Jesus, Ornithologist
Matthew 6:26-24
It would be naïve not to acknowledge from the outset that gratitude can be a difficult practice. Political animosity, social stratification, economic uncertainty, wars and rumors of wars, not to mention the stress and grief of daily life. My God! Who can find gratitude amidst all of this?
It’s easy to get lost in grief, stress, and anxiety. I get lost frequently. I have a poem hanging in my office that helps me at those times. It’s a poem called The Peace of Wild Things by poet, farmer, and faithful Christian Wendell Berry.
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Did you hear the echoes of Jesus in there? When overcome with anxiety, pause, look to the birds of the air and the earth beneath your feet. Rest. Experience the peace of gratitude, and in that peace, you are able to finally imagine an alternative.
I think this is what Jesus means when he tells people not to be anxious. Jesus is not telling people to accept their poverty or their insecurity. He is most likely saying these words to poor people who know what it means to go without. They are well acquainted with the pangs of an empty stomach. Refusing to be anxious is an act of faith in God and an act of defiance against a system that has reduced these people’s concerns to mere survival. Worry/anxiety is a spiral that ensnares us in thinking that the way things are is the way they will always be. It blinds us to the possibility of change.
What does Jesus tell them to do instead? To seek God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness. Why? How can that possibly help?
Because it asks them to envision what God’s kingdom and righteousness look like when lived out. Jesus had just taught them to pray for the real coming of God’s kingdom so that the will of God might be done both on earth and in heaven. This is not a simple instruction to personal piety but a radical call to an ethic–a lived pattern of action–that seeks to live out God’s kingdom on earth. And it all begins with a practice of gratitude.
Rev. Ryan Young
