Sermon for 8th Sunday After Epiphany

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Sermon for 8th Sunday After Epiphany

(also Sundays after Pentecost and before May 29)

Year A

"You Are Not Forgotten"

Isaiah 49:8-16

"A Prescription for Worry"

Matthew 6:24-34

"Free as a Bird"

Matthew 6:19-21, 24-34

"A Prescription for Worry"

Matthew 6:24-34

People worry. They worry about the economy they worry about their health and their families. Worry seems to be the basic state of people in our society If people are not worries about one thing they are worried about another. They worry about global warming and international affairs as well as what others may be saying or thinking about them. I once had someone tell me they were worried because they had nothing to worry about and that there must be something they should be worrying about but had forgotten and that worried them. Mark Twain said, "I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened."

The story goes that one woman realized she was worrying too much so she began a journal of her worries. After a while she looked back of the journal to see what she was worrying about. 40% of the things she worried about were about things that would never happen. 30% of the things she worried about were about things that had already happened. 12% of the things she worried about were about others' opinions. 10% of the things she worried about were needless health worries. Only 8% of the things she worried about were things that could actually happen and that she had any control over.

The end result of all this worrying is sleeplessness and high blood pressure. Most of the time what we worry about we can do nothing about so worrying just robs us of joy. So what can we do about our culture of worry? What is the prescription for worry?

Well, first of all to write a prescription you have to identify the illness. If you go to the Dr. with a fever, the fever is not the illness. It is just the symptom. If you treat the fever without doing something about the infection that is causing it, it will just come back and get worse. Worry is just the fever. There is something causing the worry and we need to find that cause and address it, then the symptom will go away.

Jesus talked about worry. Apparently people back then worried too. He began by saying "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life �" "Therefore" means the reason for the statement that follows came before. So what did Jesus say right before he said do not worry?

He said, "No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth." The problem, the illness, is divided loyalties. If you are trying to serve more than one master or if you are serving the wrong master then you will have worries. But if you are single heartedly serving the right master then your worries will go away. So the illness is divided or misplaced loyalties.

What is the prescription for this illness? The prescription is Jesus. If we will single heartedly serve and trust him then we will have no reason to worry. Jesus said, "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?" The birds trust God to care for them. They don't worry or toil. You were made in the image of God. If God feeds the birds, won't God care for you?

The same is true for the lilies of the field. If God cares for them then we can trust God's son to take care of us. Jesus is capable of giving us everything we need. The problem is that we often trust in the wrong thing. We trust in our own abilities or our own wealth or power. Those things are fleeting and cannot be trusted.

Sometimes we try to serve Jesus as our master, but we are also trying to serve another master. Jesus said it is wealth or mammon. We think that the work of our hands is what provides us with the food we eat the clothes we wear but it is really God. So if we would just trust in God first then all those worries would go away.

The illness of divided loyalties is a chronic one but it is treatable. Because we are human we will often have divided loyalties and find ourselves trusting in the wrong thing. That is a part of the human condition. So we will live with it in one form or another. The good news is that it is treatable. And with proper treatment the symptoms will diminish and eventually they can all but disappear.

As with any illness identifying it is half the battle. The problem is that often the symptoms sneak up on us before we know it. So we need to be attentive and when we sense worry sneaking up on us we need to stop and check our vital signs. Like a diabetic checking their blood sugar we need to see what our faith level is. What are we really putting our trust in? And once we have identified the misplaced loyalty we can make the proper adjustment to our spiritual diet.

But beyond that we can be proactive. There are treatments and therapies that can keep our faith levels up and prevent displaced loyalties. Regular prayer is one. By turning to God and reminding ourselves on a daily or even hourly basis who our master is we can prevent wandering loyalties. Regular Bible study can help keep our loyalties focused on Jesus. Regular worship and help us to maintain a good spiritual diet. Then we can prevent most of the symptoms of worry.

So what is the prognosis for this disease? Well, with treatment the patient will live. Untreated the condition is terminal. Untreated it will not only cause health problems but it will rob the patient of quality of life. Worrying, and the misplaced loyalty that causes it, can make life a living death.

But if properly treated the patient will have a better quality of life. In fact they will have eternal life. Trusting is Jesus for everything will make their life heavenly. Not just in the everlasting sense but in the here and now. Jesus came not just to offer us a place in the hereafter but to give us abundant life.

Do you suffer from worry? Then trust in Jesus. The Father cares for the birds of the air and the lilies of the field and His Son will take care of you. Make trusting is Jesus a constant practice. Then you will have life everlasting and eternal. Treatments will begin now at the altar.

