8.5.25 - Gospel Night & Anxiety

Opening Prayer  

Lord, we thank you for the blessing of reading your word together. 

We ask that these words of life, truth and hope enlighten our minds and strengthen our faith.

May your love and grace follow each of us as we return to our daily lives, refreshed and blessed by you.

And as you taught us to pray together…

Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be your name. 

Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. 

Give us this day our daily bread, 

And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us. 

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen. 

Upcoming major holy days:   August 15:  Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Today’s Agenda 

1. Gospel Reading for the 19th Sun in Ordinary Time: Treasure in Heaven, Necessity of Watchfulness, Luke 12:32-40

2. Catholic Reflection: Scripture and Anxiety, Mt 6:25-34 and many others. Plus references. 

3. Gospel Reading #2: The Problem of Evil, Matthew 13 (next time!)

Quote of the Week:   

“So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by 

        our spoken word or by our letter.” 2 Thessalonians 2:15

This is referring to “Apostolic Tradition.” It means not everything is found in Scripture alone (Sola Scriptura). 

Sunday’s Reading: Treasure in Heaven and the Necessity of Watchfulness

Context:  This Sunday’s reading triggered our topic of the week: anxiety. It’s opening line, “Do not be afraid…” is also translated as, “Be not anxious… for your Father is pleased to give you the Kingdom.”  

Well, is that not comforting news? 

It is, but it comes with instructions, for we have to do our part, and this “part” is more important than our worldly affairs. 

The reading has two parts; both are about the coming of the Kingdom. Our unification with the Kingdom is central to Christianity, and why Jesus put in the Our Father: Thy Kingdom Come… on Earth as it is in Heaven. 

We have much to cover on anxiety, so I will make comments in midst of this reading to make this reading go quicker.  

Luke 12:32-34

Jesus said to his disciples: “Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father is pleased to give you the kingdom. Sell your belongings and give alms. Provide money bags for yourselves that do not wear out, an inexhaustible treasure in heaven that no thief can reach nor moth destroy. For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.

Jesus is saying God is trying his @%*!, hardest to give us His Kingdom. Even Jesus came for this reason. But we need to make some choices. Last week, the Rich Fool used his surplus to build his own kingdom, and that’s why he was a fool. Jesus is saying that every penny and hour of time you spend on helping others is deposited for you into a real bank in Heaven. 

Gird your loins and light your lamps and be like servants who await their master’s return from a wedding, ready to open immediately when he comes and knocks. 

What does “girding your loins” mean? 

“Girding your loins” in the Bible means tucking in the bottom of your tunic into a belt or sash to free the legs for physical activity (i.e., serving, traveling, or fighting). 

Blessed are those servants whom the master finds vigilant on his arrival. Amen, I say to you, he will gird himself, have the servants recline at table, and proceed to wait on them. 

God will be so happy that we remain ready for Him that he will gird Himself and wait on us! Think of the Father welcoming the son back in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Same thing. God loves us and wants us to choose Him/good. 

And should the master come in the second or third watch and find them prepared in this way, blessed are those servants. Be sure of this: if the master of the house had known the hour when the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. You also must be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.”

Jesus uses hyperbole to make a point. If we thought a bad person was coming, we would drop everything and be ready, would we not? Then why not when God comes calling?  If we have God in our lives every day, we will be one of the successful ones in the story!

Scripture and Anxiety

Matthew 6:25-34

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is life not more than food, and the body more than clothes?

The Greek word for worry – marimnate – means “over-anxious.” Why? Because it places that which you are anxious about first and God second. Jesus is warning us about a divided mind – one for the world and one for God. You cannot have two masters. 

Look at the birds in the sky; they do not sow or reap, they gather nothing into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not more important than them? 

The animals rely on their instincts for food; instincts which they do not merit, a kind of pure faith! We should be so faithful!

Can any of you by worrying add a single moment to your life-span? 

Can any of you by worrying add a single cubit to your stature?

These mean the same thing, but it is a comparison to animals who do not fret about adding time to their lifespan or increasing their physical stature. Jesus points this out to show that we worry too much about things we don’t control, and secondly, that wanting to control the things we can’t is a function of our having fallen away from God.  

Why are you anxious about clothes? Learn from the way the wildflowers grow. They do not work or spin. But I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was clothed like one of them. If God so clothes the grass of the field, which grows today and is thrown into the oven tomorrow, will he not much more provide for you, O you of little faith?

In Jesus’ statement, O you of little faith – “little faith” here refers to his those in the early stages of faith. Jesus is addressing the human tendency to be anxious about material needs. In the biblical context, clothing was a basic necessity, and Jesus is speaking to a culture where garments were often handmade and valuable. This aligns with Jesus’ teaching on one’s reliance on God rather than material goods.   

Your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you besides.

Some try to use Jesus’ statement to justify what’s called the “Prosperity Gospel,” where we can be wealthy as we like if we just stay close to Jesus. That has never been the interpretation of the Church, which is that if you truly put the Kingdom first, then that’s like saying, “God, I need this, but your will be done.” It is putting God’s will over your own – and rejecting the choices of Rich Fools.  

