00:00:14.640 - 00:00:29.670

this is one of those passages of scripture that requires the preacher begin with a confession. That's right. A first person singular confession. I spent the better part of last week trying to avoid it, trying

00:00:29.670 - 00:00:47.990

to come up with some introductory story, some funny little quip about somebody else. But the text itself seemed to demand a bit more forthright honesty. So here it goes. I I am a worrier now

00:00:47.990 - 00:01:03.860

in my own defense, which is how most confessions go with some rational explanation attached. I'd like to say that I come by my worrying naturally it's inherited to a certain degree from both sides of the family

00:01:06.040 - 00:01:22.470

. From my father, I was given that I would worry about certain matters of security, of financial , where with all with some material need to be prepared for the future whatever the future might bring.

00:01:22.500 - 00:01:40.010

My father, you see, was the business manager of Union Seminary in Richmond. And seminary administrators just have to worry about money. So from him that worry is in my DNA from my mother, I

00:01:40.010 - 00:01:57.660

inherited a predisposition to worry about what's going on in the world about pesticides and pollution, about matters of civil rights, war and peace, justice and fairness . So lo and behold like most of you preachers

00:01:59.340 - 00:02:23.790

, I landed a job with a forum to rant about matters of justice. And a job with a great pension plan covers both my inclinations to worry. But with this vocational calling of ours comes what more

00:02:24.060 - 00:02:42.550

worry we know we are not alone in any of it. But I think it's fair to say that pastors in particular and active church folks in general shoulder in larger measure than most a burden of grief.

00:02:43.340 - 00:03:05.940

The weight of concern secrets, a certain amount of anger and pain and sadness. Thank God. The church is a place of great celebration for the most joyous occasions in life, births and weddings and all

00:03:05.940 - 00:03:22.510

kinds of triumphs. But those don't exactly lessen the worry we carry in our hearts and minds. So when from the pages of scripture, jesus says to me and to all of us this evening, do

00:03:22.510 - 00:03:40.140

not worry about your life. I find myself wanting to talk back and argue a little bit for goodness sake, jesus, When did you get sandwiched in between aging parents and teenage Children? When did you

00:03:40.140 - 00:03:59.000

lie awake at night wondering if you passed the exam or if your job was on the line or how that recent doctor's visit would change the course of your life forever? Most of us don't worry about where

00:03:59.000 - 00:04:18.270

our next meal is coming from, or about having close to where, but can't we, with our God given love for our neighbors, worry about poverty and a war that seems endless and the national deficit

00:04:18.270 - 00:04:38.780

that is staggering and taking its toll in so many ways, For God's sake, are we not even entitled to a measure of worry about the church? With our membership declines so many small churches, closing

00:04:38.780 - 00:04:54.670

our divisiveness, funding our annual budgets, not to mention our seminaries. And if there is enough, if there are enough positions for our seminary graduates, it seems like a little worry about the world might

00:04:54.680 - 00:05:15.500

make us more engaged disciples, and a little worry about the church more discerning followers. But here you are, telling us not to worry any more than the flowers or the birds. Where is the grace

00:05:15.510 - 00:05:36.270

and good news for us? In what appears to me at least to be among your most impossible commands , telling us not to worry. While I was having this little conversation back and forth with these words

00:05:36.270 - 00:05:54.930

of jesus, I looked up the meaning of the word and I came to understand better, jesus concern . Worry comes from an old Germanic word which originally meant strangle or choke. It has physical life threatening

00:05:54.930 - 00:06:13.640

connotations in the sense of being seized by the throat . The original greek word from our Gospel also has the deadly notion of striving with extreme anxiety. So understood that way. No wonder Jesus encourages us not

00:06:13.640 - 00:06:30.490

to worry. He does not want our lives to be choked with anxiety. I think that's why he turns our attention to the basics, because if we get down to the fundamentals of life, our worry

00:06:30.490 - 00:06:46.560

will at least be put into perspective. Life is more than food or clothing, jesus says. Now these words were not intended for persons who do not have enough to eat, one can not simply say

00:06:46.560 - 00:07:02.110

to the starving. Life is more than food. These are addressed to people who have food to eat and clothes to wear, and yet who spend their lives trying to acquire more with heightened anxiety even back

00:07:02.110 - 00:07:17.470

in the first century, maybe jesus knew more about what life would be like for us. Now then I might give him credit for. We know that anxiety itself can be a killer stress and worry can

00:07:17.470 - 00:07:39.410

cause disease or contribute to it, which of course produces the enchanting prospect of people worrying about worrying a downward spiral. For sure, as with so much of his teaching, jesus goes to the heart of

00:07:39.410 - 00:07:55.640

the way we are in order to get his message across about the coming of God's Kingdom. This wasn't just good advice on how to live a happy or carefree life. It was a call for us to

