Avoiding despair like I owe it money

some techniques

If you’d like to hear and see the preaching of this sermon, click above (starts at 7:44)

Happy Christ the King Sunday

Rather than a couple minutes of jokes at the beginning of my sermon, I thought it would be fun instead to just go ahead and admit that, in the last few weeks I’ve had to actively try to avoid despair like I owe it money or something.

And just in case, I mean on the very off chance there are other people here today who are also a tiny bit of a mess right now, I wanted to share with you how a few words from of all places, the book of Revelation truly helped me this week.

But in order to get there, I need to start with what I am calling my own Autobiography Of Worry.

Because friends, I think some of us are in who by worrying can add an hour to the span of their life, territory now.

Here we go. 

As a child I worried a lot about quicksand. To be fair, the TV shows I watched made it seem like more of a potential danger in life than it’s proved to be.

And as a teenager I worried that the Soviet Union would drop nuclear bombs on us but I equally worried that I wouldn’t get tickets to see Depeche Mode.

In my early 20s I was mostly worried I’d run out of booze, and that I would not be able to pay my $325 a month rent. Sadly, I did not think to worry about how those two things might be related.

And when I got sober and I worried that I wouldn’t be funny anymore never realizing I wasn’t all that funny before.

Then I was told to worry that Y2K was going to make airplanes just sort of drop out of the sky.

And when 9-11 happened I for sure worried the terrorist attacks would just keep going and by that time I had 2 babies and that made it feel more acute.

Then when the economic collapse happened in 2008 … honestly I was entirely free from worry because I was entirely free of money. So it was very a relaxing time for me.

Then I worried that people would think less of me when I got divorced not realizing they didn't think that much of me to begin with.

Feel free to go home and write your own biography of worry. It’s a humbling project to undertake.

But also kind of calming.

Because writing my own this week helped remind me how worrying about what might happen didn’t do one thing to make me feel safe, or to prevent bad things from happening or to ensure that good things did. It really only kept me from being present to the gifts of the day I was in.

But what I really want to tell you about is how our reading from Revelation helped me this week -

The churches in Asia minor to whom John’s Revelation is addressed had some pretty high anxiety levels too – they were living under the thumb of the Roman empire and the book of Revelation was meant to offer them comfort. It’s famous for 7 headed beasts and heavenly battles and whatnot, but If there is an overwhelming message in this, the weirdest book in the Bible, it would be this: that dominant powers are not ultimate powers. Which is another sermon for another time.

The part of today’s reading that I swear lowered my cortisol levels was this:

In his opening remarks, the writer of Revelation twice refers to God as the one who was, who is, and who is to come. That’s it.

“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.

That is what comforted me this week as I read our texts for today and tried to manage my anxiety while writing a sermon.

That God was and is and is to come.

Or as the hymn goes:

Crown him the Lord of Years,

The Potentate of Time,

creator of the rolling spheres, ineffably sublime.

It helped me this week because it reminded me that this moment we are in is a very small moment in a very big story.  A story of God and God’s people that reaches back to the beginning of time, brushes the skin of the present and moves on into a future we cannot see.  

What I am saying is that I think I am most anxious when I invest myself too fully in some Johnny come lately story.

Because looking again at my autobiography of worry, I think that at each of those anxious points in my life I was believing a story I was being told; in the media and by my friends and from our culture. Which is understandable, but in hindsight most of the stories did not end up being all that true, they just ended up being quickly replaced by new ones so we never noticed.

What I am trying to say is that the beautiful thing about being a people of faith is how we are a very small part of a very big story. We tell it, we sing it, we eat it, we paint it, we read it, because it’s the most true thing we’ve ever heard.  And competing stories will always surround us.  Sometimes, maybe a little bit like our siblings in faith from the churches in Asia minor in the 1^st century, we too need reminding that the dominant story is not the ultimate story. That that there is only one potentate of time.

When I look back, in all my times of grief and doubt and sorrow and anger and faithlessness, I can in the rear view, see the mighty hand of God.

To be clear, God was not busily arraigning all my desired outcomes. If that were true, had I gotten everything I wanted I promise you I wouldn’t be alive right now, much less standing here in this pulpit.

But what I can see now, is how often I was saved from having the thing happen that I was so sure would make me happy.

Looking back I see how often I was carried through things I thought I couldn’t survive, and how I was guided to beautiful things I wouldn't have ever even wished for.

Because God is like a shimmering, divine filament woven into our lives that provides spiritual tensile strength, and beauty in each moment, even when we forget to trust him, even when we forget to pray or be grateful.

I know I sound perilously close to reciting the footprints in the sand poem.

the point is this:

This persistent, ever present, ever faithful God is the one who we hear about it our reading from Revelation today. This is the God who spoke everything into creation, who breathed into dust to create us, who brought water from a rock and manna from heaven and who led a people out of slavery, the God who spoke through wild prophets and questionable women, who came and broke our hearts like only a baby could do, who cried at a friend’s tomb and ate with all the wrong people and wouldn’t shut up about forgiveness, this is the God who defeated death and promises to be with us.

This God is braided into all time.

In a moment, when we sing the sanctus, our voices will be woven in with the voices of saints and angels who have for eternity sung holy holy holy around the throne of God, proclaiming that there is more to life than what we fear, that we are more than just what the story of the moment says we are.

The world tries to tell us this and the news tries to tell us that, but we are not a people of the 24 hour news cycle – we are a people of a sacred story.

So my siblings in Christ, let us remind each other as Jesus reminded his own disciples that today has worries of its own, we need not borrow tomorrow’s. All the unknowns and the what ifs of the future are just that - unknown. None of us is promised another day. So if I am absolutely certain of only one thing in the future, it is this: that God is already there. The actual potentate of time is already present in the future I am so busy worrying about.

Let us tend to the worries of the day we are in, let us love what is ours to love, heal what is possible to heal, change what is possible to change in this day. And when we look back may we see the one who was always with us, who is always with us and who will be always with us. Making a way, loving us into each moment.

And above all, let us not forget that we are a people of a very old story that is still, that is even still being written.

Because as I have had to remind myself many times before, when we have one arm reaching back to the hope of the prophets, and one hand reaching forward into the future of God’s promises we get to stand firmly in the reality of the present and not have that reality consume us.

Amen.