Anxiety when the "fix" is in

Second Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 3A
May 25, 2008

Isaiah 49:8-16a
Psalm 131
1 Corinthians 4:1-5
Matthew 6:24-34

I call this “Irony Sunday” because priests and preachers all over the world have been anxious all week about writing a sermon about not being anxious.

I have found that a great deal of anxiety in this world is generated in trying to “fix” things. Especially, in trying to “fix” things about other people, problems in other people’s lives. If you’ve spent 10 minutes or more in my office, you’ve probably heard me talking about this. That’s because it’s one life’s hard lessons:

• Do not try to fix others.

• Everything’s not fixable.

• Everything does not need fixing by me – or by you.

I have found this to be a great temptation of the priesthood: to try to fix everything, trying to fix people. Much time and energy is expended in seminaries in the hopes of beating this message into young priests. The role of the priest is to be a non-anxious presence

• at the bedside

• in the hospital

• in time of tragedy and disaster

So much of being a priest is being available, but not imposing solutions. Letting people know that you are there, but not sticking your fingers into the works.

I’m talking about priests here but don’t think you’re off the hook: You’ve all heard of the priesthood of all believers.

Now I’m not a parent, but I am aware that parenthood is filled with reasons for anxiety. Several years ago, two college friends visited me in Anniston with their young son. We stood in the back yard watching him play with one of the neighbor kids. I kept wanting to step in – “Now share the ball!” “Don’t run so fast!” – but my friend put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Just let them play. They’ll figure out what to do.” He knew that the children would learn on their own and that my sticking my nose in wouldn’t help at all. The didn’t play in that manner that I would have had them do it, but you know what, they were just fine.

Those were good parents. Jesus taught us to pray, “Our Father, who art in heaven…” because we have a heavenly parent. We have someone who looks over us as a parent, who loves us like a parent. Who is a father to us and like a mother to us.

In Isaiah, God reassured the Israelites that they would be taken care of, that someone else was worrying over them: “Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.”

How God takes care of us is a mystery. And the very mysteriousness of it sometimes brings anxiety to us. Will I get that job? Will my money hold out through the summer? Will my child make it through this illness all right?

The answer is that sometimes things don’t work out the way we want. Bad things will happen. Bad things will happen to me, and bad things will happen to you. And the knowledge of that makes me anxious sometimes … and sometimes I’m able to set that anxiety aside, to ask God to help take up that anxiety from me.

That’s not the same as going through life like a Pollyanna: not taking care of the basics and hoping the Almighty will pay the bills and raise the kids. It is being realistic – knowing that, as Jesus said, no amount of worrying will add an hour to the day or a day to your life.

This is what the psalmist means when he writes, “I do not occupy myself with great matters … But I still my soul and make it quiet, like a child upon its mother’s breast; my soul is quieted within me.” The psalmist is setting aside anxiety – setting aside worries about things that he has no control over. Praying for calm and receiving it from the Father.

As my friends and I watched those children play, the children knew we were there. No matter what precautions we took, there was a chance that one might trip and fall, might accidentally collide and – as they say where I’m from – bust your head wide open. And if that happened, a parent would be there to tend things. But as they age, those children will lose that ability to run through their days at full speed, oblivious to the dangers and the worries of the world.

And most of those dangers and worries aren’t “fixable,” aren’t things that their anxieties will change. Aren’t things that the anxieties of others will change. Aren’t things that their parents can fix – because good parents can’t always look over their children as they age, can’t always fix things for them – though they never, never forget them.

If they’ve been raised right – and I know that these particular children have been – they’ll be fine. They’ll have the tools to take care of themselves.

The Lord looks down upon those children and upon us as a parent, like a mother who cannot forget the child of her womb, as our Father who gave us life. The Lord has given us tools to take care of ourselves – tools like the Commandments, like our commitment to love one another, and our commitment to prayer – that never-ending connection to the Lord our God.

So the Lord looks over us, as our creator, and is without anxiety for us though he loves us. And because he loves us, he doesn’t want us to be needlessly anxious. So Jesus tells us, “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own.” I like the translation in the Revised English Bible: “Tomorrow will look after itself.”

Or, here’s how I think of it: “Work on living today. Do not be anxious about tomorrow. And whatever you do, don’t try to fix tomorrow. Tomorrow will look after itself.”

Amen.

A Prayer for Asparagus

Fourth Sunday of Easter
April 13, 2008

Psalm 23

As many of you know, I used to be a newspaper journalist. When I worked for the Huntsville Times, I wrote a short weekly item called The Times Almanac. It gave you essential information for living your life, vital things such as when the moon would be full and the dates for National Pancake Week. It included a very short essay, usually on a gardening theme.

During my recent move, I went through some old files – which always is more interesting than actually packing and moving those files. And I came across a column I wrote 10 years ago this month, written in the spring of 1998. I thought I’d share it with you this morning:

It’s time for lettuce and radishes to be in the ground, but mine are still seeds sitting on the kitchen counter. I plan all winter, but come spring I’m always late getting seeds into the soil. When I die and they lower my casket, some gardener’s bound to turn to the other and say, “Should’ve been in the ground already.”

I blame the seed companies. I like to get as many catalogs as I can, so my dull winter days are brightened by pictures and descriptions of hundreds of varieties of flowers and vegetables. The difficulty in choosing from among them all encourages me to dither, to delay. … Some things may get in the ground on time this year, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.

