I know all about anxiety as of late. I took a survey with P as part of our pre-marriage counseling, and though I generally think of myself as a low-stress/low-anxiety person, the survey revealed that I am actually somewhat stressed and anxious as of late. I keep having crazy wedding dreams wherein people ask me uncomfortable questions in public, or disasters of all types strike. I happen to be at a particularly uncomfortable juncture in life where I am stressed out because of where I am and also nervous and anxious about where I'm going. I'm getting married, I'm moving, I'm going to be going through the approval process (the last step before ordination in the ELCA), and I'm dragging a fair amount of student debt into my new marriage with a somewhat tenuous career field ahead. Yikes!
Avoiding anxiety is easier said than done. Luke 12 says: "Do not worry" but let's be honest here, I'm gonna. How am I going to pay my loans? Am I going to be approved? Will I be able to sustain a healthy, happy marriage? Everybody has these questions about finances and relationships and health and various commitments, and they can become overwhelming, especially when they hit all at once. The Luke text says both do not worry, yet be prepared, and I have a hard time doing both at the same time! The story then goes on to give a couple somewhat bizarre examples of "watchful slaves" as my Bible titles this section. "Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes" (37) and "Blessed is the slave whom his master will find at work when he arrives." (44) These seem like sort of scary images--Big Brother God is watching and if you're not hard at work when he comes, watch out! Nothing to worry about there...
Paired with this text for the week is an excerpt from Hebrews, which is a beautiful, poetic interpretation of the people of Israel's walk with God through the generations. Chapter 11 starts out: "Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen." It then goes on to extol Abraham, the father of the covenant with Israel and all of his many virtues of faith. But if you hop back to Genesis and take a look at Abraham's story, it becomes apparent that his relationship with God was, shall we say, less than fully trusting. God says: "I'm going to give you and your wife Sarah a child!" So Abraham says, "That's cool, I'm going to go out and sleep with my wife's handmaiden because I don't actually believe you. Then I'm going to laugh about it." Not to mention the journey he took from his homeland wherein he let his wife be given to Pharaoh not once, but twice! Yes, he is surely a paragon of perfect trust in the Lord...
The readers of Hebrews likely knew that this poetic version of Abraham's adventure was perhaps slightly rose-colored, so the point is not that Abraham was great and perfect and faithful, but that despite Abraham being a kind of crappy person, he still walked with God and God was faithful to him not just in spite of his weakness, but perhaps because of it. Verse twelve says: "Therefore from one person, and this one as good as dead, descendants were born." This is not just a statement about Abraham's rather advanced age, but, I think, a metaphorical statement about Abraham's overall crappiness as a human being. It shows God's commitment to Abraham, and God's ability to take something that is a big fat failure and breathe life into it by its very presence. This is how faith can be evidence. That such an imperfect person can even have faith just points to the one who is the source of it.
This is how the writer of Luke can declare in one breath that we need to be unafraid and in the next tell us to be prepared. The question raised is: what does preparation look like? And the answer depends heavily on who you think God is and how God behaves. If you think that God is behaving like a monster waiting to condemn you for failure, you are going to be afraid. If you think God is there helping you only if you're toiling and laboring as hard as you can, you're going to be nervous about the arrival of the master. But if you think that God is one who is committed fully to your well-being and is showing up in order to help you, heal you, lead you to something greater, preparedness means doing your best with confidence that the God who makes old people have children and breathes life into dead bodies is going to enliven you and perfect all of your childish attempts to live.
That's pretty much the only way I can soothe myself when my head starts spinning out of control with wedding details and employment prospects and worries about my ability to successfully sustain a relationship with another human being. I start out knowing I'm not really going to do the greatest job, but I know God is going to be in the midst of my marriage helping us to forgive one another, and God is going to be in the midst of whatever happens with my candidacy committee and future call committees and financial future and all of my future. Worrying becomes pointless in the face of the knowledge of that kind of commitment to us and our well-being, because God is always here, raising up the things that our ineptness kills, healing and fixing all the broken things inside us, and promising a future based not one the current one, but on a reality we can't even begin to imagine. God's very presence is the assurance of things hoped for, showing us daily who we are and who God is.
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