Matthew 6: 25-34 – Dwelling on the earth with God
25 ‘Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 27 And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? 28And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, 29 yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. 30 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? 31 Therefore do not worry, saying, “What will we eat?” or “What will we drink?” or “What will we wear?” 32For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. 33 But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.
34 ‘So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.
My friends,
What a joy to be with you all today. I feel truly blessed to be here. I remember you since my days here in Chicago when I taught at McCormick Seminary. I thank God for your witness! I thank God for your work! I remember meeting Shakespeare Osorio. Even without knowing him I already liked him, simply because of his name: Shakespeare Osorio! Two names that tell so much of who we are as Latinxs people: We are a mixture of worlds and places, languages and habits, love and wisdom.
So let me start by asking you these questions:
Do you want to see Jesus in your church? yes?
Plant trees.
Do you want to see Jesus in your city? yes?
Pay attention to the birds.
Do you want to see Jesus in creation?
Take care of the rivers.
Do you want to see Jesus in your family?
Be aware of the soil, how your food is planted and where it comes from.
Do you want to live a life of discipleship with Jesus?
Be aware of climate change.
Do you want to see Jesus in the world?
Love the earth.
All these questions have to do with our theme for today: Dwelling in Hope. You have talked about God dwelling in the church and in the city. And If God dwells in the church, and in the city, these are two places we can dwell in hope. And now we have to think about God dwelling in creation.
And let me propose this: If God doesn’t dwell in creation first, God will not dwell in the church or in any city. For God’s dwelling in church and city depends fully on God’s dwelling in creation. If there is no creation, there is no praise, there is no church. And if there is no creation, the earth feeding us, there is no city anywhere. Creation takes precedence on everything.
So I am glad we are finishing the day with God’s creation so that we will be reminded that God’s creation today must be the center of our mission, of our praise, of our love, of our faith, and our living in a city.
However, for God to dwell in Church and in the City, we need to have the earth fully alive! And to dwell in hope, the earth must be fully alive. If the earth dies we die too. In some wondrous ways, God’s grace necessitates the liveliness of the earth to exist. Because God has spread God’s sustaining grace throughout the earth and that grace is what makes God’s grace in Jesus fully happen in us. How would Jesus’ life transform us, if the earth is dead? If we can’t eat or drink? We depend on God’s creation to be able to depend on God’s grace. So God’s creation and God’s grace are inextricably tied together.
Now I want to go to the Gospel text we read. I hope you consider my interpretation of it. You can throw everything away once the worship is over. But for now, please stay with me. Here is how I am approaching this text. I am reading it from the perspective of climate disasters. I am concerned about the earth losing its liveliness. So when I look at this text I have in me the background of the climate disasters that are happening right now. Very soon, in 2050, 7.5 billion people will suffer from climate disasters.
So perhaps I should talk a bit about climate disasters before I go to the text. What are climate disasters? Basically, it is what scientists all around the world are telling us about what is happening to our atmosphere: our temperatures are rising and we are destroying the balance of the climate that creates the condition of our well being. There are many reasons for our condition but the most fundamental one is the drilling of fossil fuel. This is changing everything and leading to a whole collapse of the earth’s stability.
We think we can burn as much fossil fuel as we want. We also think that we can use the earth the way we want without protecting the lives of other beings. Our dwell on earth has been a disaster. We the human species are taking up most of the space of the earth, destroying landscapes and habitats of so many other species.
Listen to this: Bernie Krause warns us that at present, “wildlife accounts for only 4 percent of the global biomass, while human beings, livestock, and pets make up the remaining 96 percent.” Only 4% of the earth is allowed to other species! “A quarter of all species face extinction, many within decades. The decline is acutely evident through the loss of the natural soundscape.”
