I would like to pay some attention to the expression of our culture, through bumper stickers and graffiti. I remember when I was helping to run a coffee house in Morgantown, in my college years, in the men’s room, in that coffee house, on the wall it said, “God is dead. Niche.” Underneath someone had written, “Niche is dead. God.” God got the final word on that one apparently. I’ve noticed a bumper sticker for a number of years, and you’ve probably seen it also. It simply says, “God is my Co-Pilot.” And I appreciate the spirit of that and the affirmation of God in our lives, but I saw a commentary about that on another bumper sticker, more recently, that really gave rise to this sermon. A few months ago I saw this bumper sticker that said, “If God is your Co-Pilot, you need to switch seats.” I thought that a pretty good commentary on the first bumper sticker.
Well those thoughts became this sermon by way of the scripture passage I just read. It made me think about a couple of things, one of which was my time in my school years when I was on the wrestling team. On our team and others, we had wrestlers that we called, “junk wrestlers.” A junk wrestler was a wrestler that knew all the fancy moves that they had seen pulled off one place or another but they really didn’t know the fundamental moves of wrestling. They liked the glamorous moves with glamorous names like the “guillotine,” or the “grapevine,” or the “midnight ride.” And if you could somehow luck into one of those moves it was very dramatic but it usually was luck. They never really knew the fundamentals – these “junk wrestlers.” They didn’t know moves that had much less glamorous names like the “sit out,” or a “reversal,” or a “one leg take-down” or a “two leg take-down.” They wanted to do the famous, glamorous moves and generally a “junk wrestler” wound up in frustration and defeat. I think that’s true of life, too. We are tempted to be like that – to go after the things that promise to be fulfilling in the short run and that promise to bring the benefits of life that we see are immediate and gratifying for right now. I think we are all susceptible to that. There’s a temptation to major in the minors often and so we pursue what looks good and seems good in the here and now but finally it does not fulfill us, often ending in frustration and defeat. Into that struggle Jesus speaks these words, “Seek first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” In this passage in Matthew, Jesus begins by urging us not engage in anxious worry. “Do not be anxious about your life,” He says. The word literally means, “do not engage in anxious worry for food and clothing and shelter.” “Do not worry about those things,” says Jesus. The Greek in this phrase about anxious worry, suggests that it’s not out of bounds to practice prudent foresight in life and planning ahead but it is out of bounds to engage in anxious worry.
A friend of mine, who is a seminary professor at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, told me about the time where he went to a family friend who was his family physician as well, and this doctor gave him a survey that was to determine some factors about his level of health. One of the questions was, “Do you worry?” Charles checked “yes.” His friend said, “Now wait a minute, you teach the Bible, don’t you?” “Yeah, I teach the Bible.” “Well doesn’t the Bible say you aren’t supposed to worry?” “Well, yes.” “Well, then, why did you check that?” Well Charles brought that back to us and said, “What’s that about? Why is it we are told not to worry and yet we do?” Well there is a place for prudent planning in life but there is no place, says Jesus, for anxious worry. Birds don’t worry about where the next meal is coming from – they do work at building nests and finding food but they don’t worry, says Jesus. The flowers don’t toil and spin and yet they are arrayed more dramatically than anyone found in the courts of kings and queens. How much more, says Jesus, will God care for you, as compared to those animals and the flowers of the field? Worry is needless. It’s useless and also can be actively injurious to us.
A man was carrying huge burden in a sack on his back, larger than himself, in fact, and an angel appeared to him and said, “What do you have in the bag, what is weighing you down so much? Let’s take a look.” The man set down this big burden and opened it and the angel pulled out about half of that burden and said, “This is the past, there’s nothing you can do about the past, it’s gone! Nothing you can do to change it or affect it, you don’t need that. Leave it aside.” And the angel took out almost all of the rest of that burden and said, “This is the future, the future is in God’s hands. You cannot affect the future, you need to live for today.” The angel set that aside and the man walked away free. So often we carry that which we cannot affect, that which we cannot change, but we carry it as a burden in the form of worry. One sage advised a young protégé. He said, “Remember, the greatest troubles you have to face are those that never come.” Medical science has shown that the stress and strain of worry and anxiety is debilitating, it can reduce our ability to fight off disease and is physically debilitating on many levels. Jesus here speaks the antidote, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things will be added to you.” How do we do that? What does that look like? What does that mean, “Seek first the kingdom of God?”
Novelist Alexander Black liked to ask people, “If you were to receive a million dollars tomorrow, what would you do?” What would you do with it first? Now, today with inflation, that would be if you would receive one hundred million dollars tomorrow, what would you do with it, how would you spend it? It really is a way of finding what came first in people’s lives, which begs the question, “What comes first in your life?” What is it around which your life revolves today? One commentator on this scripture says we place the kingdom of God second and so we spend far more money for jails and prisons and hospitals and drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers than we would have spent on descent homes and city planning. So how do we seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness? The call is to first seek God’s will and God’s desire and God’s way. We tend to put that second or third or fourth or further down the list, I think. We make our plans and then we ask God to endorse them. I have some great plans. Over the years I’ve had some incredible plans. I’ve shared them with God, said “I have it worked out
Lord, this is the way it’s going to be…A, B, C, D. It’s a great plan, but God often does not go with my plans – I can’t understand it. But we do that, we tend to make our plans and envision what we want and we ask God to endorse our plans. We want to sign God on as our Co-Pilot, as our junior partner, to be in our firm and in our endeavor or our plans and then we become frustrated when our plans don’t work. Jesus did not say, “See the kingdom and His righteousness as a priority in your life.” He didn’t say, “Seek the kingdom of God and His righteousness as a central focus in your life. He didn’t say, “Seek the kingdom of God and His righteousness as a key factor,” but he said, “Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness.”
