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?