“From Worry to Wonder”

Sermon Preached By The Rev. Bruce Sanguin
October 8, 2006

Matthew 6:24-34

            This year, Thanksgiving comes with a warning about worry. Jesus mentions “worry” six times in this short passage from Matthew’s gospel. It’s not a good thing according to Jesus. In fact, worry can be considered the antithesis of faith. Gentiles worry, he tells his disciples. You don’t worry. “Gentile” in this context is a synonym for anyone who doesn’t trust God. When you don’t trust God you end up worrying about all kinds of things, money, clothing, food. And that’s just a start.

            I was surprised to read that these first disciples worried about the same things 2000 years ago as we worry about today. What’s for dinner, I don’t have a thing to wear, and we’re all going to die. Granted, life expectancy then was closer to 35 years, and their worry was not so much about what was for dinner, but whether they would get dinner. They actually had something to worry about. But even at this level of subsistence, Jesus warns them against worry.

            Worry is, in the end, a spiritual diagnosis signifying that we’re not prepared to entrust God with our lives, let alone life in general.  Jesus tells us to consider the lily and the birds of the air. Not a care in the world. A bird might spend all day looking for food, but that’s different than worrying about food. Only humans, he says, build barns to store up excess food because they’re worried about tomorrow’s meal. Lilies neither toil nor spin, says Jesus, yet their beauty trumps King Solomon’s any day of the week.

            Sparrows and lilies possess all kinds of natural intelligence and wisdom, but they lack one thing we possess, an ego. Think about the ego, in this context, as that part of us which stands on guard for our survival. It’s the part of us that acts to protect us against all manner of threat, perceived or real. The threat could be physical, psychological, emotional or spiritual. Our ego’s job is to make sure that we’re going to get what we need to survive, come hell or high water. The more serious the threat, the more vigilant our ego is at protecting us. Our ego even worries our mind about how to survive death or at least delay it as long as possible. Build monuments, amass great wealth, eat less food, exercise more, take vitamins, do yoga.

            We owe a debt of gratitude to our egos. They’ve taken good care of us over the years. They never rest. Problem is, they badly need a rest. They are so hyper-vigilant that they have a tendency to take over every detail of our lives. They’ll try and control every aspect of our life, and other people’s lives while they’re at it. The ego is a bull-dog. We need to take it to obedience school. Otherwise, you wake up one morning and the only part of ourselves we know is our ego, because it’s hogged the show. You begin to imagine that all the worrying and fretting over your life, your children’s lives, the state of the world, is just what normal people do. But here’s the insight of every major religion. You are not your ego. You also have a divine nature which watches this drama of the ego with fascination, frustration, and deep compassion. Here’s what my own divine nature has noticed about the effects of ego in my life.         

1. Worry preoccupies the mind. Say you’ve had a fight with a friend and it’s unresolved. So, you worry about the broken relationship day and night. What’s to be done? You’re afraid to deal with it, and you’re afraid to let it go. So you mull it over and over and over, day and night, until you’re filled with anxiety, and paralyzed from taking any action. Whatever your mind is preoccupied with is the reality that you bring forth. Your own body begins to manifest anxiety; you can’t eat, you’re not breathing properly so you get head-aches, you’re not sleeping properly and so you don’t have the energy to fight the anxiety, and it becomes a viscous cycle.

Quantum physics has revealed a radically participative universe. At the sub-atomic level reality exists only as potential. There are no discrete bits of matter, only probability wave-forms. These pop in and out of a quantum vacuum in response to what the observer is looking for. If a researcher wants a particle to come forth, a particle appears. If she’s looking for a wave, then it appears as a wave. If the scientist isn’t observing, nothing appears. Physicists have concluded that at the quantum level we are participants in creating forth reality. Objective reality doesn’t exist out there.

Now, this is not absolutely true at our level of being, but it’s truer than we care to imagine. We bring forth the world our mind is preoccupied with. If it’s preoccupied with worry, we’ll eventually create a world of fear. Then one day when the enemy surrounds us on all sides, we will be able to point at the frightening world, and say to everyone, “there, you see, I have good reason to worry.” This, I venture to say, is precisely what the war on terror has accomplished. The day after the attack, plans were in place to attack Iraq.  This administration has managed to manifest more terrorists, more soldiers, more guns, and more airport security. Then, when the violence escalates, they use that as an argument to keep the cycle going. “You see, we need to be even more vigilant because just look at all the terrorists.”    

2. At the other extreme, worry induces passivity. In this scenario, it paralyzes us. Worry is fear’s last stand. It’s is trick of the ego. It requires so much energy that we convince ourselves that we’re doing something about a problem, when actually we’re not doing anything about it.  Worry makes us feel as though we’re facing our deepest fears. But in truth, worry is an avoidance mechanism.

