Almost two years after my first guest-preaching experience at my home church, I was invited to bring the message again today, this time on a topic of my choosing. Once again, it was equal parts humbling, exciting and nerve wracking. I'm so very grateful for the support I received from my pastors, Luke (who probably needs both hands to count all the various sermon iterations he was subjected to, not to mention my rehearsal of the final product), and family and friends who came, watched or offered encouragement. God is so very good to me.
Today, I preached on Matthew 6:25-34, also known as the "Do Not Worry" passage from Jesus's Sermon on the Mount.
Image of the worship bulletin:
And here's the transcript:
Good morning, everyone! Thank you to Pastor Elizabeth for asking me to bring the message this morning, and to all of you for having me. It was a busy week for Plainfield as we just finished our first week back at school, and towns around us are going on week two. My husband Luke and I have three kids; two boys in elementary school and a daughter who just started middle school, and leading up to the first day back, we had a pretty lengthy to-do list that probably looked like a lot of yours. Plus, Kara is new to the middle school, so there was an orientation for parents and students where she could get a lay of the land, try out the combination to her locker, walk through her class schedule and meet her teachers.
We were there for over two hours, and when we got home, we talked it all over, and she said, “I better take down some notes so I can remember all the things I learned tonight.” Classes hadn’t even started yet, but she already had the makings of her own to-do list to help her navigate the school day.
And we know the list only gets longer as we get older and deal with everything that life throws at us. It’s not just school kids who heave a big sigh on Sunday nights and wish the weekends could be just a little longer.
For almost a year now, all three of my kids have been obsessed with their dad’s old stash of Garfield comic books, and in the strips there’s a running joke that Garfield hates mornings, and especially Monday mornings. It’s not like he’s rushing to the office every day. But he perfectly captures our society’s attitude toward the start of the week. This one hits the nail on the head:
It's funny, but we can relate! A new day, a new week, brings a whole new set of anxieties. What do I have to do today, where am I supposed to be, what was I supposed to do yesterday that didn’t get done, what’s on my plate for tomorrow that I have to start thinking about today? And how do I feel about all those things?
And yet with all this busyness going on in our minds and in our lives, the Bible show us that no matter what trials we might face in each new day, we can face them without worry because we’re trusting it all to God.
“Do Not Worry” has always been one of my favorite scriptures, and one of the reasons I love it is that it’s so straightforward. No parables, no hidden meaning; Jesus does us a favor and spells it out for us — literally telling us to not be overwhelmed by fears in our daily lives. When Jesus came, he expanded the interpretation of a lot of those Old Testament laws around food, worship, Sabbath and so on, but “Don’t Worry” doesn’t change. We see it easily way back in the book of Exodus, after Moses leads the Israelites out of Egypt and God provides a daily meal of meat and bread to the people so they’ll have steady nourishment as they make their way to the land of Canaan. God even gives them a double portion on the sixth day, so they don’t have to collect food on the Sabbath. “Do not worry” isn’t a “nice to have”; it’s not something “other people do”; it’s not an aspiration to strive for “one day in the future”; it’s for us, and it’s for today.
I’ve had lots of lightbulb moments over the last few years reinforcing how important it is to live this scripture. One that stands out took place almost two years ago. I was going through a lot of change at work, and I was using up a good chunk of mental energy to just manage my emotions and get through the work day. I was also having something like a pre-midlife identity crisis; looking at my relationship with God, my career, parts of motherhood where I wasn’t doing so well, how I was showing up in my marriage. It was like I had gone back to school to study anxiety, and I was getting all As.
Around the same time, I noticed a tingling in my left jaw and a ringing in my ears that wouldn’t go away. I went to the health clinic at work and immediate care a handful of times over about six months. And at the end of every visit, the provider would always say, “If this doesn’t get better, you should really follow up with your primary care or a specialist.” But my life was already so full, my list was so long, that I didn’t have the mental bandwidth for this issue to take up any more space in my brain than it already was. So, each time I decided to wait it out, and take their advice only if things got worse.
Well, things did get a little worse. Two of my immediate care visits over that six months were to get checked out for intermittent chest pain. And each of those two times, they gave me an EKG, and thank goodness, all of my vitals would come back normal. Heart, good, lungs clear, everything all good. Each time, I would tell them about the other symptoms I was being seen for, and each time they asked me if I had any stress in my life, because it could be either causing or at least increasing the severity of my symptoms, and each time I would say, yes. I wasn’t really doing anything to change it, but I knew that stress was part of the problem.
