Control, Choices, and the Gospel

• Whether, when, and how many children we’ll have.
• Some even decide whether to bring conceived children to birth.
• Soon we’ll be trying to control their sex, their appearance, their intelligence.
• We even seek to control when and how our lives will end, by entertaining laws allowing Euthanasia.

Beyond good or evil: manipulating nature without regard to moral law

We seek to control everything in our lives: we are comfortable only, when we are in control, in the driver’s seat, masters of our own destiny: when we can play God over our own or others’ lives. But are we really the little gods that we desire to be! Ultimately we can’t control anything or anyone. .”Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature?”

Listen to your heart beat when you lie down in bed tonight—you can’t control the next beat, or stop it from happening. You don’t even know if you’ll wake up the next morning. We used to understand this when we were children, in the simplest of all prayers:

“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, but if I die before I wake “

—but now we play our digitized surf sounds and try to control how and when we sleep.

I have watched the airlines trying to control who and what was put on board a plane: their ability to control boiled down to warnings about strange packages repeated over the PA system, and placing a red stripe on our boarding passes.

Floods, fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, accidents, violent crime, and dread diseases: we have no control…we are not gods—and to act otherwise, with foolish anxiety and frenzy—is idolatry, self-worship.

“Therefore do not worry, saying ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ After all these things the Gentiles seek. Your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. Seek first the kingdom of heaven and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.”

Is this the biblical version of “Don’t worry, be happy!”? No—there are a couple of important differences!

We cannot use trust in God as an excuse for laziness, irresponsibility, or foolish risk-taking. Jesus reminded Satan, when that evil spirit, invited him to leap from the pinnacle of the temple: “You shall not tempt the Lord your God.” And as St. Paul wrote to some overly carefree Thessalonians, “If anyone will not work, neither shall he eat.” God promises to provide us with food, drink, and clothing—the basic necessities of life; nowhere does He go into details of what, where, how much or how easily we will be able to attain these things.

No health and wealth gospel!

The shelter Jesus promises us doesn’t tell us that we will have tennis courts and a swimming pool—or even good schools for our children. A bag of groceries from the Food Pantry is a true fulfillment of His promise. We must never get to thinking that He owes us all we have, or worse: that we have acquired these things, controlled our destiny, apart from His free gifts. The gifts for which we are held accountable, after all, may actually be the means by which God fulfills His will of food, drink, and clothing not for us, but for others!

And so, we learn from this morning’s Holy Gospel that:

• We cannot serve God and mammon—money and possessions.
• We can turn ourselves into idols and false gods by believing and acting as if we are in control of everything, when in fact, we control nothing.
• We must seek the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and He will give us all we need to survive, however, this is not a license for laziness, nor is it a promise of wealth and ease.

After all, how many temptations to worship our mammon and ourselves do we really want to place between us and our true wealth, our true riches: abiding eternally in His light, His love, and in His kingdom?

Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever! +