Saturday, June 22, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Birds, flowers, and all the rest of us
You cannot serve two masters.
Chronicles and Kings in the Bible are full of stories of leaders who said they served God but actually served themselves, and because of this one generation followed another down. Down. Into the pit of Gehenna.
Jesus had something else entirely in mind.
Look at the birds in the sky who do not sow, nor reap, nor gather anything into barns. It’s your heavenly Father who feeds them. Are you not more important than the birds?
In less intemperate heat I’d be sitting outside, walking in the woods, listening to the birds with gratitude and joy. When we find a groundhog hole under a shed, I shrug my shoulders and think that mostly we are the ones trespassing on their ground, and look away.
All the while I profit with our farmer family and friends, who are certainly focused on gathering into barns. I’m just a simple Illinois dairy farmer’s son, yearning to do more of what Jesus does, and be more of who Jesus tells me I can be.
Do not worry, boys! Will your worry add a single day to your life? A single moment? A single second? What good are you adding to the world with your worry?
I must forget this obvious truth a thousand times a day. Remembering it requires that I forget it, and I remember it often.
Look how the wild flowers grow, and blossom into beauty. They neither toil nor spin, but Solomon in all his splendor never looked as fine as they. If your Father clothes the grass of the field, which grows today and is thrown tomorrow into the fire, well. Will he not provide as much, and so much more, for you?
Jesus loves his disciples. He loves us, reading these words. He loves us even though we are of little faith.
Here are a few questions you have memorized, but you might as well forget them. What are we to eat? What are we to drink? What are we to wear?
These questions point me in the wrong direction. They assume there is not enough in the world for all of us, that we are in a season of scarcity, a season that has never ended and never will. But this is not true. God created a world of abundance, where all of us will have more than enough. This is the world where he planted us and intends for us to live.
If I worry a thousand times a day, and ask the wrong questions over and over, betraying myself to myself, then what can I do to turn around, repent, be who God made me to be?
Seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and of this will be given to you besides.
Jesus doesn’t assume we heard him the first time, so he says it again.
So DO NOT WORRY ABOUT TOMORROW.
But Jesus worries too, perhaps. At the very least he recognizes trouble when he sees it, and … in what sounds almost like an aside, he reminds himself and each of us:
Each day has enough trouble of its own. Sufficient unto each day is the evil thereof.
(2 Chronicles 24, Psalm 89, 2 Corinthians 8, Matthew 6)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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