(Proverbs 6:6-8; Matthew 6:25-34)

Wired magazine published an interesting article this past summer on the effort, led by a biologist named Robert Sapolsky, to develop a vaccine against chronic stress. That might sound strange, but while stress doesn’t cause any diseases—we used to think it causes ulcers, but it’s turned out that’s not really true—it can have devastating effects on every major system in our bodies, making us far more vulnerable to disease, and making every disease we develop worse. As the article says,

The list of ailments connected to stress is staggeringly diverse and includes everything from the common cold and lower-back pain to Alzheimer’s disease, major depressive disorder, and heart attack. Stress hollows out our bones and atrophies our muscles. It triggers adult-onset diabetes and is a leading cause of male impotence. In fact, numerous studies of human longevity in developed countries have found that psychosocial factors such as stress are the single most important variable in determining the length of a life. It’s not that genes and risk factors like smoking don’t matter. It’s that our levels of stress matter more . . . the effects of chronic stress directly counteract improvements in medical care and public health.

The article goes on to cite a public-health survey called the Whitehall study, which has been tracking tens of thousands of British civil servants for over 40 years; they’ve found that even after you control for all other known factors, people at the bottom of the hierarchy died twice as often between the ages of 40 and 64 as people at the top. Why? Primarily because those at the bottom have considerable stress from the demands of their jobs, but absolutely no control over those demands. They can’t choose what they’re going to do, they have no status to defend themselves from those above them—there’s nothing they can do but to endure, and it’s literally killing them.

In other words, Jesus knew what he was talking about when he said, “Which of you by being anxious can add even a single hour to his life?” Anxiety is corrosive, and erosive: it wears away our energy, our character, and ultimately our lives, and eats away our relationships, dissolving the bonds between us. Chronic stress makes us more susceptible to the effects of stress, making us more anxious and more likely to perceive things as threats; the more anxious we are, the more anxious we’re going to be, the more mistrustful we become, and the harder it is for us to relax and rest.

This is the story of our culture, because ours is an anxious time. Part of that, of course, is the down economy, but that’s not all, by any means. Part of it is the tenor of our politics, which are very much anxiety-driven; that’s not the fault of all those high-powered political consultants running around, but they’re still doing their best to make it worse. I remember being struck during the 2000 political campaign by polls showing that over a quarter of the electorate professed to be “terrified” at the prospect of Al Gore becoming president, with a similar percentage saying the same thing about George W. Bush; and then, just as that was all settling down, along came 9/11 to give us all something to be terrified about. It certainly wasn’t going to get any better from there.

In times like that, people tend to look for comfort in what we think we can control; which was probably one of the things driving the housing bubble. There were plenty of people around talking about the dream of home ownership, and real estate as the safest investment, tying in to the deep emotional association between home and security; to have that go bust for so many folks was like having their legs kicked out from under them, like being hit from behind. I would say that’s the sort of thing that sends anxiety through the roof, except the roof isn’t there anymore—that’s part of the problem.

The reality here is that this kind of thing inevitably happens when we’re trying to be the ones in control. That’s really the root of anxiety: we’re carrying the weight of our lives on our own shoulders—we’ve given ourselves the full responsibility for making our lives happen and making everything work. We put our trust in things because we think we understand them, we believe we can control them; we think we know what they’re worth, and we trust in our own understanding and our own abilities.

Ultimately, we see ourselves as our own providers; at the practical level, we make ourselves the little gods of our day-to-day lives. As long as circumstances are favorable, we can pull it off, and we feel pretty good about it; but when circumstances turn, as they always do, it all comes crashing down, and we become anxious—we worry—because our little gods have failed. That’s why the New Testament scholar Robert Mounce declared, “Worry is practical atheism and an affront to God,” and it’s why Jesus calls us to something better.

The opposite of worry is trust, and the opposite of anxiety is faith; it is to release our lives to God and leave them in his keeping. It’s the spirit captured in Psalm 46:10, which commands, “Cease striving, and know that I am God.” Of course, this doesn’t mean to stop working and just laze around; the wisdom of Proverbs 6 has not been repealed. We are responsible to use the gifts God has given us to do our part in taking care of his people, and that includes being prudent to work to meet our own needs as much as we are able; this is part of the way he provides for us, through the abilities and opportunities he gives us. The point is not to stop working, the point is to stop putting our trust in our own work; it’s to do what God gives us to do and leave the rest up to him.

