Today we have one last installment from the Sermon on the Mount before the season of Epiphany ends next Sunday.  In the Sermon on the Mount we find some of Jesus’ best instructions for how to live in authentic righteousness which means justice and compassion and dignity.  He says that it will be impossible to have as master both the Holy One and wealth – not just money, also property and stuff.  Material things and God cannot be served or minded simultaneously.  If last week’s directives were hard, this week’s seem downright impossible (at least to a worrier).  Maybe some of you heard the Gospel reading just now and thought to yourself, “see, this is what I’m always saying!  Don’t worry so much!”  But I have a worry button has been stuck in the “on” position for as long as I can remember -- probably since before I could walk.  

It’s hard for me to hear Jesus’ counsel to not worry.  And worse yet, rather than admire them, I get annoyed by people who do not worry.  I suspect they don’t worry because they either have others around them taking care of everything for them, or they really do not understand what is going on.  I do try to keep my worrying in check with heavy doses of meditation and prayer.  And I follow the AA/12-step wisdom of “fake it until you make it.”  I play a calm person in my role as your rector, and I enjoy occasional success.  But even then, I’m not really all that successful, because when I am not worrying, I get annoyed by people who are worrying because I start to suspect that I am not worrying because I really do not understand what is going on.  I am terrible at following this teaching to not worry about what I will eat or what I will wear or what I will preach.  It would be easier for me follow Jesus’ commandment to give to everyone who begs from me, navigating Boston on foot, than it would be for me not to worry.   

I was laughing about this yesterday with a parishioner who is on the last leg of her spiritual journey on this earth.  She asked how long I could visit and I said, “not long – I need to work on my sermon for tomorrow.”  She said, “the best sermons are the ones that aren’t finished until the last minute.” (I groaned.)  “What are the texts?” she asked.  I told her.  She thought for a moment and then she said, “we’ll work on it together.”  And then she said, “I woke up this morning trembling with fear, sure that today would be the day that death would get me.”  After a pause, she said, “now it’s your turn.”  I laughed and I thought a minute.  I said, “well, more than anything else, what Jesus keeps saying is ‘don’t be afraid…don’t worry’  Love is bigger and more powerful than death.  Love will be there to carry us after we die just like Love was there all along while we were alive and Love was there even before we were born.”  “That’s right,” she said, smiling, and then she drifted off to sleep.  I smiled too, only a little jealous of her morphine.

You know, when I pick my head up long enough to imagine the possibility that this lesson is not all about me, and I begin to think about the others in the crowd hearing Jesus’ teaching, then the teachings seem even harder.  I imagine Jesus speaking to a ragtag crowd of people who likely did not know where their next meal was coming from; people whom Matthew tells us were suffering deeply with all kinds of illness and disease.  Jesus tells them not to worry about what they’re going to eat or what they’re going to wear.  And I don’t think Jesus is only talking about spiritual food or spiritual clothing here, because based on what Matthew tells us, their hunger and their exposure were physical as well as spiritual.  The risks were real.  The misery was real.  (And they had no morphine.)

I wonder what Jesus was doing here.  I wonder if there was some way that what he was saying was actually compassionate and generous in its absurdity.  It makes me think of a time many years ago, when my closest friend lost her husband, her brother-in-law, and her sister’s fiancé in a horrific car accident a week or so before her sister’s wedding.  In the aftermath, a hurricane of grief swamped her extended family and everyone who loved them.  I’ll never forget a moment when my friend’s father walked up to her as she stood sobbing, a day or two after the accident, gave her a gentle sideways hug and said sweetly, “Michelle, you cry too easily.”  It was something he had often said to her as she was growing up because her tears were regularly spilling down her cheeks for all kinds of reasons.  In this moment of pure agony, though, his words took my breath away with their ferocity and tenderness and their absurdity.  It felt like incisive prophetic wisdom cut through the painfulness of how much we wanted our situation to be different and put some balm on how our situation actually was.

The tricky truth of this Gospel (1) lesson is about the abundance we can experience when we get available enough and vulnerable enough.  In my experience, most of us don’t mind receiving help -- we just really don’t like needing it.  And our worries and anxieties and brooding apprehensions keep us imprisoned or hidden in despair and unavailable.  My teacher, Bill Dols, puts it this way:  “What is your suffering that waits, even longs, to teach you?  How do you manage your poverty of [faith]…[how do you] deny, conceal and dissemble, keep private and secret what makes you anxious in the day and stalks you in the night?  What does your hiddenness and silence do for you, for those around you, and for the ones who love you the most?  What do you gain and what do you give up by holding onto and hoarding your deepest frustrations and fears …?  What might be the cost and promise of coming out of hiding and joining the human race…What would be required of you to be seen and heard, recognized in the crowd reaching out?  To come out, come out whoever and whatever you are?  To run the risk of being seen, known, free, and healed!” (2)  What would be required of you to serve and trust God more than you did yesterday?

There is a prayer by a man named Ted Loder that addresses this in a surprising way – it’s surprising because we usually don’t pray like this. (3)  It goes:

What Jesus is trying to call us to, according to the Gospel of Matthew, is service to the Holy One Who – or Which -- believes in us.  I know I say this over and over, but here it is again:  the Bible is a collection of stories that testify about God believing in some of the most unbelievable people -- whether we are faithful or absolutely certain, whether we are loving or fearful, whether we are vulnerable or defended, whether we are free from possessions or wealthy.  The testimony is that God believes in us and God loves us and even judges us – with more compassionate and generous mercy than we can ever possibly fathom – so let’s continue to encourage one another to come out of our various prisons, let’s show ourselves in the darkness as we are bidden by the prophet Isaiah.  Let’s show each other our truest selves and shed whatever keeps us under cover.   Let’s be people of the covenant, stewards of God’s mysteries, as Paul says in Corinthians, made to serve one another – those known to us and those who are strange – in the name of Love (capital L) with our deepest selves. 
Here’s one way to do it.  I learned it from some people who live in a very poor village in Honduras when a group of us from the Boston area visited them some years ago to build a dam and lay pipes so that they would have year-round access to water in their village.  They were scandalized that whenever we Americans prayed, our prayers were shockingly long on requests and nearly devoid of thanks to God.  Their prayers, the prayers of some of the poorest people in the Western Hemisphere, were all and only prayers of thanksgiving whenever they gathered.