(Originally preached at Calverton Baptist Church, Silver Spring, MD, Jan. 30, 1983; thereafter, with slight variations, at Clinton Baptist Church, Clinton, MD, July 29, 1984; Cresthill Baptist Church, Bowie, MD, Aug. 5, 1984; Takoma Park Baptist Church, Washington, DC, Aug. 12, 1984; First Baptist Church, Wheaton, MD, Sept. 16, 1984)
No one wants, it seems, to debate the thesis that ours is a peculiarly anxiety-ridden age. It has been the theme of much of our literature, it has preoccupied our playwrights and our filmmakers; it has absorbed the attention of psychiatrists and social workers, of entertainers and of clergymen. Anxiety is the catchword for our time; it is the umbrella under which we have come to place everything from drug abuse to overwork, everything from dieting to defense budgets: anxiety. Fear of the future, dread of what may come; anxiety, fear that we are not adequate for the days ahead, a nameless, gnawing, grinding suspicion that we are about to go under. Anxiety.
And if we are labeled as an anxious age, of course we have set out to do something about it. With American ingenuity, with old-fashioned Yankee know-how, we have come up with a number of solutions to the problems of anxiety.
We have devised the chemical escapes, so that properly understood, drug use and alcohol abuse are those ways our society has come through with that lift us up out of our worries and our miseries for a little while and allow us to forget, to escape. Never mind that when we come back from these indulgences, it's all there, just as scary and just as worrisome as before – but at least for the time being we have escaped.
Or we have developed the trap escapes – the trap escapes, the ones which look so attractive as ways out of our anxieties, but which end up making them worse, trapping us. We work hard because we fear a financial disaster, and we work harder and harder, faster and faster in order to stay ahead financially, but somehow it never really is enough. And the emotional and physical toll which is taken, the exhausted spirits and worn-out bodies become a trap, a vicious trap, because how we have something more to worry about. Plenty of cash in the bank, but too tired and too fragmented to enjoy what it might buy us. A trap. An anxiety trap, a trap escape.
I could name others, but I think you see the point. I could go on and bring you a detailed analysis of our anxiety syndrome, I could deal with the suicide rate and the crime rate, the divorce rate and the rate of admission to the mental hospitals. In the midst of such a world, such an age, I wonder how the clear, unequivocal command of the Apostle strikes you? Is there a word for us here, is there something in so deceptively simple a word as this? "Cast all your anxieties on him, for he cares about you."
Is this just one more nostrum in all age marked by cheap and easy solutions? Is this the latest California craze, the worst of the self-help adages? "Cast all your anxieties on him, for he cares about you."
My thesis this morning is that there is enormous wisdom in Peter’s command, "Cast all your anxieties on him." My thesis is that there is great wisdom in it and that it is gospel, it is good news and is liberation for us, prisoners as we are of our own making. Here is a key which will unlock us from the cages we have created; here is a hammer which will break open the boxes of our lives. “Cast all your anxieties on him, for he cares about you." And a good bit of its power rests in a single little word, in one nuance in this verse. Let me now highlight it for you: Cast ALL your anxieties on him. Cast ALL your anxieties on him, for he cares about you.
You see, what is so powerful about Peter's command is that it recognizes the fragmentation of our way of doing things. It recognizes that we are unwilling to commit ourselves wholly and radically to anyone thing or to anyone person. We always want to hedge our bets, to cover all the bases; we don't like leaving anything to chance, we say, and so we can understand what it might mean to trust God up to a point. But all your anxieties? Cast ALL our anxieties on him? We have trouble with that, don't we? We fall back on the old proverb which says, "Don't put all your eggs in one basket." And, though we acknowledge with our heads that if God be God he is able to take care of it all, yet with our hearts, down in the tummy, we feel uncertain, don’t we? How can I trust all my anxieties to Him? How can I bring him everything that I feel, everything that hurts? How call I consign to God those irrational, nameless, pointless fears? How is it possible for me to lay before the Father all that I am?
But I ask us this morning to near it and to hear it again, to hear it as a command, yes, but also to hear it as gospel, as the best of news, as the liberating power of a loving Lord: Cast all your anxieties on Him, for he cares about you.
I
What does this mean? For one thing, it means I can cast on a loving God even those anxieties which will never come true! I can cast on Him all my anxieties, even those which are more imagined than real, those which will never actually happen.
Isn't it truly the case that most of the time we worry about the possibilities rather than the realities? Isn't it your experience that those worries which nag at us the most are those in which we imagine the worst, but it never really happens?
I have to admit that in even in my mid-forties, I remain a devotee of the comic strips. My wife grumbles about the fact that when I am out of town for a few days, I have to spend some time when I return catching up on the comics. But its not just childishness, you know, there's some theology there. There are lessons, serious lessons to be learned in the comics.
And so for several days now we have been treated, through the medium of the strip “Bloom County,” to the closet full of anxieties harbored by young Milo, a closet which seems to contain everything from fearsome creatures with horns and sharp teeth to a gun-totin' cowboy who identifies himself as Yuri Andropov! And I have an idea the author of the strip is trying in his own tongue in cheek way to tell us that a good deal of what we fear is not really there, that much of what grabs at us from the closets of our waking dreams is not going to happen. But it is an anxiety, it is a gnawing, grinding fear.
And the Gospel says, Cast on a God who sorts out the true from the false even that anxiety. Cast on a God who can be counted on to provide a true and accurate perspective even for those fears which are irrational and pointless: we fear that we may lose a job; we suspect that someone down the street doesn't like us; we are anxious about crime, and who knows when it might strike us? We are uptight about the symbols of our prestige: am I up to date enough, am I cool enough, am I into the latest thing enough? And the Gospel says none of this will happen, none of this matters. Give the Lord God, who holds the future in the very palm of his hands, even that anxiety. Cast all your anxieties on him, for he cares about you!
