4th Sunday Useful and useless anxiety

 

A couple of days ago I was listening to a Christian speaker.  He was talking about suffering and in the course of his talk he pointed out that Jesus' job was simply to make people feel good, to take away their suffering or to be present with them in their suffering.  Well, I don't think he's right.  Let me put it this way: if you start with that point you radically misunderstand Jesus and his mission. For instance, if you take this little passage in Mark.  Was this guy schizophrenic? In any case he ended up being bitter.  Why? What was the point of this exorcism?  To make this guy feel better? No, but to restore him to the human family.  This is the effect of all the cures.  Jesus cured lepers.  What was a leper?  A leper was a person who, by law, was excluded from company of everybody else.  So when Jesus cured the leper did he say "Oh good.  Now I have nice Palmolive or Oil of Olay skin.  Now I look really sharp." No. That's not what it's about.  Rather, now he could be with other human beings.  The exorcism, the healings, they all follow the same pattern.

One of the worst parts of being sick is the sense that everybody else avoids you or treats you like some pitiable object which is, perhaps, even worse than being avoided.  I don't know.  But Jesus was not in that business.  This reminded me of a day a couple of years ago in Nevis where I was preaching.  As you probably know after the Lord's Prayer there is that little expansion of the prayer that talks about being anxious, and I always add an adjective.  Useless anxiety. So this very nice lady in Nevis who played the guitar and sang very well, said.... now see what Trojcak said: “We're not supposed to have any anxiety.”  That's not what I said and that's not what I intended.  Instead, there's a difference between useful anxiety and useless anxiety.

This is somewhat of a desperate stretch because, I confess, these three readings absolutely flummoxed me.  I couldn't put them together with days and days and hours and hours of thinking about them. So, I just want to focus on this thing from Paul. He's talking about anxieties here.  Again, the context of this thing is the same as we saw last week. It comes from the first letter to the Corinthians where Paul is talking about his expectation that Jesus is going to return and the whole world is going to be transformed and we're all going to become human beings to each other. Therefore, he says, business as usual is going to stop.  He uses the word "anxieties"... “I want you to be free from anxieties.”

Well, let me come at this from what might seem to be a fairly remote point. Paul and the whole Christian movement, but Paul in particular, lived in a state of double tension. Two distinctly different forms of tension, which we see in this reading today.  First there is the tension between what was going on right now as opposed as what was to come, and come fairly soon in Paul's reading of things. So we live in this kind of “already” and "not yet" or in this "in between time". There is that kind of tension, which by and large Christian churches ignore pretty much.  I don't think we are, by and large, eschatologically sensitive, to put it in technical language.  We're not waiting for the end.  We just figure life is going to thump along always, like it is right now, thank you very much.

 But the other tension is much more profound and fundamental to Paul's whole view of things.  What is that?  The tension between (and he uses a variety of words) being mature and being immature.  In the first letter to the Corinthians he draws that contrast very often. So he says, he can't say certain things because some of those people were immature and were not going to understand him.  Just like my friend in Nives misunderstood the whole notion of useless anxieties.  In other words, we're talking about conversion. What really disturbed me about this speaker that I mentioned earlier and this Nevis lady, is that they took an unconverted reading of this text and put it out as if it were a converted reading of this text.  An immature reading sees Jesus as some kind of great anodyne, the great Prozac in the sky.  But to read Jesus this way is to miss  the point.  We all miss the point.  I certainly include myself in this thing because I don't want to be miserable.  I don't want to suffer.  But what's most profoundly at stake here is the matter of what makes us suffer.  In the unconverted state we suffer from one thing.  In the converted state we suffer from something else. We get this from Paul himself.  Paul himself talks about his own anxieties.  What is he anxious about?  How these people are getting along together.  Now that's a converted reading of anxiety.  Whereas an unconverted reading of anxiety is that, no, God just wants me to go around smiling all the time. No problem.  I can handle this.  “Smile, God loves you”, like the bumper sticker says.  This is hugely important. 

