If seagulls get to eat, why worry?
These lilies are better dressed than any runway model. For real. Jesus said ” consider the lilies of the field. They do not sew clothes or go shopping, but even Solomon wasn’t at well dressed as they are.” Understand, Solomon was a major stud. Possibly the richest guy who ever lived with more wives than he knew what to do with. He wrote some wise sayings you can find in the book of Proverbs. But he can’t even compare to lilies?
During his famous speech on a mountain, Jesus also went on to talk about food. Summed up it went something like this. “Look at the birds of the air. They do not farm or keep kraft dinner in their cupboards, and yet they are fed with the leftovers of trailer park lunches and thrown out fast food.”
The big theme of this speech was WHY WORRY? If birds survive and flowers look hot, why are you spending so much time worrying about what you eat and wear?
This idea seems totally backwards in our culture where we are defined by our work, and by how much we can buy with the money we work for.
Jesus generally made a lot of rich people uncomfortable by telling them to sell all their stuff or give it to the poor. You can be sure it did not boost his popularity, but for some reason this did not worry him so much.
He told a story about a rich guy who farmed and farmed and got so much grain that he kept buliding bigger and bigger barns to keep it all in. The guy thought he was pretty cool, but one night he went to sleep and didn’t wake up. His wealth could not keep him from death, and all his big barns full of grain went to the birds.
So what’s Jesus saying? Quit your job, wear flower petals and eat out of dumpsters? We don’t think he’s telling us to give up our common sense. There is a lot of good that comes from planning for the future to ensure the survival of ourselves and others. But maybe he’s challenging our cultural world view that is work focused. So many people live to work. It becomes the definition of who we are so that when we have nothing to do we start to go a little mental.
It seems he’s probing at something deeper– that the meaning of life goes much deeper than what we do externally. He said “Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothing?”
Jesus says that God knows what we need and he provides it. But some challenge this and say that there’s plenty of birds and people out there dying of hunger. What about them?
It’s a big question, and one that was discussed a lot last Tuesday. Maybe we are supposed to be part of the solution. Ghandi said, “There is enough for every man’s need but not every man’s greed.” Maybe some of us taking too much has been what has caused this imbalance.
When Jesus got up on the mountain and started talking, he started off by saying “Blessed are the poor”. What’s blessed about being poor? Maybe he was getting at the truth that when you aren’t consumed with getting all this stuff that you don’t really need, and you have to rely on a higher power to get the basic necessities of life, then maybe you get to find out what life is about beyond the external.