We humans are defining who is to dwell on the earth which is mostly us and the animals who give some of us profit, mostly cows, chickens, pigs, goats and sheeps. Besides that, there is very little diversity allowed on our planet. The plantation of monocultures in agribusiness is the same, only few grains, the ones who give profit must be planted: wheat, corn, rice, rapeseed, sugar cane, and cotton. The dwelling on the Oikos of God, the house of God is only possible for a few kinds of animals, of plants, and mostly one kind of human, the white one, and mostly the very rich ones among them.
We have turned most of the earth, the very dwelling of God into profit. We have turned agri-culture, which means the complexity of cultivating the land with all its diversities and ways of being, into agri-business, which is to turn the earth into money, profit, business.
Due to that, a vast amount of forests are disappearing, the oceans are dying, topsoil everywhere is losing its strength, water is becoming a rare presence in so many places, animals and insects are dying at such a fast pace that scientists are saying we are facing the 6th great extinction.
For example: the bees are dying in greatest numbers because of loss of habitat, pesticides, lack of food supply, and warming weather. But bees, butterflies, birds, bats and so on are essential pollinators and responsible for much of our food supply. Without them we can’t eat!
In Australia, the birds called Honeyeaters are disappearing because their habitat has been destroyed, consumed by humans. Without a home, the Honeyeaters are becoming so few in number that their elders are disappearing. With the vanishing of their elders, their songs also vanish. The younger males cannot learn their own songs and have lost their ability to attract the female Honeyeaters. The females can’t hear the males singing their songs and have little interest in them. The males try to learn other birds’ songs but that makes it even worse. Without their own songs, there is no love and life cannot continue. The result: the Honeyeaters are dying.
I believe the story of the Honeyeaters is a parable for our times.
So in a nutshell, that is the place from which I am interpreting our text. The conditions of climate disasters have to change the interpretation of our text in fundamental ways. Why? So Jesus says “do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.”
When Jesus said these words, he knew, instinctively or not, that God’s creation had all what the birds needed to live and survive. At the time of Jesus, there was a whole eco-system in place that allowed him to say: do not worry, look at the birds, they will find a way, there is plenty of food in creation for them. They don’t need to sow nor reap nor gather into barns, for God is dwelling on creation, so there was plenty of food for the birds and the animals and the plants and every living being to eat and survive!
Unfortunately, this is not our case anymore. The chain of life that God created for us all to live in has been broken. That means that birds do not have what they need to live and to procreate the way they did. Now they face the loss of habitat, lack of food and natural conditions for them to continue. The Honeyeaters cannot sing anymore. And soon enough, if we don’t change that, we will not be able to sing as well. And if we lose our songs we lose our God, and we lose our faith. For only a faith who sings can exist.
At Union Seminary where I teach, when classes start, I often open the windows of the classroom and tell my students: we can’t start until we hear a bird singing. Because if they are not singing we cannot sing either. What if we did that in church? What if we would open the doors of the church and say: friends, we can’t start worshiping God today until we hear the birds singing. Or we can start our Sunday worship outside. The birds should be our call to worship.
But the text continues with Jesus saying “And why do you worry about clothing? 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 clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith?”
So Jesus talked about clothing. We must be constantly aware that everything comes from the soil. Our cars, our churches, this building, these chairs, this pulpit, my clothes, my rings, my Bible, everything, literally everything comes from the soil.
God has provided soil for us so that we could learn how to rest in God. But the problem is that we are also losing the soil.
“According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, a full 90 per cent of the Earth’s precious topsoil is likely to be at risk by 2050. In a bid to protect soil globally and help farmers, the Organization warned that the equivalent of one soccer pitch of earth erodes, every five seconds.”
God have mercy! What future can we have for our kids?
So when I read the Gospel and Jesus saying
“Therefore do not worry, saying, “What will we eat? “What will we drink?” I respond: God, you know the earth is in a very difficult situation right now. You have seen that many of the world’s major rivers and lakes are experiencing significant drying trends due to a combination of climate change, human activities, and variations in precipitation patterns. These drying trends have severe consequences for communities, ecosystems, and economies that rely on these water sources. How would I not worry my precious Jesus? Help me with my worries.
