Sermon on Matthew 6:24-34
One of the hardest parts of my spiritual journey, harder than returning to faith from atheism, harder than accepting the role of servant and disciple of Jesus Christ, has come fairly recently in that journey. As I have walked this road and met others on the same journey, I have been amazed at the diversity of authentic religious experience others have felt. People walking completely different paths from the one I’m one still wind up at many of the same destinations. I’ve met Jewish people whose passion for God is a strong as, if not stronger than, mine. I’ve met Muslims who thirst for justice and righteousness because of their love of God in ways that shame me for my shortcomings as a representative of Christianity.

On a broader scale, people all over the world have sacred visions. A little girl in Mexico has a vision, and she sees a brown-skinned Virgin Mary. A young man in India, sitting under a bodhi tree, has an equally powerful vision, but it is of the obliteration of the self, the union with the universe, that Buddhists still seek, the state called nirvana. A man in the late sixth century in Mecca has a vision, and it is the angel Gabriel revealing to him the true faith, which he calls The Recitation, in Arabic The Qur’an. A man in first-century Palestine has a vision, and it is of the Christ whose followers he has been persecuting.

I have not personally had any type of vision or revelation, beyond that which those who humbly pray experience in prayer and study. How, then, do I know which of these revelations to trust? Living in a culture in which a slim majority are at least nominally Christian, it seems natural for us to be Christians without ever really wondering why. But as I encountered these non-Christians whose faith was real and alive, or even people who practiced a form of Christianity very different from my own, I was forced to wonder why I was a Christian. Was it, as many suggest, just an accident of birth? If I had been born in India, would I have been as passionate a Hindu as I am a Christian? If I had been born in France, would I have been as passionate a Catholic as I am a Protestant?

Of course, it is impossible and unhelpful to ponder what-ifs. However, as I have spent the odd hour wondering about this, I ultimately realized that no religion has any proof behind it. There are no empirical reasons for following any faith tradition. No religion has produced more good or less evil than any other. So why, in a nutshell, am I a Christian?

And the answer to that is, I am a Christian because I want the God revealed by Jesus Christ to be real. Faith comes from desire. I read a passage like this morning’s reading, and I see in it a God that I hope is in control of the universe. I encounter a God that I want to know better. I am a Christian not because of evidence or fact. I am a Christian because of hope.

That hope finds expression in Jesus’ words in this passage. The God that Jesus talks about here is the God I hope is real. This is a God that deserves love. Unlike many of the gods in both Jesus’ time, such as Mammon, as a more familiar translation of this passage names, and in ours, such as nationalism or consumerism, this God loves us for what we are, not who are or what we can provide. This God doesn’t demand sacrifices and productivity. This God demands nothing of us.

I have to wonder what it means when Jesus says that God provides for the little birds. Lots of birds starve to death in winter. Almost every day we have a bird fly into a window at the parsonage and kill itself. These birds provide sorrow when we have to clean up their little bodies, but they provide nothing else. They don’t even provide another generation of birds, as nature asks of them. But even these birds, these animals with brains so small that they fly, over and over again, into the windows of our houses, even these birds, who provide nothing to the world, even these birds are valued and loved by God. God gains nothing from them. They have nothing to give God. But still, they are beloved of God. And, as Jesus asks, are not we of more value than they?

What is meant by value? We hear that horrible term applied to people all the time, as if people are not worthwhile simply because they are human beings. We hear about the most valuable player, a person who is loved not for who she is but for what she can provide to others. We hear about valued members of the community, again people who are not loved for who they are but for what they provide. But this is not why people are valuable to God. People are valuable to God simply because they are people, not because of what they can provide.

Again, this is the God in whom I have hope, in whom I have faith. This is why I am a Christian.

I often think that if we really believed in this God then we would worry less. “Don’t worry,” we are commanded by Jesus no fewer than five times in this brief passage. Don’t worry. Your value is not based in what you create, what you make, what you provide. Your value to God is in being you. Because you exist, God loves you. Not because of your tithing or your teaching, your faithfulness or your study, although these are all good things. God doesn’t love you for what you do; God loves you for who you are.

And so, in response to this love, we should joyfully tithe and teach and pray and be faithful. Because God loves us this much we should strive to praise and honor God with all we do. But God loves us no matter what we do. God loves us if we spend our Sunday mornings sleeping off Saturday night or if we spend them in church. God loves us if our money goes toward building wells in African villages or if it goes to gambling and drugs. It doesn’t matter what we do–God loves us regardless. Hear the good news: Christ dies for us while we were yet sinners. This proves God’s love for us!

Contrast this God to the gods of our culture. How many commercials did you see yesterday? Even if you didn’t watch television, you saw commercials. If you read the newspaper or a magazine, you saw more ads than content. If you traveled, you saw billboards and road signs, each emblazoned with pictures of smiling, successful people and the product that made them so happy. Heck, some of you might even know people who go to churches with Starbucks and gift shops in them. Consumerism is a god of our culture. Everywhere we look, we are being told to consume. That’s even our government’s economic policy, and it has been for decades, save the economy by spending, spending , spending. You’ll be happy, you’ll be successful, you’ll be doing your part. But this is a god that does not love us for who we are. It loves us for what we do. Like the ancient god Mammon, the god of consumerism doesn’t care about the people who worship it. It only cares that those people sacrifice every last penny to feed its insatiable hunger.

The other gods of our culture are just as selfish. Consumerism, nationalism, capitalism, communism, fashion, trends, the list goes on and on. All of these gods are empty, and they demand that we sacrifice ourselves to fill them up. They demand that we act, that we do things for them.

But our God is not like that. Our God loves us for who we are. Our God loves us no matter what. We can reject God, curse God’s name, and hide in the deepest depths of the ocean, as the Psalmist did, but still God seeks us out for no other reason than to love us. Why, then, should we be motivated to do anything for God? If God loves us no matter what, then why get up early on a beautiful Sunday morning on a long weekend to go to church? Why stay up an extra fifteen minutes every night to study the scriptures?

What good is love if it is unilateral? What good is it for God to love us if we do not love back? I don’t mean that if we do not love God back then it does not do us any good. God’s love is all anyone could ask for. God’s love, even if unrequited, is all any person needs. God’s love is sufficient for being made whole, which is what the Greek word for salvation means. God’s love will make us whole, given time, even if we do nothing in response.

When I say that it does no good if God loves us and we do not love God back is that God’ love does not good if we do not love God back. God’s love is capable of transforming the world from a place ruled by the evil powers we talked about earlier into a place called the Kingdom. In that Kingdom, humans live in peace and justice. There is an abundance of the things we need, and we are not distracted by the things we don’t. This is the kind of world God wills for us, but it can only come into being if we, in turn, love God enough to build it.

That is why we study and tithe and worship and pray. We don’t do these things so God loves us more; we do these things so we love God more, and so that we learn what it means to love God. The more we love God, the more we change the world around us. The more we love God, the more we build the Kingdom, brick by brick, in the small piece of the world in which we walk. The more we love God, the more God’s love can spread over the world, healing every sick spirit and filling every empty heart.

My trust, my faith, my hope lie in things I can never know, that can never be proved. But the one thing I do know is that I am a Christian because the God proclaimed by Jesus Christ is one I can fall madly in love with. Is this God real? Who knows? I believe, but faith and knowledge are vastly different things. But this God is the God we hope for, the God we long for, the God we love. For the grace to carry that love to the world, thanks be to God. Amen.