Life Abundant: Let Go Matthew 6:25-34

Life Abundant: Let Go
Matthew 6:25-34
Rev. Dr. Rhonda Abbott Blevins
November 8, 2026

“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? 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? And which of you by worrying can add a single hour to your span of life? 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? Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For it is the gentiles who seek all these things, and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.”

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Every summer, somebody on this beach gets caught in a rip current. Maybe one of you has been that somebody.

Here’s how it usually goes. You’re out past the sandbar, bobbing along, having a perfectly lovely afternoon. Then you look up and the shore is farther away than it was a minute ago. So you do what every cell in your body tells you to do. You put your head down and you swim for the beach. Hard.

And the water doesn’t care. A rip can pull you out faster than most of us can swim. You can be strong, you can be determined, you can be an Olympic swimmer, and none of it matters. The harder you fight, the faster you wear out.

If you’ve lived here a while, you know the drill. The lifeguards all say the same thing. Don’t fight it. Stay calm. Float. Let it carry you out a little, then swim parallel to the shore until you’re out of the current, and come in at an angle.

That has to be the most counterintuitive advice in the world. Your whole body is screaming do something! And the wisdom of the water says: honey, the something you’re doing is the problem.

I think a lot of us are fighting a rip right now. Not in the Gulf. In our heads, at two in the morning. We’re swimming as hard as we can toward the shore of everything’s handled . . . we are exhausted, and we’re not getting any closer.

We’re in the third week of the series I’m calling “Life Abundant.” We started with Be Still. Then Pay Attention. This morning the work is harder. This morning the work is Let Go.

In our text this morning, Jesus is sitting on a hillside in Galilee with a crowd of mostly poor people. These aren’t folks with a 401(k) and a pantry full of Costco. They really don’t know, some days, where supper is coming from. And he looks at them and says, “Don’t worry.”

He says it again, and again. Depending on your translation, some form of that word shows up five or six times in ten verses. Which tells me two things. One, Jesus thought this was important. Two, Jesus knew we weren’t going to get it the first time.

The Greek word is merimnaō. It’s usually translated “worry” or “be anxious.” A lot of scholars hear in it the sense of being divided, pulled in different directions, a mind split down the middle. I don’t think you need a seminary degree to know that’s exactly what worry feels like.

Part of you is here, in this pew, on this beautiful morning. And part of you is already at Tuesday’s appointment. Part of you is in your kid’s apartment in Atlanta. Part of you is at the bank. Part of you is replaying that conversation from yesterday. You’re spread so thin across all those places that there’s hardly anybody left at home.

That’s merimnaō. Worry divides us from the only moment where God has ever actually met anyone, which is this one.

And then Jesus does something ironic. He asks, “Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?” I think he’s grinning when he says it. Because, no. Lord knows I have tried. I have lost entire nights trying. I have not gained one hour. I’ve only lost a lot of sleep.

Here’s the thing about worry. It’s a liar, but it’s a very convincing liar. It tells us it’s doing a job. If I keep thinking about this, I’ll be ready. If I stop worrying, that’s when the bad thing will sneak up on me. Worry dresses itself up as responsibility. Sometimes it even dresses up as love.

A few years ago two psychologists at Penn State, Lucas LaFreniere and Michelle Newman, decided to check worry’s work. They took a group of people who struggle with chronic anxiety. These were professional-grade worriers. For ten days, they wrote down every worry they had. Then about a month later, the researchers went back and asked: so, which of these actually happened?

About 91 percent of them never came true. Nine out of ten. And for a lot of those folks, the most common result was that none of their worries happened. Not one.

Now, I want to be careful here. Some of you are carrying worries that are not imaginary. The diagnosis is real. The bills are real. The kid really is struggling. Jesus doesn’t say the trouble isn’t real. He says the opposite: “Today’s trouble is enough for today.” He’s honest about trouble.

What he’s saying is that worry doesn’t actually help with trouble. It just borrows tomorrow’s trouble and makes us pay interest on it today. Most of the time, it turns out we were paying interest on a loan we never even took out.

If you’ve ever taught a child to float, you know the hard part isn’t technique.

You’ve got your hand under their back. You’re saying, “I’ve got you, just lean back, put your ears in the water.” And they’re stiff as a board. Arms flailing, chin tucked to their chest, head straining up out of the water. Every bit of that effort makes them sink.

