Church of the Holy City

The Worries of this World

The Worries of this World

Exodus 32:1-14 Mark 4:1-20

This talk is inspired by the parable of the sower that we heard from Mark. I have heard that parable all my life and thought I knew it well. I used it at a chapel service at Paulhaven, and heard something in it that never struck me before. It was as if I heard that line for the first time. The line I refer to is that about worrying. Jesus interprets the seed sown among thorns as follows:
Still others, like seed sown among thorns, hear the word; but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other worldly things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful (Mark 4:18).
What really struck me was the line about worries of this life choking the word. I have worries, and I’m sure you do as well. But it never occurred to me that worrying might interfere with our relationship with God. I checked some other translations and some say that the cares of this world choke the word. Cares from the world is slightly different from worries, but I think the general meaning is the same. The message here, I think, is that worrying about the things of this world can block our relationship with God. This includes worrying about money and other things of this world.
I am taking a new perspective on my finances. Before I went to Paulhaven, I used to fret about my next bill. I would sit at home and calculate how much money I had in the bank, and about how much was going to my bills—my new car payment, my new insurance rates, my rent, my student loans—and how much I had left over to spend, and how little that was, and was I going to make it till the next paycheck.
Then I spent that wonderful week at Paulhaven as the camp pastor. I led chapel every morning. I visited the classes to help with any questions that may have come up. And I led a confirmation class in the afternoon. I watched the teens play soccer, played baseball, and ate three square meals each day on a regular schedule. And you know, the whole week I never once thought about money. That’s when it dawned on me how little I really needed to be happy.
You know, none of that worrying about my bills and my paycheck changed anything. All the debts and income remained the same. And each month I had enough to get by. These times with the recession and all make finances a high concern for many people. But I wonder if worrying about it fixes anything. What makes me upset about money is all those things I want to do for fun, that I might not be able to do—like going skiing in the mountains this winter. But that whole week at Paulhaven, doing anything other than what I was doing never occurred to me. I resolved not to worry about money anymore and to take each day as it comes. And so far I’m doing pretty good. I’m not worrying about money and I’m not sitting at home calculating how much money I have in the bank and how many bills I have to pay. And you know what? I’m happier.
Money isn’t the only thing we worry about. We worry about our families; we worry about our friends; we worry about the war in Afghanistan; we worry about taxes; we worry about the world economy. We can worry about anything we care about. In this sense, maybe the translation that talks about cares of the world fits better.
In fact, we worry most about just things that we can’t do anything about. And that’s why we worry. When things don’t go the way we think they should, and especially when we’re powerless to do anything about it, then we worry. When we see people we love in trouble, and we are unable to provide their needs, we worry. Or maybe our children heading down a troublesome path, and we are helpless to influence them and they shrug off our well-intentioned guidance, we worry. We want to fix what is wrong, and when we can’t we worry. We can take on the sorrows of the whole world and when we find we can’t do anything to change them, we worry about the state of affairs of the world. Cares of the world.
What we are doing when we worry in this way, is trying to take God’s power into our own hands. When things are out of our control, we want to take God’s place and make them go the way we think they should go. Worrying, in this sense, is not trusting in God. It’s not leaving to God the things that God’s providence guides in God’s way. When we are tempted to worry, we need to let go and let God. I think that this is why Jesus says that worrying about the things of this world choke off the word. By imagining that we are God, or that we have God’s power to make things go the way we think that they should, we are replacing God with self—no matter how well intentioned the efforts of ourselves may be.
We see the worst-case scenario in our Old Testament passage. In the Exodus passage, the Israelites are worried that Moses has been away too long. The Bible tells us that he went up Mount Sinai for 40 days and nights. The Israelites say, “As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him” (32:1). So they take the matter into their own hands. They made for themselves their own gods that they could see and touch. The true God that spoke through Moses was new and uncertain to them. They had seen in Egypt and in the land of Canaan magnificent statues of the gods of those lands. Now Moses told them about a God they couldn’t see or touch. Then Moses had been away so long they worried about whether they had been abandoned. The height of blasphemy is when the golden calf that was made by their own hands was called the gods who brought them out of Egypt. Thus they were claiming that the golden calf had done what Yahweh had done for them.
At its worst, the golden calf is a loss of faith in God. When the things we have to go through seem too hard to bear, when the cares of this world seem too overwhelming, we can doubt whether God hears our cries for help. There is a myth that some have, that says that believers in God will have things always go well for them. Some think that things will go their way if only they believe. Then, when things go badly, they wonder, “Where is God now?” I remember talking with a woman whose car broke down late at night way across town. She said, “Why is this happening to me? I’m a good girl.” I know of others who look at tragedies in the world and say that God doesn’t care about us, or still worse, that there is no God. They then give up and turn to worldly pleasures for satisfaction. They make their own gods that they can manipulate and that bring them tangible benefits, rather than keep faith in an unseen but very powerful real God.
There are many hard things in life that I can’t explain. I continue to search and question. But I wonder, how would things look if we could see them from God’s eyes instead of our limited, mortal eyes? If we had a vision of the infinite interconnectedness of everything—of how free will intersects with personal ambition and altruism and worldly limitations—of how God’s infinite love for his creation intersected with human willfulness, maybe things would make more sense to us.
But we can’t see things as God does. And we don’t have God’s power to change the world or even to fix one human being the way we think he or she should be fixed. We can only work in our limited, finite way to effect world change and to influence the ones we love as we feel we should. Then we need to let go and let God. Frost says, “My long scythe whispered to the ground/and left the hay to make.” We mow the field, but God turns the crop into hay. We need to let go of outcomes that are beyond our power.
So these reflections revolve around the startling idea that worrying can choke off the word. I interpret this passage to mean that worrying is a kind of golden calf. It’s a desire to control things beyond our control, and a kind of impatience with God’s providence. Perhaps the real answer to those things we worry about is to wait and have faith. To wait for God to act in God’s way in God’s time. I think that God knows what He’s up to.