Easy Answers on Birds and Flowers

The thing that can make me most weary in church life is our penchant for standard answers. Sometimes when we talk about the Bible and pose questions it can feel like all we’re doing is engaging in a call and response. That the answers are on the tip of everyone’s tongues because we’ve heard these answers a hundred times and we all know what the “right” answers are. And even if they ring hollow for us personally we say them because they are the “right” answers. As someone who more often feels the weight of the hard questions than the ease of the “right” answers it can be hard to engage. 

This past weekend I was teaching a group of students out of Luke 12, the verses about worry, verses which for me, a sufferer of chronic post traumatic anxiety and panic attacks, are fraught with condescension and hypocrisy. The reassurances of God caring for the birds of the air and the flowers of the field always felt empty for me in the darkest times of my life when I was uncared for in so many vital earthly ways. The study guide asked questions like “what’s this passage saying about worry”, and “how can we obey Jesus in giving up our anxieties to him” and one or two students actually listening dutifully answered “it says we shouldn’t worry about anything”, and “because God will take care of everything we need”. 

And I was weary. 

I laid the study guide down and I looked around the room at a handful of students half listening or not listening at all, and I asked “What would you say to someone who heard these verses and felt hurt by them?” And they sat up, the kids who’s hands had shot up as I’d started the question slowly lowered them. I looked into a dozen attentive eyes. “What would you say to someone who’s brain chemistry doesn’t let them stop worrying? What would you say to someone who told you that their family was poor and that they don’t eat regularly, that they don’t have clothes to wear except what’s currently on their back, or who told you they were homeless? What biblical truth could you extract for them?”

And they sat in silence for a few minutes, all of them staring at me. And then one kid finally raised his hand and said “I don’t know, that’s a really hard question,” and a dozen faces nodded in agreement.

So we talked about what that passage could mean when taken in the context of the verses around it, about why it’s important to know a verse’s context because without it we can apply the verse in ways that don’t see many people even though when Jesus spoke he saw everyone. We talked about how those verses go on to give a directive to us listening about giving away possessions to the needy, how sometimes we are the answer to someone else’s need, that our abundance isn’t for us but for them. We talked about what it means to live in line with disease process and to submit yourself to regiments that can keep you as healthy as possible, even if that means you can never fully “give your worries to God”. We talked about how to live a life that is ethically in line with sustainability and how ultimately feeding into longevity in every area of our life gives us more to pass on to those in need. And we talked about treasure, how it can mean something really valuable but how it can also mean something we make valuable even if it isn’t, even if it’s bad for us. How treasure can be the thing we pour ourselves into the most, and how that can mean treasure can even be giving in to unhealthy thoughts and patterns of behavior. 

I also made a dead on point using Gollum and Schmeagal as an illustration which scored me points cause apparently kids still love Lord of The Rings. 

And as we were closing one of the students raised their hand again and said “I think if someone heard those verses and was hurt by them I wouldn’t say anything to them, maybe it isn’t about giving them a biblical truth but, like, getting one for ourselves. I think the biblical truth for us is that I should ask them why they were hurt by these verses and I would just listen because they’re probably hurt by them because of not having those things themself but I won’t know that if I don’t listen, then after they were done I would try and see if there was a way I could help them get those things. And if there wasn’t I would ask someone else to help. And if there still wasn’t I think maybe I would just be their friend, because maybe even if that’s all I can do for them that’s still something.”

Amen. 

And I wasn’t weary anymore. 

The easy answers, the call and response, it’s a learned behavior. Oh Church. Your people want to know, they want to talk about the hard things, the messy things, the broken spaces. And we can raise kids who aren’t afraid to not know some answers, who understand that sometimes the only answer available to us is to love someone with our presence and our silent, attentive listening. We can be a people who live and lead with authenticity and who aren’t afraid of our doubts, who don’t worry that our God isn’t big enough for the hard conversations. We can be a people who are honest about these things from stages and from teaching platforms and in small group circles and in every day conversations.

We can be a people of more substance than platitudes, who climb mountains when we can, and sit in valleys when we can’t.

We can be a people who find Jesus in both places.