February 27, 2011 – 8th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Is 49:14-15 1 Cor 4:1-5 Mt 6:24-34

Worries…who doesn’t have some? We worry about the economy and paying bills. We worry about children catching diseases. We worry about the outcomes of what’s happening in the mid-east. We worry about global warming. Some days we can laugh at our worries knowing that a good outcome is likely. Other days we can be consumed by anxiety. And what do we get for all that worry?—nothing, absolutely nothing!

Jesus tells us not to worry today. In today’s gospel reading we see Jesus telling us to worry about no aspect of our lives. Rather, he told us, trust God for all our needs and go about our lives peacefully. The advice could make us wonder if Jesus were unrealistic about the demands of life. Not worry! How is that possible?

If we remember that Jesus was always intimately connected to God, then we might have an idea of what Jesus meant. When we think about God, we realize that God lives in eternity where there is no past or future. Instead, God lives in the eternal now. It is you and I who live linear lives that start at birth and end with death. When we worry, we are anxious about something we did in the past or we worry about something that may happen in the future. We cannot go backward and alter the past any more than we can go forward into the future and so know ahead of time what will happen. The past and the future simply are not present to us. Therefore, we can only live in the present. Living in the present, we are able to pay attention to what is happening now and respond in the most loving way possible. By living out of Christian love, we will have no regrets about the past and may hope that the fruit of love will be good.

If we think that worry about global warming will aid in avoiding climate change in the future, we are very much mistaken. Worrying takes up our attention and our energy in the here and now while our positive action on behalf of the climate is needed instead. Worry is a thief! It steals us from our present and does nothing good for the past or the present. Instead of worry, Jesus invites us to live in God’s presence now and trust that by our attention to the present moment, God will care for all our needs and bring about good.

Carmelite Father Ernest E. Larken of happy memory wrote, “The given moment is the only place one can meet God. In God there is not time, only the eternal now. God lives in that now moment on the other side of the veil that separates time from eternity. We enter the vestibule of that ‘now’ when we concentrate on the present moment. Our beloved God is there, and it behooves us to be there as well. To enter the now moment is to let anxiety fall off our shoulders and be renewed in hope by touching the God who loves us.” (Taken from Ernest E.Larken’s article, Christian Mindfulness, published in Review for Religious at http://www.docstoc.com/docs/34399778/Christian-Mindfulness.)

Let us all reach out whenever worry threatens to steal our time from us and touch the God who loves us.