Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Second Sunday before Lent 2026

The context of this morning’s Gospel is perhaps not quite what it seems. We are familiar with this teaching, Jesus encouraging his disciples not to worry, either about their life or their food and clothing, and instead to seek after the Kingdom of God. Those images of lilies and birds, creatures entirely dependent on God, illustrate how futile it is to waste human energy on worry. Even in the abstract, this is good, pastoral teaching, which offers reassurance in the life of the world, and redirection for our wasted energy. But if we miss the more detailed context of this teaching, we lose something of the real depth of what the Lord is telling us.

The first words of today’s Gospel are ‘therefore I tell you. That word, ‘therefore’, refers to what to has immediately come before. ‘Noone can serve two masters’, Jesus says in those verses, ‘for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.’ So, this discussion is really about discipleship and wealth, or rather, perhaps ‘economy’ is a better word. The Kingdom of God, which is the ‘landing point’ for today’s Gospel, is an economy of abundant grace, in which an obsessive concern for matters of clothing or food is not only profoundly unnecessary, but is also entirely to miss the point about the kind of life Christ is calling us into. In serving God, we have been given more than we need, not less. And that has implications for our stewardship of creation, for our politics and for how we share, and for the individual housekeeping habits of our own souls.

The picture Jesus paints to make his point is an organic one. Birds of the air, whose lives are not governed by industry; simple lilies which outflank even the glories of Solomon, and the grass which grows and ends up as fuel. In a sermon he preached on this passage, the great St John Chrysostom, talked about what he called an ‘acceleration of images’, which culminates in Jesus’s almost rhetorical question, ‘will he not much more clothe you?’ The value Christ is articulating is one which emerges from this pure economy of grace. Chrysostom continued, ‘It is as though he were saying, “You, to whom he gave a soul, for whom he fashioned a body, for whose sake he made everything in creation, for whose sake he sent the prophets and gave the law, and wrought those innumerable good works, and for whose sake he gave up his only begotten Son.”’ There is more, and more, and more; a creation so rich that in Genesis it can be accomplished in six days, and yet there is still one more day in the story in which God rests! 

Worry turns us in on ourselves. And when worry is about accumulating – possessing, and most especially possessing at the expense of others – we are mere slaves to the dynamic of wealth. We are living in an economy of scarcity, governed by a corrosive fear that there just might not be enough. Some thinkers have referred to this condition as a kind of ‘famine of grace’ where even mercy and reconciliation are regulated or commercialised by the ‘strong’ (of various kinds) at the expense of those who are made ‘weak’ (in various ways). But Jesus’s point in today’s Gospel, is that we do this to ourselves: using the imagery of the Hebrew Bible, we can choose, if we wish, to remain in the shadow of Pharoah rather than accept the gift of freedom and life that we see in the Exodus story. We have a choice of whom or what we serve, and how we want to live. 

The great reformer Martin Luther, with his solid training in the theology of St Augustine, described sin with a masterful simple Latin phrase, ‘incurvatus in se est’ – this literally means a double turning-in on oneself, so closed in that it cannot see anything else. This is the kind of worry which imprisons, handing over the self and its ungoverned appetite for accumulation, into a form of slavery. That is why it receives a condemnation from Jesus: because the Kingdom Jesus invites us to strive for in trust is freedom, gift, dignity. ‘Will he not much more clothe you: you of little faith?’ The remedy for our addiction to self-focused worry and all the accumulations of our little needs to bolster ourselves is precisely an economy of grace. It is not that food, clothing, all the basics of survival don’t matter, or indeed that we shouldn’t concern ourselves with them. God knows our need, Jesus tells us. But remember those opening words of the Gospel, ‘Therefore, I tell you’: you cannot serve both God and wealth, you cannot be owned by both powers, and obsessive worry is simply to choose to swim in the wrong stream. That acceleration of images which Chrysostem spoke about reminds us that human dignity is made for much more than this. Simply, it is made for the Kingdom of God.

If sin is to be doubly-turned in on oneself, the life of grace is to be lived upright. During Eastertide, some ancient Christian traditions will only pray standing up, to make the point that Christians are called to adopt the posture of the Risen One, to hold and be held by, the shape of the resurrection. If, in the language of today’s Gospel, worry is a feature of being turned-in on ourselves and failing to appreciate God’s gratuitous grace – in shorthand, serving wealth - striving for the Kingdom, on the other hand, is shorthand for serving God, liberated by the endless reach of Christ’s call.

To strive for the Kingdom of God is to be open to God’s promise, and to spend our energies living as we see Christ living. First, this is to be a life of prayer, open to God’s shaping of our own hearts as we receive his gift. Secondly, it is to be a life lived for others, with mercy, justice and reconciliation, beating right at its heart. But for these virtues to take root in us as habits, habitual ways of living, we will need to cultivate wonder and gratitude at the sheer extravagance of God’s gifts, as one writer has put it, ‘allowing God to unfold in every kind of desire the unifying thread that leads to the unlimited.’ The worry to possess, which Jesus alludes to at the beginning of today’s Gospel, is a problem in part because it believes that in possession we will be satisfied, and that in being satisfied we can take off our shoes, put our feet up, and be secure in the knowledge that we’ve arrived. The search for the Kingdom of God, on the other hand, is an acknowledgement that in the world of grace, the longing, a good in itself, but which so often can be corrupted by our fear, never ceases. In fact, our longing begets more longing, but a better kind of longing, not to possess, but to be drawn into the incalculable depths of God’s beauty and truth. Because in the world of grace there is always more to encounter, always more to love, always more to share, because we are drawn magnetically by a horizon which is never possessed. We have time to care for ourselves and for one another as witnesses to the sheer abundance God has given us: an abundance we taste in this and every Eucharist. 

‘Do not worry about your life’, says Jesus. ‘Strive first for the kingdom of God.’