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Sermons at Saint Mary's
Thanksgiving Eve Friends, do you worry? I know I do. Even on the occasion of this wonderful ecumenical gathering, there is a part of me that is full of worry. I worry about many things:
All too often, the part of me that worries gets the upper hand. And then, pardon my French, all hell breaks loose. My worries multiply, they immobilize me, they take me out of my self, and bring me near that territory in which 19.1 million Americans suffer on a daily basis with full blown anxiety disorder. Believe me, I am not alone with my worries. Indeed, we’re an anxious nation. And when you begin to add up what it costs to treat all this worry, all this anxiety, the price tag is staggering. $42 billion dollars just this year alone! Think about that. My anxiety, our anxiety costs us the equivalent of the GDP of well over half the countries on this planet! So, friends, as we gather tonight on the Eve of Thanksgiving, I wonder what are we do with these words of Jesus: “Therefore, I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you shall eat or what you will drink or what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?...Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?” Anxiety, you see, is a terrible thing. The word anxiety comes from the Latin angere, meaning to strangle, to torment, to distress. And from this Latin infinitive was derived the name of a particularly vicious weapon in the Middle Ages called an ango, a kind of spear. An ango was used in times of war by infantry, by thrusting it into the enemy. Think of anxiety as a spear that we use against ourselves, and we begin to see what our worries truly cost us. Which is why, I believe, it mattered so much to Jesus that we not be anxious, and we not worry about our lives. We do not need to inflict this wound on ourselves. So how do we not be anxious? How do we give up our worries? For Jesus, it was as simple as looking at the birds of the air, or the lilies of the field. A couple of weeks ago, I was feeling particularly anxious about something or other, and my dearly beloved who shares my bed with me was having nothing of it. She told me to get over it, rolled over, and turned out the light. I had a fitful sleep and rose the next morning, got up and started off from our home in Mashpee for the commute to Barnstable. The sun has just risen over the little bay and estuary at the bottom of the hill, and it caught the golden reeds at just the right angle, and revealed a miraculous landscape. It reminded me of these words of Irish poet and author John O’Donohue: “If you approach a landscape with an open heart, you will be amazed at what it is able to give you.” And so, I stopped, got out of the car, and looked closer. There, cavorting in the water below me, I saw the buffleheads had returned for their winter stay. Smallest of all duck species, buffleheads are also the most cunning. I watched as they performed their submarine dives, completely oblivious to my presence. Not a worry in the world. No anxiety. Here were creatures which have been at this same, carefree practice for hundreds of millions of years. And here I was, part of a species which, in the briefest of time we have inhabited this planet, lose our selves to worry and anxiety. It brought on a smile, a grin, and a laugh. And, as the things that tugged at my hearts left me, all the sowing and reaping and gathering into barns I had planned for that day vanished for a moment, it brought to mind the words of another poet, Wendell Berry: “I come into the peace of wild things, who do not tax their lives with the forethought of grief….For a time I rest in the grace of the world and I am free.” If there is antidote to anxiety, if there is a remedy to worry in this life, I think it is just this: to rest in the grace of this world and be free. And in all of this, to be grateful. What a true blessing it is that we set aside a day each year for thanksgiving. But imagine if we set aside each day, each hour, each fleeting moment for gratitude. Imagine being free of worry. Imagine seeking first the Kingdom of God where there is consolation and release from the anxiety that torments and the burdens that weigh heavily on us. It was gratitude, after all, that animated those first pilgrims, weary and at the point of starvation, who celebrated that first Thanksgiving. It was the grace and generosity of those Wampanoags, who stilled their anxious hearts. Putting down their spears and arrows and sharing of their plenty, these first Americans gave birth to a holiday tradition that sustains us to this day. On this night, then, let us remember the grace of this world is abundant. And on this Thanksgiving, may God grant us the courage and wisdom to receive this abundant grace with grateful hearts, so as the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, we, like them, may truly be free.
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