 

I've been thinking about this in a number of contexts.  We've been hearing, in all these talks on the Pope's letter on Faith and Reason, a word that keeps coming up "certainty". Certainty.  Well, that's a very interesting notion.  Everybody wants it.  We can start with that.  Everybody wants it. I want to be certain that my cheque is going to come at the end of each month.  I want to know for sure that my kids aren't going to get kicked out of school. I want to be certain that my car starts.  I want to be certain that my boss won't fire me.  We all want to be certain. But I'd like to suggest that's a kind of unconverted sort of certainty.  In other words, it is nothing more than hoping that God will deliver me from whatever I feel is my current need.  My reading of what I need is generally - I'm talking about myself - an unconverted reading.

 

Let's take love because we can deal with anxiety love, hope, faith, all this stuff, and find a converted and unconverted reading of them.  Love is somebody being interested in me and taking care of me.  When I say I love somebody, which I do periodically, I am basically saying that, "I need you". Now, that's an unconverted understanding of love. On the other hand, a converted understanding of love, is saying that I am here, absolutely, in a non-neurotic way to give myself fully to you.  Wherever you are, whatever your situation.  Especially if you're in bad shape. That's a converted understanding of love.

 

Okay, now the last thing I want to do is dump more misconstructions on my head and even more, I don't want to dump them on your heads. So what I'm saying is, that we have to live consciously in that state of tension, not only because Jesus has not arrived and the kingdom has not been established, but because I am not fully converted.  Too much talk, too much Christian talk, makes that fundamental mistake.  We hear words and we hear them as if they were converted words but they are really being used in unconverted fashion. Like love, or anxiety etc. 

 

What God calls us to is to, move beyond this unconverted state where I, my self concern, is absolutely determinative. So, Paul says “I want you to be free from all anxieties”.  We have to be really careful when we read this stuff.  I can go home and turn on Jim Bakker or Robert Schuller who make all sorts of enormous amounts of money preaching what they say is the gospel.  But there's something really wrong, there's something fundamentally wrong.  They do not have the vision of what it is to be in Christ, really.  They want rather, in some kind of premature way, to say that they have arrived.  We all do. We all want that “blessed assurance that Jesus is mine”.  Well, folks.  I wish I could say that.  But, Jesus is not mine.  I'm mine.  I've got my plans.  I've got my agenda.  I know what I've got to do, by God, and I'm going to do it come hell or high water.  The thing that exercised me was this speaker and this lady in Nives.  But the church itself keeps misleading this stuff and material not making it clear. That it is misleading.

I just read a little article about the Vatican, which, as you know, is in this big apologetic mode.  The Pope says we ought to apologize for everything.  The Inquisition, the crusades, burning heretics and homosexuals and women.... They had this big thing at the Vatican on the Inquisition and they got scholars from all stripes... atheists, Jews, Protestants, Catholics.  It was a real mish-mash.  One of the atheists stood up and said "Folks.  It's very nice to say I'm sorry and then just sort of walk away from that old bad stuff.  What people should really be saying is that.... I'm ashamed of what we did. That's a whole different thing.  A whole different thing. Sorry is cheap.  Shame is expensive.  And so, I think that this too, has to do with converted and unconverted readings.  That's what we are called to do.

 

It's much more exciting to be a grown up than a little kid.  We all know that, except religiously we haven't been told that too often or very clearly.  This is the envoy of this homily.  It drives me crazy that people think that they can talk of Christianity to little kids. The bible of Jesus was not written for or by little kids. Jesus really liked little kids.  I like little kids, too. But you don't want them to stay little kids all the time for God's sakes. Nor did Jesus. Little nippers should grow up. Otherwise they are just toys, more toys for me.  For my self-indulgence.  You want them to grow up.  We need to have that hope for ourselves and for the church as well.