Jesus says in our text today to work on trusting that God provides for our needs by considering the grass of the field and the beauty of the lilies. I invite you, just take a look outside and consider the lovely grass, the bright flowers. Here, I’ll open the door for you so you can see. Wait a minute!!! Brr, oh! close that to keep that wind and snow out!...When was the last time any of us saw bright green, young, healthy grass? The last time that you saw little flowers blooming in the fields. Or for that matter a little bird flitting happily around that didn’t look harried and a bit like it was darting out to grab a bite and then get right back under whatever shelter it came from?
No, winter is not a time when this text makes the most sense, especially this winter. Talking all about things that we see in the springtime, lilies of the field, little grass flowers. Birds of the air. But maybe it is the perfect time of year to think about it because it does seem so far off. It has been dark and cold forever. We were hoping that the snow was about done and then we got something close to another foot over the past couple days.
If school had been in it would have closed on Friday, if plants had begun to grow I have to think they’re regretting it. Winter feels like it will last forever, but God says, don’t worry about tomorrow, about what you eat or drink or wear, does not God clothe the flowers of the field more perfectly and beautifully than we could ever do? And how much more will he care for us. Even though everything is dead right now, frozen and seems to be completely unmoving, soon we will find that it isn’t true, we’ll get to watch transformation all around us. Soon the ice will melt, life will stir, leaves will grow, blades of grass will sprout, hillsides will be covered with color, sound and life.
I grew up on a dry hillside where the winters were very, very cold. They seemed like they would never end but each March like clockwork, right around the first, right around now even, through dead pokey pine needles and slick ice covered rocks amid patches of snow the hillside would turn from dead brown to purple. Lady slippers and grass widows, tiny wildflowers everywhere. New abundant life where just a day before everything was completely without life. But it was the same flowers every spring, every time things got their most bleak those grass flowers showed up.
This is true mostly because life was always there just under the surface, waiting to bloom, to blossom, to spread. Those tiny delicate plants were there.
In fact even now, here, where it seems so lifeless, things are starting to grow, life is stirring, life was always there.
What was dead will live again. Jesus was so sure of this, so sure of Easter that in our text today he tells us, don’t worry about tomorrow. And really what better time than right now when things still seem a bit too dark, too cold, a bit too lifeless, is there for us to hope in how true it is that tomorrow there will be beautiful flourishing life.
But sometimes that doesn’t seem true, sometimes it is hard for that life to shine through and so tomorrow gets harder and harder. What Jesus was getting at when he said these words wasn’t so much that we should act without care about what tomorrow will bring as that we can’t let tomorrow get in the way of today.
We can’t let worries about money keep us from following our dreams and our passions. We can’t let fear of failure keep us from trying something new. We can’t let exhaustion from looking at everything on the horizon keep us from addressing the things right in front of us. We can’t let worry get in the way of being true to ourselves and our neighbors and God.
There are couple of Lutheran churches down in New York city in the Bronx, St. Peter’s and Incarnation Lutheran Church that have been around for a long time. They started out healthy and strong, filled with life, packed to the gills every Sunday with worshippers from Europe who were new to the United States, who brought little with them but kept their religion, scrapped together what they had and built houses of worship. They spent many years nurturing young souls, and sending the old off to rest in a gentle peace. But the neighborhood changed, the original church builders died, so did their children and grandchildren, their great grandchildren moved away, leaving vacant lots behind.
The neighborhood fell into disrepair, beautiful houses were abandoned or demolished and the churches weren’t immune. But they held on. The people around them got poorer and poorer and instead of providing for the church they needed the church to provide for them.
So the churches did, day after day. They clung to life through those years, eeking out a tiny existence with very little, while the world seemed to fall down around them. They were constantly scrapping, constantly losing grip on what little they had, constantly feeling like the work to be done in the world around them was too much to do and that the work of keeping up their own little church was an impossibility as all of the manpower that they had was needed, for neighborhood watches, caring for the homebound, for providing services for women and children in the neighborhood. And picking up the slack in the church because they ran out of money, first to hire a secretary, then to employ a music director then to employ a full-time pastor.
Life had a constant feeling of heaviness, darkness, hopelessness. And worry about tomorrow seemed impossible to avoid. But they kept striving to seek the kingdom of God right where they were, a place that needed it most.
And then something happened, once a year in the midst of the darkest, coldest season of the year new life started to blossom, right there in the concrete of the Bronx. A group of young people from some other churches decided to seek first the kingdom of God, they started to give up their school break, to share some hard earned money and time, to walk through the cold, the wet the ice, the rain the snow, to work in cold dirty buildings to bring a little new life to those languishing churches.
This past week I went with a group of 5 other adults and and 26 youth, six from right here, to those churches in the Bronx that have lived in years in disrepair in a part of New York city that has a reputation for being the worst place to be, the least safe, the least desirable. We painted and cleaned, and in a matter of a two days turned a lot of darkness into light. A group of kids from Colombia and Renssalaer Counties made today better for these places so that tomorrow will keep being a possibility.
And I think the most important part of what we all learned in doing this was that by starting each day, each season as a community that seeks the kingdom of God first and leaves tomorrow’s worries for tomorrow, churches, people and lives can flourish eve in the midst of what looks like dead, dry, wintry ground.
Throughout the first day most of us had a turn to climb onto the roof of one of the buildings that we were working on. It was an old four story row house and so had a great vantage. And as we looked out we saw something amazing. There was actually light spreading from the church. Day by day, season by season they had worked with the neighbors and in the neighborhood and you could see a difference. The row houses nearest to the church with the help of our group year after year and others from the church and other churches, had been restored, given their pride back, their stoops were unbroken, they had been painted. Community gardens had popped up, basketball courts were clean and safe. And this change was slowly creeping down the nearby streets, through the next block. Today by today seeker of the kingdom, by seeker of the kingdom new life is spreading all over the winterworn parts of this world. God does that. This is good news. Thanks be to God. Amen.