One thing I haven’t planted is asparagus. We love those green-and-purple shoots at our table, but we’ve never been in one place long enough to try growing them. They’re not particularly hard to grow, I’m told, and the culinary payoff for your efforts is tremendous.

But they take time and faith. Time because crowns planted this year won’t be ready for a full harvest until 2001 or even later. A properly planted and attended bed will produce, amazingly, for dozens of years. That bed I plant this spring could feed me for the rest of my life.

That’s where faith comes in. Planting food for the future seems a commitment that I’ve never been sure I could take. Will I be in this house three years from now when this spring’s efforts pay off in full? Will the Internet have stolen my job in five years? Will I be alive in 20?

I’m comfortable planting radishes, which will be ready in just a few weeks, when I’m sure I’ll still be around. The very thought of planting asparagus – like getting married, like choosing a career – has my stomach in knots. I look out over my raised beds and wonder what the future holds.

I never did plant that asparagus. One year later, my wife died and I sold that house and moved to Auburn and then New York and have lived in a series of apartments and rental units ever since. None of them had a garden.

But I’ve carried a picture of that last garden around in my head ever since. And on the coldest Manhattan winter day, I could close my eyes and remember exactly where each tomato grew, the lettuce patch, and the green beans. It wasn’t just a picture of that garden, it was the garden. Portable and life-giving, like a prayer. In fact, not just like a prayer, but I think a prayer in itself. It reminded me of my connection to God’s creation, and in it was held the promise of new life in the future.

That is what prayers can do for us, be with us always whenever we need them. You know that there are many types of prayers, just as there are varieties of gardens and the plants within them. All kinds are necessary and beautiful and beneficial.

The extemporaneous prayer – the prayer said in the moment with words from your heart to address a particular need – is like an annual flower. It may bloom for only one day and be gone, but it gives color and life in that one moment, perhaps the moment when it is most needed. We don’t talk about extemporaneous prayer as much in our tradition as in some others, but it’s important and life-giving.

The traditional, composed prayer – the prayers you find in the Book of Common Prayer, for instance – this type of prayer is like the perennial plants which come back reliably year after year. You can carry them around and pull them out any time, as I do in the Prayer Book, in my St. Augustine’s Prayer Book, and others. You can carry them in your pocket or in your heart.

Such prayers are easily memorized and, when life throws something at you and you’re at a loss for words, they can come easily to your lips. When I am on my knees and feel myself empty, not even knowing what to pray for, much less what words to use, then I can let one of these ancient prayers speak through me and speak for me.

There are several such prayers that are especially important to me. When I was going through my hospital chaplaincy training, I found myself going back again and again to the Aaronic Blessing, the priestly blessing given to Moses from the lips of God:

The Lord bless you and keep you;
the Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you;
the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.
(Numbers 6:24-26)

One prayer that I use, especially at the end of the day, is from John Henry Newman. One of my seminary professors would always include this prayer at Evensong in our seminary chapel. It looks to the coming evening and also to the coming of the end of life:

O Lord, support us all the day long, until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in Thy mercy grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last. Amen.

Every time I pray this, I can shut my eyes and I’m back in the Chapel of the Good Shepherd with my friends and colleagues, and that always will be with me.

Another, of course, is the prayer given by Jesus to his disciples, who had asked him to teach them how to pray, and he told them to say, “Our Father, who art in heaven…”

I pray these words every day. And it’s meaningful every time. But occasionally, I will pray it in a different translation, and I’ll say:

Padre nuestro ques estas en el cielo,
santificado sea tu Nombre,
venga tu reino,
hagase tu voluntad,
en la tierra como en el cielo.

With my poor Spanish, I have to concentrate on ever word, and I see the prayer in a different light. The words come alive in a different way. So I recommend this practice to you – no, not the Spanish, but sometimes the contemporary translation. And think about the words, their meaning, and the meaning of your prayer.

That is what we’ve just done with the 23^rd Psalm. A year ago on Good Shepherd Sunday, I deliberately changed the reading to the traditional, more familiar wording of the 23^rd Psalm from the appointed reading, which comes from our Book of Common Prayer. The BCP translation is beautiful and appropriate, but sometimes you want and even need the security of the more well-known prayer. That’s why the traditional 23^rd Psalm is printed in the burial rites of our Prayer Book; a funeral is a time when the time-honored words of Scripture and prayer can be especially comforting. And remember that the Psalms are prayers – written to be prayed together in the liturgy, but also to carry with us and to pray over and over again.

But today, I wanted us to use the newer translation, to think about the words, to think about what we mean when we say them. For the same reason, later in this service when we come to the Lord’s Prayer, we’ll say it together in the contemporary translation on page 364 for the same reason.

Those are our perennial prayers. And we’ll add our annuals – our extemporaneous prayers during the Prayers of the People. And, I hope, we’ll use them throughout the coming week, in prayer gatherings, in our private lives, in our work and leisure, in the garden of our lives.

These prayers are something I had plenty of time to think about yesterday as I spent the afternoon in my garden, digging for myself an asparagus patch.

And at the end of the day, I looked out over that raised bed and said a silent prayer of thanksgiving.

Amen.