Anxiety with a Side of Fear
Matthew 6:25-34
Epiphany 3a
February 1, 2015
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
Being in a room with a crying baby is hard, especially a baby that can't be comforted. Or worse yet being on an airplane with one. The few times I've had that unhappy experience I could feel the blood pressure of every passenger going up.
I imagine that if there's anything worse than being with a crying baby it's being the crying baby. Babies have little ability to tell the adults around them what they need. They just cry. I say they have little ability, but that's more than none at all. Parents learn to tell the difference between the "I'm hungry, feed me" cry and the "I'm feeling scared, hold me" cry. And some parents have learned to use some very basic American Sign Language to talk to and listen to their babies. But even so, babies have a hard time telling us what they want and need.
So they resort to telling us loudly that they are unhappy--they have unmet needs--and they let us figure out just what it is they want. We human beings seem to be hard-wired for it: to figure out what babies need and to meet that need. It's a good thing, too, because human babies are absolutely helpless. Fawns are born and a few minutes later they wobble to their feet. Eaglets batter their way out of their eggs and are soon jostling their siblings to get first crack at supper. Human babies cry to survive. Their ability to make us anxious by crying is a survival skill. Our anxious response to babies who cry means that our little band of humans will survive and replace itself.
The psychiatrist Erik Erikson that we grow through a number of predictable life stages, each having to do with meeting a basic challenge of being human. In the first two years of our lives the basic question that we confront is "What kind of universe is this? Will anyone or anything even notice that I am here? Is it the kind of place where I can live? Will it meet my basic needs?"
Of course we don't do this in so many words. But we do come to have a sense of an answer to those questions by the time we are two or so. Most of us had our basic needs met more or less well enough. We were fed often enough when we were hungry, we were held often enough when we were lonely or scared, the people around us paid us enough attention. We have a basic sense of trust and hope.
At the same time, the universe doesn't exist simply to give us what we want. There were times when even what we needed was slow in coming, even when we were a year old and a lot cuter than we are now. So the sense of the universe we tend to have is that it is mostly trustworthy. Our sense is that our needs will be met most of the time. We matter some to the universe. But, we have some anxiety. Some of us have more and some less, but all of us have some.
That's not a bad thing. A little anxiety keeps us on our toes. It helps us keep an eye out for stalking lions and other dangers that might be lurking about.
And that was fine until some local tough guy got the idea into his head that he could use our anxiety and decided to start calling himself a king. He taught us to worry about the tough guy from the next town. In the meantime the tough guy in the next town was telling his people the same thing. The king's arguments became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Our anxiety about the universe is a spark that is always ready to be fanned into a flame. People seeking power have always understood this. In the twentieth century until the advertising industry made a science of it.
If our anxiety is at its root a fear of not having our basic needs met, we would think that we wouldn't be very anxious. After all, we're warm even in the winter--at least when the heating system is working the way it should. We're well-fed--even too well-fed--and our refrigerators and cupboards have enough food in them to keep us alive for quite a few days. We can lock our doors at night and besides we mostly trust our neighbors, so we can sleep without having to keep one eye open. We should be carefree.
Guess what? The places where people suffer the most from anxiety are North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.1 The places where we are the most anxious are the places where we have the least reason to fear not having the basic needs of life met. Pundits reacted to this discovery by blaming the precarious job market, the loss of control of daily life, and other factors.
Jesus directs our attention in a slightly different direction. He points to the natural world around us. What is the level of suffering from anxiety among day lilies and Queen Anne's lace? How much Xanax do goldfinches need in order to get through their day? When we look, of course, we find that very few day lilies and Queen Anne's lace have been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. And, unless the ingredients list on the bird seed I buy is incomplete, very few goldfinches need any Xanax at all.
No, the lilies are beautiful and the goldfinches are carefree. So, Jesus says, we should be the same way.
So, have you ever tried telling yourself when you're feeling anxious, "Stop that! Be carefree. Be unconcerned."? How did that work for you? So now, not only am I anxious, but I'm feeling like a failure because I can't do what Jesus told me to do. Guilt on top of anxiety: that's just where I wanted to be.
No, we can't stop being anxious by willing it so. But that's not really where Jesus is telling us to look.
Our reading began with the word, therefore. Whenever a sentence starts with "therefore", we have a clue that we need to look at what came just before. Unfortunately, that sentence isn't in our reading. But I know because I have the whole Bible with me, so I can just look it up. And I'll even share it with you. And here's what Jesus said just before he said, "No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth."
You cannot serve God and wealth. Notice that this isn't a command or even advice; it's a simple statement of fact. We cannot serve God and wealth. It can't be done. We can try. But then what we get is anxiety. The harder we try--as individuals, as families, as towns, as a nation, as a world--the harder we try to serve God and wealth, the more we get anxiety.
Therefore... Therefore don't worry about your life...
Better, but not there yet.
Jesus gives a lovely little list of things not to do. And we can't do them for the same reason that we can't not think of elephants when we're told not to. Our minds don't work that way. But, if I tell you to think about butterflies, there's a much better chance that you won't think about elephants.
So, Jesus, at the end of the list of things not to think about, tells us to set our sights on God and on God's justice. If we do that, if we give our lives to connecting with God and to seeking God's justice, to living justly ourselves, and to seeing that justice is done for others, then we see a way forward. It's not an easy way forward--in fact it will be hard--but it's possible, and that's all we're asking for.
This, then, is God's dream for us: that we might live our lives carefree and unconcerned, trusting in the goodness of God's world and of the God who gave it to us. We live into God's dream by seeking God and God's justice for ourselves, our neighbors, and our world.
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Pederson, Traci. “Anxiety More Common in the Western World, Depression in East.” Cited 31 January 2015. Online: http://psychcentral.com/news/2012/07/26/anxiety-more-common-in-the-western-world-depression-in-east/42253.html.↩
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