Consider the Lilies

Emily Dickinson, great poet of Amherst once wrote: “The only commandment I ever obeyed- ‘Consider the Lilies.’”1 The words point to her worship as wonder at God’s creation. Looking out on a day late in summer she wrote:

Oh Sacrament of summer days,
Oh last Communion on the Haze-
Permit a child to join.2

As we ponder Jesus’ command, “Consider the Lilies,” I think Emily Dickinson had her finger on the pulse of one of the meanings of the command: the praise of Creation. That is one of the three meanings we can glean from Jesus’ teaching.

I

          The first is the primary meaning given with the larger paragraph of Jesus’ words: Be Not Anxious. Here is trust in the daily provision of God, and trust in God who is our daily provision. It is one of the most beloved passages in the gospels:

Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor about your body, what you shall wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air. They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, yet your heavenly Abba feeds them…..Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will God not much more clothe you, O you little-faith ones.  (Matthew 6:25-30, RSV, adapted).

It is a lesson in trust, trust in the God Jesus called Abba, the Aramaic word for Daddy or Poppa, trust in God as a perfectly loving parent. His relationship with such a God was marked by intimacy, trust and obedience.

Jesus was addressing those faltering in such faith. “Little-faith” ones he called them, O little-faith, small-faith, constricted faith ones. Life sometimes takes a trash compactor to our faith.

Jesus drew on deep Hebrew wisdom about how we worry even when our stomachs are full. In the Babylonian Talmud, Rabbi Elser says:

Whoever has a mouthful yet remaining in his basket and says, “What shall I eat tomorrow?” belongs to the number of those who have little faith.

Jesus wants to enlarge our trust in God who comes to provide all we need to flourish as children of God. He comes to quell the dailiness of our worry over the future.

Of course there are far too many in our world with too little to eat or drink or wear and with no decent place to sleep. But this is not the fault of our graciously provident God, but rather the work of our human hands. As Gandhi said, “There is enough in this world for everyone’s need but not enough for everyone’s greed.”

We live with an exaggerated anxiety about the future, an out-sized worry, so much so we cannot live trustingly, generously, joyfully in the present. We have what some call “the control disease”, believing that we can secure our future only by controlling what we in fact cannot control. As the Buddhists say, “Don’t believe everything you think.” What we think can drive us to distraction. Jesus counsels us: “Can worry add one inch to your height or add one year to your life?” Worry may in fact take years off your life.

As parents we worry over our children, but how little control we have. Novelist Ann Beattie in her novel Picturing Will has a character say:

Do everything right, all the time, and the child will prosper. It is as simple as that, except for fate, luck, heredity, chance…his order of birth, his first encounter with evil, the girl who jilts him in spite of his excellent qualities, the war that is being fought when he is a young man, the drugs he may try once or too many times. The friends he makes, how he scores on tests, how well he endures kidding about his shortcomings, how ambitious he becomes, how far he falls behind, circumstantial evidence..danger when it is least expected, difficulty in triumphing over circumstance, people with hidden agendas, and animals with rabies.

We need the wisdom of the Serenity Prayer:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Years ago a Japanese theological student gave me a beautifully calligraphed piece of art. It had four Japanese pictograms which said

Birds [of the] Air
Flowers [of the] Field

It hangs in my kitchen to remind me of Jesus’ teaching: Consider the Lilies; Be not Anxious; Trust in the Care of God.

There is a healthy kind of worry; it motivates us to do the things which must be done. But Jesus calls us from excessive anxiety, worry that pulls us apart and wears us out. The old English translation of the verse went: “Be careful for nothing,” meaning full of care, burdened with care.

The command does not mean to live carelessly. God will not plow the field for us or gather the harvest. God will not go to work for us or balance our checkbooks. But God will provide what we need. So these words call us to a simplicity of life and to a centering trust in God.

Most of my anxieties have little to do with what I need and more to do with what I want. So Jesus says, “Why do you wear yourselves out with worry over such things. The Gentiles do. But why you?” The first message. Be not anxious. Trust in God. (A teenager in worship at MPBC was reading this passage from Matthew 6 and by mistake read: “For it is the “genitals” who strive for all these things.” It was an alive moment in worship!)

II

          The second dimension to the command “Consider the Lilies” reflected in Emily Dickinson’s comment is To Revel in God’s Creation. This meaning hit me when I first saw the Galilean hillsides and meadows strewn with wildflowers. Jesus grew up in a world of beauty. So I now imagine Jesus walking through meadows praising God: “Look at the wildflowers how they grow!” In ancient Galilee these included blue bellflowers, white narcissus, pink and saffron mallows, yellow and white daisies, golden broom and scarlet anemones. Jesus went into the desert to pray, but he also played in fields of wildflowers—and no one planted a single seed.

So there is praise inherent in “Consider the lilies.” E.B. White wrote in a N.Y. Times interview:

…I arise every morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.

A world not worth savoring is not worth saving. Jesus, the Savior, savored the world.

The poets are our priests helping us praise. So the Psalmist: “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork (Psalm 19:1). Or the poet Hopkins: “Glory be to God for dappled things” and “The world is charge with the grandeur of God.”3 Or e.e. cummings: “I thank you God for most this amazing day.”4 Here’s Mary Oliver:

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird–
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.5

We need the poetry of protest, anguish and lament in our world so fallen from God’s design, but we also need the poetry of praise to give us energy and delight as we seek to change the world. So “sing Awe” Denise Levertov writes, “breathe out praise and celebration.”6 “Consider the lilies.”

III

          The last dimension of this command is to Care for the Lilies. The care of creation is a form of the love of God and neighbor. To consider the lilies is to consider their welfare, to live considerately upon the land God has given us as our home. All of this is inherent in God’s command to us in the Creation Story: “To dress and keep” the garden (Genesis 2:15). The Bible is a “greener” book than we know, with careful instruction on how to care for God’s earth. Just check out Leviticus.

The church has too often lived oblivious to the exploitation of the earth and complicit in its destruction. Just as the church in the South in Pre-Civil War days justified slavery because of the economic benefits of the slave economy, so today the church justifies the destruction of the earth because of it dependence of the industrial economy.

Wendell Berry, Kentucky poet, essayist, novelist farmer calls us to a renewed care of creation. We misread the Bible, he says, because we always read it indoors. The bible, he writes, “is best read and understood outdoors and the farther outdoors the better.”7 Hear Berry’s challenging words:

To live we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and other to want.8

Conclusion         

So here we are with Jesus words. Consider the lilies: Be not anxious, trust in God; offer wonder and praise for creation; and care for God’s earth, our home.

It is a command to live freer more trustingly, and joyously and responsibly in this world. Will you hear his words today?

 

  1. Emily Dickinson, Letter. 904
  2. Emily Dickinson, “These are the days when birds come back”, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, #130 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1969), p. 61
  3. Gerard Manley Hopkins,“Pied Beauty” and “God’s Grandeur”, The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 69, 66
  4. e.e. cummings, 100 Selected Poems, (N.Y.: Grove Press, 1959), p. 114.
  5. Mary Oliver, Thirst (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), p.1.
  6. Denise Levertov, “Poetry, Prophecy and Survival,” New and Selected Essays (N.Y.: New Directions, 1992), p. 144.
  7. Wendell Berry, “Christianity and the Survival of Creation”, The Art of the Commonplace (Washington D.C.: counterpoint Press, 2002),p. 311
  8. Ibid., p. 304

 

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