And then
there were the days where Tim and I were hitch-hiking on our honeymoon, traveling
wherever the winds blew and the busses drove, never knowing from one day to the
next if we would have a nice, cockroach free place to spend the night, or where
the next job might be found. It was a
real adventure, but my nails never did grow much that whole time because I was
too busy nervously biting them. What a
terrifying challenge.
And don’t
get me started on my first pregnancy!
So this
teaching of Jesus is one that really sticks in my craw. Don’t worry, be happy, He says. Ha! I
never really figured that out.
Being an
atheist worrier is a full-time job.
Trying to make sure you have packed everything you might ever need. Packing the baby seat in the car trunk two
months earlier than needed, just in case.
Having a heavy purse with everything from hand sanitizer to 35 cents for
a payphone. Having a glasses repair kit
with spare parts as well as a sewing kit with first aid supplies.
But even I
have never been locked up in a jail while a city is being torn apart by
war. Bombs flying, or okay, no bombs in
Jeremiah’s day, but there would have been battering rams, for sure, starvation
after the blockade was up, and no end in sight for the people of Israel,
surrounded by the Babylonian armies.
To do a real
estate deal to help out your bankrupt cousin and thus your whole extended clan
in the midst of such chaos, is ludicrous but that’s exactly what Jeremiah
does. A wild, bold risky venture in the
midst of dangerous times is what he feels called to do. Such an act might have inspired Jesus, several
centuries later, to remind his followers to keep their heads on straight, not
to panic, and to focus on what is important.
As Tim likes
to point out to me on a regular basis, worry does indeed not add anything to
the quality of my life. As Jesus reminded
us, worry does not add a single hour to my life span, nor does it help me to
change the things I cannot change. Worry
leaves me fretting about impossibilities that might happen in the future that
are beyond my control. I can’t control
how many people will come to tonight’s supper, or how many tickets might sell
for it, whether or not there are enough pies, well actually, that’s something I
can do.
We need to
remember to focus on the here and the now, and not just that, but the why we do
what we do. Why do we have a harvest
supper? To raise money, of course, but
it’s more than that. People don’t go
making pies and donating tomatoes and hand crafting meatballs for two hundred
people just for the sake of money. No,
it’s far more than that. It’s because we
believe that Jesus came bearing good news that needs to be shared to all. That the meatballs we make remind us that we
are connected to our community and our community is connected to us.
It helps us
to sit at the hospital beds of folks who are needing our love and support, it
helps us feed kids at school who can’t learn on an empty stomach, that it
prevents folks from committing suicide because they know we care, that it
reminds people that there is hope for men and women trapped in cycles of domestic
violence, that we want to work towards justice for all and living with respect
in creation. It helps us buy
environmentally sensitive products from lower-phosphate laundry detergent to
energy efficient lightbulbs. It helps
atheists heal, searchers find comfort, and faithful folks go just a little
deeper in their prayer lives and in their faith journeys.
We do the
harvest supper because we care about folks, and one of the key identifiers of a
Christian community is that it is passionately committed to the people in the
community who need a beacon of hope in this scary, worrisome world. That we dream of a day when all will have
enough to eat and to clothe themselves, that no one will live in fear and
anxiety. That we try to show with our
actions a vision of a time when we can work together in harmony towards a
common goal, the way we come together to put on a delicious spread for the
Athabasca friends and neighbors here this day.
That we
testify to a different future, one which cares and works. In 1979, I couldn’t imagine the future that
would lead me here. In 1989 when we
fretted about George Orwell, 1999 when we worried about Y2K, in 2001 when
crashing airplanes meant the start of World War 3, in 2008 when the crash of
the stock market meant we were all doomed to perpetual poverty, in 2014 and so
on. We are not at our doomsday yet
because ordinary folks like you and me care and make meatballs. Because we remember Jesus telling us to focus
on God’s vision, not our worries.
Remember last week’s prayer that was good for the mosquito thoughts that
suck our hearts? It’s also excellent at worry wart mind meanderings. God, grant
me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change...