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A while back I came across the advice of a spiritual teacher, who wrote, "The best indicator of your progress in the spiritual life is how much you worry and how much you complain." Worry in particular is a symptom of spiritual malaise.

This is the clear teaching of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus says:

Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

Few of Jesus’ sayings arouse more resistance, even open hostility. If I asked each of you to make a list of things that you are worried about, my guess is that the list might be long. But yet Jesus’ message is central to the Gospel. Worry and spirituality are intimately connected, because worry is the opposite of trust in God.

When we worry, we are living in our heads. We are not living in reality. All that is real is the present moment, what is happening right now. Spirituality is about living fully in the present moment. When we worry, we think we are paying attention to the future. But the future exists only in our minds. The past exists only in our minds. And when we are in our minds, we are no longer present in the moment. The present moment is where life is lived. If we are in a head full of worries, the tragedy is that we have stopped living. Jesus understood this perfectly. He says, "So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today."

The sin of worry is that it keeps us from paying attention to how filled with God the present moment is. Jesus’ words about worry are definitely not him saying that nothing is important, or put on your rose-colored glasses and retreat from the world. He is saying that what is happening in the present moment matters a great deal, and if you are worrying about the future, you’ve taken your eyes off what reality offers you now. It’s about attention. And inattention means suffering. I was feeling pretty good the other day until our 160,000-mile car failed its Maryland emissions test. That quickly precipitated a downward spiritual spiral – with grim scenarios of major expense. And I sadly realized that it doesn’t take much to knock me off my stride. Then I thought, "Why am I letting this spoil my day? If I am feeling bad, it is my responsibility, not the car’s or God’s or the world’s. Mine. I’ll worry about this next week. What God has in mind will become clear, and it will be fine." In Jesus’ story of the Good Samaritan, why did the priest and the Levite pass by on the other side of the road from the man who had fallen among thieves? They were worried – worried that they might be rendered unclean by touching him, or worried about being late for worship. It was only the Samaritan who was fully present. He didn’t have time to worry. He saw reality: someone is hurting. Help is needed. He didn’t think about anything. He just helped. Ponder Rosa Parks riding that Montgomery, Alabama bus. Sitting there up front, she was fully present. And when confronted that she was breaking the law, she had the courage to do nothing.

Worry is a sign of fear and our inability to trust. Trust what? To trust that if we are attentive to the present moment, we will discover everything that is needed. In the present moment, we find that nothing is lacking – in the world and in ourselves.

Let’s switch our attention to the Letter to the Ephesians. Ephesians is really about the church. It is a celebration of what it means to be Christians in the Church of Jesus Christ. And just about every sentence brims with a kind of radiance, a confident sense of trust. I find the whole book luminous with God’s love for the church. As I read that wonderful first chapter again, I am struck with something in particular. The focus is on how much God has already done, already accomplished in the world and in you and me. While there is clearly also a sense of a future fulfillment to come, the message is that through Jesus Christ God has already done what is most important. What does Paul say?

Look at some examples. God has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places; God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless; God destined us for adoption as his children; in him we have redemption; we have forgiveness; the mystery of God’s will has been made known to us in Christ; we have obtained our inheritance (not in the future, now); we have already been marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit. And so on. Do you get the idea? The message is that right now you are whole, you are redeemed, you are acceptable, you are okay, you lack nothing, you have within you everything you need to lead lives of the utmost joy and meaning. You’ve got it. So let’s live like a church. Right now. So what are you worrying about? The message to the church is the same as the message to each of us. Be present and faithful to God in the moment. And entrust the future to God.

Scholars point out to us that whenever Jesus says to seek first the Kingdom of God, we can miss something implicit in his words. Everyone listening to Jesus in his day knew that he was always contrasting the Kingdom of God with the Empire of Caesar. Some have suggested that a better translation of the Greek might be "The Empire of God," making the contrast inescapable. Who rules the world, God or Caesar? Whether it is Caesar in ancient Rome, or Caesar in modern Washington D.C., Caesar always answers, "I do." Or "the state does." Then and now the Emperor will say, "I, of course, will permit you to have your religion, which you may practice in the privacy of your church or home. It is fine, particularly if it helps you to be placid, compliant, and supportive of my agenda. But when push comes to shove, your devotion belongs to me. For you need to know and trust how much I truly care for your well-being." It is important to remember that the persecutions of the early Christians at the hands of the Roman emperors had nothing to do with what Christians believed privately about God and Jesus. The Empire could care less about theology. Christians were executed for their public refusal to bend their knees to the symbol of the Emperor. It was like refusing to salute the flag. The earliest Christian affirmation of faith was "Christ is Lord." And what is implicit in that is, of course, that Caesar is not.

Today, given our American democratic ideals and system of checks and balances, we may not have an emperor in quite the Roman sense, but we certainly have an empire. In the context of this sermon today, empire always sees its responsibility as to tell you and me what to worry about. I listened to the Diane Rehm show a few weeks back on the subject of Iraq. The administration spokesman was Kenneth Adelman. His confident, even cheerful message that day was "Don’t worry about it. Everything is fine. Everything is going the way it is supposed to go. Just trust that we know what we are doing."

But Christians are called to trust God, and pay attention to what Caesar is doing, especially when he starts acting like God. Living as individuals means being attentive to this moment. Living in the moment as a Church, a community of Christians, means being attentive to the historical moment. This historical moment is full of the presence of God; both in joy, and in the face of human suffering – just like the Good Samaritan story. The world of empire will always try to tell us the meaning of the present moment in history – what to worry about, and what not to worry about. So who do you believe?

The prophets of Ancient Israel had a simple message. Pay attention to what is happening right now. Look at the world and let your response always be shaped by two things: God’s justice and God’s compassion. The prophets said do not let your understanding of justice and compassion be dictated by the state or, for that matter, by organized religion. Ultimately only God can be trusted.

As he approached his death at the hands of the Nazis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer brooded about the relationship between Christians and the world. He was full of hope about the future, but sought to be a realist about the world. Bonhoeffer had little patience, even in his prison cell, with those Christians who were tempted to worry and despair. He wrote, "They think that the meaning of present events is chaos, disorder and catastrophe; and in resignation or pious escapism they surrender all responsibility for reconstruction and for future generations." That is, they miss the fullness of God’s presence now. Reviewing a new film on this martyr’s life, Philip Kennicott says of Bonhoeffer’s writing in prison:

It is a goad to the activist mind, a reminder, from someone who knew all too well, that the only moment that matters, historically, is the present moment, which means that mulling right action and bolstering courage to some future end, are often just ways of shirking duty.

For us as individuals and for us as the Body of Christ, the present moment is all there ever is. Let us be faithful in it. AMEN.

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