A Sermon Delivered by The Rev. John D. Painter at Centenary United Methodist Church Metuchen, New Jersey May 25, 2008

Text: Matthew 6:24-34
“No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be de-voted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth. 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. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 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? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.
“So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.” —Matthew 6:24-34, NRSV
“Worrying about something that may never happen is like paying interest on money you may never borrow.” – Unknown
“Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.” – Dale Carnegie
“What were you worrying about this time last year?”
“Worrying is like a rocking chair: it gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you anywhere.” – Unknown
“Worrying works! About 90 percent of the things you worry about never happen.”
“Anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but only empties today of its strength.” – Charles Spurgeon
“When a train goes through a tunnel and it gets dark, you don’t throw away the ticket and jump off. You sit still and trust the engineer.” — Corrie Ten Boom
“Pray, and let God worry.” – William Law
If you are at all concerned about how much you worry, perhaps you should pay a visit to The Worry Bank at www.worrybank.com. If you are having trouble dumping your worries and you can’t seem to leave them all with Jesus, go there to practice letting go. At The Worry Bank you can make regular worry deposits. The site says: “Everyone worries. How much time do you spend worrying? Most things we worry about don’t happen. But we still spend time and energy worrying about them. Do you ever wish someone else could do your worrying for you? Deposit your worries at The Worry Bank.”
“Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?” That question is as timely today as when Jesus posed it 2,000 years ago. Does worrying do us any good?
It would be good to know the answer to that question, because, Lord knows, we’ve put huge amounts of time and energy into worrying about all sorts of things that might happen, most of which never actually come to pass. And what’s more, life has been generous in providing us with a cornucopia of possible problems in which we can invest our angst.
But having burned through all that anxiety, what do we have to show for it? Have we, as Jesus asked, added even a single hour to our lives? Certainly, since Jesus asked that question rhetorically, he intended for his audience to answer it in their minds with a resounding “No!” But if you’re at all analytical, another possible answer may occur to you, and that is “Who knows?”
If a man is a worrier and dies at the age of 68 years, 114 days and 17 hours, who’s to say that without all that fretting, he would’ve lived to be only 68 years, 114 days and 16 hours? In other words, his worrying gained him an hour. How can we possibly know?
By setting up a study using the scientific method, that’s how. And it happens that that has been done, with the results published in the December 2006 issue of the Mayo Clinic Proceed-ings medical journal.
As far as I know, the researchers didn’t have Jesus’ point in mind—that worry cannot add even a single hour to one’s life—yet the study’s conclusion suggests that Jesus was right. But even more, it reveals a surprising flip side to that argument, suggesting that not being a chronic worrier can add not only an hour, but perhaps even years to your lifespan.
By tracking and collating all kinds of data from a decades-long study involving several thousand graduates of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, researchers determined that pessimists had a significantly greater likelihood of dying sooner from any cause than did optimists. Of course, pessimism and worry are not entirely identical. Pessimism is the tendency to take a gloomy view of life and to assume that most things ultimately drift or march toward negative outcomes. Worry is a mental and emotional response of concern or even fear to specific or unspecified threats. To describe the difference another way, we could say that pessimism is an outlook about things in general and worry is a response to possibilities in particular. And perhaps it’s possible to be a pessimist without being a worrier.
Yet, at root, both pessimism and worry are related to a shortage of hope and trust. Pes-simism, which has no confidence that things will work out, can breed despair, and that word lit-erally means “un-hope.”
In the “Sermon on the Mount” where Jesus posed this question about adding to our span through worry, he went on to make clear that what he was calling for instead was for us to trust God. He pointed to the birds that do not sow or reap the fields but are fed by their heavenly Crea-tor nonetheless. He pointed to the flowers that do not toil or spin but are clothed in beauty by the God anyway.
It’s critical to understand, however, that his words were directed to people who did have to sow, to reap, to toil and to spin to stay alive. He wasn’t telling them to stop doing those tasks; he simply wanted them to understand that their lives were a lot more than the sum of their sow-ing, reaping, toiling and spinning…or the length of their FaceBook profile.
