Do Not Worry! (?)
Matthew 6:24-34
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
February 15, 2026
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlpkzzcN-DM
Americans are feeling gloomy about the future. A recent Gallup poll asked people to evaluate how good their life will be in 5 years. Americans gave the most pessimistic responses When asked to evaluate how good their life will be in 5 years on a recent Gallup poll, Americans responded with the lowest measure of optimism since Gallup began asking this question about twenty years ago. [1]
A pastor once knew about some particular challenges in a certain household, so she asked the father if they were worried about the situation. The father replied, “No, but I worry that it is already past the time when I should have started worrying.”
Many of us are worried and stressed. I know someone who loses valuable time because she gets caught up in doom scrolling and then she loses more time because when she finally puts down the phone she is so depressed that she has to take a nap. I know someone who feels the stress as chronic, low-level nausea which is never fully relieved no matter how many antiacids or ginger ale he consumes. I know some folks who have not got a full night’s rest in many months. I know someone who has gone through the public motions of celebrating their children’s milestone accomplishments while privately grieving the world they are inhabiting. I won’t ask you to raise your hands, but maybe some of you resemble those descriptions. I know I do.
By many indications, we are worried. We are anxious. And for many good reasons. It is not like our worries are unfounded. Bad things are happening and even when they are known by many people and even by people with some power to effect change, they are not being fixed.
In times like this, we should be able to turn to our faith, to be comforted and guided by the wisdom we find there. So I went to Jesus. I went to this collection of his core teachings called the Sermon on the Mount. Last Sunday at Dinner Church, we explored Jesus’ teaching on anger in this same collection and I heard from some of you that that was kind of helpful. So, I thought to try again with this part about worry.
“Jesus’ longest discourse on a human emotion is about worry.”[2] Jesus could have picked any number of different emotions to focus on – anger, fear, grief, affection – but he chose worry. One scholar writes “It is clear from Jesus’ attention to the subject that worry has been an unwelcome guest in human hearts and minds from the very beginning, . . insinuating itself, creeping up and settling in wherever and whenever it can.” [3]
So, Jesus had a lot to say about worry. That seems like a good sign as I reach for my Bible, as I anticipate receiving the wisdom I’m looking for. I also know that Jesus’ audiences were the 90% of the population who were poor. They were people who earned enough to eat today, but who might not work tomorrow and therefore might not eat tomorrow. People who had good reason to worry about the world their children were inhabiting. People who were suffering brutal oppression and military occupation. They carried all the physical signs and symptoms of worry and anxiety and fear with them all the time because life was so uncertain.
If Jesus talked a lot about worry, if he had guidance and comfort for those first century Palestinians, then surely I will find what I need in this passage, right? Confidently then, I open the Bible and discover these words. Jesus said, “Do not worry about your life. . .” He says a little bit more, something about not being able to get any taller or live any longer just by worrying. None of this seems especially helpful.
When I am deeply concerned about something and someone says “Don’t worry about it. I am sure it will be fine. ” that is the opposite of comforting. The result is that I am still concerned but also now angry about the other person’s cluelessness.
I know Jesus is not clueless, but so far is not giving me much to go on. So I read more slowly, trying to figure it out. He says “Look at the birds of the air.” “Consider the lilies of the field.”
It turns out that look and consider are very strong verbs in Greek. Jesus is saying “No really, look at these things, study them.”
Barbara Brown Taylor writes “As moral as [Jesus] was—as much as he cared about the blessedness of the poor, the welfare of widows, the healing of the sick, and the raising of the dead – he seemed to know that what anxious people need is to get over ourselves for a moment, losing ourselves in the kind of beauty that loosens our grip on all the things we mistakenly think will keep us safe.”[4]
I was very fortunate that Wayne Oates was one of my teachers. He was professor of psychiatry at the University of Louisville School of Medicine and also taught at my seminary. His work was foundational to the field which is now known as pastoral care. He is the person who coined the term “workaholic.”
One particular lecture has stuck with me. It’s one in which he talked about how to manage chronic pain. He said that if you live with chronic pain or if you care for someone who does, you have to create coping strategies. One strategy is distraction or interruption. In this strategy, you take breaks, to give yourself opportunities to shift your focus from your pain and from whatever you have to do to manage your condition. In some way, you change your routine, your location or whatever is receiving your primary attention.
