Do We Have to be Anxious?

             Anxiety-producing stuff is all around us now.  Attempted political assassination and mass murder in Arizona, over-heated political rhetoric, over-heated political rhetoric over whether over-heated political rhetoric is a bad thing, global warming, melting polar ice caps, rampant deforestation in the Amazon, the Great Recession, wars without end in Iraq and Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, epidemics of cancer, ever-rising health care costs, job insecurity, failing schools, college applications, strained church budgets, Mayan prophecies of 2012, somebody please stop me!

            Anxiety is not unique to our day and age. Jesus and those to whom he ministered knew, in their own time, all about anxiety, anxiety that was personal, communal, political, economic, religious.  Health care was abysmal, child-mortality astronomical, foreign taxation oppressive, foreign military occupation relentless, religious bickering unending, the political world polarized, pensions, not invented yet, retirement planning limited to having lots of strong sons.

            So Jesus knows better than to tell the people, “Don’t worry, be happy.” Instead, he knows he needs to help them face their darkest fears and deepest dreads, he needs to go beyond offering the temporary band-aid of easy comfort and Pollyannaisms. And so he gives them a bracing does of reality, telling that there will be times, yes, when the very foundations will be shaken beneath their feet, times when it will seem that all moorings have been lost, times when it will feel like they have been “confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves.” (Luke 21:25) They likely would have understood that he was speaking not just about the end time of world history, but about what feels like the end times in their own lives – about those cataclysmic-feeling times that all too often are part and parcel of this earthly existence.

            But Jesus does not stop there, with sounding warnings that seem as if they might be coming from the Channel 7 Storm Center on the eve of a winter nor’easter. No, he takes them to another place, a new place, an unexpected place – a wondrous place. Not, “Don’t worry, be happy”, not, “Stick your head in the sand and just pretend that everything is all right”, but, instead, this: “Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

            As Flora Slosson Wuellner writes (Weavings, No. XXV, Number 4, 2010), “The moment of our greatest fear, that moment when the ground shakes beneath our feet, is the very moment of God’s deepest presence and power within us. It is the moment of our new beginning.”

            She goes on,

“This does not mean that our sun and moon will shine for us again in their old way, or that the sea will return to its former shores, or the cracked earth will become that old solid ground we used to walk upon. We will walk in new lights and on new foundations. The God of endings and new beginnings never returns us to the old life after profound change. We are offered a new creation.”

The times of our greatest anxieties, these are times not to dread the worse, but to anticipate the best, not to cower in our foxholes, but to stand tall with eyes eagerly scanning the horizon, ears stretching for the sound of the cavalry’s bugle call.

            This is my story, the story of my new life. Many of you know some of my story, about how Sue, the mother of Julia and Katie, my first wife, died of breast cancer at an all too young age, and how I later met Christie, and fell in love, and married. And you know that I believe I have been blessed to have lived two lives, and perhaps you assume that I date that second life from the moment I met Christie.

            But actually, that rise to new life began well before that. I remember the moment as if it were yesterday. I can feel the pajamas that I wore, the robe on my back, the slippers under my feet; I can see the back door, the view out its windows onto the driveway outside, the newspaper lying there. I knew that what I was about to do I had been doing every morning since we had moved into that house, had stripped off and then rehung the horrid wallpaper, had redone the kitchen, celebrated the pregnancies that resulted in Katie and Julia, and so much more. That I had started off each day by going outside and bringing in the newspaper. But this day was different, and even as I reached out to turn that doorknob, I knew that the world was a different place and might never be the same again. Because this was the first day after the cancer had come back, and now all bets were off, and now I knew that I could never trust life again. And I felt robbed, violated, completely overwhelmed by violent seas.

            And yet – and yet, that was the day I began, if slowly, to rise to new life. While my old trust in life had been destroyed, what was made room for was a new trust in the one who, as we sang earlier, has “the Whole World In his Hands”.  No, its not that the challenges and the pain and the suffering went away – cancer stinks, and losing a spouse and mother and friend to a debilitating disease is horrid – its that I discovered that we were never left alone, never abandoned, never left unloved, that help unlooked for always came, that when we ran out of our own resources new power miraculously came our way. Yes, something in me died that day – the faith that life was fair and just and would go on and on – but in that dying there was room for something new to be born, a trust in one whose trust is steadfast and sure.

            Minnie Louise Haskins wrote over a century ago,

“And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’ And he replied, ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be to you better than light, and safer than a known way.”

The Bible tells us over and over about God’s hand, that symbol of comfort and care and protection, of endless love and strength and guidance. In Psalm 139, the psalmist sings “If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.” And in John 10:28, Jesus says “I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand.”

            And so this is the good news for us today, and this is what Jesus means when he says to us, “Do not be anxious.” When we are faced with those times when it seems that the world is moving beneath our feet, when it seems that the stars are falling from the sky overhead – when the test results come back from the lab and the specialist tells us that it is bad news, when the boss calls us into the office and starts apologetically mumbling about reductions in force and how sorry he is, when a spouse packs their bag and walks out the door, when that thin envelope arrives from the admissions office of that college you longed to get into, when you realize that you just made the biggest mistake of your life – then is the time to stand tall; then is the time to raise up your head; and then is the time to put out your hand to the one in whom you can always trust, and who stands ready to open up for you a new life and a new day.