Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you

 

 "Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on.  Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?  Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them.  Are you not of more value than they?  Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature?  So why do you worry about clothing?  Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow:  they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.  Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?  Therefore do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?'  For after all these things the Gentiles seek.  For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.

"But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.  Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things.  Sufficient for the day is its own trouble."

 

- Matthew 6:25-34 

 

We are currently reading through the Sermon on the Mount.  In yesterday's reading, Jesus taught:  "Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal.  For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.  The lamp of the body is the eye.  If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light.  But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness.  If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!  No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other.  You cannot serve God and mammon." 

 "Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on.  Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?  Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them.  Are you not of more value than they?  Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature?  So why do you worry about clothing?  Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow:  they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.  Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?"  My study Bible tells us that here Jesus is warning against anxiety, but not against thoughtful planning.  It notes that our physical well-being is directly dependent upon God, and only indirectly on food, drink, and clothing.  Anxiety over earthly things, it says, can be a demonstration of a lack of faith in God's care.

"For after all these things the Gentiles seek.  For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things."  Because the Gentiles served pagan idols, they remained consumed by dependence upon earthly things, my study Bible says.  Those who follow God can be freed from this dependence. 

"But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.  Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things.  Sufficient for the day is its own trouble."   My study Bible says that the kingdom of God is the central theme of Jesus' teaching.  God's righteousness is the subject of the entire Sermon on the Mount.  These are what we are to seek!  Jesus calls us to be free from anxiety about earthly things, and directs us to look to heaven, taking our security in the faith that God will provide needed earthly blessings.  

As my grandparents were survivors of genocide, it often gives me pause to think about this passage and the notes from my study Bible.  I grew up in a community of genocide survivors, all of whom had horrific stories of watching many family members murdered, of marches without food and water, seeing their entire communities destroyed.  They were simply lucky to have their own skins and to have survived.  It was an act of mass Christian persecution, its 1.5 million victims are now officially martyrs and saints of the Armenian Apostolic Church.  It always gives me pause to think about the readings we're given today.  It's important to add that Christ's teachings here are resoundingly powerful in my own life.  Learning to trust to God for what I need -- and to let go, in those times I have to, of what I thought I needed, but God seems to ask me to live without, has been an integral component of my own spiritual journey in life.  Without those times of letting go, and learning to plant my faith more deeply in Christ, I would not have learned what my faith is, nor learned about myself, nor about the realities of life separate from fantasies and popular ideas.  In short, every word I read here in today's reading I have experienced as true, and I am continuing to go down that path in my life.  As for the extreme hardships such as those my grandparents endured, I cannot comment on what is not my experience.  But it was their faith that kept them together as a community, shaped their identities, blessed them with an understanding of who they were and therefore how to go forward and rebuild their communities in the face of the worst crisis any community can face.  My grandparents (despite the horrific things they experienced when they were young) were cheerful, robust, hard-working, forward-looking people, taking joy in what life offered and especially in the unquestionable love with which they blessed me.  And I believe that this, too, was facilitated by their faith in Christ and the ancient faith which was part and parcel of their cultural inheritance.  Christian faith, above all, is an affirmation of life, for Resurrection is at the heart of it.  As He said, He is "the way, the truth, and the life."  "Mammon" did not have the last word, nor define who they were.  What Christ offers us today is the way to live with that always-present affirmation of life.  That is, in all things, we trust in God, and it is a process of learning to let go not just of excess anxiety -- but also of our own modern sense that so much depends upon what we look like, what house we have, what clothes we wear, and on and on and on.  Our faith, we always need to be reminded, does not consist solely of the things we have, but of what we know about ourselves and our relationship to God in terms of the intangible treasures that don't have a price.  What price is compassion in the midst of a genocide, for example?  My grandmother, along with tens of thousands of others, was an orphan, saved by American missionary doctors who trained her to be a nurse.  My other grandmother and my great grandmother were saved by a Turkish widow of a military officer who hid them in her home; my great grandmother had worked for her. In yesterday's reading, Jesus directed us to store treasures in heaven, and acts of compassion surely create those treasures -- just as we also remember that He said, "And whoever gives one of these little ones only a cup of cold water in the name of a disciple, assuredly, I say to you, he shall by no means lose his reward" (see Matthew 10:40-42).  In today's reading, Christ fully teaches us what it means to serve one master or another, and what it means to serve the purely material instead of trusting to faith in God first.  Jesus says, "Sufficient for the day is its own trouble."  How often have those words been true, despite anxieties and worries?  In this, too, He teaches us what is essential and also what we need to let go. In the long run, and even through calamity, it is the intangible values of Christ that sustain a good life, the rock of faith which teaches us how to build our lives and gives us the strength to do so.