2nd Week in Lent

Don’t Worry, Be Happy
By Rev Steven R Mitchell
First Congregational UCC, Rock Springs, Feb 28, 2010
Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Philippians 3:17-4:1; Luke 13:31-35


Several decades ago there was a very popular song playing on the radio with a Calypso genre that is credited to Bobbie McFerrin titled: Don’t Worry, Be Happy! Let me share a few of the lyrics from this song with you:
Here's a little song i wrote,
you might want to sing it note for note,
don't worry, be happy

in every life we have some trouble,
when you worry you make it double
don't worry, be happy

dont worry be happy
aint got no place to lay your head,
somebody came and took your bed,
don't worry, be happy

the landlord say your rent is late,
he may have to litagate,
dont worry (small laugh) be happy,

look at me im happy,
don't worry, be happy

i give you my phone number,
when your worried, call me,
i make you happy

don't worry, be happy

aint got no cash, aint got no style,
aint got no gal to make you smile
but don't worry, be happy

cos when you worry, your face will frown,
and that will bring everybody down,
so don't worry, be happy

listen to what i say
in your life expect some trouble
when you worry you make it double
dont worry be happy

don't worry, don't worry, don't do it,
be happy,put a smile on your face,
don't bring everybody down like this

don't worry, it will soon pass whatever it is,
don't worry, be happy,
i'm not worried
The Story that we have this morning dealing with Abraham might very well have been inspiration to Bobbie McFerrin’s song of Don’t Worry, Be Happy. Abraham at this stage of his life was in an examining stage of his life, we might refer to it in today’s terminology as dealing with a “mid-life crisis”. Abraham was finding that he was aging and he had no blood heir in which to pass on the empire that he had been so focused on building. He was starting to worry that all that he had accumulated was basically for nothing because up to this point he, Abraham, was the end of his bloodline.
Within Western Christianity, there is a tendency not to give too much attention to the Hebrew bible and the stories that it has to share with us. I think the basic reason being we look to Jesus as the completion of God’s promise; that promise of living under grace and not living under the judgment of the law to which we ascribe to the Hebrews as living under. But the Hebrew Scriptures are rich with our history and the more we understand the stories of the Hebrews the better we are able to understand what Jesus was saying to his generation and the better we are equipped to deal with issues and situations that we face in the twenty-first century by using Jesus as our guide.
This August, Paul and I will be attending one of my family re-unions that represent my father’s family, the Browns. For me this has been a very important gathering, as my grandmother, my father’s mother, was the only one of the Browns that stayed in our home town in Kansas. All six of her brothers moved out to the West coast during the late 1930’s and decided to settle in California, Oregon and Washington State after WWII. I only had memory of one of my cousin’s who is the same age as me only because of their final visit to KS when I was 16 yrs old. Once I had moved to Washington State, I was able to finally make connection with one of my Aunts and discovered that there was a re-union that meets every other year.
I was able to talk my sister in coming out to Washington State to attend the first re-union that I went to, mostly for moral support just in case I found myself feeling as an outsider within this group of cousins. Actually, these cousins are my second cousins as it is my father who is the true first cousin. Yet they all looked to my father not as a cousin of theirs but rather as an Uncle for he was 10 yrs older than the next oldest cousin and they saw him as part of the generation of their parents. Anyway, upon the first meeting of this part of the family I had no memory of; it was one of those Kodak moments where, you just seem to understand the sense of family, of this connection, even though you had no memories of one another.
Two things were evident for me at that re-union and all the re-unions that have happened since. The first thing is the sense of history and of belonging. I was living out in Washington State, isolated from my family in Kansas; my grandmother as well as my father had both passed away. For a number of years I was missing that connection with my father and grandmother because of their deaths, but when I gather with the Brown family, I have that sense of connection with dad and grandma; one connection comes because there are facial features that resemble both my father and grandmother; another reason is there is behavior among my cousins that is similar with those that I grew up around. This is one of the things that I discovered when I first met this side of my family.
The second thing that I came to realize is that my cousins know very little about the Brown family history, in part because, as they have very little physical relationship to where their parents grew up at. The cousins all grew up on the West coast, while their fathers grew up in south central Kansas and earlier in Southern Missouri. Another aspect to their lack of knowledge came from the fact that their parents never shared any of their family history with their children. Where for me, not only did I grow up in the “home” country so to speak, but on a very regular basis, the family history was repeated at almost every gathering. Subsequently, I was the cousin who has the family history of the Browns; I posses a number of photographs of their grandparents and great-grandparents. I know firsthand the graves of where these ancestors are.
For the cousins that attend the Brown family reunion, they receive the benefit of being able to relate to one another only on the level that comes from growing up together and the stories that they can share from their childhood. For me, my experience is not only of being with this cousins but also it gives me a sense of continuity of family through history, because of my knowledge of this family. It helps me understand who I am as a person, not just being alone in the world, but as someone who connects with family through history as well as in the present.
Abraham was having all this worry because there was no heir in which to pass on the future to. In the culture that he came from, ones immortality comes from those that come after you. God had promised Abraham that through him great things would happen. As Abraham passed the time of normal child rearing, he began to question the promises of God and was wondering if there would be a future, of whether or not the promises of God would truly hold as life moves forward.
“But the Lord came to him: I am the Lord who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess. God brought him outside and said, ‘look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them’, then he said, ’So shall your descendants be.’ And Abraham believed the Lord.” What a marvelous scene, you can almost picture, Abraham sitting in his easy chair worrying about the fact that he had no son’s to carry on the name of Abraham. Then in comes God, starts to have a discussion with Abraham about his anxieties, and says, “hey let’s take a walk.” Walking side by side, God puts his hand around Abraham’s shoulder and says to him, “look up into the sky Abraham, see all those stars? Don’t worry about your future; I will give more blessings than you see numbered in the stars.”
God was promising Abraham that through his descendents, God would be with them, an everlasting promise that even if things seem dim today, there is the promise that God will continue to be there not just today but in the future. Jesus is what eventually came from this promise and if we like Abraham look to God’s promise through Christ, we will have the knowledge that God is the one who is in control. For we are the descendants of Abraham; the church is the promise that God now uses in a world that has forgotten their connection to God.
When we gather weekly, we should have the sense that we are not here just for one another and share in memory those events that have happened just between us, but rather, we should have the sense that we are a part of a history of what God has been doing in this world. We only have this knowledge of our history, through telling and retelling every time that we meet the stories of Abraham, the stories of David and of Solomon, and the stories of the Exodus and of Pentecost, of Palms Sunday and of the Easter event, of Mary and her stories, of the disciples and all that they struggled with.
This is our history of faith, it is through these stories that we gain our strength; it is through these stories that we keep our equilibrium during times of trial; it is through these family stories that we can keep our faith, that the work that was started in the past by people who have preceded us at First Congregational will continue to exist in the future ministries of this congregation. As we look to the future and plan and work at shaping the future ministry of this faith community let’s remember the wisdom that God gave us through the song by Bobbie McFerrin, Don’t worry, be happy! Why? Because God is the one in charge! Amen