ONE MORE THING
Scripture Lesson: Philippians 4: 4-7
Dr. Matthew S. Brown
December 17, 2006
I know a number of members here have enjoyed the frenetic, irreverent, and comically hypochondriacal musings of a struggling and straggling faith seeker named Anne Lamott who wrote Traveling Mercies some years ago. If worrying were a professional sport, Lamott would be in the Hall of Fame.
In her book she talks about a harrowing encounter with an innocent mole, not the kind that dig up the back yard, but the kind that distinguish Robert Di Niro and Julia Roberts from the other movies stars or the kind that prevent you from looking at your Uncle Harold straight on.
She certainly had reason to be aware, her father had suffered with melanoma, but Lamott carried her worries to another level. I mean, not many of us refer to the dermatologist as “my main mole man.” Anyway, she arrived for yet another visit to her “mole man,” Stephen, who she says, “has been walking me through my moles for years.
She writes, “I show up and I show him my moles, and he usually has one of two reactions: one is that he claps his hands to his ears and opens his mouth like the guy on the bridge in Edvard Munch’s The Scream. The other involves a series of gestures: first his face falls in a sad Buster Keaton way, but he forces himself to make eye contact and whispers ‘I’m sorry’ with more than a hint of sarcasm.
And yet, in the midst of one of their many, many visits, the
doctor’s boredom was interrupted with one of those wordless sounds that patients
loathe to hear from their doctors. “Hmmm.”
“Hmmm what?” Lamott asked.
“Well,” he said, “You know what? I think I’d like to remove this one.” Lamott says, “He pointed to a small mole on
my rib cage. “There’s something a
little… off about this one.” Off? Off?”
She says, “I felt suspended and vacuumy, like when you’ve been
underwater for too long, or that moment when the drugs have just kicked in and
you haven’t had time to adjust to the fact that the kitty can now speak
English. Lamott had led a colorful life
up to that point.
“Excuse me?” She
asked incredulously. “My mole is a
little off? She asked, as if he’d said her rear end was too big.
Well, at that point Lamott’s level of worry was launched to
a different altitude. Do you remember in
Star Wars when the Millennium Falcon would shift into hyper-speed and the stars
would flash by in a blur? Let’s just say
Lamott was really worried now. She
writes, “I was too young to die – or at least too upset to die. You don’t want to die when you’re this upset
– you get a bad room in heaven with the other hysterics… and the exercise
compulsives. But thinking of heaven made
me remember something: that I believe in
God. And I smote my own forehead.
So I wrote God a note on a scrap of paper. It said, ‘I am a little anxious. Help me remember that you are with me even
now. I am going take my sticky finger
off the control panel until I hear from you.”
Then I folded up the note and put it in the drawer of the table next to
my bed as if it were God’s In box.”
And then, she felt a sense of peace. It was fleeting, but it was definitely
there. When the worries did return she
called the specialist’s office and managed to slide into someone’s cancelled
appointment in order to have the mole removed.
She asked the doctor if she would get stickers for being brave and he
said, “Lots of stickers.”
“Then,” she writes, after removing the mole, “he put a bandage over the stitches and sent me on my
way. He said the biopsy would take about
a week but that he was 98 percent sure that it was going to be benign.”
“Are those good enough odds for you?” he asked smiling.
“Clearly,” Lamott replied, “you have never worked with me
before.” (Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies)
The mole turned out to be nothing more than another reminder
that Lamott was the steroid enhanced Barry Bonds of worriers.
Do we have any worriers in the house today? If we were of another faith tradition, are
there those who so resonated with Lamott’s mole encounter that they would with
hands raised been muttering along, “Ummm, Ummm!” “Yes, Lord.”
“Amen.”
If we had an altar call for worriers today would the front
of the sanctuary look like the door of Target when it opened in the dark after
Thanksgiving Day? Do you worry, fret,
agonize, lose sleep over matters large and small?
“Rejoice in the Lord always,” Paul encourages us. “Do not worry about anything, but in
everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be
made known to God.”
It is a lot easier for me to read that text to you than it
will be for me to read it at 11:00, because I don’t know if my wife can hear me
reading those words without bursting forth with laughter. You see, I know how to worry. I’ve had a black belt in worrying all my
life. I come from good worrying stock.
When I would go out to ride my bike my mother would remind me about some tragic
bike accident in North Dakota she had read about. I’ve never lost a job in my life, but
periodically my father will, with all the solemnity of the pope ask, “Are they
happy with you?” How do you answer that? If worrying is genetic, I’ve got it
good. I know how to worry.
I worry about what I will say to someone and then, afterward
worry about what I said to someone. I
worry that the pepperoni pizza I crave will give me indigestion. And then I worry that the calcium rich Tums I
take to fight it will give me a kidney stone.
Believe me, I know how to worry.
If I’m going to meet someone, I worry about arriving late
and I worry about arriving too early.
You don’t want the waitress to have the impression that you’ve been
stood up. Nobody wants to hear that
sympathetic question, “Would you like to go ahead and order or do you want to
wait?” I know how to worry.
Does the tie match the shirt? Will I be able to get that smudge off of my
shoes? Will a side trip to the dry
cleaners make me late for the appointment?
