Thursday, October 22, 2015

Trust and Contentment: Matthew 6:25-34

It was great to welcome Stefan Kurle back to Highbury.  Stefan did a pastoral placement with us fifteen years ago while he was doing a PhD at Gloucestershire University.  He went on to learn Portugese and for the last 8 years has been teaching biblical studies at one of the major protestant theological seminaries in Brazil.  it is a privilege to have Stefan as one of our mission partners linking us with the world church.

“Do not worry!” It seems to be quite radical, even extreme, what Jesus expects from us. “Do not be anxious about your life … your heavenly Father knows that you need all this.” Can this be realistic? Isn't it a bit unbalanced when phrased in this way? What did Jesus think of, when he said these words?
Yes Jesus is extreme – but what is also extreme is the excessive consumerism we are into – here in the rich western world. Maybe Jesus' ideas on worrying and trust have a very relevant contribution to make in a world dominated by excessive consumption and by a relentless strive for more possessions and wellness.
Usually, I live in Brazil and in this country the gap between the rich and the poor often is very obvious.
·         Imagine: The simplest hut, not necessarily very old, but certainly with a leaking roof, is right next door to the futuristic designer villa of a local entrepreneur.
·         Imagine: The trolley overloaded with waste paper pulled by an old sunburnt man along the road is being overtaken by the most recent Mercedes type S ignoring any notion of safety margins.
·         Imagine: In the local supermarket a family strolling down the isles, a calculator in the hand of the daughter figuring out how far the money will go until the next paycheque. In the same isle a fashionable young lady chatting loudly on her even more fashionable iPhone 6 trying to organize the party tonight.
These contrasts, closely together, are quite normal in Brazil. This is how much of the world looks like on a larger scale. Luxury and poverty. Somehow the wonderful resources of this world seem to be distributed with great unfairness. Obviously, we can complain about this – but the system has us firmly in its grip: If we were to buy only the things we really need the whole system would collapse. The result would be massive unemployment, poverty and all its social consequences – a catastrophe! Contentment is against the basic interests of our modern societies.
But, contentment does not seem to be a great and pressing danger at the moment. Obviously, the rich people are happy to sustain the system and with it themselves. Jesus would suggest that they worship the god “mammon”.
But, interestingly, many of the poor people today have the very same focus on money as their rich comrades. This is something very obvious in Brazil: People are prepared to make great debts in order to participate in the world of consumerism. Just as the rich, the poor find their identity in their acquisitive power, only that they are still looking forward to the glorious day when they will be able to buy the latest smartphone or a new car. The poor focus on the money they would like to have. Contentment would be considered as a stupidity – for if you were content you would never get out of misery.
There are even churches in Brazil which try to apply the consumerist ideology in church. To give the tithes becomes an investment insuring the continuous flow of God's blessings. These expected blessings are often unashamedly material in nature – the imported car, the newly built house. We call this type of theology the prosperity gospel. A child of God cannot possibly be poor or sick. If a Christian were poor there would be something wrong with their investment – or a lack of faith or some sort of hidden sin. This is consumerism in the middle of the church – exploiting many of the poorest who are selling their last T-Shirt in order to be able to “invest” so they could hope for abundant divine interest for their investment.
These tendencies are one reason for us to invest in theological education in Brazil. The hope is that the future ministers will have the necessary resilience against the temptation to make quick money by promising things to people which they never can deliver.
With consumerism, your identity is based on your acquisitive power. With christendom, your identity is based on your relationship with Jesus. And this new identity implies, among many other things, also a certain attitude regarding trust.
The question is:

On whom do we trust for our lives?

Jesus talks about the birds and the flowers. Not the bees and the flowers, so the topic is different here.
I do not know what you already heard about this text… Many people seem to think that the birds and the flowers serve as an example to follow – apparently we would not need to worry about our livelihood, God takes care of this in a supernatural way. Some call this “living by faith”. But this kind of lifestyle is precisely not what the text talks about.
The birds and flowers do not serve as role models. And if you wish to copy birds you should be aware, that they do hardly anything else during their day than gathering food. No, Jesus' focus here is on God's provision. God himself is concerned with the livelihood of his creation and even takes an interest in the outward appearance of his creation – just look at the beauty of the flowers.
What Jesus talks about here is the question of who is ultimately responsible for our sustenance. Looking at a beautiful loaf of bread, the wonderfully woven piece of cloth, looking at the mastery of modern medicine, we have the tendency to proudly slap ourselves on the shoulder and think that we did well. And we did do well… Nothing against this. But our hard work, our research and our thinking depends ultimately on God. This we tend to forget. The greater the distance between the final product and the original resources, the more we are convinced that it is our work which gives us wellbeing and beauty. We are convinced that all depends on ourselves – if we do not care for ourselves who else will do it? There is no place for God anymore – so we need to take his role. An agnostic or atheist is damned to be god – all depends on us humans and so we take all responsibility. This is a great burden to carry.
Jesus, on the other hand, calls us to accept our human dependence on God's provision. His point with the birds and flowers is that they receive their livelihood from God and are thankfully aware of it. It is God's care which should lead to a radical trust. This means to resist constantly the temptation to overestimate our own possibilities. This attitude of trust could bring a certain amount of composure and tranquility.