The true meaning is indeed the crux  of Jesus’ message upon which everything hinges. Keeping God first is cooperation; like a dance. Putting God first should be like putting on your clothes before you leave your bedroom each day. It should be like breathing comes before talking and doing. Take the HS with you everywhere you go, like a child takes his/her teddy bear. 

Do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself. Sufficient for a day is its own troubles.

In AA, they say, “One day at a time!” That is a Christian message, why?

The present is all there is. When we allow ourselves to get wrapped up in the future, we get anxious and depart from the present. The present is the only time we can be Christian. It’s the only time we can love, forgive, help others, or change. And the present is the only time we can receive grace, too; no other time. 

In conclusion, Jesus does not deny the reality of human needs, but forbids making them the object of over-anxious care and, in effect, becoming their slave. Worry is not compatible with faith. It is a red flag calling us to bring God back into our life. 

Root Causes of Anxiety

The sources of human worry are many. Although their most immediate cause – to desire to avoid bad things happening and the desire for good things – is normal, and our worry about these things can easily become distorted and even debilitating. This is borne of man’s unique ability to dwell on the past and future. Without this spiritual capacity, we would, like animals, dwell only in the present. 

The root cause for this goes way back to when we received a spiritual nature, which includes our free-will. Animals can follow their instincts without any second thoughts. We also still have our animal instincts, causing us to want to control our surroundings for safety/survival reasons. But we also have free-will, which means we can choose to override our instincts. Suddenly, we have many choices far beyond our animal instincts. (Some of us wish we could return to those good old days!)

The problem is that the free-will God gave us was meant to remain in connection/partnership with Him, who is the Source of our spiritual natures. The story of Adam and Eve teaches us this lesson – that deciding to go our own way leads to nothing but trouble, as well as all the conflicts we see in the world today. As long as we operate autonomously, future events – being out of our reach – will continue to exasperate our quest to be in control. The more we try to control events, the more we will run into conflict with others who are doing the same thing and/or want the same thing. Autonomous from God, free-will is dysfunctional. Moreover, without God, worldly matters take on a much higher perceived value in our minds, because we think that is all there is, and that we are the only ones who can fix it. Unfixable anxiety. 

Our “perceived value” of future events is extremely flawed. Psychologists tell us that 9 out of 10 things we worry about never come to pass (that’s how bad we are playing God). And even knowing this doesn’t stop the worrying. 

So then, we work harder, get therapy, get depressed, take medicine, and have breakdowns, with a few moments of happiness and thrills in between, just enough for us to push forward. 

What Jesus is getting at is our “perceived value” of material things, which is a function of our thinking we can be in control of everything. On a 1 to 10 scale, if our problems are, say, a 3, we often feel they are a 9 (our “perceived value”). We think that the only way we can get ahead of all this worry is to try to get more control of, and protection from, our surroundings, which is typically more money, power, etc.) – maybe more protection will keep bad people and bad things from touching us. We might get lucky for a while, but these things are external to us. We cannot buy enough protection in this world to keep internal/personal problems from creating stress and anxiety, and our prioritization of external/material success makes our personal lives even more stressed. 

Simply said, Jesus says that over-attachment to temporal goods and outcomes leads to a loss of inner peace and happiness. He teaches us that this world and all its treasures are like sand, or fool’s gold. The reason happiness is always just out of our reach is because we are searching in all the wrong places. If this world is our priority, we are condemned to thinking we just missed it, or we made the wrong decision, or we have bad luck, or we’re not good enough, or happiness is just around the corner – the next job, the next car, the next spouse, the next adventure. False! We take our miserable insides with us wherever we go. We are denying our spiritual nature that requires any lasting peace or happiness to be reached at the spiritual level first. THEN, this peace and happiness will flow into our worldly life, because our priorities are straight.  

Free-will means first and foremost that happiness is a choice. It’s a spiritual choice that can govern our physical being. 

Is happiness a state of mind? Can we choose it?

Frank’s story in jail.

Frank was moving up after college in his real estate job. He had his own apartment for the first time and money to blow. He envisioned that the next step would be to be get a larger apartment, one that had several extra rooms: one would be for his library, the next would be his music room – he played the guitar. A third room would be for meditation, which he thought would be a cool thing to try. 

Frank’s vision and desire was so great that he started stealing at work. He finally reached the point when he could get his larger apartment! But it was also at that time that he got caught. Frank went to jail for several years. 

A year later, Frank found God. He was soon sorrowful about his stupidity and begged God for forgiveness, and received it. His heavy load was lifted, and he began to be grateful for the first time in his life. He was freed from his past, but he was still in jail. So after praying about it, he decided to turn his jail cell into his earlier vision. So he made one corner of his cell his library. He was allowed to have one book at a time, and that's where he went to read. Another empty wall became his music room, and there he sat and hummed his favorite songs. In the remaining available corner, he started to meditate to God. 

