Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink, or about your body, what you will wear... For it is the gentiles who strive for all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.
Matthew 6:25, 32
These are the first and last verses of our New Testament reading, and to what we may think of as hard-nosed realism, their advice may seem disastrously impractical. There is however a sense in which it is literally and powerfully practical. If our highest priority was the kingdom of God, that is, we would take care of each other. If we were hungry or homeless, our distress would be felt by others, who would supply our needs in such a way that we could bring our own gifts to fruition in service. That is the clear message of the verses that link this opening and closing. Look at the care the Lord gives to birds. Aren't you worth more than they are? The Lord knows what you need far better than you do.
We can see in the growing interest in ecology an effort to understand how the Lord feeds the ravens and clothes the lilies. They survive and thrive because they are participants in an incredibly complex support system. Darwin, to my mind, sends a mixed message in this regard. There is no question that he "accentuates the negative" with his personalization of the process of evolution as "competition" and "struggle." He writes,
We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see a superabundance of food; we do not see or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life; or we forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, are destroyed by bids or beasts of prey . . .
When he chooses the metaphor of struggle, though, he himself “does not see or forgets" the face of nature that is bright with gladness." It's really there, and in fact, his own evidence shows that the bright side is stronger than the dark side. He did indeed write those fateful words, "let the strongest live and the weakest die." but his own research does not support it. He also wrote, "The ultimate result is that each creature tends to become more and more improved in relation to its conditions"; and he added, "This improvement inevitably leads to the gradual advancement of the organization of the greater number of living beings throughout the world."
Of course, if "let the strongest live and the weakest die" were actually the rule, we would still have the dinosaurs and mastodons, and there would certainly be no bunny rabbits or butterflies. How could anyone observe the world of living creatures and come to that conclusion?
Edward O. Wilson, who is regarded as today's leading Darwinist, has recently written a book entitled The Social Conquest of Earth. Its major theme seems to be that groups that learn to cooperate are better able to compete; and by the end of the book he is suggesting that this might even be applicable on a global scale. He also sees the human race at present "destroying its own biosphere," and remarks, "The origin of modern humanity was a stroke of luck—good for our species for a while, bad for most of the rest of life forever."
Anything that is "bad for most of the rest of life forever" is surely not good for us. In the light of the Sermon on the Mount, the heart of the problem is precisely identified in Wilson's title, The Social Conquest of Earth. Jesus is telling us that the earth is not our enemy, that in Einstein's image, the universe is a friendly place. WE don't need to run scared. If we seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, we will "behold the face of nature bright with gladness," we will be supplied with "a superabundance of food."
Why "on earth" do we keep trying to conquer our friend? The example comes to mind of being a passenger in a car driven by someone less cautious than you. You keep your foot on an imaginary brake pedal. There is a felt need to be in control, and the underlying motivation is anxiety. We feel a need to be in control of the world because we don't trust the Lord who is at the wheel.
This felt need to be in control is common that we take it for granted. It is like the air we breathe—most of the time we aren't aware that it's there. It is the shadow side of our sense of responsibility, which is why our third reading highlights our sense of self-importance.
So let's step back a little, and look at the control problem against its background. To begin with, we are important. To paraphrase a 60s T-shirt, the Lord made each one of us, and the Lord don't make junk. The Lord designed us to be of value, specifically, to be of value to each other. To the extent that I am wrapped up in myself, though, I am blind to the extent to which I am of value to others, so I have to prove my worth to myself. I do this by trying to control a world that I perceive as challenging my importance—a world that is essentially hostile. This is what our theology labels "a love of dominion from the love of self."
This, I am coming to believe, is the shadow side of our whole obsession with science and technology. Huston Smith once remarked that the cornerstone of science is the controlled experiment, which means that science can study only what it can control. If you immerse yourself completely in what you can control, you are bound to lose your sense of the reality of anything you cannot control—in the case of the physical sciences, of anything spiritual.