Henry Drummond said to his theological students, “Don’t be an amphibian, half in one world, half in another.” Later on he said, “Do not touch Christianity unless you are willing to seek the kingdom of heaven first. I promise you a miserable existence if you seek it second.” C. S. Lewis, along those lines, said, “Seek heaven and you’ll get earth thrown in, seek earth and you’ll get neither.” And so the call is to seek God first, for God’s vision and God’s will in our lives, not to make our own plans and ask God to sign on as a junior partner. What we are about now in this invitation to prayer time is just that, to seek God for what God wants for us, individually and together. Not to respond to needs particularly, not to respond because there is a call, or respond out of duty, or even out of guilt, but rather to seek God to see what is the appropriate response for each of us in His will for you and for me. To seek first His will, His kingdom and His righteousness and allow Him to lead the way. A life of seeking God first has a whole different perspective. In life, the pessimist sees the cup as half empty, the optimist sees the cup as half full, but biblically we are told, if we follow Jesus Christ, the cup is overflowing. Pressed down, shaken together, overflowing is the image of scripture if we will put the Kingdom of God and His will first in our lives.
A person I knew in college named Brad had a very active faith, he had come to a realization of the centrality of Christ in life, and he was active in his faith, helping out in church and various ministries, but Brad had a plan. His plan involved going to a wonderful, bucolic setting, a particular place he had in mind. He was going to build a particular life, and he had plans drawn up of the house he was going to build and the various features of that house. He was going to pursue a particular career, a particular way and as his life unfolded, it didn’t happen that way. He tried over and over to get it to work out the way he planned it and it just wouldn’t work. So he walked away from Christ. Jesus Christ had not given him what he wanted, had not endorsed his plan and signed on as a junior partner and so Brad walked way, dropped the faith, bagged the faith and said, “That’s it, the deal’s off.” Well, the fact is he did it all backwards and as I would hear about his life over years of time, it was marked by frustration and a lack of a center, a lack of focus because he demanded it be his way and he failed to realize that he needed to seek first God’s kingdom and His righteousness and all those things that he desired so much would be added to him.
A friend of mine, who was head of surgery at a Pittsburgh hospital when I was a seminary intern at Shadyside Presbyterian Church, sat down with several of us who were in seminary and he looked at us and, as I shared with a few of you before, he looked across the table and he said, “You know, if I had it to do over again, I would do exactly what you are doing.” And as I heard that, I realized it would not have been the
best thing for him. His ministry was to be a surgeon in a hospital in Pittsburgh because he was very good and was a Godsend. It was his ministry, but I understood what he was saying. He had finally come to the realization somewhat late in his life, that it’s most effective to put Christ first, to seek His will and as he had done that, he had found the joy of Christ. He had found a peace at the heart of his life that had eluded him to that point. As successful as he was, as “well off” as he was, he found, finally, the peace of heart and the peace of mind that he had longed for and so his reaction was, “If I had it to do over again, I would go into the ministry.” Well, I believe, that as time went on what he was doing was a ministry, and a powerful ministry. But we understood that he had found the joy of Jesus Christ when he put Christ first in his life and it changed his whole perspective and filled his life.
Perspective is fairly powerful. A few weeks ago, I shared with you about “D-Day” as we were celebrating Veterans’ Day. Those of you on the younger edge of the congregation, as I mentioned before, may not have any sense of that. It may not have come up in studies in your school yet. Some of you remember D-Day first hand. It was a time when my father and my father-in-law were in the thick of the war effort. But for those of you on the younger edge of the congregation, as I mentioned before, it was a time when the free peoples of the world launched an invasion, the most powerful and elaborate ever in the history of the world – across the English channel, from England, some 26 miles across to the coast of France, literally to take back Europe and give it back to it’s rightful owners. There were those with the German army and in the power of the Nazi’s, guarding the shores of France. Can you imagine on that morning, in June of 1944, as dawn crept across the waters and the beach, as those defenders of the coast looked out to see 5,000 war ships off the coast, coming right at them? I would imagine it gave them pause for just a moment. It would have been absolutely terrifying to be on that shore that morning. And yet the same image was one of great joy and great celebration for the free peoples of the world as the word went out that the invasion had begun on the coast of France. It was a time of celebration and anticipation and prayer and great expectation of victory. Those people in France who were under the thumb of the Nazi’s found it a point of great joy that the allies were landing to take back their country and give it back to them. And that same event was an event of great terror and great fear for those who were of ill will in the German army and in the command of Nazi Germany.
So it is as we seek God’s kingdom and seek first the will of Christ, it is a different perspective. Suddenly there is a different view of life – the cup is not half empty, it is not half full. The cup is really overflowing in life and we find there the joy that God meant for us to have from the beginning. We find the peace that so easily eludes us as we try to find fulfillment in so many other areas of life, apart from Christ. We find there meaning and purpose and direction when we seek first His kingdom and His righteousness at the heart of life. What is first in your life today? What is it that is first in your life? Christ saves us from darkness and sin and despair and meaninglessness and He saves us for something, He saves us for life and for purpose, for meaning and for a place. A place for you and a purpose for you in life. So the question is for each of us, “What is it that is first in your life today?”