00:07:55.640 - 00:08:18.820

trust in God's sovereignty. As one biblical scholar puts it sweeping the world with love and power so that human beings each made in God's image, and each loved dearly, may relax in the knowledge that God

00:08:18.820 - 00:08:41.700

is in control, reflecting on the birds and the flowers is not meant to encourage a kind of romantic nature mysticism, but to stimulate serious understanding. God , our creator loves to give us good gifts,

00:08:41.700 - 00:09:05.620

loves to give us the kingdom, loves to call us Children. What is stopping us from trusting in that, jesus draws our attention to these lessons from nature in order to offer a most eloquent antidote for

00:09:05.620 - 00:09:28.460

worry. Wonder! Consider the birds of the air and how God feeds them. How much more value are you than the birds? Consider the lilies, how they grow. I care for you as much

00:09:28.470 - 00:09:52.860

, even more than I care for them. Do not keep striving. So wonder is the prescription for worry. Look around you, Jesus says, You will see the creative power and providence of God.

00:09:56.140 - 00:10:18.390

But how do we do that when we live with our faces glued to a screen, a television, a computer, a cellphone playing angry birds, dealing with email and facebook on call all the time,

00:10:18.400 - 00:10:37.350

Who has time in the day to consider the birds and wonder. The author and poet D. H . Lawrence, who lived at the turn of the last century, was concerned way back then about the

00:10:37.350 - 00:10:54.140

toll that industrialization was taking on the human psyche. When he wrote about the importance of wonder. When wonder has gone out of a man, he is dead. Lawrence wrote, When all comes to all

00:10:54.140 - 00:11:13.340

the most precious element in life is wonder. Love is a great emotion, and power is power, but both love and power are based on wonder. The one religious element in all of life is the

00:11:13.340 - 00:11:37.110

sense of wonder. It is the 6th Sense. Lawrence, concluded, and it is our natural religious sense Wonder. Any serious consideration of wonder takes us back, doesn't it? To childhood explorations of the

00:11:37.110 - 00:11:54.320

natural world, getting kicked out of the house on saturday morning and told not to come back until mealtime in summer, catching fireflies and mayonnaise jars with holes poked in the top, until we had veritable natural

00:11:54.320 - 00:12:16.790

lanterns lying in the grass in the dark and doing nothing but watching for shooting stars in winter, scratching our own pictures in the frost on the windows, catching snowflakes on our tongues, covering pine cones and

00:12:16.790 - 00:12:33.540

peanut butter, and rolling them and bird seed to hang on a limb and wait for the birds. In those childhood days, writes Richard Lewis, we knew as much as we had to know, in

00:12:33.540 - 00:12:58.030

order to ask what we didn't know. Our ignorance was not just innocence, but the foundation from which we offered ourselves the daily surprise of discovering another question . Another way to uncover something mysterious, something we

00:12:58.030 - 00:13:31.060

hadn't understood yesterday we lived. So it seemed bye wonder for, by wondering, we were able to multiply a growing consciousness of being alive. A growing consciousness of being alive lies at the heart of jesus

00:13:31.070 - 00:14:03.910

invitation. Do not worry, consider the birds one of the cover articles of this month's National Geographic, is the curious history of feathers. The journey begins with a fossil found in Germany That is 150 million

00:14:03.910 - 00:14:26.450

years old, noting that birds are so commonplace that it's easy to take for granted that a bird's wing is vastly more sophisticated than just about anything we see . Various birds use feathers to keep cool or warm

00:14:28.040 - 00:14:54.600

to make or muffle noise to float or snowshoe to concentrate sound to improve hearing, build nest, assist digestion, carry water and escape predators by shedding feathers in a way a lizard sheds. Its tail feathers

00:14:54.610 - 00:15:20.750

are the most complex thing that grows out of the skin of any organism, says richard Prum of Yale University. It is astounding how thousands of diverse structures work together to create plumage. That's just the feathers

00:15:22.840 - 00:15:50.590

of the birds for which God gives providential care, God says jesus says God cares more about us than that. Is there any way now in our grown up days amid all the worries of serving the church

00:15:50.140 - 00:16:15.530

of preaching good news In a world where good gets little press and not much seems very new to recover a daily sense of wonder. The Gospel message this evening is that our life depends on it. It

00:16:15.530 - 00:16:45.260

makes me wonder if each one of us were to put a bird feeder outside the window of our study where we work and right and pray. We might be less anxious, less anxious about the church,

00:16:47.740 - 00:17:14.670

less anxious about the world, less anxious about our life simply to watch the birds of the air wing their way into our view with the grace of the Gospel, to remind us that God is God,

00:17:15.840 - 00:17:26.360

and we rest in God's good and providential care Man