Thanksgiving Eve: How to Overcome Worry

[This message was shared during the joint Thanksgiving Eve worship celebration of All Saints Lutheran Church (Cincinnati, Ohio), Lutheran Church of the Resurrection (Cincinnati, Ohio), and Friendship Lutheran Church (Amelia, Ohio), on November 22, 2006.]

Matthew 6:25-34

I spent a long time as a student: thirteen years in public school, four years in college, four years in seminary. Somewhere around the end of my twentieth and the beginning of my twenty-first and final year as a student, I figured something out. Do you want to know what it was? It was this: If the teacher repeats something, it’s probably important. (I figured that out all by myself. I didn’t say I was the brightest student.)

Now, I bring this up for a reason. Jesus’ words to us tonight come from the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew. Ed Markquart, a wonderful Lutheran pastor in Seattle, has calculated that in the four gospel books of the New Testament--Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John--”there are 60 teachings, 40 parables, and 25 miracles of Jesus.” And the Sermon on the Mount contains a whopping twenty-five of Jesus’ sixty teachings. They come at us at such a furious pace in chapters 5, 6, and 7 of Matthew’s book, that you think Jesus would hardly have the time to repeat Himself in order to highlight what’s important.

But He does repeat Himself in the ten verses that make up our Bible lesson. In fact, Jesus punches home the same teaching three times in these verses. And then, to underscore His teaching, He asks seven rhetorical questions, all with the same message: DO NOT WORRY!

Jesus also gives us plenty of good reasons for heeding that imperative. He says that life is more than food or clothing and that if God the Father takes care of the birds, He’ll take care of us. He says that worrying won’t add a single second to our earthly lives and that to be consumed with these things is to be as futile in our thinking as the Gentiles with no knowledge of God. I think that Jesus would endorse the words of Canadian folk rocker Bruce Cockburn, when he sings, “You can take the wisdom of this world/ And give it to the ones who think it all ends here.”

You and I know that Jesus is right. We shouldn’t worry. We know that God cares about our every moment. We know that we’re in the palms of God’s hands, that God hears our prayers. We know too, that all with faith in Jesus Christ belong to God eternally. Even non-believing people realize the silliness of giving our minds over to worry. The writer Mark Twain, an atheist, once said, “I am an old man and have known great troubles, but most of them never happened.”

So, why exactly do we worry?

And what does this all have to do with Thanksgiving?

We worry, let’s face it, because we’re control freaks. Adam and Eve were lured into sin because the serpent told them that when they ate the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they would “be like God.” It bothers us that while, unlike all of God’s other creatures, we can project and to some extent, predict, what the future will bring, we can’t control what happens to us. This past week, several people on the staff of the school where my wife works learned that they’re dealing with various threatening health conditions. I’m sure that when this year began, that wasn’t part of their plan.

Yet we persist in stewing over things over which we have no control. I once visited a man who had recently undergone a quadruple heart bypass surgery. The procedure had gone well and he was recovering. But his face was twisted with worry when I arrived. “How are we going to solve the federal budget deficit?” he asked me. His wife shook her head and told me, “He worries about that all the time.”

It’s good for us to make plans and it’s good for us to be engaged in trying to solve problems in our world. But we need to realize that worrying about things solves nothing. The number one fact of the universe is that God is God and we’re not. So, make your plans and when the time comes, willingly move on to Plan B.

Jesus puts it this way: “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.” Pastor Gerald Mann summarizes Jesus’ imperative this way: Wait to worry. I would add: And live today.

So, worrying is a bad thing. But what’s it got to do with Thanksgiving? Just this: No matter how facile you may be at multitasking, there are two things that are very difficult to do simultaneously. Though you may be able to do them both at the same time for awhile--maybe decades--eventually, one will win out over the other and become the prevailing habit of your life. You can’t keep worrying and remain thankful at the same time.