Now, you might say this is harder in difficult economic times like these, but I’m not really sure that’s true; it’s just a different challenge, that’s all. Right now, we’re most of us anxious about having enough—about being able to pay the bills, keep the house, put food on the table—and we’re driven by fear of going without and losing what we have. When the economy is better, that’s not so much of a question; but when there are more jobs to choose from, we have more opportunity to choose based on what will make us the most money rather than on what is most pleasing to God. Whatever the circumstances, the Devil’s going to try to use them to get us to put our trust in money instead of God.

If we let him, it’s a tragedy, because it makes us less than God wants us to be; and more than that, it’s foolish. As Jesus says, we have every reason to trust God—just look at the way he takes care of the rest of his creation. We try to find security through planning our careers, saving our money, and making investments—all wise things, certainly, but not what we make them out to be; the birds don’t do any of that, but they still have enough to eat. And look at the flowers—they don’t work at all, but they’re still more beautiful than any human being. Why? Because blessing comes from God, and only from God. Our own labors are necessary because God asks them of us, because he gives us work to do as a part of our own growth—he gives us the dignity of responsibility in our own lives, which we need—but their results aren’t truly in our hands; they are in God’s, and God’s alone, as the one who created all things and holds all things together.

This means that all our anxiety is ultimately for nothing, because putting our trust in anything other than God is doomed to fail; whether we rely on him or on the money we have in the bank, he will determine our success either way. All we can accomplish through our mistrustful worrying is to make ourselves sick, take time off our lives, and lose a lot of our enjoyment of them in the process; we can’t do anything to make them better than what God has planned for us, because it’s beyond our ability and the breadth of our understanding. God alone is able to guide us perfectly through the choices we make and the challenges we face, because he alone knows perfectly what we need and what is best for us, he is powerful enough to give us perfectly what we need and what is best for us, and he absolutely desires to do so; we can’t do that, and we’re the worst kind of fools to try, because all we ever manage to do by our own efforts is to get in the way.

What we hear Jesus saying here is what we hear God saying so many places in Scripture: “Just trust me.” Just lay down your anxiety, just lay down your striving, just lay down your frantic efforts to get things for yourself when I’m trying to give you something better. I know what you need, and I’m not going to fail you—I will take care of you, as I always have. Don’t worry about yourself—just put me first, make serving me your top priority, and I’ll provide for you, everything you need to do what I’ve called you to do and be whom I’ve called you to be. Don’t worry about the future—just do what I’ve given you to do right now, care for the people who are before you this moment, and let the future take care of itself, because I’m watching over it, too. Just let go, Jesus tells us, lay down the weight of your life, and let God be God; he’s better at it than we are. Give generously, live freely, and don’t worry about keeping yourself up—trust God to do that. He’s faithful, and he will never let you down. Never.

(Proverbs 19:17; Matthew 6:19-21)

I’m sure you’ve all heard “two kinds of people” jokes—they aren’t up there with knock-knock jokes or light-bulb jokes as a genre, but there are a lot of them around. There are two kinds of waiters in the world—those who can remember what you order, and those who bring you what you order. There are three kinds of people in the world—those who can count, and those who can’t. There are two kinds of people in the world—those who think there are two kinds of people in the world, and those who don’t. And so on, and so on.

It’s exaggeration for effect, of course, as so much humor is; but when it comes to money, it’s no joke, there basically are two kinds of preachers in the world. On the one hand, there are those who talk about money all the time, usually because they want your money to become their money; of such preachers are media exposés made. And on the other hand, there are those who try to avoid talking about money out of fear of being mistaken for members of the first group.

And through the crack in between falls the gospel. And no, that’s not an overstatement, for effect or anything else. It’s not merely that Jesus talked a lot about money, either, true though that is; that means that if we aren’t willing to talk about money, we wind up shying away from a lot of Jesus’ teaching, which is a bad thing, but that’s not even the biggest concern. There’s something a lot deeper going on here, but we tend to miss it—and unfortunately, those of us in the pulpit all too often make matters worse when we do start talking about stewardship and giving. To understand why Jesus talks so much about money, we need to really dig into what he had to say about it, and so that’s what we’re going to be doing for the next several weeks; because no matter how hard we try, one way or another we will end up talking about money, and if we don’t let Jesus set us straight, we’re going to keep right on starting in all the wrong places.

Perhaps the most popular wrong place is to start from the budget: “We need this much money, so you need to give more.” It’s understandable; I’ve never met a church that couldn’t use more money, and I’ve known a lot that could have done wonderful things with a bigger budget. I’m proud of this congregation and all the ministry we do, and we’re running off of investments to keep most of that going; God has provided for us in some wonderful ways, which I take as a sign that we’re being faithful to do what he wants us to do, but it would be nice to be able to make our budget out of congregational giving, so that we didn’t need to sell stock to keep the operation going. That would give us a lot more flexibility to be creative in reaching out and ministering to our community. But you know, “we want more money” isn’t the main biblical reason God calls us to give.