After my second chest pain episode, it was February of 2018, and by this time, the tremors were spreading up my face. OK, I said, I get it Lord. I have to see someone.
So I saw my primary care doctor and an ear-nose-throat specialist, and there were two or three weeks where I had a lot of appointments. A hearing test, blood work, a brain MRI to rule out neurological issues. In the end, they found an iron deficiency that was most likely contributing to the facial tremors. They determined that jaw-clenching was causing the ringing in my ears, and that both of these symptoms were made worse by … stress. Bring up my iron a bit, nix the gum checking, literally stop worrying so much, and after a while, the symptoms should disappear. And they did.
Now, this was not a serious medical drama. “Gray’s Anatomy” is not going to buy the rights to my story anytime soon. In the grand scheme of things, I was fine. But it took a long time and a lot of money to figure that out. It also forced me to take a step back and examine my choices up to this point:
This issue took so much longer to resolve than it needed to because I was so stubborn. How much stress and money would I have saved myself and my husband and my health savings account if I’d seen those doctors in September instead of February and gotten all that information earlier.
But here was my problem: I had all these great ideas for these big changes I wanted to make. And they were good changes. Who would say you shouldn’t work on your parenting skills? Who would tell you it’s wrong to get excited about a different career? But I was so sure that my agenda was right, that I wasn’t noticing the signs God was sending me that I was going about it all wrong. I was so focused on the nitty-gritty details that helped me feel like I was in control, that I couldn’t see how they were distracting me from making progress on that deeper, harder work. And my thoughts were so “I” focused that I wasn’t giving God a chance to weigh in. Really, I was talking more at him, talking more, period, instead of giving Him the space and openness He needed to work in me.
Here are a few things that helped me get to a better place:
One: Reminding myself that a fear-filled life is not what God calls us to. He doesn’t need us to have a perfect plan, or figure it all out. He needs us to trust. To take things one day at a time. To follow him over everything else, and be receptive to his actual call for our lives.
Two: I needed to talk to someone. Actually, lot of people. For me, this looked like being more open with my support network about all the different ways I was struggling. I made it a point to talk to my husband more and reach out to close friends and family, and Pastor Ken Loudenback here at PUMC. But I also found a counselor, because I needed that outside perspective to help me look at everything I was doing, figure out what wasn’t working, and help me make healthy changes I could sustain over the long haul. I needed someone to tell me that you actually can’t work on every area of your life at the same time and to show me that, in a lot of ways, I was being my own worst enemy. Having that outside perspective really helped me pinpoint what triggered my stress, how to manage it when it showed up, and how to look at some of my situations differently so that they didn’t cause so much anxiety in the first place.
But the practice that led to these insights and changes was prayer. Prayer is always something I’m working to get better at, but when I start my days this way, it puts me in a better frame of mind to deal with whatever life throws at me. I had another lightbulb moment when I realized that I needed to change the intentions of my prayers — to stop trying to bend things to my will, and start asking for help in staying open to *His* will. So I now say all the time, “Your will, Lord, not mine,” because I need this reminder to stay focused on Him.
One of my *favorite* prayers to reflect on is Psalm 23, “The Lord is My Shepherd,” and there are two lines that really stand out. The first one is, “He makes me lie down in green pastures,” because I can visualize God standing in front of me, and putting His hands on my shoulders and saying, “Seriously, lie down. It’s going to be OK.”
The second line that stays with me is, “He prepares a table before me in the presence of my enemies.” I used to pass over that verse pretty quickly because I would think, “I don’t think of anyone as an enemy.” But when I started defining “enemy” in a bigger way — as unhealthy beliefs, self-destructive thought patterns — this verse held a lot more power for me. Here I see Jesus setting that table, with all those harmful thoughts and behaviors around us, and I can hear Him say, “Don’t believe a word. *I* am your Creator. You are made in *my* image and likeness, and I have a purpose for you. We’ve got this.”
Earlier this year, I saw the movie Groundhog Day with Bill Murray for the first time. I may have been the last person on the planet to see this, but it’s a movie about an East Coast weatherman named Phil Connors. And this weatherman is a jerk. Phil hates his job, he’s condescending and sarcastic to his TV crew, looks down on everyone, and he definitely hates going to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, every year to cover the annual Groundhog Day festival. So of course, by some twist of fate, Phil is forced to relive Feb. 2 over and over and over until he gets it right.