I sure hope the chicken salad doesn’t have onions in it. Will that traffic light turn yellow before I
get to the point of no return? Will I be
rendered to Guantanamo or some Turkish prison if I misplace my boarding pass at
the airport? And where did I park? O, I know how to worry. If worrying were a spiritual virtue, Mother
Teresa would have nothing on me.
And then, Paul has to go and heap guilt on top of my
worrying by saying something so cheerful as, “Rejoice
always, again I will say, Rejoice. Let
your gentleness be known to everyone.
The Lord is near. Do not worry
about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving
let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all
understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
Great! Now I have to
worry about being a spiritual slacker in addition to all my other worries. But, don’t you think Paul had to be a bit of
a worrier, too? Walking down that road
to Damascus, gonna arrest some of those Jesus followers, he hears that James
Earl Jones of a voice, “Saul, Saul, why persecuteth, thou me?” And he’s struck blind!” Don’t you think he was worrying just a little
bit? You bet he was. And later he’d be anxious about the potential
for murmuring and arguing in Philippi, he’d fret over Peter fretting over the
Gentiles, and he was always worrying about what crazy things they’d do next
down in Corinth.
And yet, Paul knew that in this life, there was at least the
potential for the experience of a peace that is beyond our capacity to
understand, other than to know it is a peace that is experienced in the embrace
of a loving and present Lord. Notice,
that when he challenges us to rejoice, he is not merely encouraging us to wrap
our Christmas wishes with Pabst Blue Ribbons.
No, he says, “Rejoice in the Lord.”
Why, because he says, “The Lord is near.”
Now that phrase carries two meanings for us communicated in
the liturgical traditions of the church.
At Pentecost we affirm that Christ truly is near to us, and, in fact, is
at work within us through the power of the Holy Spirit. Paul himself, states in Romans 8 that in
those soul searing moments when our lives are so turned upside down that we
can’t even begin to direct a prayer toward the heavens, “The Spirit intercedes
[for you] with sighs too deep for words.”
Do you hear that? When you can’t
pray, the Lord’s Spirit prays for you!
Consider the awe inducing words of Psalm 139:
1 O Lord, you have searched me and known me. 2 You
know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away.
3 You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my
ways. 4 Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it
completely.
Wow! And there’s
more:
7 Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee
from your presence? 8 If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my
bed in Sheol, you are there. 9 If I take the wings of the morning and
settle at the farthest limits of the sea, 10 even there your hand shall
lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.
The Lord is near! I
forget that, sometimes, and worry so needlessly. How about you?
In Advent, those same words, “The Lord is near,” remind us
that God really does have a plan for all this:
this creation, this world, this church, your life. There will come a time when it all comes
together, the pain, the worry gone, the tears wiped from our eyes, the old
animosities, grudges, wars and conflicts and uncertainties – never again. The Lord is near. And so, in this season we lift up the prayer
– “Come, Lord Jesus.”
Listen to Eugene Peterson’s translation of a portion of our
Philippian text:
6 Don't fret or worry. Instead of worrying, pray. Let
petitions and praises shape your worries into prayers, letting God know your
concerns. 7 Before you know it, a sense of God's wholeness, everything
coming together for good, will come and settle you down. It's wonderful what
happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life.”
Terry Gaines was kind enough to lend me her copy of the book
the Mom’s Study used last year: “Having
a Mary Heart in a Martha World.” The
author, Joanna Weaver, reminds us of the old saying that worry is like a
rocking chair – it gives you something to do , but it
doesn’t get you anywhere. And she raises
the question of how many of our worries are nothing more than a waste of
time. How many of our worries are things
that deep down we know will never happen?
How many of our worries are about the past – which can’t be
changed? How many of our worries center around criticism by others, mostly untrue? In fact, one author suggested that much of
our toxic worry is based upon nothing more than exaggeration and misinformation. (Weaver, Having a Mary Heart in a Martha
World)
How many of our worries are about health, which gets worse
with stress? A member of our Bible Study
suggested the question: How many of our
worries arise because we’re trying to stuff one more thing in our lives? If I could only get that outfit, that
house! If I could squeeze in this one
more load of laundry before I leave for the appointment! Why don’t we try to squeeze three holiday
gatherings in one evening so that we don’t offend anyone?
If we could set all these worries aside, what small group of concerns are about real problems that can be
solved? And there is a difference
between a worry and a concern. Weaver
quotes a pastor who said that (Now listen up because Terry had this underlined,
red-lined and starred, so I think it must be important), “Worry is allowing problems and
distress to come between us and the heart of God. It is the view that God has somehow lost
control of the situation and we cannot trust Him. A legitimate concern presses us closer to the
heart of God and causes us to lean and trust on Him all the more.” (Weaver)
Let us set aside fruitless worries that we may focus on the
concerns that matter: Feed the hungry,
teach the children, house the homeless, welcome the stranger, rejoice with
those who rejoice and weep with those who weep, love a family member, a friend,
an enemy. There is plenty to concern us,
but we won’t get anywhere shackled by the worries that will not do us, or God’s world any good.
Is it not our worries that make our “Joy to the Worlds”
sound so out of tune? So may Paul’s
benediction become our mission: 6 Do not worry
about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving
let your requests be made known to God. 7 And the peace of God, which
surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ
Jesus.” The Lord is near. Come, Lord Jesus. Amen.
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