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May 25, 2008

Beth Foote - May 25, 2008

1 Corinthians 4: 1-5 ; Matthew 6: 24-34 ; Psalm 131

It’s prom season, and our son Colby is renting two tuxes with red vests this year because his girlfriend Noelle has a red prom dress and she lives on this side of the bay. Last weekend they went to her prom and next weekend they’re going to his prom. Although it turns out that both dances are being held at the Julia Morgan Ballroom in San Francisco!

It made me remember my senior prom long, long ago, back in the 1970’s. A little different…I remember Powder blue tuxes and driving in my convertible Volkswagen named Max…no limousines. …And way back when, my prom date quickly figured out that I am a first class worrier. He gave me a hilarious book called “How to Make Yourself Miserable, a training manual,” which I still have today. There are chapters like “How to select a 3 dimensional worry”, and my favorite, a chart that has disastrous possibilities to consider while flying. Six geese could fly into engines simultaneously. Excessive vibration could loosen bolts holding plane together. And my favorite: “disturbed pilot could jump out of plane in fit of pique.”

I’d like to think that I’ve grown out of my worrying ways over the years. But unfortunately, some things are hard-wired. So, being a first class worrier, this passage in Matthew has always been a favorite of mine. What is worry after all? What does it mean to live without worry? How can we do that?

One of the great things about the Revised Common Lectionary, the system of readings we now follow in the Episcopal Church, is that for most of Ordinary Time, we will read through a big chunk of Matthew. So we will get a good sense of the flow of Matthew’s gospel which was written primarily for Jewish Christians, and reflects Jewish customs. Today we look at the sixth chapter of Matthew, a discourse by Jesus on how to pray. I encourage you to look at the whole chapter sometime this week. Jesus gives us the Lord’s Prayer in this chapter, and advises people to seek an intimate relationship with God through prayer; he says we should not pray publicly for effect. He says we should go into a room in private to pray. Our passage on worry comes after his discourse on prayer and I think it develops out of it; I believe Jesus is saying that to get to the place where you don’t worry, you need to have an intimacy with God.

Several weeks ago I traveled down to UC Santa Barbara to see my oldest daughter. I also wanted to spend a quiet day at Mount Calvary, an Episcopal monastery and retreat house. It sits at the top of the mountains overlooking Santa Barbara.

I got to Mt. Calvary in time for had lunch with the community of 7 monks and their guests at the monastery. I happened to sit next to Brother Roy, who does calligraphy and teaches Centering Prayer. As we ate together, we found we knew people in common in Berkeley, and I told him a little about the many transitions going on in my life. He said simply, “God is in all of it. God is usually in the midst of turmoil” He recommended I walk their labyrinth outside.

The mountains behind Santa Barbara are very dry and rocky, and the Mt. Calvary labyrinth is made out of native rocks. It’s rugged. Dry and homemade. They had a flyer with suggestions on how to walk the labyrinth, and the following stood out for me: “Take the risk of recognizing an emptiness in ourselves that only love can fill.” And “consider the possibility of the new, the miraculous, the transfiguring entering our lives.”

There are three movements to walking the labyrinth: moving inward, centering, moving outward. Moving inward means shedding our roles, our worries, our expectations, and just be.

This is difficult for those of us who are worriers. Worrying really is a way of trying to be in control; if you worry enough, something bad won’t happen, or by worrying enough about the what-ifs, then you’ll cover all the bases. In a way, a worrier is always on guard. At the opening to the labyrinth I struggled to let down my guard. An image came into my mind of coming to airport security where you have to take off your shoes, empty your pockets, in a sense shedding your outer defenses. So I walked into the rocky labyrinth, and I offered my worries up to God.

When I got to the center of the labyrinth I sat there in the dirt for a long time. I watched a California quail and many other birds I would not have usually noticed. Then I began to notice that in between the dry boulders of the labyrinth there were small green plants pushing up shoots. There was a large wild fennel plant that smelled of licorice pushing aside several boulders. People had left pebbles at the center of the labyrinth. All was very quiet. Within my soul and around me on the mountaintop. In those green shoots, those birds, that experience of quiet, at the center of that dirt labyrinth, I found that intimate connection with God, and that experience of being held.

Our Psalm today describes this state. Being like a baby on mother’s breast. Quiet. Absolutely trusting. Perhaps that is what Jesus is talking about here in Matthew. That place without worry. That place where you are in the presence of God, in the now.

I think worry is part of the human condition. Whatever our life situation, there seems to be something to worry about. In contrast to those around the world today who really worry about having enough food, and the fundamentals of living, we are so privileged here in Menlo Park in the early 21st century. Yet we still worry because the bar has been raised, and we’re living at such a high level of materialism that demands so much to maintain. And our culture says that we cannot let any weakness or cracks show in the veneer. Especially perhaps for those of us who are good at the game of making money, and have signed on to the total package. We have so much to lose. Perhaps this reality relates to what Jesus says about serving both God and wealth being impossible.

Jesus is saying here that worry is wasteful. Worry fills up our mind with useless and essentially hopeless white noise. When we worry we’re distracted from the centrality of God because we’re focused inward on worrying.

Worry diminishes, faith grows. Worry closes us down, faith opens us up to God’s abundance. When we are faithful rather than worry full, there is a sense of God’s time, God’s depth and breadth. God’s possibilities that are always bigger than any we could worry into existence and beyond our imaginings. Faith brings us into connection with the “Wow, I never thought of that.”

The Spirit moves in surprising ways. Worry closes us off to only what we know and can personally imagine. Perhaps this is what Jesus means by the Kingdom of God. “Strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be given to you as well.” The Kingdom of God, the place of surprises, is a hard place for worriers to enter because we’re always thinking up our own kingdom of known possibilities, our own kingdom of worry, and we miss the exit into wonder and surprise.

These days we hear a lot about being good stewards of the earth, about being green. Let me suggest that as Christians we can be good stewards of our relationship with God, too. In our reading from Corinthians, Paul suggests that ministers are to be servants and stewards. When we move away from worry and move towards God, we becoming better servants to God and better stewards of our relationship with God.

This has been a challenging time for us here at Trinity, and I think this passage also speaks to where we are as a parish. Collectively, we may be worried about the direction Trinity will take. What’s going to happen now? Can we withstand more change? Who will be our interim? Who will be our new rector? How will all of this play out? How will we get through it? One could really make a 3 dimensional worry, a first-class anxiety out of all of this.

Yesterday as an alum, I attended the graduation at CDSP, my seminary in Berkeley. Retired Professor Bill Countryman preached. He spoke about how the Holy Spirit is like a great storm, stirring up everything in her path, including the Episcopal Church as a whole. I agree. The Holy Spirit is not a tame little flame from a bic lighter, she can be a storm, a whirlwind that often feels destructive and chaotic when she’s moving through. Certainly, the Holy Spirit has been roaring through Trinity as of late. Professor Countryman also said that the Holy Spirit does not leave a barren wake of destruction, though, like Hurricane Katrina. She clears the ground, and then seeks out raw recruits to rebuild in a new way. In the context of the graduation, he pointed to the new seminary graduates as the raw recruits. In the context of Trinity, I think we who are here are all the raw recruits.

How do we know our marching orders? Jesus recommends we do not worry about it, but pray about the path, the labyrinth ahead. The instructions for walking the labyrinth said, “Take the risk of recognizing an emptiness in ourselves that only love can fill.” And “consider the possibility of the new, the miraculous, the transfiguring entering our lives”

AMEN

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