But is it realistic?

Isn't this a bit utopian or far-fetched? Just trust God and all your worries go away? What about all the people who already died of hunger or froze to death? Most likely there were many Christians among these. Doesn't Jesus here propagate an irresponsible carelessness?
I don't think so. What he does is to offer a rough direction. During the entire sermon on the mount, of which our text is an integral part, Jesus has a tendency to speak in extremes. I suspect that he is a very gifted teacher who firstly marks out the topics in rough lines. Only later on Jesus fills in some details, looks at particular cases. In our text he is concerned with the main point and this he phrases in his usual radicalness. By and large, he claims, we are better off once we realize that our lives depend on God. This implies radical trust. And it is quite realistic – “Which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?” (6,27)
How does God go about sustaining our lives? Well, the grain grows quite independently from us. We did not invent the idea that edible fruit develops on trees. We find resources but we generally do not create them. So were are dependent in a very physical way. God sustains us also by helping us to act in solidarity – to share and thus provide necessities for one another. Historically, large parts of our social systems, hospitals, cooperatives and family values have a biblical base.
Radical trust in God is not displayed by loafing about and expecting great blessings straight from heaven. No, radical trust in God is the awareness that our hard work can only lead to success because God guarantees the favourable circumstances. All depends on God. And this kind of worldview is very realistic indeed.

But what about the phrase  “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness” (6,33)?

Some have understood this phrase as urging us towards emphasising the spiritual aspects of our faith… evangelism, missions, praise, devotion, care for the soul. Then the material things including the finances will fall into place as a side effect.
But this is not the issue here.
God's kingdom is not far away somewhere in the skies, nor is it purely spiritual. God's kingdom, biblically defined, is God's realm, speaks of the way how God organises and rules this world. How does God rule this world? God has committed himself to sorting out the wrongs of this world – he seeks to put the world to rights again. The biblical language for this centres around the terms of God's righteousness and faithfulness. It is God's great project and he will follow it through. Since we are his followers, we Christians are called to participate in this project. This is Jesus' concern: That we seek to participate in God's mission to bring the world to rights again. We are called to anticipate and thus live out the values of God's kingdom. For this we need to be reshaped in our thinking, in our attitudes and value systems – and this is exactly what our text is all about. Only as renewed human beings we can give our fellow humans a foretaste of what will come when God will finally renew this creation.
It will not suffice to adopt a couple of new habits and maybe a greener or more social awareness. Although this is all very important, it is only a consequence of a much more foundational change of orientation towards a person, towards God himself. Jesus challenges us to accept God as the one who takes great interest in caring for our lives. With this perspective all other things will adjust themselves. We begin to learn what really is important. We begin to figure out what the real issues are. We begin to be less pompous about ourselves and to look thankfully to God.
Once we learn to look towards God for orientation in this complex world, we will begin to realise what is important to God himself and this is exactly what Jesus means when he urges is to “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.”
I began talking about the unfairness in our modern economic world, the distorted luxury and sick expectations towards money. I think we may now be in a position to pinpoint a couple of practical points to learn.
1.       We are part of God's creation. This is quite a challenge for the modern man. We are so used to think of us as being over against, apart from creation, while we really are part of it. It is so easy to forget that we are creation not creators. In this sense we are on the same level as the birds and the flowers. We should be content with this position. When humans began to dominate others assuming a quasi-divine role, it generally has brought great suffering to all of creation.
2.       A keyword for us could be “contentment”. The resources of this world are sufficient for all but they are certainly not unlimited. This earth cannot sustain 7.3 billion people living the standards of luxury and wastefulness that we live in the global west. We cannot go on to consume as if there were no tomorrow. There is a very real limit and God has given us humans the wonderful capability to restrict ourselves. Contentment could be a great resource in order to live responsibly. What is necessary? What is luxury? What are basic needs? Contentment will be a key attitude.
3.       Reading the sermon on the mount in it's entirety would help us to see Jesus' emphasis on cooperation. Our modern individualism was unknown to Jesus and his contemporaries – but if he were living today, surely Jesus would preach against it with all his power. God sustains us by the means of solidarity. For us in Europe this could be a fruitful approach in the current situation with the many refugees – these refugees are fellow creatures and maybe God chose to sustain them through us.
Jesus wants to teach us a new way of thinking. His primary goal is not necessarily that we have less worries, but rather that we are effective angled mirrors reflecting his divine love and sustenance out into his world. To seek his kingdom first and foremost, means that we need to rethink our place and role in this world. God wants to rule through us so we should know what is important to him.
The focus is on God, not on ourselves. But this focus on God does not distance us from this world, it rather changes us in a way that enables us to encounter the world in new and meaningful way.
It is a wonderful exercise to imagine what a new trust in God could change – with respect to our worries and with respect to our fellow creatures. The task is not easy – but God is patient and he expects from us only things we can manage. The perfect world is yet to come and it will not come by our effort, but by God's gracious intervention.

May our Lord Jesus renew our hearts and minds. Amen.

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