You see, in the end, worrying is a form of self-worship. Even though we may express our worry by saying things like, “What am I going to do?,” seemingly confessing helplessness, the underlying assumption is that my immediate problems and, by extension, the long-term good of the known universe, depends on me.

Thankfulness, on the other hand, takes an inventory of our lives and asks, “What has God already done?” How has God already blessed us, starting with our eternal salvation through the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ? I liked it a few years ago when Michael Bridges, of Lost and Found, told me that instead of those little "What Would Jesus Do?" bracelets that were so popular at the time, there ought to be ones that said, "What Has Jesus Done?" Thankfulness is a byproduct of faith and it gives us the capacity to face whatever life may bring to us.

The people of this congregation have heard me tell the story of my visit with an elderly farmer shortly after I was ordained twenty-two years ago. “You know, Pastor,” he said, “if you’re a farmer, you have to have faith or you won’t last long.” He went on to explain that you could pick the best seeds for your crops and be diligent about cultivation and weeding. But farmers know that they have no control over the sun or the rain or temperatures that if not just right, could scorch or freeze their crops. What this farmer discovered is that over his long life, God could be trusted. Thankfulness displaced worry. Faith supplanted anxiety.

I found this to be true generally of the people of that congregation in northwestern Ohio. And out of this thankful attitude, not only was worry banished, something else happened. Thankfulness led to generosity. I never saw people who were so generous in giving to the relief of hungry people around the world. Here in the burbs, we may go to Biggs, Meijers, or Kroger and take food for granted. But those folks knew what a miracle food is and they were thankful.

And we followers of Jesus have much for which to be thankful. This past week, I heard again a story that took place during the Holocaust, that spasm of murder and barbarism perpetrated by Nazi Germany against the Jews. When the Nazis put people in concentration camps, they would work the imprisoned until they could no longer do anything. Then, they would execute them.

One family was composed of a father, a mother, and their two children, one of whom suffered from a physical disability. Every day, the mother and two children were taken to one work site and the father was shipped to another. And every night, the father checked on his family. One night though, the father found only his one son. "What happened?" he asked. The surviving child said that the brother with the disability had no longer been able to work. And so the guards had taken him to be executed. He clung to his mother's skirt, sobbing. She picked him up and, holding him close to her, said, "Don't be afraid. I'll go with you." And so she did.

That's akin to the God we have through Jesus Christ. In Christ, God stands with us in the darkest and the worst of times--even in death--so that all who trust in Him will be ushered into eternity with Him! For that, we can be the most thankful of people.

Having heard me say how bad worry is and how important thankfulness is, you all have a right to know whether I worry or not.

Well, I do. I worry every time my son and daughter take trips. I worry how my daughter and son-in-law are going to make it financially down in Florida and how they'll deal with their first holidays on their own. I worry over what my son may do in his future. I worry about bills and debts. I worry too, about the people of Friendship and their spiritual well-being. I worry how Friendship is doing. I worry whether I’ll be able to do a good job as president of the Boys and Girls Club board next year.

But if I worry, then I suppose that I fit right in with the rest of the Church. It’s been my observation that the Church is Jesus Christ’s community of recovering control freaks. We’re learning to replace our worry over tomorrow with gratitude to the God Who tells all who believe in Jesus, “You belong to Me for eternity!”

Years ago, I learned about a man who had a “worry tree.” He had a stressful executive position and every night, before he walked through the front door of his house, he touched a tree close to the porch and said, “God, all these worries I’ve been stewing over, I’m giving to you here now at the worry tree. I’ll pick them up from You tomorrow if You seem to be telling me there’s anything I can do about them. Otherwise, I’m turning them over to You...and thank You!”

Martin Luther said that we recovering control freaks are to live in “daily repentance and renewal.” A suggestion for how to make each day--and not just tomorrow--a day of Thanksgiving: Leave your worries with God and when you do, thank Him for all your blessings. Thankfulness can become our way of life and God can make us a blessing to everyone and everything we touch.

Amen