Worry Warts
The Rev. Samuel Schaal
First Congregational Church of Wauwatosa
Oct. 12, 2008

Exodus 32:1-14
Philippians 4:4-9
Matthew 22:1-14

Worry warts are not a dermatological condition. Worry warts are sometimes what we are. At least, when I was growing up, my dad said to me a lot, “Don’t be such a worry wart!”

After giving this sermon its title, I began to wonder about the origin of the phrase “worry wart” and so of course, I went to the fount of all information, the Internet, and found out that we really don’t know. Several sources said the phrase might come from a character in “Out Our Way,” a newspaper comic strip that ran from 1922 to 1957. The Worry Wart was a young boy who caused worry in others, rather than being such a worrier himself.

Well, I suspect that this week we have all been worry warts with the economy. By week’s end the stock market gyrated up and down, sending the Dow Jones industrials bouncing around and we were perhaps happy that on Friday the market was only down 128 points.

It’s not been an easy week for all of us, no matter where we are in terms of age or finances or financial planning or hopes for retirement.

I was out of town Monday night on a brief overnight clergy retreat and got back in town Tuesday afternoon to see this headline in Tuesday’s paper: “Fear Sends Dow Below 10,000.” The headline accurately captured the spiritual dynamic. What we’ve seen this week was a huge expression of our individual and corporate fear. So perhaps that fear is the real problem we face.

Amid this week’s condition we hear Paul’s affirmation: “Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your request be made known to God.”

Really?! Even though we’re experiencing what is perhaps the most traumatic week in the Dow Jones history? Even though we’re watching our retirement accounts shrink? Even though the credit markets are gripped in fear? “Do not worry,” the apostle tells us?

One of the themes throughout our lessons this morning is this very affirmation about faith in the face of fear. This morning’s lessons all have something to say about how we worry, and give excessive attention to the short-term details of our lives.

The text from the Old Testament, or Jewish scripture, gives us a marvelous example of how worry can express itself in society and cause fear to grow to dangerous levels. Israel’s apostasy can be attributed to excess worry of the people.

Moses is up on Mount Sinai receiving the tablets from God. He’s left Aaron in charge of the people at the foot of the mountain. The people are getting tired of waiting on Moses and this made them anxious. So they decide they need a god they can worship, a god they can better understand and not this invisible God on the mountain.

So Aaron says, perhaps buying in to the anxiety of his people, “Okay, let’s make a god!” and they donate their gold jewelry to melt down and made an idol of a calf. This gives them comfort to have this god they can see.

(There’s an interesting observation here. In times of a credit crunch people lose confidence in the markets and so turn to more tangible wealth such as gold and we’ve seen the price of gold increase greatly these last several weeks. This is the same principle of the people who lost faith in the real God and turned to a more tangible god of gold.)

Amid all this reveling, an interesting thing happens. God sees what’s going on, becomes angry, and wants to destroy them. But Moses, in an almost comical episode, bargains with God. “O Lord, what would the Egyptians say?” he first says. And then he appeals to the covenantal relationship between God and Israel. Moses appeals to the relationship that God himself established. And this causes God to change God’s mind. The point here is not that God is indecisive, but that God’s justice is tempered with mercy. We might say that God offered the people a bailout!

So the sin of Israel is to substitute a produced God for the sovereign one who is not immediately available. Perhaps the real sin of Israel is to worry excessively and not trust God.

In the Gospel passage, Matthew’s parable of the wedding banquet is a parallel of a similar text in Luke, the parable of the great dinner. In Luke (14:15-24), the host invites people to a dinner, but the guests were too busy worrying about their businesses and affairs to go to the feast. So the host invited “the poor, crippled, blind, and lame” and his house was filled. Luke, in typical fashion, emphasizes inclusion of the outcast in the community of Christ.

Matthew takes this story and makes it into an allegory that emphasizes the Jewish rejection of Jesus as Messiah. But the underlying theme of both accounts is essentially the same: that God has prepared a feast for us, and our first response is to not come to the feast. The theme of these parables are best expressed by Auntie Mame’s famous line, “Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death.”

