I want to begin my sermon with a very silly story.  You’ll wonder what this has to do with Matthew 6.  It actually had a lot to do with it.  I have an aunt who lives in Glendale near Phoenix and she is only five years older than I am.  She is like my sister.  Several years ago my family and I were visiting her.  She had a trunk in her garage that belonged to my grandmother.  My grandmother died twenty years ago and Cathy had not opened that trunk since my grandmother’s death.  She knew that there had been some personal things in the trunk that belonged to my grandmother and she wanted to wait for the right time to go through those things.  When we opened it we saw many things that my grandmother had treasured.  There were pictures of all of us from various times in our lives.  Some of the pictures were more embarrassing than other ones.  There was one particular picture that interested my older daughter Sarah.  I was very proud of that photograph showing me standing on the steps of the United States Capitol.  Our House of Representatives members had taken a group of us there when I was in high school.  At first I thought Sarah wanted that picture because she thought it was neat that I was standing at this building.  But there was something more sinister than that.  I was wearing a pair of pants that I was very proud of.  Every guy I knew had a pair of pants like them, and I had gone to work at a grocery store to earn the money to buy those pants.  Do you want to know what they looked like?  They were plaid bell-bottoms.  Sarah thought I looked like a clown, and she begged my aunt for that picture and my aunt couldn’t hand it over to Sarah fast enough.  That picture sits by Sarah’s bed even to this day. 

Now, you say, what does that story have to do with the test?  Teenagers are a gift to us.  They are at a point in their lives when they are growing fast.  They are children, they are adults, and they are neither.  Try to remember when you were a teenager.  They are probably the greatest worriers on earth.  And, of the things they worry about, the greatest is whether they fit in with their peers.  Clothes have always identified them. The way teenagers dress reflects their desire to be like their peers.  As silly as those plaid bellbottom pants may seem now, at that time they were a mark that I belonged and that I was a part of my group.  I recall how hard I worked to buy that pair of pants so that I might be OK.  When we think about our own teenage years, we are reminded of the feeling of vulnerability and the desire to do whatever was necessary to protect ourselves from feeling vulnerable.  But I’d also be willing to bet that we feel those vulnerabilities today just as keenly as we did then.  They merely touch our lives in different ways now.  Do you worry about your pension plan?  Do you worry about some relationship in your life that doesn’t seem to be going right?  Do you worry about world events?  Every one of us could fill in some more things to worry about.

In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus holds us to a high standard.  Read it in chapters 5, 6, and 7 in Matthew’s gospel.  Many times we shrink from that text because we feel guilty that we haven’t attained the perfection of Jesus’ standard.  John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, often spoke about moving to the perfect love of God.  That word “perfect” meant something a little different from the perfectionism of our modern times.  He didn’t mean that we literally had to become perfect in everything we do.  He meant that we needed to strive for the perfect love of God.  The interesting thing is that John Wesley never claimed that he had reached that perfect state in his own life.  Nor did he claim that he knew people who had.  That fact that he knew thousands of people is some indication to me that he never expected any of us to reach perfection.  But he pushed those whom he thought were seeking to be true Christians.  For Wesley it was the striving that mattered.  Jesus tells us that our every loyalty must focus on God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness in this world.  If that is our one and only allegiance and if we focus on it totally, we can be assured that our lives are in the gentle hands of our Heavenly Father.  Jesus tells us that we need to stop worrying about our lives, what we wear, or what we eat.  As a good country boy, he points to the created order around Him and He reminds us that nature itself reminds us of God’s blessings in our lives.  That is the reason we sang the Korean hymn, “Mountains Are All Aglow”.  When one looks at the words of that hymn, they remind us that we see God’s blessings in nature and that nature itself speaks of God in ways that are profound.  Jesus reminds us of the birds.  Sometimes in our busy lives we forget that there are birds singing around us.  Is there a day that you forget that birds are singing?  Somehow the birds survive.  Jesus says the lilies of the field don’t strive for anything.   They live in God’s grace and that grace takes care of them.  However, if you know anything about nature, you know that sometimes there is a drought and a few lilies die.  You also know that when those birds are flying around, there is a hungry chicken hawk somewhere.  Notice that Jesus doesn’t say that the lily’s and the bird’s life go smoothly.  I know people that have read this text and get angry because they think they have given their lives to God and their lives should be perfect.  I don’t think, Jesus says that, if you read the text closely.  What He says is that God will always take care of us and see that our needs are met.

We have come to the end of our stewardship campaign.  We have reminded you of the ministries of this church and your need to dedicate yourselves through the pledges we will be taking at the end of this service and by your participation in the worship life and the outreach ministries of this congregation.  I confess that I am a great worrier.  Many of the sermons I preach are directed more at me than at you.  I learned worrying from a great master of worry, my father.  He thought that if someone died in Japan, he either caused it somehow or needed to do something about it.  He is the most conscientious person I’ve ever met.  I also think that there is a balance in learning what we are responsible for and what is not our responsibility.  It is important not to cross that line because, once we cross it, we’ve made an assumption that God’s business in suddenly our business.  Rowan Williams, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, is a deeply spiritual man.  Several of his books have talked about our inability to wait, and, in the waiting, discover where God is acting.  We assume it is our job to do the acting.  Jesus makes it clear in Matthew’s gospel that the reason we are not to worry is not because of anything that we may or may not do.  We are simply to put our trust in God.  This morning, as we give our offerings and our pledges, we are doing our part to remind ourselves of God’s kingdom as we live as a community of faith.  In the weeks to come we will take those pledges and determine how to prioritize the outreach and ministry of this congregation for the year 2004, based on the resources of this congregation.  We are not going to worry.  We are not going to worry that there won’t be enough resources or that there won’t be enough people volunteering to teach Sunday School.  We are going to trust that God will enable us to take care of all of those needs so that we can continue to live out the Kingdom of God through this congregation   My hope and my prayer is that each of us can convert our hearts to total trust in God as it has been revealed to us through Jesus.  I want you, at least once today, to look up in the sky and watch a bird.  Be reminded of the promises that Matthew’s gospel has given us.  Let’s bow our heads now for a word of prayer.