Sermons
August 10, 2025 (Proper 14)
Untying the Knot
Matthew 6:24-34
Before my time in Sac City, so I was told, there was an elderly man in the church whose name was Homer. Homer had what nowadays we’d probably call an anxiety disorder.
Every time some pastor would preach on today’s Scripture, Homer would get himself all in a swivet. And he’d go to the pastor and say, “Jesus says not to worry, but I can’t stop worrying. Am I going to go to hell because I can’t stop worrying?”
They told me this story like it was something funny, but I felt really sorry for poor Homer. He was a good man, a farmer, took care of his family and supported the church, but he couldn’t stop worrying, and as a result he was sure he was a terrible sinner about to step onto a cosmic elevator heading down to a place where it was really hot. That, as you might imagine, just worried him even more.
The question we have before us today is whether the Bible actually says that worry is a sin.
There are people who will say, “Well, Jesus said, ‘Do not worry,’ and ‘Do not’ is a commandment; so therefore, if we worry, we are disobeying a commandment, which is sin.” And like Homer, if we’re the sort who has worry and anxiety, when we hear that, we are immediately that much more worried.
It’s like when somebody says, “Try not to think of an elephant.” Elephants may not have crossed your mind at all in days, if not weeks; but the second you hear that, it’s all you can think about. So it may be with “Do not worry.” If you hear that, does your mind suddenly fill with all the things in the world that could go wrong?
Do you watch the news and think, “What if the economy goes south, and everything’s too expensive, and on top of that I lose my job or Social Security goes belly up or the stock market crashes and takes my retirement income with it?” Do you sit down with your bills and think, “What if I pay this bill and then don’t have the money to cover this other bill?” or “What will happen if something happens and I can’t pay this bill?”
Do you look at your children and think, “What if I let them play in the yard and don’t supervise them, and they wander off or somebody snatches them?” (Experts say, by the way, that the world is actually much safer for children these days than it was 50 years ago when I was growing up, at a time when kids often spent long stretches of time unsupervised. I’m not really a “blame-the-media” sort of person, but I do think the media, especially our 24-hour news cycle, are at least partly to blame for the anxiety of parents who think the world is exponentially more dangerous for kids today than it was when I was a kid. I’ve heard that when there’s an alert for a missing child, and the 24-hour news channels show that child’s face over and over again—and not only that, but those news channels are nationwide, so this might be a kid who has gone missing hundreds or even thousands of miles from where we live—our brains process it not as one missing child alert on repeat 100 times, but as 100 separate missing children!)
When someone says, “Do not worry,” it’s more or less inevitable that we begin to worry, assuming we weren’t already worried. But is it a sin?
If you Google the question “Is worry a sin?” you get a mixed bag of answers. On the one hand, you do have a number of people who will say, yes, Jesus said don’t worry, and that’s a commandment, and disobeying a commandment is a sin. But there are other ways of looking at it.
I ran across a blog called “The Weary Christian,” with the tagline “Living with Faith and Depression.” It’s written by someone who previously worked as a journalist with an independent media outfit. He takes on the question of whether it’s a sin for Christians to worry. And he reframed the matter in a way that I thought made sense.
Imagine you’re out to eat with a friend, and when the time comes to pay, you pull out your credit card to pay for both of you. When your friend objects, you say, “Don’t worry about it; I’ve got this.” In other words, you’re not commanding your friend not to do something; you’re assuring them that they don’t need to worry.
So is it possible that this is what Jesus means when he says, “Do not worry” about your life, where your food is coming from, and so on? I think it could be, because of something he says just a tad further into the passage. “…your heavenly Father knows you need these things.”
Maybe he’s not commanding us not to worry, but reassuring us that God will make sure we have what we need.
I want to point out something that might also make some worry a positive thing.
A friend of mine years ago was in school researching how the Cold War influenced architecture in the United States. Pretty niche topic, and I’m not sure whether I could even make sense trying to explain what she found. But at one point she argued that the Cold War affected the mentality and spirit of America in ways that we may still be feeling.
