Sermon on Worry

I struggle against worry now. My actual present circumstances are these. I and my family are healthy; we genuinely love and enjoy each other; we have a roof over our heads and food in our bellies and in our cupboards; my church is a place where I really encounter God in worship and I can see that others do, too; my closest friends are people at NewStart who love and support me; and I continue to see new people becoming a part of NewStart and finding the same transforming love that we found here.

And yet, I struggle against a paralyzing, distorting, defeating worry. I worry that the last paying client my business got is the last client we'll ever get, and the house will be foreclosed on and my wife and children will be ashamed of me. I worry that the worst decision my kids have made in the past year will be habits rather than exceptions. I worry that my church will become visionless and haphazard on the one hand, or rigid and controlling on the other, instead of the place of freedom and grace and destiny that it began to be and all our sacrifices will be in vain and all our dreams be exposed as foolish. But when worry drives me, it drives me to the very thing I fear.

A long time ago, two boys were born, fraternal twins named Esau and Jacob.

As the boys grew up, Esau became a skillful hunter, a man of the open fields, while Jacob was the kind of person who liked to stay at home.

Gen 25:27

Esau was big and strong and rugged and daring. Hunting took him far from home as he tracked his quarry. Jacob tended the sheep, which let him stay close to home, and was a little more certain of success than hunting, and a little safer. He did a little cooking, too, and he was pretty good at it. He was a homebody who tried to avoid conflict and unnecessary risk. Now, God had made some promises to Jacob. God had promised that Jacob would do well, that he would prosper, that he would be strong, that he would be given prominence. But Jacob was a few minutes younger than his brother Esau, and birth order was important in those days. It would be Esau who would inherit his father's position in the family as the leader, and who would inherit the bulk of his father's estate, not Jacob.

And Jacob began to worry. What if Esau is the head of the family and gets all the breaks and all the resources and I'm supposed to be subservient to him? How can things turn out right for me if that happens? And worry begins to consume Jacob, and he schemes to get what he thinks he needs to be who he thinks he's supposed to be. So one day when he's in the kitchen cooking, his brother comes home from a long, unsuccessful hunting trip, and he's just famished, and Jacob's cooking smells so good, and he asks Jacob for some. And Jacob says: "I'll sell it to you -- in exchange for your birthright!" And Esau, thinking with his stomach, focused on right now, says: "what good is a birthright if I starve to death?" and sells his birthright for a bowl of stew. Later, he tricks his poor, blind old father into giving him Esau's blessing as the firstborn son, as well, by dressing up as Esau and pretending to be him. So when he has a little power, he's controlling, and when he doesn't have any power, he's deceitful. He manipulates and he steals, and at last his brother threatens to kill him, and Esau is big enough to do it, so Jacob has to flee his home. He runs away to the country that his mother came from, and there he finds a wife. Actually he finds two wives, sisters, (it was a fairly messed up culture, and that was legal) and he went to work for his father-in-law in the sheep raising business. And Jacob, who has cheated his brother, worries. He worries that his father-in-law will cheat him. He prospers, but his father-in-law doesn't trust him and he doesn't trust his father-in-law, and his wives are fighting among themselves and he's playing everybody off of everybody else. Finally, although nothing bad is actually happening to him, his worry about the bad things that may be about to happen drives him to flee from Laban in the middle of the night, without notice or warning, with his wives and children and the sheep and cattle he's acquired over the years.

He heads back toward the home that he fled 20 years earlier but in that direction is his big red-headed brother who can still break him in two like Bill Howerton could break me. And in the intervening years, Esau has acquired a small army of employees and followers, and he's found out that Jacob is coming, and he's heading toward Jacob with his army.

So Jacob is between a rock and a hard place, alone in the open country, caught between the brother he cheated and the father-in-law he abandoned.

At sundown he arrived at a good place to set up camp and stopped there for the night. Jacob found a stone for a pillow and lay down to sleep.
Gen 28:11

Now let's go back and look at our first verse again. Now lets look at the next one again. A stone for a pillow. Jacob, who loved home, is sleeping in an open field with a stone for a pillow. Jacob has lost his own identity. Jacob who didn't like confronting people, who tried to avoid open conflict, now had open war and mortal danger coming at him from every side. Jacob has lost who he is. Jacob, who wanted to be prominent is alone. Jacob who wanted to become powerful is vulnerable. Worry has driven him from everything that gave him his identity, his sense of worth. Jacob is the son of Isaac, the grandson of Abraham, whom God had chosen, and who was called the friend of God, but Jacob now feels utterly abandoned by a God he doesn't know, doesn't trust and doesn't see. Jacob has utterly lost his identity, and the quiet homebody takes a stone for a pillow, and worries about war and destitution, as his children and his sheep sleep peacefully in the fields around him, and at last, sleep overcomes him.

As he slept, he dreamed of a stairway that reached from earth to heaven. At the top of the stairway stood the LORD, and he said, "I am the LORD, the God of your grandfather Abraham and the God of your father, Isaac.... I will be with you, and I will protect you wherever you go. I will be with you constantly until I have finished giving you everything I have promised." Then Jacob woke up and said, "Surely the LORD is in this place, and I wasn't even aware of it."

Gen 28:12-16

In his worry, in his fear, in his desperation, when he thought the darkness would take him, he finds himself almost literally at the gate of heaven. When he thought he was alone, the God of glory reveals himself to Jacob. A lot of bad things had happened to Jacob, and a lot more bad things would happen to him in the future, but the shame of his past and the tragedies in his future never again defined Jacob. This dream defined him. The certain knowledge that "the LORD is in this place" defined him.

Jacob is not the example of a spiritually, emotionally, relationally healthy person. But he is an example of the stubborn work of God in his life, so that he gets healthy after all. At the end of his life, he is, after all, prosperous and secure and respected and he has, after all, become a healthy leader, passing on what God wants to pass on to his children and his grandchildren. And a thousand years later, when the God of heaven wanted to identify himself to someone, he would identify himself as "the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac -- and the God of Jacob.

I've done some praying this past week. I'm planning to do a lot more praying over the next several weeks, and some of you are probably going to be doing a little more praying than usual, as we as a church seek to let God work himself more deeply into our minds and spirits.

There's a great bit of advice, followed by a great promise, written many centuries after the time of Jacob, by someone who counted himself -- and us -- as descendants of Jacob.

Don't worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. If you do this, you will experience God's peace, which goes beyond anything we can imagine. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.

Phil 4:6-7

His peace will guard our hearts and minds. Even with all the things that may sometimes seem to be stacked against us and hinting at some impending doom, his peace will guard our hearts, our minds, our identities, will cause us to remember who we are and whose we are, and to be who we really are and want to be. Most of what we worry about never really happens, of course, but the promise of God is that even when it does, I can still have peace, and I can still remain the me I mean to be, the me that prompts the God of heaven to say he is the God of Abraham and the God of Jacob and the God of you and me.

May the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.