We have obviously made tremendous technological strides in the last fifty years; and yet the best research indicates that there has been little if any increase in our sense of well-being. If we put these two observations together, we may wonder why we assume that the residents of other planets will be far more technologically advanced that we. Edward Wilson speculates that on the contrary, they may have found out "that the immense problems of their evolving civilizations could not be solved by competition among religious faiths, or ideologies or warrior nations." They may, that is, have learned that the secret of survival is not competition but cooperation.
Actually, it seems that this is not a matter of either/or, but a matter of priorities. In a friendly environment, we can compete in order to cooperate. That is, we can compete to see who is best at meeting some particular need. Or, we can cooperate in order to compete, in which we make our own contribution to the unfriendliness of the environment in which we find ourselves.
Because the Lord created us to cooperate, we are given the ability to do so. We are given the ability to understand ourselves and each other. We are given the ability to discern what needs to be done, and the freedom to choose to do it. Granted, our understanding is far from perfect, and our freedom is limited, still much of the time we have at least a rough sense of how we should behave. I suspect that most of us could think of some particularly important decisions we have had to make, but I suspect also that of we thought it through, we would find that these altered our circumstances more than they altered our character. Our character is the cumulative effect of millions of little decisions in our dealings with each other. That character has been years in the making, and is not likely to change overnight. We very gradually learn to trust, or to mistrust.
The controversial evangelical minister Rob Bell put the central issue very clearly in his book, Love Wins: "We do not need to be rescued from God." We do, though, need to be rescued from an image of God as unforgiving, as condemning sinners to eternal hellfire. This is not the Father Jesus spoke of, the Father who knows that we have need of all these things, the Father who relieves us of our anxieties, our fears.
A tremendous amount of ink has been spilled on the issue of "theodicy," on efforts to reconcile the goodness and omnipotence of God with the actuality and ugliness of evil. The simplest and most satisfactory reconciliation seems to lie in recognizing that a truly loving God would not compel us to do good—that is, would leave us free to do evil, at least to some extent.
Even the best intellectual argument, though, does not get to the heart of the matter. One of Benjamin Franklin's couplets puts it in a nutshell: "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still." If, deep down, we feel that God is unforgiving, we cannot help but feel that we must look out for Number One that we can't afford to let things get out of control. In doctrinal language, this is the love of dominion from the love of self, and it has no built-in limits. Its ultimate goal is the conquest of earth.
This in turn calls to mind a variant of the familiar Serenity Prayer: "Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change, the courage to change the person I can, and the wisdom to know that it's me." We cannot make people others forgive us. What we can do is practice forgiveness ourselves. In little ways, day after day. We can try to understand why others, like ourselves, can seem thoughtless or unkind, and recognize that if we do not understand, we should not pass judgment. We should be honest about our own inclination toward thoughtlessness and unkindness, knowing that we have our own bad days, and reminding ourselves that those bad days are by no means the whole story.
In other words, we can practice forgiving ourselves, not in the sense of making excuses for ourselves but in the sense of looking for the fear, the anxiety that brings out the worst in us. We can be quite sure that it is in there somewhere, because on days when God's in our heaven, so to speak, the world seems friendly, and we have no inclination to find fault with it.
After all, the first and greatest commandment is to love the Lord our God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our mind (Matthew 22:37f.); and how can we love an unforgiving God, a God who is constantly looking over our shoulder, just waiting for us to make a mistake? Our theology tells us again and again that God is love. If we really believed that, we would know and feel that God is loveable.
The second commandment, to love the neighbor as we love ourselves, is like the first, and this brings us full circle back to our text. To the extent that we actually love the Lord, we are not governed by our anxieties, so we are not constantly on the defensive. We do not try to manipulate or control others. To the extent that we trust the Lord's leading, we find ourselves looking for the doors that are opening for us, looking for the inner gifts of prudence and wisdom that the Lord is constantly offering us, seeking "the kingdom of God and his righteousness," helping our tiny corner of the universe show a little more of its underlying friendliness—and ultimately, all these things, everything we need, will be given us as well.
Amen.
