaps those of us who are captive to worry or our own hungers. We are designed for joy, for wholeness, to usher God’s justice into sight. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown says we have the technological ability to save the earth, to eliminate poverty, to provide health care to everyone, to live in wholeness and peace; we just need to make the choice. We are invited to join God’s dream…and live it into being. Amen.