It’s not as simple as the advice I received from my evangelical friends, when they told me to simply “give it all to God.” Why would God want it? Trusting God means choosing to stop gnawing away at it, and coming up with the most compassionate, responsible action plan we can imagine, implementing it, and then and only then, entrusting the outcome to God. There are times when I gnash away at something in my mind for weeks and it accomplishes absolutely nothing, except robbing me of the life I haven’t noticed because I was so worried. Make a plan and entrust the outcome to God.

3. Worry distracts us from awe. Have you ever noticed that when you’re worried, you don’t notice anything around you? Worry is a windowless, self-imposed prison. I’m walking down the beach with Ann, worrying about something extremely important, like the direction my sermon is going to take. Really, I’m worried that the sermon is going to be a stinker and people will think I’m not very smart, then they won’t like me, and the next thing you know I’ll be wandering around the city jobless and broke. Back to the beach. I’m in the middle of describing some very important, very abstract idea, when I realize that Ann is not with me. She’s stopped five minutes back to look at the sun sparking on the water, or something equally mundane! J

Think of the letters A.W.E. as an acronym for Awakening to Wonder Everywhere. When Jesus directs his disciples to consider the lily, the correction translation is actually closer to “study the lily.”  How did it get so beautiful? Think about the creativity involved in fashioning a lily! The lily simply emerged when the time was right by pure grace. Tomorrow it will be gone, but it goes into God’s care and keeping, as do we all. Awe is the quintessential spiritual sensibility. Even one moment of authentic awe returns our heart to God. It reminds us that we didn’t do a blessed thing to earn this free ride on this planet earth. We came equipped with 14 billion years of evolutionary history built into our genes, and with imaginations capable of creating wondrous futures.

4. Worry focuses on insufficiency, on the money we haven’t yet accumulated for our retirement, on our one body part we don’t like, the work that is not yet done, the kingdom that has not yet come.  We live in a culture which reminds us constantly of our insufficiency. We define ourselves by what we lack. The absence of the desired object blinds us to the presence of infinite abundance. The advertising industry exists to create and exploit this pervasive sense of insufficiency. A magazine arrived in my Globe and Mail this week called Driven. The sub-title, set in large red print, was Money! How to Make It. How to Flaunt It! It was filled with products which only the rich and famous could afford, and the likes of me could only covet.

5. Worry is an idol-maker. It turns whatever it is we’re worrying about into an issue of ultimate concern, as though it defined ultimate reality. When we’re in the midst of a good worry session, and someone tells us to “get over it” because from the outside they just know we’re making a mountain out of mole hill, we respond with enormous indignation. Whatever it is that’s worrying us attains god-like status.

Most often, worry elevates ego to the status of god. Was he mad at me? Did she like what I said? How did I do? What did she mean when she said that? Did you see him lift his right eye brow? Everything and everybody has value to the extent that they bolster my self-image, and watch out if they wound it!  Narcissism is really a coronation of the ego which coerces us through fear into believing that what we’re worried about is of ultimate importance. It’s not.  

The Devil Wears Prada is a film about high fashion. Great title! If Jesus tells us not to worry about what we wear, it makes sense that the devil would wear Prada.  The protagonist almost loses her soul in the world of fashion. She goes from being a graduate student, comfortable in jeans and a T-shirt to desiring to be a fashion mogul. At the depths of her descent into the wilderness of haute couture, her biggest worry of the day being whether her outfit needs a scarf or not. She begins to identify with her clothes. She is her clothes. She is unable to see how silly she has become. Not surprisingly, the culture of high fashion is portrayed as a cauldron of anxiety, of people striving to be somebody, to get just the right look, to please the high priests and priestesses of fashion.  Now, Neil calls me a “clothes horse” from time to time, so this one cuts a little close to the bone. My mother tells me that even when I was two, if my socks didn’t match I’d throw a tantrum! The Devil Wears Matching Socks, argyle preferably, a blend of Lycra and merino wool.

6. Worry destroys gratitude. In those rare moments when I am truly worry-free, I wander down to Kits Beach, look over the water at the mountains, and feel grateful to be alive to experience all this. It doesn’t mean that I’m not aware of the atrocities going on in the world, but those atrocities aren’t alleviated one bit by worrying about them. Weep over them, don’t worry about them. Write letters to your MP, march, send money, learn more about the situation, but letting it steal your gratitude by worrying about it does not make you a better a Christian.

Worry is not a badge of honour announcing to the world that I really care. I look at the joy of Bishop Tutu, who has seen more suffering than I ever will, or the Dalai Lama, giggling, despite the history of oppression in Tibet. On the other hand, I’ve shared a panel with a very sincere Buddhist teacher, whose presence almost made me ill, he was so worried about the world.