Consider the Lilies

     (thank you to Sue Kravits for the meme)

This blog post is based on my sermon from February 3, 2019.

Last week there was a story on the BBC about a mother and daughter in Chippenham, England. The mother has dementia, and one day the mother was being visited by her GP, Dr. Philip Grimmer. He noticed a whiteboard that had been positioned in his patient's line of sight. On that whiteboard were written such messages as:

YOU'RE OKAY.
EVERYONE'S FINE.

YOU'RE NOT MOVING.
NO ONE IS MOVING.

YOU HAVEN'T UPSET ANYONE.
YOU DON'T OWE ANYONE ANY MONEY.

When asked, the daughter explained to Dr. Gimmer that she had written on the whiteboard the responses to her mother's most frequently asked questions. The daughter said that her hope was to reduce the number of frantic phone calls that her mother made to her and to other family members, but more than that, the hope was that the whiteboard would relieve her mother's anxiety.

Dr. Grimmer told the BBC that he had not seen anything like it before in thousands of house calls. "It's caring, reassuring, and sensible," he said. "It's such a simple idea."

Dr. Grimmer had tweeted a photo of the whiteboard messages to a few of his interested colleagues, and since then the tweet has been liked over 40,000 times and has helped spark a global conversation about caring for people with dementia. (see Kris Bramwell, "Dementia Whiteboard touches hearts around the world", BBC News, February 1, 2019)

It seems to me that in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus has done something very much like taking a whiteboard and writing on it the messages that we most need to hear when our own chronic anxiety threatens to overwhelm us.

To those of us who obsessively worry about having enough--enough money, enough health, enough time--Jesus takes a dry erase marker and writes on a whiteboard for everyone to see:

DO NOT WORRY ABOUT YOUR LIFE,
WHAT YOU WILL EAT OR DRINK,
OR ABOUT YOUR BODY ABOUT WHAT YOU WILL WEAR.

IS NOT LIFE MORE THAN FOOD,
AND THE BODY MORE THAN CLOTHING?

Jesus continues:
LOOK AT THE BIRDS OF THE AIR,
THEY NEITHER SOW NOR REAP
NOR GATHER INTO BARNS,
AND YET YOUR HEAVENLY FATHER FEEDS THEM.

And then later Jesus says:
CONSIDER THE LILIES OF THE FIELD, HOW THEY GROW;
THEY NEITHER TOIL NOR SPIN, YET I TELL YOU,
EVEN SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY WAS NOT CLOTHED LIKE ONE OF THESE.

As preacher and scholar Thomas G. Long points out:

At first, Jesus' words about the birds and the lilies, lovely as they are, are not very compelling. Sure, birds and lilies don't worry about life, but they also don't have mortgages, car payments, grocery bills, and college tuitions to keep them awake at night. All of us would like to be relieved of worry and anxiety, but Jesus appears to be suggesting an unrealistic strategy--"look at the birds, look at the lilies"--to which one is tempted to reply, "Yes, but look at the bills!" (Thomas G. Long, Matthew, Westminster Bible Companion, p. 75)

Jesus is not suggesting that human beings can be like birds or lilies. Instead, Jesus is using a teaching technique that was fairly common in his day--arguing from the lesser to the greater. If God so generously provides for the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, then how much more so will God also provide for you and me?

There is something else we should notice. The verbs look at the birds of the air and consider the lilies of the field are, in New Testament Greek, very strong verbs. (Long, p. 75)

Jesus is essentially imploring us to scrutinize the birds of the air and painstakingly examine the lilies of the field.

What is it that Jesus wants us to see?

The poet Mary Oliver died last month, and I'm reminded of her admonition to "pay attention," which she said is "our endless and proper work."

In her poem "Wild Geese," Mary Oliver wrote:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert,
repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of
your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will
tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles
of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the
clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and
exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
(Mary Oliver, "Wild Geese," originally published in Dream Work, 1986)

In telling us to scrutinize the birds of the air and painstakingly examine the lilies of the field, Jesus is inviting us--no, Jesus is commanding us, compelling us--to look, really look,

at a world where God provides freely and lavishly, a world where anxiety plays no part, where worry is not a reality. Jesus [tells] us to allow our imaginations to enter such a world, to compare this world with the world in which we must live out our lives. (Long, pp. 75-76)

The rent is still due, of course.
Middle schoolers still have to contend with school bullies and all kinds of social pressure.
More than a few of us anxiously await the results of the latest medical scan.

But as Tom Long reminds us:

We have seen this other world, this world of God's gracious and tender care, and it promises to overthrow the power of anxiety. We still worry [about all kinds of things, but having seen this other world, we now know] that there is nothing in this world that can take away what God provides--dignity, a sense of worth, the confidence of being treasured in the heart of God. (Long, p. 76)

All glory and praise be to our God. Amen.

Questions for Discussion:

1. What would your whiteboard tell you to stop worrying about?

2. How compelling do you find Jesus' admonition to look at the birds of the air and consider the lilies of the field?