Lenten Devotion – Day Two

Thursday, February 19, 2015

Today’s Scripture Reading: Matthew 6:25-34

”And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?...  But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.” (Matt. 6:27, 33-34)

Serenity Prayer
God, give me grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.
Living one day at a time,
Enjoying one moment at a time,
Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
Taking, as Jesus did,
This sinful world as it is,
Not as I would have it,
Trusting that You will make all things right,
If I surrender to Your will,
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
And supremely happy with You forever in the next.
Amen. - Reinhold Niebuhr, longer version of the popular Serenity Prayer

  In this passage from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, Jesus poses the question about adding to our span through worry, he wants to make it clear that rather than worrying he is calling us to trust God. He pointed to the birds that do not sow or reap the fields, but are fed by the heavenly Father nonetheless. He pointed to the flowers that do not toil or spin, but are clothed in beauty by the heavenly Father anyway.

  Jesus’ listeners understood how God takes care of his creation, for the birds in the air and the flowers in the field. While at the same time, Jesus understood, that his words were directed to people who, in fact, did have to sow, to reap, to toil and to spin. He wasn’t telling them they needed to stop doing those tasks. He simply wanted them and us to understand that their lives were a lot more than the sum total of our sowing, reaping, toiling, spinning, or the length and depth of our Facebook profile.

  Jesus never said that people were to build the Kingdom of God. On the contrary, the establishment of the kingdom is exclusively the work of God. God will reign, and people can contribute nothing to that reigning of God. Jesus was telling us we can’t build the kingdom through things like worry but we need to focus our attention on striving to enter the kingdom and worry will not achieve the goal. “Strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” (Matthew 6:33) Strive for it.

  “Strive” means to exert a lot of energy and effort toward a goal. So, far from simply saying we should rely on the eventual coming of God’s kingdom as an antidote to daily worry, Jesus is saying we should actively work for the spread of the kingdom. And as we do, some of the things we fret about are going to become non-issues because we’ve got more important things to be focus our efforts each day.

  None of this is to say that we won’t therefore have some normal worries. We can’t love someone without worrying about threats to his or her well-being. We cannot be sensitive people without occasional concern that we haven’t done all we should. We cannot listen to the news without some uneasiness about the direction many things in the world appear to be going.

  Jesus goes on to advance ways in which to defeat worry. The first is to “strive first”, to concentrate upon, “the Kingdom of God.” Striving to live in the kingdom and to do the will of God is one and the same thing. Concentrating on the doing and the acceptance of God’s will is the way to defeat worry. By striving we place our efforts and focus on what can be changed and accomplished today, not worrying about things of tomorrow, which may never happen. It was Jesus’s conviction that worry is banished when God becomes the dominating power of our lives.

  Lastly, Jesus says that worry can be defeated when we acquire the art of living one day at a time. “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.” (vs. 34). We needlessly worry over our life and our church believing that it is solely up to us for its success. We neglect to understand we are participants in the Kingdom not the builders. We belong in the Kingdom, because of God’s invitation, not due to our own righteousness, but on God’s. God reigns over the Kingdom, we are the workers called to participate in the harvest, which is plentiful. We need to follow God’s lead and direction and “strive first for the kingdom and His righteousness.”

  If each day is lived as it comes, if each task is done as it appears, then the sum of all the days is bound to be good. It is Jesus’s advice that we should handle the demands of each day as it comes, without worrying about the unknown future and the things which may never happen.

Today’s Lectionary Readings
Morning: Psalms 27; 147:12–20
Evening: Psalms 126; 102
Deut. 7:6–11
Titus 1:1–16
John 1:29–34