Matthew 6:25-33
As I was reading and preparing last Sunday’s sermon, the advice from our lectionary text, “don’t worry,” only began to make sense when I thought of the actual listening audience as the disciples themselves. The crowd was listening, to be sure, but there is a single and conclusive clue that this is a message for the closest followers of Jesus and not just the crowd. Jesus said "ye of little faith." This was the rebuke Jesus reserved for his disciples, his constant companions, the twelve who seemed to frequently miss the point. It was an ongoing tutorial, and they were always struggling to keep up…as are we.
Determining that the message of Matthew 6 was specifically to the twelve, does that let us off the hook? We may think, “Surely Jesus is not speaking to us!”, or, after a couple minutes of biblical interpretation we may say to ourselves, ”Presto, no more worries about worry! It is about them not us! They are the only ones who need to give up worry, leaving us free to worry with abandon!”
But it is not that easy. The whole point of recording the instructions to the twelve is so that we will follow them, too. We, who are the heirs to the disciples, the successors who can trace our way back to the same "yes" said by those who also had so little faith. Whenever we see the word disciple we are meant to read ourselves into the text, going into the world to make other disciples, messing up over and over again…but not giving up. Standing up and trying again.
So how do we translate the message "don’t worry" two-thousand years later? What worries can we shed as we imagine our life together and the state of the church? The state of the union? This may be harder than you think.
Rev. Dr. Debi Powell-Maxwell
11/24/2024
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