II
Second, this truth of the Gospel, this commandment of power means that I can and must cast upon God those fears and worries which grow out of the dilemmas in which my life genuinely is placed. If I can trust God with the imaginary fears, I must also trust Him with the crucial issues of life, with the survival issues. For you see, if I don't trust Him down where life takes place, day by day and hour by hour, then I do not trust him at all. If I trust God's care for me only as it pertains to some carefully marked off spiritual realm, but I refuse to trust him for daily bread and for power for this day and this time, then I haven’t trusted Him at all.
You know, when we pray the Lord's Prayer, the first request we make of our Father is that He give us this day our daily bread. Think about that for a moment; that's not very spiritual, is it? Wouldn't you suppose that Jesus would have told us to pray for salvation or for enlightenment or for a deeper spiritual life? But he didn't. He told us to pray, "Give us this day our daily bread.” Give us the material resources we need. Give me what I need right now, to survive.
And isn't interesting, too, that the prayer does not say, “Give me all the bread I need for the rest of my life?” It says. ”Give us this day our daily bread.” Give me what I need, right now, for survival. For you see, what our Lord wants is that we should trust him, right now, in life's daily needs; and then that we should return tomorrow and trust him again, for that day and for its needs. We can trust our God, we can cast on him our anxieties, even those anxieties which have to do with today, with survival, with passing over whatever really does threaten us.
In the days of slavery in America, before the Civil War, there developed the institution known as the Underground Railroad. Through the underground railroad, which was not so much a rail system as it was a network of contacts and safe places and means of travel, many slaves escaped their masters and found their way to the free states or even out of the country. And the slaves, having found out the hard way that they could not speak openly of what was happening on the Underground Railroad, developed a kind of code language, the language which we call the Spiritual song. The thing we often miss about the spiritual, however, was that it expressed a lively and contemporary reality as well as a heavenly reality. And so when the slaves sang, “Steal away to Jesus,” they sang not only of going off to a quiet place to pray; they also were saying, it's time to leave, our contact is here, let's go. And when their voices rose to command, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, coming for to carry me home,” you can be sure that it was not only some imaginary chariot moving in to whisk them off to heaven; it was the chariot of the wagon of some friendly person, about to give them safe passage across Mason’s and Dixon’s line.
Now what I'm saying is that like the slaves who could wed their faith in the God of salvation with a trust that spoke to today's issue, to today's survival needs, in just that way you and I are called upon to cast our anxieties on our God, even those anxieties which are real, which do get right down to business, to today's survival. The unpaid bills, the failing grade; the broken relationship; the shattered marriage; the failures and the sins which so easily beset us, even these we cast upon a loving God. Because if we do not, they will eat at us and plague us until they crush us. Because we are not big enough, strong enough, consistent enough to manage it all. But our God is sufficient. He is sufficient; and, best of all, he cares bout us. Cast all your anxieties on him, for he cares about you.
III
And, finally, if I can cast upon this caring God my anxieties, foolish and nameless though they be, about things which will never even come to pass; and if I can bring myself into a daily trusting of this one whose shoulder will bear those things which do in fact threaten me, burden me; then I also know that I can cast on this Lord my ultimate anxieties. I can trust him with the profoundest, most shattering fear that I have, the fear that stalks the night, the specter that looms over every man and woman, and that is the fear of death.
We don't like to speak about it, do we? We reserve our talk of death for the funeral home and the graveside, where it lasts for a few moments and then is set aside so that we can erase it from our awareness. But, as Alfred Lord Tennyson put it, man "thinks he was not made to die." We fight against it, we rebel against it. We do not easily accept the idea that this is the end, that this is all there is. And even the best of us confesses to a fear of death. The last, the most profound, the most unanswerable, tile most destructive of our anxieties: the fear of death.
Now hear the apostle again, and hear him in the fullness of his declaration: “Cast ALL your anxieties on him, for he cares about you.” And I submit to you that all includes even this one, the anxiety, the fear that says. “What if this is all there is?” What if in the end all your struggle is for nothing? Do you have the faith to cast that fear on him too?
I sometimes stop and wonder what it will be like to be 75, 80, 85 years old. It seems a strange thing to do, doesn’t it? Maybe the fact that I have another birthday this week (they come around with astonishing regularity), and therefore am one notch closer to old age. Maybe that has something to do with it. But I do wonder what it will be like, no, I wonder what I will be like. The possibility is there for a crotchety, grasping, fear-dominated, bitter existence. I've seen it happen, and so have you. But I also dream of an old age of serenity and of gratitude, thankful that I've been permitted to live that long, and ready, as ready as the human spirit can be, for that final step of faith. I hope that there is some way I can prepare to cast that last and most devastating anxiety on my God, and to know that he cares about me.
Come to think of it, there is. There is a way to prepare for that. And the way is to start now. The way to prepare to divest myself of all my anxieties is to unload them now. The way is to look to that cross up there and to see in its emptiness a picture of the one who cared so deeply that he climbed upon its heights, but who defeated it, conquered it. The way to deal with my anxieties, now or in the future, is to know that in that cross and in that empty tomb my Lord has won the victory. His life has become, mysteriously, my life, and his resources my resources. He cares about me, has invested in me.
The way to prepare to die is to live, you see. The way to clear the calendar of my anxieties is to cast all of them, from the least to the greatest, on him. Those which won’t happen anyway; those which make the going pretty tough right now, today; those which surround me as I recognize that the time will come when I must die. All of them. ALL of them. He has nailed them to the cross and has risen, has won. Cast ALL your anxieties on him, for he cares about you.