The Philippians text gives us the interpretive key for today’s lessons: “Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.”

This might sound like simple, rose-colored-glasses kind of optimism. “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” as one song put it. But really, it’s grounded in Paul’s experience with God in community. He writes this letter from prison awaiting trial and he’s not sure of the outcome of that experience. Despite his immediate situation of being imprisoned, he expresses this great affirmation of God’s benevolence out of the experience of the early church. Paul speaks from the depths of his relationship with the people and with God.

And so it is with us. We can be worry warts about the state of the world, about the state of our accounts, or we can live out of the faith as a community that even in difficult times, God is present.

These times are difficult. I worry about finances. I worry about retirement. I have felt, this week, the pull of fear around me. I have heard the closing bell of the market these last few days on television and I have seen the anxiety and the fear on the faces of the traders, of our national leaders, even of our global leaders as the fear has spread beyond our own borders. I know the fear in my own life.

And yet, and I borrow this from Jim Santelle’s stewardship testimonial of last week, we need not be held hostage by this fear. For whatever happens, we participate in the everlasting household of God and we are invited to the table of God’s abundance, even amid the appearance of lack and the appearance of scarcity in our world right now.

This is not a time to retreat into our fears. This is a time to more forward in the community of Christ and be the people God has called us to be.

For the church stands as a testament in our secular culture that God is alive in communities of faith, of acceptance, of abundance. That even in tough economic times, we need to be mindful of being disciples of Christ, ambassadors of God, and that includes letting God’s invitation to the abundant life work and flow through us.

When we express fear, when we live our of our fear and not our faith, when we fail to think about “what is true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable,” and especially when we fail to “keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me” — then we fail to be the people and the church God clearly calls us and all disciples to be.

Right now no one knows where the markets are going. But our response is to live abundantly. This doesn’t mean racking up more credit card debt. It doesn’t mean living in blissful ignorance of what’s happening. It means in fact, probably paring down how we live and getting down to the essentials. That’s what a market correction does, of course—it reminds us of our excesses and forces us to correct that.

This correction might reduce our emotional dependence on consumerism, so that we’ll value people more than things. This correction might remind us to treat our employees and those we lead with a more humane touch, so that we treat them as God’s subjects and not mere objects to increase the profit of our company or organization or team. This correction might remind us that the quality of our lives is dependent upon our spiritual and emotional habits more than the amount of money in our accounts. This correction might return us to a simpler, deeper, more sustaining life than we’ve seen when markets exploded upward and onward, seemingly without end.

Especially, I hope this correction does not reduce our giving to benevolent causes and to this church, but that we sustain and even increase our giving, to fund the ministries of this church abundantly so that the church might minister abundantly.

For we must remember that there are those in our wider community, as well as in our own church, who do not have the resources to ride out a sustained recession. The community’s needs will increase. People need food, shelter, the essentials of life, and our Scriptural witness is clear—crystal clear—that we are to welcome the stranger, feed the hungry, and offer fellowship and welcome to the excluded. During this time let us shift the focus from ourselves to the needs of the world, for the church exists to minister to the world and to bless the world.

Most especially, may our faith hold out. A story is told, and it is a true story, of two women in the Depression. One was a partner in a religious publishing company and the company started to have financial difficulties in the 1930s. One employee approached the partner and said, “We must pray that our money holds out.” “Oh, no,” the owner responded, “We must pray that our faith holds out.”

In these times, the world needs our faith. The world needs our optimism grounded in the reality of Christian community. The world needs God’s abundance.

Worry warts are not a dermatological condition, but excessive worry does show in the body of our lives and can block the divine intention in our lives.

So amid the fears of this age, let there be faith and let it begin with us. Amid the scarcity of this age, let there be abundance, and let it begin with us. Amid the anxiety of this age, let there be peace in the world, and let it begin with us.

So may it be. Amen.