"You Are Not Forgotten"

Isaiah 49:8-16

Have you ever felt forgotten? Have you ever been left behind? It's an awful feeling. To be totally abandoned. You feel like you don't count for anything. Someone has failed to consider you worth remembering and you feel like you count for nothing.

Israel felt forgotten. They had been carried off into captivity. Because they had put their faith in alliances and military power and other gods, God Almighty allowed them to be conquered and carried off to a foreign land. They felt abandoned by God. They felt utterly alone and hopeless.

The Psalmist put their feelings into words. "By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. There on the willows we hung our lyres, for there our captors asked us for songs, our tormentors demanded songs of joy; they said, 'Sing us one of the songs of Zion!' How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land?"(Ps. 137:1-4) How could they be God's people when they felt that God HIMself had forgotten them?

Have you ever felt like God had forgotten you? Sometimes it happens. People sometimes enter into periods of spiritual darkness in their lives. Like the Israelites in exile they feel utterly abandoned by God. They feel alone and forgotten by their own Heavenly Father.

But God spoke to these people who felt forgotten. Through the prophet Isaiah, the same one who had foretold their defeat and exile, God spoke to them. God said, "In a time of favor I have answered you, on a day of salvation I have helped you." Another word for "favor" is grace. At an appointed time of grace, God will answer Israel. When the time is right.

You know sometimes God does not work on the same timetable as we humans. God knows when the time is right. God has a plan and most of the time we don't know the details. So we have to trust God.

When we are in the dark spiritually and feel forgotten we have to know that God has a plan for us. At the right time on a day of salvation God will answer. We are not forgotten.

Isaiah goes on "I have kept you and given you as a covenant to the people, � saying to the prisoners, 'Come out,' to those who are in darkness, 'Show yourselves.'" On one level God is talking to the Israelites in captivity and saying "I have kept you and given you as a covenant to the people." In other words God has not forgotten them but God is the one who has been preserving them. Sometimes God lets our world fall apart around us but he holds us up through it. If the Children of Israel could still mourn and struggle to sing the "songs of Zion" in captivity, then they were not completely lost. If they were lost they would have just given up on God and worshipped the gods of the people who captured them. But God was sustaining then through the crisis.

At the same time God was giving them as a "covenant to the people." A covenant is a promise. Their very existence was a sign and promise that God would not abandon his people. Who was it a promise to? Well, first to Israel; all the believers in God that lived back then scatter throughout the world, but maybe also to the nations or Gentiles. God had not forgotten them either.

That brings us to another level on which we can understand this prophesy. Who has God given as a promise, a covenant, a testament to the people of the world? As a Christian I have to say "Jesus." In a moment of grace at the right time God gave his only begotten Son to be a New Testament to the world. A living, dying, and living again sign of God's promise that we are not forgotten. And through Jesus God has said to all who are prisoners of sin "'Come out,' to those who are in darkness, 'Show yourselves.'"

Isaiah describes how God would provide for them and bring them home again. Then he says, "Sing for joy, O heavens, and exult, O earth; break forth, O mountains, into singing! For the Lord has comforted his people, and will have compassion on his suffering ones." God did show compassion. God did bring the people out of Exile. A new king arose who allowed the Israelites to return to their homes. They returned and rebuilt the temple and the walls of the city.

When we read in the New Testament about the temple and Jerusalem we are reading about a place and structures that were begun by the people who returned to Israel in fulfillment of this promise. And when we read about the people of Israel in Jesus' day we are reading about their descendants. God did sustain them and care for them and bring them back to the Promised Land and enable them to rebuilding the culture and lives.

To us all that is history. But to those people it was just a dream. It was a promise made by God through his prophet. Yet Isaiah tells them to "Sing for Joy" because God has comforted them.

There is a lesson in this. Sometimes things seem so dark. Light seems only a dream. But God promises to bring us through the dark and into the light. God promises us that we are not forgotten. In those times we have to act on faith and praise God for not forgetting us even though we feel forgotten. Not just think positive but act on the assurance of an unseen truth that God will deliver us at the right time.

Sure God had promised the exiles that he would deliver then and make them a sign to the nations. Isaiah had even told them that they could start celebrating that deliverance before the fact. But they still felt forgotten: "Zion said, 'The Lord has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me.'" God replied to them, "Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you." It seems inconceivable that a mother can forget her child but I have seen it happen. Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia can make a mother forget even her children. A mother might conceivably forget her children, but God cannot forget us.

I accompanied someone in an ambulance once and the EMTs were writing the patient's vitals on their palms and wrists. Later I asked one of them about that. He said, "In the heat of the moment I could forget something from the time I get the information from the patient to the time I have the chart to write it on." He also said that if he wrote it on a piece of paper he could lose the paper, but he would never misplace his arm. God says, "I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands."

