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Living in a world of worry

8:16am Saturday, 20th August 2011

If there’s any one emotional state that is characteristic of our experience of the contemporary world, it has to be worry.
If we know how to do one thing, it is to worry.
And there’s no shortage of things to be genuinely worried about: we worry about loneliness; whether we will be able to meet our mortgage repayments; our health, and our relationships; we worry about our children – and whether we will be able to keep them safe and how they will turn out. We worry about what people will think of us, and about what will become of us.
Just after the First World War my great-grandfather, who was a brickie living in Newtown, caught influenza. After a short period of illness he died, leaving my great-grandmother and their six children to fend for themselves.
Later in his life, my grandpa, who was ten years old at the time, would recall walking through the family home in bewilderment, and asking his sobbing mother, “What will become of us?”
His mother had no answer.
What will become of us? It is a question that any of us might ask in uncertain times. It is a question that comes from worry: worry that the future is uncertain and insecure. We ask this question because we like to be in control; and every now and again, our experiences remind us how little in control we really are. Our investments shrink. We are made redundant. A spouse walks out. A terrible diagnosis is given. Things happen to those we love.
Everything is plainly not in our control. In fact the very things we need in order to get by in life hang by threads that are prone to snap. What is to become of us?
Perhaps more than ever before in human history, we live in a society which is aware of its vulnerability, and is deeply worried about it. That is to say, on top of the worries that human beings would ordinarily have, our generation seems to worry in a particularly intense way about how things are out of control. The sources of this worry are what novelist David Malouf calls the “two big Es” – the Environment and the Economy.
Worry – which may of course be a genuine concern and responsibility – has become a pathology. It has become a community health problem on a large scale. We have heart conditions and high blood pressure, we abuse recreational and prescription drugs, we have developed anxiety disorders and panic attacks.
Well, here’s something Jesus said: “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes?” In other words, don’t worry about what you need to survive; and don’t worry about being accepted by others.
Is this just a saying with which we can switch the worry button off just by choosing to?
Certainly some people think that is the best way to confront our worries in life. It’s the ostrich method. Should we just deny the reality of how worrisome things are, and whistle a happy tune; sing a song and do breathing exercises in the hope that our worries will just blow over our heads? I mean, as Jesus himself says, you can’t add an hour to your life by worrying about it, can you? In fact, given the health effects of worry, you will probably shorten your life by worrying too much. So, just get on and enjoy life; forget about how insecure things are; we can worry about those things when we get there.
This was of course the philosophy of the popular song “Don’t Worry Be Happy”, a hit in 1988 for Bobby McFerrin. For years the rumour circulated that he had failed to heed his own advice and had committed suicide in 1992. I believed this myself until quite recently; according to Wikipedia, at least, McFerrin is very much alive and well.
If it is any consolation, Felix Powell, the man who wrote the WWI classic “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile” did shoot himself, in 1943.
McFerrin was inspired by the teachings of Indian mystic and guru Meher Baba, who used to end all his letters with “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” Of course the problem with the don’t worry, be happy method is that it refuses to accept the truth: that the life we live is precariously balanced and out of our control; that there is plenty we ought to be worried about. To deny this is to lie to ourselves and to those around us.
But what Jesus is saying is not that we ought to put our heads in the sand and deny reality. It is the opposite: he wants us to accept the deeper reality. And the deeper reality is this: that everything we worry about is in the hands of a loving God.
Jesus says this in two ways.
First: we are valuable to God. Take a look at the birds of the air; think about the lilies of the field. What catering arrangements do they put in place? What stylists do they consult, what tailors do they employ? Do they cook like Jamie Oliver? Do they have Trinny and Susannah to tell them what not to wear? Yet, how well they are fed! How beautifully they are dressed!
Second: God knows how we worry about the future, whether we will survive and have enough, and whether we will find acceptance with others. He knows – even when we don’t let others know.
He knows what you need, and you are precious to him. So, says Jesus, our obsession with securing these things for ourselves, to screen ourselves from our worries – as if we could anyway - is barking up the wrong tree. We don’t live, it turns out, in a chance universe, where we just have to hope that our luck holds out. We live in a world which is governed by our heavenly Father, the one who counts human beings as valuable, and who knows what we need.
And so, knowing this deeper reality, what we ought to worry about most, what Jesus says we really ought to focus on, is this: “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness.”
What we should long for, in the teeth of all that worries us most, is that God’s kingdom should come, and his righteous will be done. This is not advice to ignore your troubles, or to deny that they are there and to learn to “just be happy”: it is instead a call for us to see that the rule of God is established on the earth and that his justice is done. That’s what ought to concern us more than anything.
The world is not governed by chance after all; it is governed by its great creator. And so, says Jesus, pursuing what God wants is always going to be a successful strategy.
But there’s a sting in the tail here. If we long for God’s rule and God’s righteousness, for everything to be as God wants it to be, then we will find that that includes us too. You can’t long for God’s kingdom without recognising that you haven’t acknowledged God’s rule in your own life. You can’t long for God’s righteousness with any integrity without recognising that God’s righteousness has not that often been a feature of your own story. You can’t consider for a minute what God wants in this world, without realising that you yourself have more often been part of the problem than the solution.
It is all very well to cry out for justice and peace and righteousness: but are you yourself a reflection of those things? Can you long for them, without hypocrisy? If you are seeking the kingdom of God and his righteousness, are you not pursuing something that is a guarantee only of your own destruction? Isn’t that something to be really worried about?
And so: if we think about the deeper reality of things, with the holy character of God at the core, then we ought to be not just worried, but very afraid. If God is going to enact his justice and his rule, then as things stand we have no security at all. What will become of us? We can only know the certainty that we will get swept up in the mess. But then, how does this fit with the caring Father that Jesus is speaking about? And how could this be a true antidote for our worries?
However, Jesus knows that God’s kingdom and righteousness have to do with mercy – a mercy that God brought about through the death of Jesus on the cross. In that death, when Jesus paid the price for our sin, God brought about his righteousness AND made it something that we could hope for without fearing that we would be destroyed by it. He made it something we could rest in.
God will indeed clean up the world according to his righteous character – of that we can be sure. But we can also know that, because of the man on a cross, God has made it possible for us to survive his clean-up. On that man, the Son of God, our sins were placed.
And like the drinks at a great wedding, the mercy of God will flow and flow to us when we ask of it. When Jesus says “Don’t worry,” he can say so because he knows that, in his very own life and death, God has provided a saviour for men and women in their desperate condition before him.
This then is the sweet, juicy kernel at the centre of the Christian message. When we look to God’s righteousness, we know we can find the mercy that we truly need and the security that we so badly want. And that really is news that can take your worries away.