Now, in is 10x10 ft jail cell, Frank had the “castle” that he always wanted. He told me how happy he was and was looking forward to the day he could get out and start his life over again. Then he apologized – his life had already started over again. 

Jail cell or castle? Is happiness a state of mind?  Is it a choice?

Yes, the minds God gave to us are capable of incredible things, most importantly happiness, but we have to partner with God and reorder our priorities. It requires a recognition that this world is temporary and we are practicing for our next life that matters; and it requires us to decide to see everything through the eyes of gratitude and practicing love towards others. Notice, neither gratitude nor love is centered on ourselves.    

Make no mistake, the things in this life are important, but they are opportunities for practicing the kind of person we want to become.  Most importantly, we are not alone anymore. Christ offers to help us carry the load so that we can keep our “worry spectrum” down to 1 or 2 instead of an 8 or 10.  Many times, God will help us solve the problem’ other times we will gain great wisdom from our experience; but in all cases we will not be alone.  As Jesus said, 

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart,

and you will find rest for your souls – Mt 11:29.

This is a metaphor for keeping Christ in our lives. He will share the burden (and take away our perceived stress) if we bring him along and consult with him. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.  

God recognizes the anxiety problem humans have without Him. That’s why we find so many scriptural references seeking to comfort us. Below are some passages that might be useful to refer during times of unexpected anxiety. 

Matthew 11:28-30

“Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.”

John 14:1,27

Do not let your hearts be troubled. Have faith in God; have faith also in me. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid. 

Rom 8:38-39

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Hebrews 13:6

God has said: “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.” So we say with confidence: “The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?”

1 Cor10:13. 

No trial has come to you but what is human. God is faithful and will not let you be tried beyond your strength; but with the trial he will also provide a way out, so that you may be able to bear it. 

Phil 4:6-7

Have no anxiety at all, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God. Then the peace of God that surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. 

1 Peter 5:6-9

So humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time. Cast all your worries upon him because he cares for you. 

Psalm 23:4

The LORD is my shepherd; there is nothing I lack. 

In green pastures he makes me lie down; to still waters he leads me; he restores my soul.

He guides me along right paths for the sake of his name.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. 

Psalm 55:23

Cast your care upon the Lord, who will give you support. He will never allow the righteous to stumble. 

Psalm 56:4-5

O Most High, when I am afraid, in you I place my trust.

I praise the word of God; I trust in God, I do not fear. 

What can mere flesh do to me? 

Psalm 94:17-19

If the Lord were not my help, I would long have been silent in the grave. 

When I say, “My foot is slipping,” your mercy, LORD, holds me up. 

When cares increase within me, your comfort gives me joy.

Proverbs 12:25

Worry weighs down the heart, but a kind word gives it joy. 

Isaiah 26:3-4

Trust in the LORD forever! For the LORD is an eternal Rock. 

With firm purpose you maintain peace; in peace, because of our trust in You. 

Isaiah 35:4

Say to the fearful of heart: Be strong, do not fear!

Here is your God, he comes with vindication; with divine recompense he comes to save you. 

Isaiah 41:10

Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be afraid, for I am your God. I will strengthen you; I will surely help you; I will uphold you with My righteous right hand.

Jeremiah 17:7-8

But blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, whose confidence is in Him. / He is like a tree planted by the waters that sends out its roots toward the stream. It does not fear when the heat comes, and its leaves are always green. It does not worry in a year of drought, nor does it cease to produce fruit.

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux emphasized that those who "run in the way of the Lord shouldn’t be thinking of suffering that can take place in the future. It is a lack of confidence. When one truly believes in a Father who loves without limits, there is a freedom from obsessive calculations, constant worry about the future and fears that take away our peace." 

Two good videos on anxiety. 

https://youtu.be/St8TwhU3nqU - (10 min) Five Scriptures That Healed My Anxiety, ZEE… https://youtu.be/3JikMjSjjjU

https://youtu.be/N96X6OVEyD8 - (30 min) Prayer That Will Stop Worry From Running Your Life, Chris Stefanik

Dear God, as I lay me down to sleep, relax the tension of my body; calm the restlessness of my mind; still the thoughts which worry and perplex me. Help me to rest myself and all my problems in your strong and loving arms. Let your Spirit speak to my mind and heart while I am asleep, so that, when I wake up in the morning, I may find that I have received in the night-time, light for my way; strength for my tasks; peace for my worries; forgiveness for my sins. Grant me sleep tonight, and tomorrow power to live.

Closing Prayer: 

Dear God, as I lay me down to sleep, relax the tension of my body; calm the restlessness of my mind; still the thoughts which worry and perplex me. Help me to rest myself and all my problems in your strong and loving arms. Let your Spirit speak to my mind and heart while I am asleep, so that, when I wake up in the morning, I may find that I have received in the night-time, light for my way; strength for my tasks; peace for my worries; forgiveness for my sins. Grant me sleep tonight, and tomorrow power to live.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

Blessed are thou among women,

and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

Holy Mary, Mother of God,

pray for us sinners,

now and at the hour of our death.  

Amen.