Have you ever felt forgotten by God? Know that you are not forgotten. Oh sure the preacher high and mighty up in the pulpit with his nice white robe says I am not forgotten, but that doesn't change the fact that I feel forgotten. How can you know God has not forgotten me?

God gave his only begotten Son as a sign that he has not forgotten any of us. Jesus is a covenant to the people. God could no more forget you than a mother for get her child. In fact Jesus went as far as to allow God's love for you to be inscribed on his hands. And those nail prints are there to this day. No matter how you feel know that you are not forgotten - that truth is written on our Lord's hands!

"Free as a Bird"

Matthew 6:19-21, 24-34

Jesus said "Consider the birds of the air, they don't worry about food so don't you worry none." Well that is just fine if you're a sparrow. They don't even know how to sow or reap so why should they worry about it. They don't have car payments and house payments. They don't have college loans to pay off. They don't have to pay for medical insurance and such.

Then Jesus says, "Consider the flowers of the field, they don't work or sew." Well, that's fine if you are a dandelion. They don't have to worry about their children. They just send them off on the next breeze.

The birds and the flowers may not have anything to worry about, but as for me I have plenty. I have bikes and braces and broken arms and college expenses to plan for. I have payments and insurance and taxes and such. I have a family and responsibilities galore. I can't be carefree like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field!

Of course Jesus is not saying that we should be carefree. He is not saying we are or should be like the birds or the lilies. That's impossible. We have brains and God expects us to use them. God gave us the ability to sow and reap and gather and plan for the future. God doesn't expect us to just turn those abilities off and return to nature, or pretend we have no responsibilities.

It would be irresponsible to act like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. It would be unfaithful for us not to plan for the future and work toward it. We have to toil and work and plan because we have been called to do that. God wants us to use our God given abilities responsibly.

So what does Jesus mean when he said "consider" the lilies of the field and the birds of the air? The point in considering the birds and the flowers is that God cares for them. They are unable to think and plan ahead. So God in his infinite wisdom cares for them. The birds can't grow their own seeds so God provides seeds for them to eat. The flowers are incapable of producing clothing so God clothes them marvelously.

And if God cares for them how much more will God care for us. This is one of the cornerstones of Christian Stewardship. I know you usually think of "Stewardship" as giving. But "Provision" is a part of Stewardship too. If God provides for birds which are a dime a dozen and wild flowers that wilt and die with the first frost, then our Heavenly Father will certainly care for us who are created in his image.

That doesn't mean we don't think and plan ahead. We still have to act responsibly. But we don't have to worry. Not because we are oblivious like the birds or the flowers, but because we know that God will provide. We plan and work but we don't worry because we trust in God's provision.

That's a liberating realization - I can think of the future but I don't have to worry about it! It may be liberating, but it is not easy to come by. I was sitting with a group of pastors one day. We were discussing church finances. One of the pastors expressed concern that offerings had gone down at his church. He was concerned because his salary came out of those offerings.

Then one of the other pastor's asked, "Is that offering really the source of your salary?" We all agreed on a theological level it wasn't. God is the source of provision for all our needs. Sure on paper the money that was used to pay the preacher might have come out of the funds placed in the offering plate, but ultimately God is the one who provides what we need. That's easy to say, but a little harder to live by. All us preachers could agree that this was the truth, but it is still hard not to worry.

God, who cared for the birds and the flowers, will provide for our needs. It may appear on paper that it's the company you work for or whoever it is that sends you a check every week or month that provides for your needs. But ultimately that employer or those investments are just the vehicle God uses to provide for your needs. God is the one who provides. We can all agree with that in our heads, but it is a little harder to affirm it in our hearts - even for preachers sometimes.

Which brings us back to something else Jesus said. He said "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth ... but store up treasures in heaven." If God, and not the bank account or job, is the true source of our provision, then shouldn't that be the place we invest ourselves. I'm not just talking money here. Shouldn't our hearts and lives be invested in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Jesus points out that what is invested in this world will pass away. In this world moths and rust and the whims of the market can take our investments away. But what we invest in the Kingdom endures for eternity.

When you give to the church you are investing in the Kingdom of Heaven. Don't think of what you pledge as an amount of money you are giving away. Think of it as an investment in the furthering of God's kingdom. It will go into the programs and ministries of the church or into the expanding of the facilities that host those programs and ministries. So let us all, without worry, invest in the Kingdom of Heaven!

Like Jesus said "You can't have two masters - You can't serve God and wealth." If you serve wealth you will always be worried about what you will eat and what you will drink and what you will wear. But if you invest your life in God, he will provide for you just as he provides for the birds and the flowers. It's your choice. Will you invest in God or wealth.

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