Luke 12:22-26
“Therefore,” he said to his disciples, “I bid you to put away anxious thoughts about food to keep you alive and clothes to cover your body. Life is more than food, the body more than clothes. Think of the ravens: they neither sow nor reap; they have no storehouses or bar; yet God feeds them. You are worth far more than those birds. Is there one among you who by his anxious thoughts can add a foot to his height: If, then, you cannot do even a very little thing like that, why are you anxious about the rest?”
Those are beautiful words-ones with which it is difficult to argue. We do know that our life has been at its best and deepest for us when we have been able to free ourselves from obsession with all the nitty-gritty of staying alive, fed, healthy and comfortable.
It seems to me, though, that it is getting more difficult rather than easier to be free of the anxiety and worrying about staying alive. The more we know about what helps us and what harms us health-wise, the more there is to worry about.
Sigmund Freund said that he believed that deep down, people did not really believe in their own deaths. Quite to the contrary, had he lived no in late 20th Century America, I doubt that he would have said that. Life threatening illness, degenerative disease, environmental hazards, medical perils seem to be now becoming a mass fixation; almost a religion. Something like ten percent (a tithe) of our gross national product is spent on health care, as you probably know, and that the most legitimate part.
For the most bizarre picture, step back and look once at the content of entertainment. Growing in numbers and popularity are TV programs built on hospital settings and medical formats. Cropping up more and more frequently in other TV shows are individual episodes where the central predicament is illness, surgery, exotic medical dilemmas.
And what are the commercials in between? They are for substances or mechanisms purported to restore failed health. Reminders, suggestions, harangues about stomach gas, headaches, constipation, arthritis, sleeplessness, yellowed teeth, nervousness, anemia, sweat, post-nasal difficulties…and on and on and on.
Slightly more subtle, but a variation on the same theme are the insistent commercial reminders that we do, after all, have certain absolute minimum daily requirements of various elements and “wouldn’t it be safest and most reassuring to get those out of the way in one bowl of breakfast food, and be protected malnutrition for the rest of the day?
And, if with all that coming at you on commercial television, you are still not sufficiently sensitized, there is a whole cable TV health network to which we can subscribe that can address you at any hour of the day about what you could be leaving undone that you ought to do, or may be doing that you ought not be doing, that could subtly sapping your health and well-being.
Another place you can “take the pulse on this matter”(to use a medical figure of speech), is by looking at the size of the section of health related books at the book store. Absolutely authoritative volumes are there offering to rescue you from one or more of the vast array of deteriorations that could be at work on you right now. They offer rescue or preservation through meditation, through ingesting sea water, through jogging or through vitamins.
And vitamins, of course, are a faith all of their own, having seemingly taken the place of prayer for man as the central disciplined pursuit of, and assurance of protection, undergirding, hope, and nurture for the day ahead.
Now by no means is any of this to discount the seriousness of illnesses with which human beings can be afflicted, or to ridicule or detract from the many kinds of careful, responsible efforts and progress that have been made in health care.
But I am raising the question as to whether we haven’t (without intending to), created an aura or impression or overall sense that we human beings are badly designed, intrinsically, horribly vulnerable to this terrible host of hostile forces, viruses, germs, and grave, lurking weaknesses – the impression that is, that we are only precariously alive.
Well, no matter how many lurid examples cited, statistics offered, or perils catalogued, from a Godly, Biblical, Christian standpoint, that picture is a destructive obsession, working in quite the opposite direction of faith.
It does several really unfortunate things to us and to our spirits. It blocks, for example, the wonder and gratitude that ought to be a natural presupposition of ours. It smothers the awe that grows just out of experiencing and enjoying our own aliveness, the rhythms of our walking, sleeping, healing, growing, tiring, recovering. What seems to happen is that the reverent wonder over the way the billions of cells and hundreds of miles of tubes and millions of nerves build and repair and maintain themselves, while quietly supporting and adapting a whole, intricate “self”…that awe is commonly exchanged for a shallow state of chronic anxiety and self-pity, wild imaginings, paranoia or panic over each passing anomaly or malfunction.
