The Wildflower Gospel

Matthew 6:24-34
May 29, 2005                                                                          2^nd Sunday after Pentecost

Paul Simpson Duke                                                      First Baptist Church, Ann Arbor

            Wendell Berry, Kentucky farmer and writer, has said this about the Bible: “I don’t think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible really is. . . . It is best read and understood outdoors. . . . Passages that within walls seem improbable or incredible, outdoors seem merely natural.  This is because outdoors we are confronted [1]everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence.  It is our daily bread.  Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distance will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine . . . .”[2]

            To this claim that the Bible is best read outdoors we could add that a fair amount of what happens in the Bible takes place outdoors.  Jesus himself did most of his work under an open sky.  His teaching made free use of what his listeners could witness in nature: the wind in the trees, a storm cloud in the west, a farmer sowing seed, or, in today’s passage, birds and wildflowers.

        “Look,” he said, “at the birds of the air.”  No doubt he meant whatever birds were soaring above them or singing around them there on the hills of Galilee.  “Look at them,” he says.  His word look means to look thoughtfully.  And “Consider the lilies of the field,” he says.  He isn’t likely referring to what we think of as lilies but to whatever wildflowers were blooming on those hills.  Imagine them in the colors you choose: lavender, gold, scarlet, blue.  “Consider them,” he says; the word means to ponder deeply.  The crowds had come to see Jesus.  We’ve also come looking for him.  Look elsewhere for a bit, he says, and directs our attention to hyacinths and swallows.

        Why?  To help us quit being so anxious.  He has just said, “Don’t be anxious about your life . . . .Don’t be anxious about your body.”  But apparently he knows what many of us know about the words, “Don’t be anxious.”  Such words never ever work, not by themselves.  So having said them, he presents us with flowers and shows us the freedom of birds on the wing.

        It should be said that the people he was talking to had better reason to be anxious than we do.  Most of them were desperately poor.  Their anxiety had to do with food enough and clothing enough.  It was to people genuinely worried about necessities that Jesus said, “Don’t be anxious.”

       You and I are not poor.  Is Jesus speaking these words also to us?  I think he is speaking first to the poor, whose anxieties concern the most basic provisions, but that he is also speaking to us.  We are by no means unfamiliar with anxiety.  Some are more anxious than others.  If you are the worrying type, the objects of your anxiety may range far and wide, from your own body, to the needs of your loved ones, to something you did long ago, to something that might happen in the future, to matters of financial security, to the character of our nation, to the condition of the world.  I think there’s something to be said for people who worry about such things.  At least they care enough to worry.  Worry may even drive them into good action.

        But that’s not usually the case.  As a rule, anxiety doesn’t free us to act but puts us in a state of paralysis.  The root of the word anxiety means “to choke.”  Anxiety is constricting.  This is physically true: anxiety constricts blood vessels, the throat, the gut.  It’s also spiritually.  Anxiety constricts faith.  It narrows hope.  It pulls back the reach of love.  Anxiety comes to our open hands and tightens them into a fist.

       There is a kind of fear that is wisdom.  There is a fear that serves as a spur to finer action and truer living.  Anxiety is the fear that paralyzes, choking faith, hope, and love.

       The words of Jesus about anxiety can be heard on two levels.  First he speaks to concrete anxieties about physical need, the needs of the poor for food and clothes.  But he seems also to speak to our broader, more abstract anxieties, the dread that is grounded in not knowing anything of what the future may bring.  Will the people we love be happy and safe?  Will the principles we care about survive? What kind of death will we die?  What other losses await us?  Will there be enough of what we need?  We stare at the blank wall of the future and wonder such things.  Jesus says, “Don’t be anxious about tomorrow.”  I’ve often wondered if he didn’t smile as he said the rest: “Tomorrow will bring enough troubles of its own.”  Reminds me of something Charlie Brown said:  “I’ve made a new commitment.  From now on I’ll dread just one day at a time.”

        To help us get past our anxiety Jesus shows us birds and wildflowers.  Notice, he says, that the birds don’t sow or reap or gather into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them.  Are you not of more value than they?  And none of these flowers ever took up needle and thread, yet I tell you, Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.  And if God so clothes the grass of the field which is blooming one day and burned up the next, how much more will God clothe you, oh you of little faith?

        But isn’t the analogy rather weak?  Our situation is a good dead more complicated than flowers and birds.  The work of other species is propagation and survival, but we’re held in a vast complex of systems, commitments, needs, and relationships; and we have this consciousness that is thrilling and dangerous, creative and frightened.  Consider the birds and the lilies?  If we were chickadees or hollyhocks we wouldn’t be anxious either.  But we’re human.  So Jesus has either offered a very poor analogy, or he’s up to something else.

        He’s not saying we’re like these, though surely he’s suggesting we’re connected to them.  Mostly he is saying: look very closely at them and look for what they show you about God.  God feeds the birds.  God is a birdwatcher and feeds them.  If God delights in feeding the birds, why would God’s hand not be stretching out to give us what we need?

        And what of the flowers?  He’s not sentimental about them; he speaks bluntly about how they don’t last at all – they bloom, they burn.  Even so, he points us to them and says, Would you look how gorgeous they are!  And to those first listeners, oppressed as they were, how cheered they must have been to hear him call the flowers at their feet more splendidly arrayed than the great king Solomon, and to hear how love was clothing them more gorgeously still.  Jesus says that such beauty speaks volumes to human beings about who they are under God.

       It’s worth pondering, that the world is waving all these unnecessary colors, all this wanton splendor.  Science can tell us that this beauty has biological function, that natural principles account for so many lovely colors and shapes of life.  Yet how easy to imagine a world less brilliant, more dull, with fewer forms and shades to break the heart with beauty.  And who can explain why these things move us so?  These plants do what they do as parts of their ecosystems.  They’re not here for us.  And yet, and yet, we thrill to them, as if Someone had set them into the world with our deep needs also in mind.

        I can account for the violence and cruelty in the world better than I can account for all this beauty and all this music.  Can it come from anything but an infinitely beautiful Mind, and a Mind that is exquisitely caring for detail, with a flair for extravagance?  I love Robinson Jeffers’ poem, “The Excesses of God.”
      Is it not by his high superfluousness we know
      Our God?  For to be equal a need
      Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling
      Rainbows over the rain
      And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows
      On the domes of deep sea-shells,
      And make the necessary embrace of breeding
      Beautiful also as fire,
      Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom
      Nor the birds without music:
      There is the great humaneness at the heart of things,
      The extravagant kindness . . . .[3]

       So far as we know, we’re the only creatures who feel it so.  Petunias never gasp at a sunset, but we do.  The face of a cow never breaks into a smile at the beauty of the hills, but ours do.  We are made to be moved and, being moved, to learn our truest identity.  Like all God’s creations, we are delighted in and cared for.  But beyond this, God so honors us as to sing to us through these creations, to whisper down from the stars, to speak to us from the birds of the air and the lilies of the field.  If God has cared for us not only to meet our need but to raise us up for such high communion, how can we possibly remain in the grip of anxiety?  God has sent us flowers to move and lift the heart.  How can we, how dare we, be anxious, when we are so made and so lifted and called to serve in the kingdom – the garden – of God?

            When you go to the florist to buy flowers for someone, they ask, “You want a card with that?”  On the card you try to condense into words the volumes you hope the flowers will say.  God has sent flowers, knowing we would need them.  If you could condense the message of God’s gift to you – to us – into words, what would they be?  More important, having gotten that message, if you could condense your answer into a life, how would you live?