Then Jesus says “do not worry, saying, “What will we wear?” And I respond: Dear Jesus, we have a big issue with fashion and clothing right now. In fact, the world faces a major problem with textile waste, with billions of garments produced annually and a significant portion ending up in landfills or incinerated. This fast fashion cycle, driven by rapid production and consumption, contributes to environmental problems like greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution, and microplastic contamination. Please forgive our over production and over consumption.
Oh friends… As we see, we are in a very difficult situation. When we talk about God dwelling with mortals on earth, we have to think about God dwelling in every being on earth, God dwelling in every inch of our planet. It was theologian Sallie McFague who said that the earth is God’s body, and we cannot separate God’s presence and the body of the earth. To care for the earth is to care for God’s own body.
And if the earth is God’s body then everything on earth carries a spark of God’s full presence. And we haven’t thought much about that. Our theologies, our liturgies, our ecclesiological work, our mission, everything we do and preach often don’t consider the earth. We have always dwelt in the realm of the humans and lived our faith only amidst the humans. Our faith is fully anthropocentric. No other species have almost never existed in our theological horizons, in our ecclesiological thinking, in our urban missiology, in our preaching, in our own spiritualities.
However, if we pay close attention, the earth has always been at the center of our entire existence. Before climate disasters and the dangers of earth’s liveliness, we could go about our lives without thinking about soil and plants and waters and temperature raising. Because God had placed the earth in a mode of full living, full life for all of us. The earth has always been there giving us what we need: food, water, shelter, clothes, warmth and so on.
However, with the ecological crisis, everything is turning upside down. We cannot take the earth as a given anymore. The earth is telling us there is not enough for the huge appetite we have. The earth is telling us we need limits! The earth has always had enough to give us and to keep replenishing itself as to continue to give. However, our abusive ways of living are breaking that cycle of replenishment and givenness.
It is time for us to pay close attention to that break of patterns and start caring for the earth so that our children and grandchildren can continue to live their lives fully.
But there is something in this passage that we can hang on tight! It is in the last words of Jesus in this passage. Jesus says: “Strive first for the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” This is our dwelling hope! We must strive for the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness!
But in order to do that we need to do the theological work of reinterpreting the kingdom of God. Our precious Latina theologian Ana Maria Isassi-Dias has taught us to see the kingdom of God differently. We should strive not for the Kingdom with G, as might and power. Instead she taught us to think of God’s kin-dom without the G letter. Kin-don as kin-ship, as relationships, where we are all kin to other beings, humans and more than humans. A kin-ship of God where all species have a place to live in God’s creation. If we strive for the kinship of God, we, the people of God, the humans, must become the caretakers of the earth, deacons of the earth, the custodians of the earth. As pastors you would then offer pastoral care to humans but also to other species around your congregation. So I pray you will leave here today and continue to care for your own people, as much as you will pastor and take care of the trees near your church, the plants next to your church, the birds near your church, the rivers near your church.
May we learn that to live in God’s kin-dom is to get deeply involved in it, knowing deeply what your bio-region is made of! Not only know your people but also the other beings around it.
To see God’s full dwelling with us, we need not to worry to the point of being paralyzed. Perhaps the key aspect of this text is to strive for God’s kin-don where God dwells in Church, in the City and all over creation. There, in the striving for God’s kin-don in our bio-region, is where we produce the hope that will sustain us.
So I finish asking you the same questions:
Do you want to see Jesus in your church?
Plant trees.
Do you want to see Jesus in your city?
Pay attention to the birds.
Do you want to see Jesus in creation?
Take care of the rivers.
Do you want to see Jesus in your family?
Be aware of the soil, how your food is planted and where it comes from.
Do you want to go into deep discipleship with Jesus?
Be aware of climate change
Do you want to see Jesus in the world?
Love the earth.
Amen.
PS. A Sermon preached at the American Baptist Churches Conference in Chicago, May 2, 2025.