So today I’m thinking about worry as that chronic pain. Maybe Barbara Brown Taylor has it right. Jesus could be saying, interrupt your pain with beauty. Look up from your doom scrolling and watch the birds. Watching the birds is not going to right the world’s wrongs, but Taylor says, “beauty can make them seem small in the presence of something so luminous, so unexpectedly lovely and generously given that we welcome its disruption; the silver wings of a bird, the purple throat of a lily. Beauty can hold our gaze for a moment of perfect stillness. Then, when it is done dismantling us, beauty can bring us back to ourselves with a wider gaze and a surer sense of connection to every living thing, ready to engage the divine work of creating more beauty in the world, more justice and true love.”[5]
It is counter-intuitive to me, not easy to trust that turning my attention away from the struggle is the right thing to do.
The world has watched as two white people were murdered by authorities in broad daylight in Minneapolis. Accountability for those crimes has been elusive or non-existent and some people have said, “this is not America.” But other voices have said, “This is who America has always been.” Brown and black people have always lived in this America. They are too familiar with lynchings by those supposedly charged to serve and protect. They know well the rage at injustice and the chronic worry that a loved one could be next.
And so, I am wondering if I might also turn to their faith and wisdom to understand what Jesus meant. Rev. Otis Moss III is the pastor at Trinity United Church in Chicago. Moss embodies black spirituality and black liberation theology. His first book was Blue Note Preaching in a Post-Soul World: Finding Hope in an Age of Despair. That sounds like the kind of wisdom I’m looking for. More recently, he released another book, entitled Dancing in the Darkness.
He said that the title comes from an experience with his daughter in 2008, when then-Senator Barack Obama, who was a member of his congregation, was running for president. The church and Moss’ predecessor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, were receiving death threats. Moss was also on the church staff at the time.
He said, “One night we heard something in the house and my wife tapped me and said, ‘[You] need to check that out,’” Moss recalled. “So I grabbed my rod and my staff that comforts me — that being a Louisville slugger — and looked around the house and I heard the noise again coming from my daughter's bedroom, and I'm thinking that someone broke into our home. Was I going to have to defend my children and my wife? I come into my daughter’s room and there she is in the middle of the room and she’s dancing. She’s saying, ‘Look, daddy, I'm dancing.’ It's 3 a.m. So I get that fatherly voice — ‘Baby, you need to go to bed.’
But then the spirit just rested on me and said, ‘Look at your daughter, she’s dancing in the darkness. The darkness is around her, but it’s not in her.’ And at that moment, I ran down to my study and I just started writing until the sun came up. And when I finished, I stepped into the pulpit and said, ‘We are called to dance in this darkness, dance with love, with joy, with justice, with compassion, with dignity.’”[6]
Here’s another story -- An American woman named Yvonne went to Honduras to work in refugee camps for people fleeing the war in El Salvador in the 1980’s. One day a woman asked Yvonne whey she always looked so sad. Yvonne talked about the grief she felt over all the suffering she was witnessing and her commitment to give everything she had to the struggle. The refugee woman told her, “Only people who expect to go back to North America in a year work the way you do. You cannot be serious about our struggle unless you and play and celebrate and do those things that make it possible to give a lifetime to it.” Each time the refugees were displaced and had to build a new camp, they immediately formed three committees, a construction committee, an education committee, and the committee of joy. Celebration was as basic to their life as digging latrines and teaching their children to read. [7]
We are now in a struggle for the long haul. I am aware that I don’t know much about that. My inclination is just to grit my teeth and get through this. America 2026 is not a joyful place, so if I don’t expect joy or justice. If it seems wrong to celebrate, that seems reasonable. But Jesus spoke about life in abundance, about joy being full. And in this passage, Jesus says that life is more than food and clothing. Life is more than that. Worry robs us of life, chronic fear results in a cautious way of living that is not really living at all.
Jesus is always offering us an alternative. Look at the birds, consider the lilies. These are phrased like commands.
“Jesus means for us to study and scrutinize a world where God provides freely and lavishly, to enter into God’s reign where anxiety plays no part, where worry is not a reality.”[8]
Look at the birds, consider the lilies, dance in the dark, choose joy no matter what – these are commands that may save our lives. Amen.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/new-gallup-poll-reveals-depth-of-americans-gloom-about-the-future
[2] Martin Copenhaver, Jesus Is the Question: The 307 Questions Jesus Asked and the 3 He Answered, (Nashville: Abingdon, Press, 2014), p. 45.
[3] Martin Copenhaver, Jesus is the Question, p. 45
[4]Barbara Brown Taylor, “Errors About Beauty” in Always A Guest: Speaking of Faith Far From Home, (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2020), p. 15
[5] Barbara Brown Taylor, Always a Guest, p. 15
[6] https://news.wttw.com/2023/02/11/seeking-light-during-difficult-times-dancing-darkness
[7] Told by Joyce Hollyday in Turning Toward Home (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), pp 263-264
[8] Thomas G. Long, Matthew: The Westminster Bible Companion (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1997), p. 75