Further, Jesus tied the call to not worry to the kingdom of God: “But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” That’s a significant linkage because God’s realm is the ultimate reason for optimism and hope. The very meaning of the kingdom is that God and those who stand with him win. In the end, good tri-umphs over evil. If you’re a citizen of God’s realm—and all who follow Jesus faithfully are—it’s still possible that you might be pessimistic about human activity in the short term, but you’ve got every reason to be optimistic about God’s activity in the long term.
This was not Jesus’ dissertation on worry. He’s not Dr. Phil giving us a prescription for how to avoid anxiety. His main point is this: “Strive first for the kingdom of God and his right-eousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” Strive for it.
“Strive” means to exert a lot of energy and effort toward a goal. So, far from simply say-ing we should rely on the eventual coming of God’s realm as an antidote to daily worry, Jesus is saying we should actively work for the spread of the kingdom. And as we do, some of the things we fret about are going to become non-issues because we’ve got more important things to be busy with.
None of this is to say that we won’t therefore have some normal worries. We can’t love someone without worrying about threats to his or her well-being. We cannot be sensitive persons without occasional concern that we haven’t done all we should. We cannot listen to the news without some uneasiness about the direction many things in the world appear to be going.
But we can be focused enough on the things of God that we’re able to relax about our priorities and have confidence in God’s providential care. And that’s a definition of “hope.” You see, hope actually assumes that the pessimists are sometimes right in the short run, but it ulti-mately trusts the long-run view, and that confidence has a way of leaking back into our present circumstances. That’s why, instead of wringing our hands in despair, we clasp our hands in prayer.
Possibly in this one particular situation worry can actually add years to your life:
A man was seen fleeing down the hall of the hospital just before his operation. A security guard stopped him before he could leave the hospital and asked, “What’s the matter?”
The man said, “I heard the nurse say, ‘It’s a very simple operation, don’t worry, I’m sure it will be all right.’”
“She was just trying to comfort you,” said the security guard. “What’s so frightening about that?”
“She wasn’t talking to me,” exclaimed the man. “She was talking to my doctor!”
Dr. Edward Hallowell is a child and adult psychologist who taught at Harvard for more than 20 years and has now left academia to devote his full professional attention to his clinical practice, lectures and the writing of books. Back in the 1990s, he was the one who brought At-tention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) to the public’s awareness, but he’s also made a study of worry, which is the subject of one of his books.
Writing about worry a few years ago for Psychology Today magazine, Dr. Hallowell of-fered several suggestions for dealing with excessive worry, but finally he said this: “Talk to God when you feel worried…. Brain scans and EEG monitors show beneficial changes in the brain during meditation and prayer. The changes correlate with most of our measures of improved health, including longevity and reduced incidence of illness” (emphasis added).
In his book on worry, Dr. Hallowell revealed that he is a practicing Christian, and so in an interview with Psychology Today, the interviewer asked him if that admission was a risk for someone of renown in the psychiatric community. He acknowledged that it was a risk insofar as some people might dismiss him, but he added that he often advised patients to develop a spiritual life and, therefore, felt it was important to acknowledge his own. And he said that spirituality is a “very powerful part of the mind.” He concluded, “In my case, a relationship with God is another source of connection. And ultimately, it makes sense of my life in ways that nothing else can.”
“Pray, and let God worry.” – William Law
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PRAYER
Divine Companion, from beginning to end, we rest in your embrace, though we do not always acknowledge or recognize your presence. All along our days you journey with us. Some-times you are a loud shout to help us to heed your call. Sometimes you are a quiet whisper to help us to listen. You help shape our questions and are patient with our answers. You are full of compassion and care like a loving grandmother. You love us tenderly like a mother cradling her child. You give us visions to soar like the eagle. Like a wise doctor, you heal our memories with a gentle touch. O God, how wonderful you are. How good it is to be in your presence. We bring to you our whole life, our joy and our grief, our patience and our worry, our dreams and our de-spair. Like a long-time friend, you know us beginning to end. And you embrace us into new life. Amen.
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