Consider the Lilies of the Field: a meditation on St. Matthew 6:26-30
[Summer, so meditations rather than homilies]
Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?
Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?
Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature?
So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin;
and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?
We are so jaded by this world that when we hear words like these, we are tempted to trump them with our worldliness and call them “naive”. But you can’t trump the Truth. Let’s be honest: Christ was not naïve. He was the ultimate realist: [in fact,] He is the one crafted reality (and through whom it is being recrafted to overcome the flaws we have put into it). When Christ says something that runs counter to our understanding, we should rejoice and listen attentively because we are being given the opportunity to learn something new. And I love the way Christ teaches. Academic theologians may use a lot of big words and logical proofs, but Jesus presented the Truth simply and in ways that speak directly to the open mind and the simple heart. And his words are designed to bring solutions to our very real problems.
[What he is NOT teaching: the prosperity Gospel. Bad theology and empirically unsustainable. We know from our own history that holiness is rarely correlated with worldly success (example of the martyrs of the Holodomor and and of the Turkish Yoke). Christ is teaching us something much more powerful: how to achieve the kind of peace that will continue irregardless of our circumstances. He is teaching about the kind of joy that will sustain us throughout the worst sort of martyrdom… much less in a place of abundance like 21st century America.]
Today, Christ teaches us how to live without stress using the example of the lilly of the field. If you look at the rectory, you’ll notice a lot of daylilies. I love them. Let me share three things we can learn from their example:
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Christ describes how the lilies of the field achieve beauty without stress. They are perfectly in balance with their environment, taking the spot in which they they find themselves and transforming into a garden of delight. We can do this, too. As that great sage Bukaroo Bonzai pointed out; “wherever you are, you’re there.” We are meant to bring beauty to this place and time. And we can do this [in fact, we MUST do this] without worry and without stress.
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The secret of the lily’s stress-free success is that it thrives in diverse soils and situations. Like it, humans are very adaptable. We can survive in many climates and so on. Biologists tell us that this confirms a huge evolutionary advantage. But life is about more than survival, and like the lilies, we have the ability to really thrive [and to make it look effortless and graceful]. In this, we have an advantage over the lilies: no matter where we are, our soil can always be perfect. As long as our roots are set in the good soil of the Christian heart and strengthened by the Holy Spirit, we are sure to flower and bear good fruit. And this can happen whether the world responds to our holy lives with glory or with martyrdom. Any setting will do just fine.
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Lastly, one of the things I love about daylilies is the way they rejoice in the rays of the sun. You can almost hear them singing as they turn their flowers and leaves towards the light. The Sun of Righteousness is shining on all of us – and so, like the lilies, we lift up our arms and raise our faces to bask in his glory; and in so doing become part of a world that has been reclaimed from sadness and sin and brought into glory.
Consider the lilies of the field.
