Consider the Lilies

A short sermon for Harvest Sunday

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church, 7 October 2018

Matthew 6.25-34

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I can find the whole conversation

            around environmentalism, global warming,

            and the many and varied ways humans fail to care for creation,

                        to be a hugely distressing topic.

I remember a few years ago now,

            I was at a conference and I heard a talk about this,

which pulled no punches on the damage we were doing,

            and the devastations that were coming,

and I found myself unable to sleep properly for some weeks,

            because as soon as my mind relaxed,

                        I started worrying and worrying

            about what kind of a world we were creating for future generations.

And yet against this, in today’s reading from the Sermon on the Mount,

            we hear Jesus saying, ‘do not worry about tomorrow,

                        for tomorrow will bring worries of its own.

            Today’s trouble is enough for today.’ (6.34).

Which is fine, at one level, I suppose.

‘There there Simon, it’ll be alright, or it won’t,

            but don’t worry about it either way.

Just focus on today, and leave tomorrow to tomorrow.’

Great, well, thanks Jesus.

But I don’t know how this helps really

            – I mean, for starters, telling me not to worry about something

                        is a bit like telling me not to think of a pink elephant.

            Immediately, it’s all I can think of.

And anyway, if the climate scientists are right,

            today’s trouble is nothing compared to the trouble that’s coming for the future,

            so a bit of worry might seem a perfectly proportionate response!

And I find myself wondering,

            is the appropriate Christian response to environmental concerns

                        to simply busy ourselves with the problems of today,

                        and put tomorrow’s problems out of our minds?

There are certainly plenty of Christians around

            who will tell us that this is exactly what we should do:

focus on issues of the moment,

            such as personal morality, or the conversion of the nations;

            and leave the environment to its own future.

In fact, some Christians will go even further than this,

            and will say that they believe that the earth

                        is going to be re-created in the near future anyway,

            and so the reason they don’t need to worry about the future of the planet

                        is because God is going to make a new heaven and a new earth,

                        and the old one is going to pass away.

Sadly, this morning isn’t the time for a sermon the eschatology of catastrophe.

            Maybe we can come back to that another day.

But I do wonder whether this is all something of a misreading

            of what Jesus is getting at in the Sermon on the Mount.

After all, his advice to not worry about tomorrow isn’t the starting point,

            it’s his conclusion,

and I’m not sure he’s talking about creation care,

            although he is clearly talking about creation.

I’m also not sure he’s talking primarily to people like me,

            who have enough money and power

            to make strategic choices about the future.

In our reading, Jesus starts by telling those listening to him

            not to worry about their life,

                        what they will eat or what they will drink,

                        or about their body, what they will wear. (6.25).

He’s talking to people facing death through starvation and thirst,

            to people who didn’t have enough in the way of clothing.

He’s talking to Jewish peasants,

            the victims of the Roman occupation of their country,

            the people at the bottom end of society, not the top.

To those who have been damaged by society,

            the marginalised and the impoverished,

Jesus offers an analogy with the birds and the lilies.

            And he does this to assure them of God’s great love

            and care for all that has been made, including them.

One of the conversations that sticks in my mind

            from my first year of helping with the night shelter here at Bloomsbury,

was the observation from the trainer

            about how a person’s horizon of planning

            can shrink when they are made homeless.

So, for example, my horizon of planning stretches to when I’m in my 80s.

            I invest in my pension,

                        I hope for a long and healthy retirement.

            I save for the next time I need to change my car.

                        I save for my next holiday.

                        I plan for the future.

By contrast, a person who has lost everything,

            who has no home, no stability, no job,

will often find that their horizon of planning shrinks,

            sometimes to just today.

The only questions on their mind might well be

            ‘where shall I sleep tonight’,

            and ‘what shall I eat today’.

If you want to understand Jesus’ words

            about not worrying about the future,

            because today has enough worries of its own,

                        talk to someone who is homeless.

Better yet, volunteer to help with our Night Shelter.

But back to worrying about the future,

            and way we care for creation.

I do not think that it is possible for us to separate out

            our environmental concerns

            from our concerns for the poor,

and we cannot separate our desire to help the poor and vulnerable

            from our care for the world we are asking them to live in.

These are two sides of the same coin.

The liberation theologian Pablo Richard sums it up quite well. He says:

[The various plagues of the Bible]:earthquakes, volcanic explosions, floods, droughts, cyclones, hurricanes, [and so on], are not natural disasters since such they fall [primarily] on the poor. Agonies of this kind… [are the] direct consequences of the structure[s] of domination and oppression [that humans create]: the poor die in floods because they are pushed out of safe places and forced to live alongside rivers; in earthquakes and hurricanes the poor lose their flimsy houses because they are poor and cannot build better ones; plagues, such as cholera and tuberculosis, fall primarily on the poor who are malnourished, uneducated, and lacking in sanitation infrastructure. Hence the [various] plagues of [the Bible are not] ‘natural’ disasters, but the agonies of history that [humans both cause] and suffer; they are … the disastrous results of ecological destruction, the arms race, irrational consumerism, the idolatrous logic of the market, and the irrational use of technology and of natural resources. – Pablo Richard.

So, if we think back to what we’ve heard already in this service.

There is enough abundance in creation to sustain all that live on this planet.

            There is no need for anyone to be starving.

There is no need for us to live destructively.

            We live in a resourceful world,

            and as Christians we need to learn to see this as a gift from God.

But our faith also tells us that we have a responsibility before God

            to be good stewards of creation,

to ensure ‘a just and equal sharing, of the things that earth affords’,

            as Fred Kaan’s hymn that we sing sometimes puts it.

And we need to realise that it is human behaviour

            that forces people from abundance to scarcity,

which means that the decision of who gets food and who doesn’t,

            of who lives and who dies,

is a spiritual one, because it comes from human choices,

            which are informed by human consciences and ethics.

So, should we worry about tomorrow?

Well, Jesus asks the question:

            ‘Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?’ (6.27)

And maybe the first part of our answer to this needs to be

            ‘no, it’s true, we can’t add a day to our own lives by worrying about tomorrow.’

But, as Dawn said to me when we were planning this service,

            maybe the second part of our answer to Jesus’ question

needs to be a recognition that by considering the futures of others,

            particularly those who are the victims of our globally destructive systems,

and by acting accordingly,

            we might well be able to add an extra day to their lives.