8th Sunday
One of the peculiar
things that has come to be a particular issue in our age is stress. Stress is everywhere. We have so many things we have to do, so much
to accomplish, so many choices and decisions, and while sometimes we've been
there before or can ask for advice, ultimately the decision is ours. We live in a world where one wrong move could
make us lose our Job, launch us into poverty, or alienate us from our
world. In many ways, We do not live in a
world that believes in second chances or forgiveness, but one where in many
careers, if we slip, there might be a dozen people, just waiting to take our
place.
Of course, every age
in history, and every part of the world has its problems. If we fall into hard times, it is unlikely
that we will be completely abandoned. We
have a government that offers social programs, a Church that will help us in
need, and all sorts of resources. Even
if we make bad choices, most of us will never starve to death. Most of us will never have our property
seized by a power-hungry dictator. We
might find ourselves shopping at St. Vincent DePaul or Goodwill for a pair of
jeans, but most of us will never have to worry about taking old clothes and
sewing them together because we can't afford new fabric to make a pair of
Jeans.
I think what is
peculiar to our age is stress. Unlike
any age before ours, we have far more choices open to us. More than any people who ever lived, we
really can be whatever we want to be.
Yet, while that freedom is a good, it comes at a price. While our ancestors may have been locked into
the trade they were born into and the land, we are not. They often were born, grew, worked, and died
in the same town. We do not. That means that we have many more choices
than they ever did, and we must make them.
What will I do? Where will I live?
What do I value? What's next for
me? With those choices come
stress. Did I make the right
decision? Could I have done it
differently? What if I had applied for
another trade? What if I had just worked
harder?
Even a hundred years
ago, I think those who came before us could have looked at today's Gospel and
said to themselves, as I look at my life, I've done what I can. Either it'll work, or it won't, but there's
really nothing more I could have done.
This is who I am and where I was born.
Like the lillies of the field, I accept my state in life, and I'll just
do the best with it I can.
Today, that logic
doesn't quite work anymore. While not
perfectly, to a greater degree than ever before, we choose our state in
life. To the extent that we choose it,
we also bear responsibility for our choices.
Now we must say not that, a famine struck the land, and I just have to
trust in God that we'll make it somehow" but that "I decided to take
this dead-end job, and now I'm stuck in a mortgage I can never pay off, and
have trouble putting enough food on the table." Then, while life was certainly harder, it was
easier to say, it's not my fault. Today,
it can be easy to blame ourselves, to say that it is our fault, and to some
degree we might be right.
Yet, that doesn't
mean we need to throw out these words of Jesus, just because their context has
changed. It does mean though that we
need to ask ourselves honestly, what Jesus's words mean for us today. How do we let go of the worry about worldly
concerns, while still doing our duty as Christians?
I remember reading
in the Screwtape letters, one of CS Lewis's suggestions about the Devil, is
that one way he distracts us from our daily work is by tempting us to consider
the future. It can be tempting to think
of all the possible things that could go wrong, trying to plan for everything,
and keeping in our mind at once all the horrible things that could happen,
often failing to realize that they could not possibly all happen at once. Still, it doesn't stop us from worrying about
them. Sometimes it can get overwhelming,
taking ourselves back through the past and over all of the things that could
have been, all of the decisions we might have made, how we could have been
different, and then walking through the future, imagining all the possible
things that could happen and wondering how we can possibly make it.
Yet, our Lord gives
us the answer. We, like them, certainly
do obsess about clothes far more than we need to, and at the end of the day,
they don't matter near as much as we suppose.
Some of us also stress about food.
Is it good enough, will they like it?
Is this the appropriate thing.
Yet, more than any of those, I think today, we can relate to the lines,
can any of you, by your worrying, add even a single moment to your own
lifetime? And don't worry about
tomorrow, tomorrow will take care of itself, sufficient for today is it's own
evil.
Now of course,
making preparations for tomorrow is today's work, but that worry can crawl so
deep inside of us that it can be paralyzing.
So we must ask
ourselves….do we listen to these words of Jesus. Are we so hung up on tomorrow that it
paralyzes us from acting today? Do we
let the devil get the better of us? Or do we choose to do the good that we can
do?
Comments
Post a Comment