Then at some point, usually when they’re too tired to keep fighting, they give up and lie back. Their ears go under. Their belly comes up. And you slowly slide your hand away, and they’re floating, and their eyes get big. The water’s holding me!

The water was always going to hold them. They just had to stop fighting it.

That’s what Jesus is pointing at with the birds and the lilies. Look at the gulls out there. They don’t have a 401(k) either. Look at the sea oats on the dunes. They’re not up nights worrying about whether they look okay. They’re held. And Jesus says, you’re worth more than they are. If God holds the gulls, God has got you.

Anne Lamott, one of my favorite writers, gave a talk where she listed some things she’s learned. One of them made me laugh and then made me think. She said, “Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.”

We all know that’s true of the Wi-Fi router. Somehow we forget it’s true of us. We think the answer to being overwhelmed is one more hour of effort, one more scenario run, one more lap around the worry track. Lamott says, and so does Jesus, more or less: unplug. Lie back. Let the water hold you for a minute. You will not believe how much works better afterward.

Back in the early 1970s, Father Henri Nouwen (another of my favorite writers) was a young Dutch priest teaching about prayer. He spent a lot of time talking it over with a group of students, and out of those conversations came a little book called With Open Hands. It was his first book on spirituality, and the whole thing hangs on one image: a clenched fist slowly learning to open.

He begins with a story. An elderly woman was brought into a psychiatric hospital. She was frightened and wild, lashing out at anyone who came near. The staff had to take everything away from her. But there was one small coin she held in her fist, and she would not let it go. It took two people to pry her hand open. It was as if letting go of that coin meant losing the last piece of herself.

Nouwen says that’s us. That’s us when we come to God. We show up with our fists clenched around something: a grudge, a plan, a fear, a picture of how our life was supposed to go. It’s usually something small, like a coin. And we hold on as though our very self depends on it.

He even wrote a prayer about it. One line has stayed with me for years: “Who will I be when I have nothing left to hold on to?”

That’s the real question underneath our worry, isn’t it? Not what if the bad thing happens? but who am I if I’m not holding this?

The central claim of the book is that prayer, real prayer, is learning to live with open hands. Not to grab at God, and not to clutch at life. To open our hands and receive. Nouwen walks it out in stages: through silence, through acceptance, hope, and compassion, and on into a faith that’s willing to challenge the world. It all starts with uncurling the fingers.

Now, an open hand isn’t an empty gesture. A clenched fist can’t receive anything. Not a gift, not a hand to hold, not grace. When you open your hand, you aren’t just losing something. You’re making it possible to be given something.

I think that’s what Jesus means when he says, “Seek first the kingdom of God, and all these things will be given to you.” Given. Not grabbed. Not earned. Not worried into existence. Given, into open hands.

Letting go isn’t giving up. Letting go is how we make room. (Which, spoiler alert, is next week’s sermon.)

So let’s go back out past the sandbar.

You’re caught. The shore is getting farther away. Everything in you says fight. And somewhere, a voice you’ve been hearing your whole life says, Lie back. I’ve got you. Let the water hold you.

It doesn’t mean the current isn’t real. It doesn’t mean you’ll never swim again. It just means you stop trying to save yourself by exhausting yourself. You float. You trust. And when the moment comes, you’ll find your way in, at an angle, probably not the way you planned.

The gulls know this. The sea oats know this. That woman with the coin, I hope she learned it. And I believe, I really do believe, that the God who feeds the birds and dresses the lilies is patient enough to teach it to us too. One finger at a time.

I want to invite you to do something a little uncomfortable. Wherever you are, put down your bulletin for a moment and make a fist. Squeeze it tight. Think about what you’re holding: the worry, the grudge, the plan, the coin.

Now slowly open it. Turn your palm up. That’s it. That’s the whole posture of faith right there.

Keep your hands open, and let’s pray together. The prayer is in your bulletin. When you see the bold line, that’s yours.

A Prayer for Letting Go

Pastor: O God, You know how tightly we hold on: to our plans, to our reputations, to the way we’ve decided things ought to go. It’s exhausting, all this holding on, but somewhere along the way we started calling it faithfulness.