Going into the movie, I figured it would be good but predictable. Phil Connors would fall in love, get out of the time loop, and find a new lease on life. And I’d laugh a lot because hello, it’s Bill Murray.
And those things do happen. But it’s about more than just a romance. The theme is actually a lot closer to “It’s a Wonderful Life,” but with a twist. George Bailey was a man who needed to be erased from his life to realize how much he loved it. But in Groundhog Day, Phil Connors needs to be trapped in his life, in this one awful day that represents everything he hates about humanity, so he could learn how to love it.
We’re going to watch a couple clips from the movie, and in this first one, Phil has already lived through several iterations of Groundhog Day, and by this point, he’s over the shock, he’s done manipulating the situation to his benefit, mentally exhausted from being stuck in this small town day after day after day. Take a look.
Start clip at 1:28 and play to 2:47:
It’s so easy to relate to Phil Connors, because at some point or another, we’ve all been there. Feeling trapped in your circumstances, worried that you’ll never get out, and believing there’s nothing you can do to change it. No matter how we got there — it’s so easy to give into despair when we don’t see another path forward.
Groundhog Day Director Harold Ramis said that after the movie was released, people from all kinds of religious and spiritual communities came out in support of it, because each group could relate it back to their own theological viewpoint. But, Harold Ramis said, it’s really a universal concept — exploring the idea of, “How many times do you have to make the same mistake in your life until something different happens?” He said, and I’m paraphrasing a little, “When you come to those moments when you could make the same mistake, the key is having the insight, courage, and energy to make a different choice. Because if you can change one little thing, then everything might change.”
And that’s what Phil does. The one little thing he changes is his attitude around Feb. 2. But not before he’s tried everything else, right? He was set on a way of viewing the world that ultimately didn’t serve him or others, and only until everything else failed did he resign himself to make that change. But that change has a domino effect on everything he does and helps him find a sense of purpose — even before he ever gets out of the time loop. Here’s the other clip:
Start clip at the beginning and play until 2:34:
So, what does this mean for *us*? I think these Groundhog Day type situations are where the rubber meets the road for us as Christians. They test our faith exactly because we have to put aside our pre-conceived notions, our best-laid plans, and our pride, and put our trust into God’s goodness and purpose for our lives. Jesus tells the crowd on the mount: “Do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’” He says, “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.”
But it’s hard to do this! Writer C.S. Lewis describes it really well in his book Mere Christianity. He writes, “The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self — all your wishes and precautions — to Christ. … That is why the real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day.”
So how do we make it easier for God to flow through our days?
One of the best ways is to start it with Him. Whether it’s before you get out of bed, or you’re taking your shower, or driving to work, carve out time to talk to Him. Find prayers that help you set your intentions for the day. Maybe you spend five minutes writing in a prayer journal. My sister uses a Sarah Young flip-book devotional that has a scripture and prayer for every day of the year. Find a Bible plan that gets you in the Word a little bit every day. The whole idea is to let God be the first thing to fill you up, before life starts rushing in.
It also helps me to remember that we worship a *loving* savior, who really does provide for us in ways we’ll never know or see. Who answers our concerns about physical and spiritual hunger by reminding us, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” It’s so easy to get caught up in all the things we have going on in our lives, and all the things we have to do — or think we have to do — but Jesus has already done, is always doing, all the hard work on our behalf. We just have to accept it, and follow.
I’m going to close with one of my favorite prayers from St. Thomas Aquinas, because it offers us a great mindset for entering our days with God:
Most Merciful God, order my day so that I may know what you want me to do, and then help me to do it. Let me not be elated by success or depressed by failure. I want only to take pleasure in what pleases you, and only to grieve at what displeases you.
For the sake of your love, I would willingly forgo all temporal comforts.
May all the joys in which you have no part weary me.
May all the work which you do not prompt be tedious to me.
Let my thoughts frequently turn to you,
That I may be obedient to you without complaint,
Patient without grumbling, cheerful without self-indulgence,
contrite without dejections,
And serious without solemnity.
Let me hold you in awe without feeling terrified of you,
And let me be an example to others without any trace of pride. Amen.
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