The creaks and flaws and repairs to what we were to understand as “The Temple of God” make of it anything but a “temple” to us-often some, more a chamber of horrors. It creates a deep, pervasive, compelling belief in disease as the active, dominant fact of life. Health, wellness, meanwhile, come to seem merely passive. Wellness, health are the interims between diseases, not known at all as a positive presence, a force in of themselves. That’s crazy.
Some, who become preoccupied with it, cast themselves into a terrible hell where demonic spectres called germs, malignancies, and medical deteriorations haunt and torture the confidence and hope and health right out of them-without ever “laying a finger on them.” Each twinge, cramp, physical change is an ominous loss of morale. Each new ailment or syndrome that is identified or speculated upon by the Center for Disease Control, or even by some imaginative medical news writer, is “tried on” to see if it fits the most recent real or imagined symptoms. It is an awful world to live in and it can scare one to death!
Yet another effect of this whole preoccupation is that it takes dying and makes of it something that instead of being that natural comparatively brief process immediately preceding death, is a demon that chases us through major portions of the time of our life. For some, early in adulthood there is this sense of the long, sad slide toward the inevitable loss of all wellness-dying!
Worst yet, from faith’s perspective, it elevates death to a position of being the ultimate, grand adversary and nemesis. Death becomes the taunting victor-the great punisher and punishment for those who knowingly or unknowingly left some “I”” undotted or “t” uncrossed in the sweaty matter of meticulous self-preservation, safety or medicinal ritual.
In some ways worst of all, this “survival apprehensiveness” flies squarely in the face of our trust in God. For one so afflicted, God, it seems (while calling us and intending us for great things, for abundant living, and to work miracles of and caring and healing), unfortunately has burdened us with such fragile, vulnerable, death-ridden bodies that it is more an a full-time task just to keep up with the protecting, the trouble-shooting, the elaborate preventative maintenance, and damage control.
So how in the world, how in this life, can we reasonably be expected to get anywhere close to living with the free-spirited faith and hope and love of Christ? That optional, spiritual stuff is fine, but first there is this whole heavy matter of what should we eat and what can we drink and how much do we put on. Germs before Jesus, right?
I know that I am overstating this for most of us, but I don’t think that there is any question but that the preoccupation, the obsession is alive and growing. The enthrallment with “disease-ness” is itself a sickness. It is to let “the tail wag the whole dog” in the experience of being alive.
Now once more, this is not a deny the fact of disease or ill health or dying or death. It is simply to put all of that back in its place. And it is to suggest that to whatever extent we may have become preoccupied, distracted, and spooked to the contrary, that as an act of faith, we take a deep breath, throw back our shoulders and reaffirm and reclaim the truth that we are living temples of an acting, present God- not pitiable skin bags of medical vulnerabilities struggling through a hostile, hazardous life and world.
There is more to us than meets the eye, meets the stethoscope, the pulse rate, the mortality charts-more power, more healing, more resources, more life. As Jesus said in another context, “God knows that you have need of these things. But seek first his kingdom and he will see to those things needful.”
That, you see, is the starting point, the truth that keeps us whole and live no matter what our age or physical condition. It is this understanding that while, yes, we are creatures, still somehow God has made each of us just a little less than a god’ as the Psalm says “infusing us with His image, with glory and honor and healing and spirit.”
That is why, that is how Jesus kept telling people, “Get up and walk. Be restored. Your faith has made you.” Only in recent years do we seem to be fining out the depth of the truth of that. We are discovering that there is not a tissue in the human body that is removed from the influence of the spirit- you spirit, God’s spirit.
So, yes, we are remarkable creations, loved by God, remarkably gifted by Him, remarkably sustained and supported, remarkable incarnations of His presence and creation and healing when we allow it when we claim it.
None of that protects us from all the pain and illness or from the very real wear and tear of living. And in no way does it alter the fact that at some point our bodies will be used up and give out. No, in its proper proportion all that is important and is an area of our proper responsibility, concern, and stewardship. But it is not even close to being the “main event.”
So…don’t ever mistake surviving for living. It’ll sap the very life from. “Life,” as Jesus said, “is more that…You,” He said, “are the very light of the word, the salt of the earth.”
We are God’s word made flesh, nothing less-unless we settle for less.