It came right on the heels of the Second World War, as you know. During that war, everybody was urged to “do their part” for the war effort. Those who could, enlisted in the military. Those who couldn’t serve in the military did other things. My grandpa was turned down for military service, but still wanted to do his part; so he became a security guard at the munitions plant in Parsons, Kansas. Women[1] and men who, like Grandpa, weren’t able to serve in the military worked in factories making the equipment the military used to win the war. Children even did what they could: I have seen a picture of my uncle Barry, six years old when Pearl Harbor was attacked, taking his rubber toy soldiers to a collection point so they could be recycled. The residents of North Platte, Nebraska, pooled their rationed foodstuffs to make treats and meals for servicemen traveling through there on the train.
Even if a person wasn’t able to do anything else, they lived on rationed food, grew victory gardens, maybe put their cars up on blocks to save rubber and gasoline for the war effort. Everybody did their part, everybody worked together, and the war was eventually won.
That’s actually an example of an old definition of worry: say you’ve got a hard knot in your shoelace, and you pick and pull at it until you get it untied—you worried at that knot till it came loose. Or you have a pile of brush in your yard that you take, little by little, and cut up, burn, put at the curb for pickup, or whatever—it takes some time, but you’ve worried at it until you got it gone. We could say that the United States and our allies worried at the enormous challenges we faced during the Second World War, until we emerged victorious.
Far from being a sin, that kind of worry is a good thing!
But right after that war ended, we were plunged into a very different kind of conflict, the Cold War, which included a “space race” and the development of enough nuclear weapons to destroy the entire world several times over. The issues of the Cold War were too big for any of us to have any influence over. There was nothing any regular person living in a small town in the Midwest could do about the nuclear threat hanging over our heads.
Some people tried, perhaps by putting bomb shelters under their ranch houses—the house I grew up in had one; it wouldn’t have done a thing against a nuclear weapon because it had a flimsy wooden door and you could see daylight between the concrete blocks it was built out of. Kids went through “duck-and-cover” drills in school, as though a desk was going to keep them safe from an atomic bomb or its fallout. (Those had fallen by the wayside by the time I started school in the early 1970s; nobody actually believed they were anything but a waste of time.)
But when it came right down to it, there simply wasn’t any way most of us could worry at the threats we faced in the Cold War until they were eliminated. So our worry became fretting—and fretting does nobody any good at all. That’s what you do when you wake up at 3 a.m. with your mind filled with all the things that could go wrong but that you can’t actually do anything about, especially at that hour. It’s what you do when there’s nothing you can do to affect a situation, and all you’re doing when you’re fretting is raising your blood pressure and giving yourself an ulcer.
But is it a sin? Well, no, I don’t really think it is. Even if it isn’t a sin, though, it might well be something for which we could use an antidote.
And that’s what our passage for today gives us. “Don’t worry about your life, what you’ll eat or drink, or your body, what you’ll wear. Consider the lilies…and the birds of the air. Doesn’t your heavenly Father take care of them? How much more can he be trusted to take care of you? Your heavenly Father knows you need food, and water, and clothing, and you will be taken care of.”
Fretting about this stuff doesn’t do you any good; you’re not adding a second to your lifespan or an inch to your height. All you’re doing is losing sleep.
God will provide what you need; in the meantime, worry at the business of showing the world the light of Christ, glimpses of the Reign of God, God’s righteousness and God’s compassion. You can do all that because you don’t have to fret about the other stuff.
I think I’ve told you more than once before about another one of my Iowa church folks—actually a relative by marriage of Homer, our long-ago chronic worrier.
Beth had left an abusive marriage, put herself through school and become a teacher, raised two kids on her own, then walked with her second husband, the county extension agent, through the farm crisis of the 1980s, and then through his final illness. Many times when church folks would start fretting about the church budget, or some issue with our building, or something else that raised the anxiety levels at board meetings, Beth would say—speaking from years of lived experience—“We’ve been taken care of before, and we’ll be taken care of again.”
There is something in Bible scholarship called the “theological passive.” It’s present in Beth’s frequent statement; what she meant was, “God has taken care of us before, and God can be trusted to take care of us now and in the future.”
What if, at those times when problems loom large and we begin to fret, and feel our stomachs knotting up and our blood pressure rising, we simply repeated what Beth told the Sac City Disciples so many times?
“We’ve been taken care of before, and we’ll be taken care of again.”
[1] I am fully aware that women served in the military during World War II: for instance, my mother-in-law, Lt. Ann Meloy White, served in the Navy Nurse Corps in the Pacific theater.