The Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity '26

Note: No video is available for this sermon. We apologize for Sunday's audio difficulties during our YouTube livestream.

At first glance, this morning’s lessons seem completely at odds. One of them bids us not to be anxious. One of them bids us to be crucified. How can these things hold together? In the Gospel Lesson, our Lord confronts our common tendency to be anxious. Anxiousness in the Scriptures is not "anxiety" as a modern diagnostic manual would define it; it is not a crippling cognitive or neurological condition that afflicts some. Instead, it is a condition of the heart whose name derives from an ancient word meaning "to choke"—the creeping sense that the world is against us, a slow strangling, the margins of life continually thinning out—it is the general condition of grappling with our insufficiency. We know deep down that we cannot be enough for ourselves, and yet we can also be stubborn, resisting the self-surrender required to grow in trust toward God while our youth, wealth, strength, fame, and outward beauty pass away. 

As our Lord teaches us, anxiousness thrives when we step out of pace with the natural tempo of life, either slowing to ruminate on the past or accelerating to worry about the future. Many of us have experienced  missing out on the joy of good moments in life precisely because we were not where or when we actually were. Sometimes, becoming unstuck in time like this can be the result of traumatic experiences; for many of us, it is much more often the result of distraction or a desire to micromanage life. We find it difficult to be content that we are provided for today because of our worry that we will not be provided for tomorrow. Avoiding this tendency, however, is notoriously difficult. As Bp. Scarlett has pointed out, there are few things as useless as telling an anxious person not to be anxious. Dwelling on how anxious we are drags us deeper into the anxiety. And appeals to theological abstractions like providence or benevolence—true as they are—do little to quiet the anxious heart. Rather, we have to make the counterintuitive move of leaning into the worried moment, remaining in its discomfort. Each day has enough trouble, and each day’s trouble is the opportunity to know that God’s help is more than enough.

Our Lord repeats His command not to worry three times, and after each offers a replacement that draws us further from the anxiousness. First, He invites us to look at—a return to attentiveness, a willingness to stay still where we are. To look at the birds of the air requires we look up; yet they draw us back down. After all, they do not find their daily bread on the wind, but descend to find it given. Second, He invites us to consider—how fragile lilies grow even in harsh seasons, how life unfolds delicately over time, how something so fragile is nevertheless beautiful, and how that loveliness is not necessary to its sustenance but a sign of God’s abundance. Third, He invites us to seek the Kingdom—not as a band-aid for our wounded life in the world, but as our true home that we find precisely when we do not abandon those uncomfortable and painful places where life in the world proves most fleeting. Our Lord will not have us linger in the doorway between the world and the Kingdom. We cannot ultimately be in both. And ultimately, the doorway that we must pass through from one to the other is the Cross of Christ.

For ancient Israel, circumcision was the irrevocable mark of devotion to God and His calling. It definitively signaled passing from belonging to the nations to belonging only to God. In St. Paul's logic this morning, though, if circumcision was so profound and significant, how much more the Cross, which fulfilled it? On the Cross, the crucified Lord assumed the irrevocable marks of devotion to His Father, suffered for our redemption, and made good on the promises of all the covenants; through His self-offering we are rescued from captivity in the world and given a place in God's family. By the Cross, we pass from belonging to sin and death into belonging to God through love and life. For St. Paul, the Cross was not only a moment in time; it is now a fact of every Christian’s life. Thus, as he says of his scars gained through persecution, "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." Glorying in the Cross is not passive but active participation, bearing through suffering with faithfulness like our Lord, trusting the Father in hope.

The world and our life in it can only be anxious, because ultimately it is the attempt at life apart from God; we become chronically anxious in the Scriptural sense when we participate in that delusion. The antidote is to turn away from the world's attempts to manage the past and future, and return instead to what I am called to do in this body and on this day. Paul does not bear the marks of Christ merely as a pious memory of one afternoon at Golgotha, nor as a source of optimism for better days ahead; he bears them now, in the only body he has. "Let no one trouble me," he says—not because the pressures against him have ceased, but because he has already given his body over to a truer mark of belonging than any the world can press upon it.

This, then, is our own invitation: not to solve the world or secure ourselves against every contingency, but to offer this body, on this day, marked by the Cross of Christ, in the small and irrelevant-seeming moments before us. This week, find something that makes you look above you and remember God is higher yet does not neglect to provide. Find something that makes you look below you and remember He upholds your life from beneath everything that seems so foundational. And so, remembering you are loved and upheld from above and beneath, seek some small way the Lord is calling you, this day, in this body, out of that choked-up life of anxiousness into the freedom of knowing you are His beloved. "Therefore do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you."