Do Not Fret – Br. Curtis Almquist

SSJE Sermons

Br. Curtis Almquist

Psalm 37:1-12

In the portion of Psalm 37 appointed for today’s liturgy, one verb appears several times: “fret.” “Do not fret yourself.” Fretting, which is jealous, angry teeth grinding when we see evil doers, the unscrupulous, the insidiously clever people getting ahead. In just a few verses, the psalmist repeats this mantra three times: “Do not fret yourself.” “Do not fret yourself.” “Refrain from anger, leave rage alone; do not fret yourself; it leads only to evil.”[i] Which is easier said than done when we see in the news every day how good things happen to bad people.

We need good peripheral vision. On the one hand, we need to keep in touch with history and see, in the long view, how the playing field eventually levels. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”[ii] Quite. Remembering how justice will eventually thunder forth can help us claim hope. In the fullness of time, things will come round right, if not in this lifetime, then in the life to come.

With our peripheral vision, we also need to live in the present and to look ahead, claiming our own agency for God’s will to be done on earth as it shall be in heaven. What is our vocation, what is our calling to be and to do amidst somuch that is wrong? To quote again Martin Luther King, Jr.: “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”[iii]

The psalmist gives us an elixir for living fully alive in a troubled world:

1. “Do not fret yourself; it leads only to evil.” The risk, of course, is our becoming the very thing we hate and envy. Detach. “Do not fret yourself.” And then,
2. Live in hope. In the fullness of time, things will come round right. And then,
3. Seize the moment. Claim our own agency to make for right in what is within our own reach and power, especially on behalf of the powerless and voiceless in God’s creation: people, birds, animals, the sky and sea, mountains and plains. To make for right, what is within our own power.

But do not fret.

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[i] Psalm 37:1, 8, 9.

[ii] Martin Luther King, Jr., originally quoted in a 1958 article printed in “The Gospel Messenger” periodical.

[iii] Martin Luther King, Jr., from his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” an open letter written on April 16, 1963.