Beyond that, of course, we can just hammer on giving as a requirement, our duty to God; which at least has the advantage of pointing out that giving is about God, not about the church budget. Unfortunately, it also pitches us headfirst out of gospel and into legalism—and quite frankly, all the way back to paganism, which is all about buying the favor of one’s preferred god or goddess so as to be able to claim favors. What’s more, it turns the whole thing into an exercise in religious manipulation and guilt-tripping, which is pure anti-gospel in its own right.

A far better approach is to talk about giving as part of our grateful response to the work of Christ: it isn’t something we do because we must, it’s something we do because we love Jesus and want to please him. In connection with this, we can also talk about the importance of giving generously for our spiritual growth, and about how that involves more than just money. It’s all true—Jesus calls us to be good stewards of all the gifts he’s given us, our time and abilities as well as our material wealth—and it’s all quite important, and we’ll be spending some time on that later on in this series; but it isn’t the place to begin, because it isn’t the fundamental issue.

The fundamental issue when considering our giving—what we give, how much, and so on—is an issue of worship. That might sound strange, because when we think of worship, we tend to think of formal services and singing and all the things we do here on Sunday mornings; but these are acts of worship, corporate expressions of worship, they aren’t the whole of worship. Indeed, they’re only worship at all if they’re expressive of the deeper reality of our hearts. Worship at its core is about who or what we value most, the people and things that determine our priorities; as Minneapolis pastor Rick Gamache put it, “Worship is my response to what matters most to me.” The original form of the English word is actually “worthship”—it means to ascribe worth to something, to treat something or someone as being of great importance to you. What you worship is what you prioritize, and vice versa; the priorities we set and the choices we make show us and those around us what we truly worship, and they also shape the worship of our hearts.

This is the critical point in this passage. Jesus offers us a practical reason to use our wealth and our abilities to serve him rather than ourselves—in so doing, we’ll earn a reward which is eternal and indestructible rather than one which is temporary and all too easily destroyed—and we’ll talk more about this later on; but he doesn’t stop there. Why is it possible to use earthly things to win heavenly rewards? Because God needs our stuff to carry out his plans? No, because it’s not about our stuff at all: it’s about our hearts. Because while we don’t always put our money where our mouth is, we do consistently put our money where our heart is; and because the more we put our money there, the more it will anchor our heart there. If we put our treasure in this world, we ensure that our heart will be in this world with it; no matter how many times we come on Sunday and sing about how much we love Jesus, our true worship will be of our career, our income, our investments, our possessions, our pleasures, whatever it is we treasure.

There’s a word for that, in Scripture: idolatry. Don’t store up treasure on earth, because in so doing we create idols, false gods on which we set our heart even though they cannot endure and will not save. Where you put your treasure is where your heart will be, so give your treasure to God. It’s not just about the old saw about hearses not pulling U-Hauls, which I understand Dr. Smith used to repeat—this isn’t just a matter of choosing the right investment plan. Rather, it’s about this question: are we truly worshiping Jesus Christ, or is something else guiding and determining our decisions? Because if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, but you don’t give him your money because you have a standard of living you want to maintain, then in reality, your bank balance is Lord. Your money is your treasure, and it’s an idol.

Maybe that’s a new thought to you, since the idea of money as an idol isn’t a common one in the American church. At least, that’s true on the conservative side, where we’re all good capitalists who pretty much regard money as a good thing—and to be clear, Jesus isn’t saying there’s anything wrong with having money. What’s wrong is when money has us, when getting and having and spending and saving is what drives our lives; which is all too common a problem, both for people and for churches, in our consumeristic, materialistic, individualistic culture. We cannot truly worship Jesus, we cannot honestly claim to be his disciples, if our decision-making is mostly based on money.

The fact is, Jesus’ call to let go of money, to let go of building up treasure on earth, is unsettling, as any call to lay down our idols is unsettling; money may not be all that trustworthy, really, but it’s what we’ve been taught to trust, and it works a lot of the time. Jesus came to set us free from idols so that we could love and worship the one true God with a whole and undivided heart, but like any sort of real freedom, it doesn’t come easy. To choose to put our treasures in heaven rather than on earth is to live by faith in a deeper and more radical way than most of us are used to doing, because it means that if God doesn’t come through for us, we’re ruined. But that’s what Jesus asks of us, and as unnerving as it can be, that’s good news, because God truly is faithful; those who put their trust in him will find hardship on the way, but they will never be put to shame, and in the end, their victory is secure, for Christ has already won it. In this is treasure greater than anything we can find in this world; it only remains for us to choose it.