Worry
Thank you so much for having me, though I’m still not completely sure that the invitation to preach reached the right person at Campion Hall. I’m neither a public figure nor a senior member of the clergy, but a cog in the administrative machinery of the University – as Senior Tutor at Campion Hall, the Jesuit Permanent Private Hall. My “eminence” consists in world-leading contributions to the preparation of committee agendas and to the volume of the University’s email traffic. But I’m deeply honoured to be asked, and grateful to be here with this congregation.
Over 25 years of working in this University (longer than is strictly healthy), I’ve seen – and felt – a lot of worry. Anxiety is an engine of this institution, perhaps as much as its decision-making bodies. Some of us have a superstition that if we’re not consumed with worry about the next deadline or presentation, we’re not doing it right. This is an environment in which individuals are constantly being assessed, evaluated, reported on, reviewed by acid-tongued peers. No wonder we get the idea that scholarship is all about our individual performance. No wonder that some of us hang so much significance on a numerical grade, or the endorphine hit of some nice feedback. It’s a system run by and for perfectionists and worriers, and there aren’t many “lilies of the field” to use the phrase in P.G. Wodehouse’s sense, referring to languid youth of leisured status, drifting through life without a care. Though, maybe one or two undergraduates of my acquaintance have fit that description.
Many of us experience worry as a default setting, a constant inner tyranny: oppressed by other people’s expectations, by fears about what might go wrong. But worry can also have real weight, fixed on serious troubles and heavy responsibilities: health concerns, supporting a community, caring for a child. Jesus’ consoling words to the disciples in today’s Gospel reading have an echo of the Governor of Utah about them: “do not worry about your life, look at the birds, consider the lilies; touch grass, hug a family member, log off.” Telling someone not to worry isn’t usually very effective and I’m sure I’m not the only middle-aged woman who bridles slightly at what at first sight feels dismissive and blithe advice, as though life’s responsibilities are so easily shaken off.
Do not worry about your life, what you’ll eat or drink. Quite apart from our personal anxieties and responsibilities, it would seem blithe indeed not to feel worried about the world around us, about the state of democracy and the planet, about mind-blowing corruption among the most powerful, unjust war, food insecurity, poverty. We need the kind of concern that spurs to action, and faces real problems. Paul’s words in Romans 8 acknowledge this: creation is groaning under exploitation, in need of liberation, and we ourselves are groaning inwardly, longing for the signs of hope.
Both New Testament readings this morning offer something other than superficial comfort; they call for a reorientation towards hope rather than fear. They anchor hope in the liberating revelation of who we really are as human beings, and where our dignity and security lie.
The verse immediately preceding today’s Gospel, Matthew 6.24, provides an important preface. This is the famous saying: “No one can serve two masters, for a slave will … be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.” (That word “Mammon” meaning material possessions or security.) The connotation of the verb to worry - merimnáō – is, I understand, to divide into parts, or pull apart in different directions. “Do not be divided, don’t be pulled in different directions”, Jesus says to his disciples, after telling them they cannot serve two masters.
Recent news has offered a shocking insight into the depth of degradation of some of the very rich, and their dehumanising exploitation of the vulnerable. This is a stark picture of humanity curved in on itself (to use Augustine’s phrase), and it seems more apparent than ever that you cannot serve both God and wealth. Some commentary on the passage has stigmatized worry as arising from this idolatrous enslavement to material security. But I see it rather differently; coupled with the Romans passage, in which creation longs for “the freedom of the glory of the children of God” to be revealed, the core message of this text seems rather to be that our truest identity, the dignity of our life, consists in more than meeting the body’s needs, essential as this is for us as for the birds and the lilies.
Jesus, as many theologians after him have done, turns to the natural world to talk about who humans are in relation to the Creator. Look at the birds of the air, consider the lilies of the field. Being in nature is pretty good therapy for worry: it’s an anchor in reality, in the present moment, and in our connection to all things. Recent research suggests that the presence of birds has an especially positive impact on mental health; how wonderful to find that this congregation has cultivated Oxford’s bird life at Holywell Cemetery. The research of the University’s ornithologists, though unsentimental, has deepened our appreciation of the social sophistication of birds: they help each other as groups, not just in pairs, in caring for the young, navigation and nest-building. Birds flourish, as do we, in social cooperation. This is inspiring in itself, but observing their grace, delicacy, weightlessness and freedom also brings us into contact with something essentially good and beautiful and innocent imprinted in nature.
In my own research on religious radicalism in the seventeenth century, I’ve encountered a cast of colourful characters, including one Roger Crab who was a great lover of birds. Crab kept a hat shop, before serving in the parliamentarian army in the English civil wars, when his skull was “cloven to the braine” in the fighting. After the wars he started to experience a regular visitation of “birds of the Aire, which”, he reported, “every day brought me intelligence according to my worldly occasions”. The birds would warn him of bad weather, and loss of cattle or corn. Naturally, at this point in the story, one has to wonder about the impact of the head injury on Crab’s sense of reality. But there’s something moving about his account of how birds tended to and radically converted this wounded soldier.
He became a hermit, wearing sackcloth, and was so averse to violence of all kinds that he refused to eat meat, subsisting on turnips, dock leaves, herbs and roots. Crab identified the root of evil in his time as the will to dominate, to accumulate property and become “destroyers of fellow creatures”. There’s a parallel here with Søren Kierkegaard’s discourses on the Lilies of the Field, where he saw the core message of our Gospel passage as a revelation of what it means to “be human”. The most damaging perversion of true humanity for Kierkegaard is the domineering spirit that tries to appropriate everything to themselves, saying, “See, it is my image, it is my idea, it is my will”. (“It’s my Nobel prize, my name on that building.” – I paraphrase.) Such a person “domineeringly refuses to go out of oneself, domineeringly wants to crush the other person’s distinctiveness.”
In his own confrontation with the selfish nature, Roger Crab looked for Christian community marked by equality and mutual responsibility: “one cannot have a being in this body to uphold it without the other, so that every one [is] equally ballanced.” The model of redeemed humanity, innocent of violence and perfect in solidarity, was Christ. For Crab, Christ is to humanity as the dove is to birds and the lamb to beasts. But it’s not just that Christ is a moral exemplar; he is God with us, showing us where we come from, what we are in our truest and most free selves, and what it means to be subjects of the kingdom of God. This kingdom is no domineering tyranny. It’s the kingdom of the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful.
This is what grounds hope and drives out worry: not freedom from work or responsibility or suffering, but a rooting in the knowledge that the real power at the heart of all creation is love. As Lent approaches, perhaps we don’t need to go full Roger Crab in an ascetical protest against violence and greed. But I pray that in this season we will seek first the kingdom of God between us and among us, recognising our interdependence and the bond of love in Christ.
I close with John Wesley’s vision of the kingdom of heaven, in his own University Sermon in 1744:
all are harmless as doves; and being … united in one body by one Spirit … they are all of one heart and of one soul. Neither saith any of them that aught of the things which he possesseth is his own. There is none among them that lacketh.
Amen.