Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

Our Office Reading from Matthew today is, for me, one of the most challenging of Jesus’ teachings, and maybe it’s challenging for you, as well. “Do not worry,” says Jesus, “about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? … But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today's trouble is enough for today.”

Confession: I’m a worrier. I worry. And I’m a planner. I plan. First I investigate, then I plan. And I use my investigating and my planning to try to assuage my worrying, to bring order to the chaos of my anxiety, to give myself a feeling of control.

But if there’s anything that this moment right now is teaching me...but let me back up in order to affirm: the present moment is not a cosmic lesson God has sent us that we need to figure out. The idea that we’re in the midst of a cosmic lesson we need to decode or test out of or learn from not only reductively robs the moment of its heartbreaking complexity, but also misunderstands how Love goes when Love teaches us how to love. Regarding that last point, love doesn’t cause suffering and death so we can have an awakening of compassion, but love does break our hearts so that we can meet the brokenness of the world that is already there. And grace does have a habit of opening our eyes in the midst of times like these to help us see just how it is we’re meeting the time and where it is grace might be inviting us in the midst of the heartbreaking complexity of the moment. So all of that being said: if there’s anything grace is teaching me right now, it’s that I don’t have the control I desire; that I need to hold my plans lightly; that my worry, as exhausting as it is, doesn’t accomplish much; and that me accomplishing anything may not actually be the point.

The point, I think, is allowing God to make the plans, allowing God to accomplish God’s purposes, and allowing grace to fit us to those plans and purposes. Which doesn’t mean the opposite of worry: it doesn’t mean indifference or apathy or checking out or being completely unconcerned. It means becoming more deeply involved in the work of love that is remaking the world—a work of love that looks like the Kingdom.

Beloved Friend, when Jesus tells us not to worry and to “strive first for the Kingdom,” he’s not telling us to ignore this world and focus on the next; he’s not telling us, “don’t worry, be happy;” he’s not even telling us that the Kingdom is a thing our striving produces. He’s asking us to imagine with him, with his own imagination, a world renewed and restored by love, a way-of-being that means all of our relationships, all of our desires, all of our concerns are ruled by, for and toward Love--that they're concerned for the good of others, for the good of our communities, for God's sake and for God's glory. Further, Jesus is saying that this world, this way-of-being, this kingdom is not a function of our planning (whether grandly or anxiously utopian) but a gift of his grace; and that if we live toward this Kingdom, if we allow grace to live in us and lead us toward this Kingdom, then all those things about which we worry will be met not through some kind of magic, but even more wonderfully in and through the relationships of love and justice and righteousness that give some inkling of the Kingdom that is coming to be even now in and through us. Ceasing to worry won’t make the Kingdom come, but receiving the grace to strive for the Reign of Love might mean that our worries and our needs will be met by the love of God working in and through our relationships, our communities, each of us meeting the needs of each.

Particularly in this in-between time, I hope that we can recommit ourselves to the work of prayer, the work of the Spirit in us, that allows us to relax into the loving arms of God and more fully become visionaries of grace that see with God’s loving vision the world that God, in God’s love, is restoring and renewing even now!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+