Just Look. Consider. Then, Live.

A Sermon for the Second Sunday after Pentecost

Recently I took a walk in Baker Park with two church friends. We were strolling along when one of them stopped walking. After a moment, we stopped, too, and he said quietly, “Just look at that heron.” I looked, and I saw a heron perched on the edge of Carroll Creek. Wow, I whispered. I’ve never seen one that close before. She was magnificent. So are all the morning birds that perch on my porch, up close. My daily guests include doves and cardinals and finches and robins. They come and just warble their little hearts out.

Poet Mary Oliver says this about birdsong:

I will try
I will step from the house to see what I see
and hear and I will praise it.
I did not come into this world
to be comforted.
I came, like red bird, to sing. (“I’ll Try”)

I don’t know about you, but this spring, while sitting in my chair each morning, drinking coffee and waiting for the sun to come up, I’ve been listening to and watching the birds. I’ve become fascinated with birds again, just like I was when I was a child. I think Jesus was more than fascinated. I think Jesus loved birds. He spoke of them often. Jesus also knew those passages in the Psalms about being guarded by God, hidden under the shadow of God’s wings. He knew that, in the beginning, God the Heavenly Dove swept over the face of the waters. Jesus knew that no creature under heaven understands God’s Spirit better than birds, who soar skyward and become one with the wind.

Do birds worry? Do they get anxious? Eugene Peterson thinks Jesus might put it this way: “Look at the birds, free and unfettered, not tied down to a job description, careless in the care of God” (The Message). Free and carefree – that doesn’t sound like anxiety to me. Jesus tells the crowds listening to his sermon – Jesus tells all of us – not to worry. He tells us not once, not twice, but four times today. Jesus is not singing that clever little song, “Don’t worry, be happy.” He warbles a different tune: “Don’t worry. Just Be. Look at the birds. Just be. Consider the lilies. Don’t worry. Just look. Consider. Then, live.”

Easy for him to say, right? Easy for some guy, preaching a sermon on a mount, telling everyone else why they shouldn’t worry. So…how do preachers stop worrying? How did the human Jesus reduce his own anxiety? Surely the Savior of the world had some technique, some practice, some way to help him feel more free and carefree, more birdlike. Mary Oliver, who is Christian, may have had Jesus in mind when she wrote, “But I’m not (a) bird…(I’m) a woman whose love has vanished, who thinks now, too much, of roots and the dark places where everything is simply holding on” (ibid.).

Are you simply holding on, perhaps for dear life? In a world where love may seem to have vanished, a world with so many dark places, where, you might ask, is the light, the love, the Good News? There is no lack of that awful, bad news, news some of us don’t watch any more because it makes us even more anxious. But how can we call ourselves Christian – those who follow Jesus, the One who taught us to love – how can we be Christian and ignore what goes on in our world?

After its greatest national disaster in three decades, China declared three days of mourning, interrupting the relay of the Olympic torch. The death toll climbs every time we hear the news. Relief efforts have reached the stage at which the missing become the lost. There’s an unexpected transparency with which this tragedy has been reported. This openness, one priest suggests, “has done more than a dozen trade agreements ever could, to bring ordinary Chinese people into our hearts: when we see a mother and father cradling the body of their only child, we know that they are just as we would be.” They are, as the poet put it, holding on for dear life in a dark place. “Both recent Asian disasters, Cyclone Nardis and the Sichuan earthquake, remind us how important it is to be part of a worldwide communion. Our partnerships,” through Episcopal Relief and Development, Barbara Crafton reminds us, “are already in place, so we can send help at once” (The Almost Daily eMo from GeraniumFarm.org, May 23, 2008). Still, we may be worrying: what if this kind of disaster happens to us?

Back home, out of nowhere, anxiety rises of another kind. It is yet another crisis facing a famous family and their friends, the kind of crisis familiar to so many of us. After 46 years in the Senate, Ted Kennedy has been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. President Bush said he is praying for Senator Kennedy’s full recovery. Yet we know the odds, and this tragic situation may raise our own anxiety, evoking questions like: What is recovery? What is healing? What is reconciliation?

Like the rest of us, Ted Kennedy has made mistakes, falling short of the grace of God. But now, for him, for us – what does making peace with God and with others look like? The hospice movement suggests five final statements we need to make to others, so that we might live into a good death. “Thank you. Forgive me. I forgive you. I love you. Goodbye.” In our final days, what will reconciliation be like for us? Do we worry about that?

It’s no wonder we can feel overwhelmed. How will we manage our anxiety? Where in heaven’s name is the Good News? In the midst of bad, worrisome, anxious-making news, Jesus says: “Look at the birds. Consider the lilies.” Is he kidding? And then he says: “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.”

Just before I was ordained with my peers, our bishop led a retreat and offered to hear our confessions, using a rite in what was then the “new” (1979) Book of Common Prayer. It’s “The Rite of Reconciliation” (by the way, you can find that rite starting on page 446). After I made my confession, the details of which I thankfully can no longer remember, my bishop said: “Matthew 6:34. That is your penance. I want you to write that verse on a piece of paper, tape it to your bathroom mirror, and pray that verse every day…FOR A YEAR.” When I got back to my room, I looked it up. It’s the last verse of today’s Gospel. I know it best in an “old” translation: “Let the anxiety of the day be sufficient unto itself” (RSV).

I did what I was told, one day at a time. What happened? My anxiety level began to go down. I found that I worried less. And I began to learn, more and more, how to pray. I believe my daily practice of prayer – which I try to offer faithfully, yet imperfectly – has done more to reduce my anxieties than anything else. When I get up from my prayer chair and go out into the world; when I prayerfully open my mind and heart to God’s worry-free world of birds; when I take a long, loving look at non-anxious, glorious flowers; when I make time for a walk in the park or down the street – then I begin to live my life. When I look at both my friends and my enemies and see the face of Christ; when I see that loving my neighbor includes all of nature; when I dare to believe that, as one theologian puts it, “all God’s ‘createds’ are ‘relateds’” – even the ant crawling across my living room! – then my worry wanes, and I am less anxious.

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has invited more than 800 Anglican bishops to attend the Lambeth Conference in England this summer, an event that has created some anxiety around the globe. About three quarters of those bishops have accepted. The conference has met once every 10 years or so since 1867. This gathering, beginning with a three-day retreat, will be different. “It takes the whole Communion to engage in God's mission," says our Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, explaining that this is why "we have so much invested in (the Communion’s) continuation and growth…why people of different viewpoints and ethnicities continue to remain in communion with one another. (Lambeth) is an opportunity to come together,” she says, “and have challenging…enriching and, we hope, converting conversations.”

Daily morning prayer, bible study and worship will be fundamental at Lambeth, where different parts of the Communion are invited to bring their cultural understandings and find a way toward unity in diversity. One organizer puts it this way: "This (is)…a bold, new, exciting thing we are walking into together….we are being faithful to who we are as Anglicans in the world today and to where God is calling us" (Ian Douglas in Episcopal News Service).

In other words, words that Jesus might use in calling us: “So, my beloved Anglicans, my Episcopalian friends, do not worry about tomorrow….”

Once again, the prayerful words of poet Mary Oliver:

But this too, I believe, is a place
where God is keeping watch
until we rise, and step forth again and –
but wait. Be still. Listen!
Is it red bird? Or something
inside myself, singing? (“I’ll Try”)

The Rev. Thomas A. Momberg
May 25, 2008
All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Frederick, Maryland