Online Sermon, Second Sunday Before Lent, 8 February 2026
Readings: Genesis 1.1–2.3; Romans 8.18–25; Matthew 6.25–34
Theme: Don´t worry, be happy.
This Sunday our worshipping communities are meeting online because of a series of storms here in Spain and Portugal, most recently, storm Leonardo and storm Marta. Thousands of people have been evacuated from their homes in our autonomous community of Andalusia, and our hearts and prayers go out to those who have lost their homes, and especially to those who have lost loved ones. May they rest in peace and rise in glory.
When such events happen, we are painfully reminded that we are part of a much bigger natural order that, as Christians, we understand to be God’s creation. Whether such events are directly caused by climate change is always difficult to say. However, what we can be sure of is that the human interaction with the natural order has tended to instrumentalize it without the care and responsibility we should show to it as its stewards.
Such a charge of care is given to us in the book of Genesis, which we read on this Second Sunday before Lent, and it reminds us that our origin does not lie within ourselves. We are created and this has profound implications for how we should understand our lives and the vocations we are given by this same creator Lord. So in my words today, I would like to focus on this theme of being creatures of God and exploring just what this means for our self-understanding as human beings. But, if our origin lies with God, why is it that we seem to spend so much of our time worrying as if everything depended upon us, absolutely?
The 1988 Bobby McFerrin song, “Don´t worry be happy” is one that we might use as a background to this sermon because it combines two key themes of our readings today, the admonition not to worry, and the invitation that because of freedom, we should be happy.
There is something about the happy-go-lucky chorus of Bobby McFerrin’s song which can put us in a positive frame of mind no matter what is going on around us. Yet, it is easier said than done, isn´t it? How challenging it can be to stop worrying and simply to accept happiness as a gift from God. Yet this admonition, to not worry, is Jesus´s in the gospel of Matthew for the Second Sunday Before Lent. He tells us to focus our lives on striving for the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all that we need will be given to us.
But how should we understand this instruction from Jesus? Is it really possible to live in this way? To help us to answer this question, we also read the Book of Genesis for our first reading this week. Here, we are told that we are God´s creatures and that all life originates with God´s act of creation. Out of a “formless void” God creates life. This tells us that we are not self-subsistent. We depend for our very existence on God, and nothing can be without God´s creative hand at work.
This is why it is pointless to worry and we should be happy, because it is God who holds us and all things in being. We can add nothing to life with our worries only more stress for ourselves and for others. Yet, following this instruction, especially in difficult moments, can remain a step too far. There is something in us which tends to assume the role of the creator and makes us forget that God alone is the creator.
The second reading from Paul´s Letter to the Romans provides us with a clue as to why this might be. The creation has a dimension of futility to it that makes us wait with eager longing to be released from this situation. There is a bondage to decay in the creation which awaits its fulfilment in the New Creation, so as to release it from this cycle of decay. And that is perhaps why we tend to worry. We are subjected to the futility of worry because we can be so easily focussed on our decaying mortal selves and not on the coming of the eternal kingdom of God.
So, being ensnarled in the tangled dimensions of futility in the world is perhaps one of the reasons that we seem to spend so much of our time worrying about things. Not that we should be lackadaisical about life, of course, because it is important to live with awareness and responsibility, but there does seem to be a lack of focus at times on who we really are. Understanding ourselves to be creatures, dependent upon God, really does change everything. It liberates us from a certain sense of false independence which tends to leave us living in the wind tunnel of vertiginous disorientation. We are liberated from this sense of finding ourselves in the void, when we realize that God is our origin and our destiny. The journey in between this origin and destiny is the vocation of life in which we are called to learn to share in the legacy of the glory of God given to us freely in Christ, and to share the fruits of his kingdom with our fellow travellers.
So, take a moment of prayer this week and whistle that song of Bobby McFerrin for yourselves, and as you do, ask God to help you to focus on his kingdom; the place of no worries and true happiness, because this is our eternal hope and our destiny as sons and daughter of the one true creator God. Yet, don’t be surprised if worry returns, because as creatures of God, we live in the ambiguity of the between time. That is to say, the time between the creation and its consummation in the Parousia. So, be patient, and know that such ambiguity is just part and parcel of what it means to be creatures groaning with the rest of the creation in labour pains for its final liberation in the consummation of all things in God: So, as Jesus, and indeed Bobby McFerrin say, don’t worry be happy!