No, winter is not a time when this text makes the most sense, especially this winter. Talking all about things that we see in the springtime, lilies of the field, little grass flowers. Birds of the air. But maybe it is the perfect time of year to think about it because it does seem so far off. It has been dark and cold forever. We were hoping that the snow was about done and then we got something close to another foot over the past couple days.
If school had been in it would have closed on Friday, if plants had begun to grow I have to think they’re regretting it. Winter feels like it will last forever, but God says, don’t worry about tomorrow, about what you eat or drink or wear, does not God clothe the flowers of the field more perfectly and beautifully than we could ever do? And how much more will he care for us. Even though everything is dead right now, frozen and seems to be completely unmoving, soon we will find that it isn’t true, we’ll get to watch transformation all around us. Soon the ice will melt, life will stir, leaves will grow, blades of grass will sprout, hillsides will be covered with color, sound and life.
I grew up on a dry hillside where the winters were very, very cold. They seemed like they would never end but each March like clockwork, right around the first, right around now even, through dead pokey pine needles and slick ice covered rocks amid patches of snow the hillside would turn from dead brown to purple. Lady slippers and grass widows, tiny wildflowers everywhere. New abundant life where just a day before everything was completely without life. But it was the same flowers every spring, every time things got their most bleak those grass flowers showed up.
This is true mostly because life was always there just under the surface, waiting to bloom, to blossom, to spread. Those tiny delicate plants were there.
In fact even now, here, where it seems so lifeless, things are starting to grow, life is stirring, life was always there.
What was dead will live again. Jesus was so sure of this, so sure of Easter that in our text today he tells us, don’t worry about tomorrow. And really what better time than right now when things still seem a bit too dark, too cold, a bit too lifeless, is there for us to hope in how true it is that tomorrow there will be beautiful flourishing life.
But sometimes that doesn’t seem true, sometimes it is hard for that life to shine through and so tomorrow gets harder and harder. What Jesus was getting at when he said these words wasn’t so much that we should act without care about what tomorrow will bring as that we can’t let tomorrow get in the way of today.
We can’t let worries about money keep us from following our dreams and our passions. We can’t let fear of failure keep us from trying something new. We can’t let exhaustion from looking at everything on the horizon keep us from addressing the things right in front of us. We can’t let worry get in the way of being true to ourselves and our neighbors and God.
There are couple of Lutheran churches down in New York city in the Bronx, St. Peter’s and Incarnation Lutheran Church that have been around for a long time. They started out healthy and strong, filled with life, packed to the gills every Sunday with worshippers from Europe who were new to the United States, who brought little with them but kept their religion, scrapped together what they had and built houses of worship. They spent many years nurturing young souls, and sending the old off to rest in a gentle peace. But the neighborhood changed, the original church builders died, so did their children and grandchildren, their great grandchildren moved away, leaving vacant lots behind.
The neighborhood fell into disrepair, beautiful houses were abandoned or demolished and the churches weren’t immune. But they held on. The people around them got poorer and poorer and instead of providing for the church they needed the church to provide for them.
So the churches did, day after day. They clung to life through those years, eeking out a tiny existence with very little, while the world seemed to fall down around them. They were constantly scrapping, constantly losing grip on what little they had, constantly feeling like the work to be done in the world around them was too much to do and that the work of keeping up their own little church was an impossibility as all of the manpower that they had was needed, for neighborhood watches, caring for the homebound, for providing services for women and children in the neighborhood. And picking up the slack in the church because they ran out of money, first to hire a secretary, then to employ a music director then to employ a full-time pastor.
Life had a constant feeling of heaviness, darkness, hopelessness. And worry about tomorrow seemed impossible to avoid. But they kept striving to seek the kingdom of God right where they were, a place that needed it most.
And then something happened, once a year in the midst of the darkest, coldest season of the year new life started to blossom, right there in the concrete of the Bronx. A group of young people from some other churches decided to seek first the kingdom of God, they started to give up their school break, to share some hard earned money and time, to walk through the cold, the wet the ice, the rain the snow, to work in cold dirty buildings to bring a little new life to those languishing churches.
This past week I went with a group of 5 other adults and and 26 youth, six from right here, to those churches in the Bronx that have lived in years in disrepair in a part of New York city that has a reputation for being the worst place to be, the least safe, the least desirable. We painted and cleaned, and in a matter of a two days turned a lot of darkness into light. A group of kids from Colombia and Renssalaer Counties made today better for these places so that tomorrow will keep being a possibility.
And I think the most important part of what we all learned in doing this was that by starting each day, each season as a community that seeks the kingdom of God first and leaves tomorrow’s worries for tomorrow, churches, people and lives can flourish eve in the midst of what looks like dead, dry, wintry ground.
Throughout the first day most of us had a turn to climb onto the roof of one of the buildings that we were working on. It was an old four story row house and so had a great vantage. And as we looked out we saw something amazing. There was actually light spreading from the church. Day by day, season by season they had worked with the neighbors and in the neighborhood and you could see a difference. The row houses nearest to the church with the help of our group year after year and others from the church and other churches, had been restored, given their pride back, their stoops were unbroken, they had been painted. Community gardens had popped up, basketball courts were clean and safe. And this change was slowly creeping down the nearby streets, through the next block. Today by today seeker of the kingdom, by seeker of the kingdom new life is spreading all over the winterworn parts of this world. God does that. This is good news. Thanks be to God. Amen.
