We have just concluded a season in the Church that covers the fifty days of Easter, the Feast of Pentecost, and Trinity Sunday.  Sounds like kind of a whirlwind tour when you line it up like that.  Now we’re in the long season that’s called “Ordinary Time.”  And we’re embarking on a journey through the heart of the Gospel of Matthew.  Matthew’s project (as far as I can tell) was to teach – that is, to lay out Jesus’ teachings between the time of his baptism and the time of his passion.  Matthew organizes the teachings into five major courses of instruction.  The first course is Jesus’ teaching on how to live into God’s realm.  The second is about how to bring healing to the world.  The third is a collection of parables which make clear that Jesus’ followers have what they need to understand God’s realm.  The fourth contains instructions on how to get along in community with an ethic of humility and radical forgiveness.  And the fifth course is Jesus’ teaching about the end times – the end of life as we know it. 
             And so today we start the first course with instructions from what gets called “The Sermon on the Mount” where we find Jesus teaching about how to live rightly, justly – how to live into God’s realm.  God and Mammon, Jesus says, are masters who cannot be served simultaneously.  Here Mammon is translated as wealth.  Mammon was the Syrian god of riches –- of property, wealth and earthly goods.   And then as if that Jesus could read our racing minds, we have a long piece about not being anxious or worried.  You know, don’t worry, be happy! 
             The problem with the instruction, whether from Jesus or Bobby McFerrin, is that, in my experience, it’s much harder to serve the Holy One than to serve wealth.  Serving the Ground of All Being, trusting in God requires regularly reorienting our lives.  Maybe you know individuals or groups who have been able to do this once and for all, but I find that this is a daily challenge.  It is a daily challenge to move deeper and deeper into a relationship of service and trust in God (whose existence we may be unsure of) and to move further and further away from service to everything else that offers security or certainty.  But wait.  What if the opposite of faith is not doubt?  What if the opposite of faith is certainty? 
             What keeps you from serving the Holy One more faithfully?  What keeps you from trusting The Unknowable more faithfully?  What are our worries, our anxieties, our brooding apprehensions that keep us imprisoned or hidden?  What if the opposite of rich is not poor, what if the opposite of rich is free?
              All week the words of poet Audre Lorde have been running through my head.  Maybe you know her poem called “A Litany for Survival.”1  Listen to this:

              I don’t know if Audre Lorde wrote that poem as a commentary on Matthew’s sixth chapter, but in the context of today’s readings, it seems to me that she’s explaining some of what Jesus meant by his admonition against worry.  In order to “[seek] a now that can breed futures” we have to be actively engaged in the work of bringing about the realm of God, actively engaged in the work of justice and peace.  Audre Lorde, like Jesus, understood that fear and worry are what keep us from participating in the redeeming work of God.  It’s fear and worry that keep us from attending to God’s mysteries.  It’s fear and worry that keep our truest selves – our souls silent and in hiding.  What if hate is not the opposite of love?.  What if the opposite of love is fear?
              One of my teachers, the Rev. Bill Dols asks, “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 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  To those questions, I add, what would be required of us to serve God more than we did yesterday?
             There is a prayer by retired Methodist minister Ted Loder that addresses this in a surprising way. It’s surprising because we usually don’t pray like this.  Listen to this:

              We will be spending the rest of this liturgical year, which ends on the Sunday before Advent, with Matthew.  Matthew is our companion on Memorial Day weekend, amid reports and experiences of tragedies that are both specific and personal, as well as unfathomably broad and global.  So here is the radical theme shift into Ordinary Time that I mentioned at the beginning of the sermon. We have moved from the theme of believing in God.  We have moved to serving the Holy One who –- or which -- believes in us.  In fact, I believe that God believes in us whether we are faithful or certain, whether we are loving or fearful, whether we are rich or free.  God believes in us, and God loves us.  God judges us –- with more compassion and mercy than we can fathom. So let’s come out, show ourselves.  Let’s show each other our truest selves.   Let’s serve God with our truest selves.  Let’s imagine that this is the day that the Lord has made.  Let’s rejoice and be glad in it.