Is this how Season 1 ends?

Yes. Season 1 is finally wrapping up. In this episode - Episode 34! - I explain why (it's episode 34?), what I'm up to next and why I'm doing something as chronically unprofitable as The Wycliffe Papers. I also refer to my blog, The Situation Room and this post: https://thesitutationroom.substack.com/p/amuse-yourself

I'll be back. Have no fear. You can't keep me away from a microphone, to be honest. I love conversations with friends about ideas and figuring out who we are, how we got here and where we are going.

Want to talk about the podcast and engage with other listeners? Come on over to the Facebook Group.

Find out about my touring show, God the Bible and Everything (in 60 minutes) and get in touch via my website.

If you’re serious about the Bible and church history and like jokes, I’d recommend subscribing to The Wycliffe Papers. It's free. But you can also support the podcast by coming a Paid Subscriber to the Wycliffe Papers, making you a Loyal Lollard. Could you consider that?

Or email me in gmail now you can see how to spell Wycliffe...

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Welcome to the Stand Up Theologian Podcast. My name is James Carey. And this really is, I really mean it, the last in this current season of the Stand-Up Theologian podcast. It's episode 34. When I started doing this podcast back in the autumn last year, I thought, I'll do eight or ten up to Christmas and then see how I go. And then I thought, I'll just get to Lent. And then I thought I'd stop for Lent and I didn't. And here I am. And then I thought, oh, I'll just wrap up. And then I didn't. And then I was on a podcast about Good Morning Vietnam and I shared that and talked about the quiet revival. Last time I talked about St. George's Day. So I can't not podcast, but I really am going to take a break. Otherwise, I will burn out and not come back. And I've got lots of other things on. And I'm going to tell you about them now. And then after that, I'm going to play in something else I've written, which was a sermon that I delivered at my church on Sunday evening last weekend, which might be of interest to you. And so it's about Do Not Be Anxious from Luke 12. So that's the second half of the podcast. Here is the first half of the podcast in which I'm going to mention the Wycliffe Papers hard copy that I've been doing. And actually, I wrote about this on another blog that I do. I know it's ridiculous. I wrote about this on the Situation Room blog, which is a sort of a secular writing advice, particularly for Situation Comedy blog, which also links to my YouTube channel, The Situation Room, which I am going to be making more videos on over the coming months because not only do I love sitcoms, I do actually love talking about them and helping people write them, and I'm enjoying it. And it's got about 3,000 subscribers, and I think I can build that up into something that also might help me make a living. And it's a living that I actually like the idea of as well. So I'd previously eschewed that way of going about things, partly because sitcom is so hard. I thought, why help people write sitcom scripts that stand virtually no chance of being made? But I think we're at the other side of that now. And I think you can make your own sitcom. And I think that's where I'm going to go over the summer, back end of the summer, into the autumn with ideas and helping people really condense down what a situation comedy is. It's just a relationship, it's a little family of characters. And I think we've been overthinking it in the TV world and working out how we can do a cheap version of something that was very expensive in the 80s and 90s. And I think we just need to strip it back completely, almost start again from first principles, and acknowledge the fact that the biggest streamer on TVs now is YouTube. And people just watch YouTube. In fact, last night I watched uh a stand-up show on YouTube that had been released by the comedian Miles Jupp, who interestingly is I think the son of a clergyman, not a Christian believer himself, although I think he studied theology at the University of Edinburgh. Anyway, he's a terribly well-spoken trap, and he leans into that, and he's not a believer himself, and he drops a couple of uh fairly large swear words in the show, although it's not a terribly sweary show. It's called On I Bang, and I watched that, and he had brain tumour. I don't I haven't seen the ending yet because I had to go and pick up my daughter uh from school, so I didn't catch the very end of it, and I will go back to that. I don't think it was particularly life-changing for him, um, but he it was interesting and it was funny. But note, I didn't watch it on Disney Plus, I didn't watch it on the BBC, I watched it on YouTube, and I guess he just captured it and released it, and there it is, and that will accrue him a little bit of money probably over the following five to ten years because it's a good show, it's a funny show. Uh filmed in Chelmsford, and uh he refers to Chelmsford quite often, and so I think sitcoms can be made individually by small numbers of people rather than cut down cheap crews and that kind of thing. I think it just needs to sort of start again. That is for later in in the autumn, and so I need to make lots of YouTube videos about that, and I'm writing a book called Field Notes, I'm a sitcom writer, and in that book I am describing the process of writing a script. I'm writing a script called The Lab. And The Lab is an attempt to pitch a studio sitcom script about a forensics lab. And the idea is that I'm just going to write this script, make it as funny as I possibly can, and then invite industry people to come to a read-through of the script, which I will cast with the most famous and appropriate people I can and see what happens. I'd hope to have that script ready in May or June, and I actually don't think it's going to be ready till September, and there's no point pitching over July and August when the Edinburgh Festival's on and everyone's on holiday and nothing happens. So I think well I'll keep my powder dry for September, and but just enjoy the development process of the lab. And so if you go on over to the Situation Room, you'll see me talking about sitcoms and writing that particular sitcom at the moment. I've I've made some videos which are in the process of being put up. So that's all taking time, and obviously, this podcast is probably one thing that I can probably uh take a break from at the moment. I'm obviously going to come back because I love podcasting and I've made six, seven hundred episodes of podcasts in my life, and so and there are just people I want to talk to about various things, and I keep making a note of them and just thinking, oh, I could talk to that person or that person for series two of my podcast, which I suspect will resume in the autumn a year after the last one started. I don't quite know. And I might drop extra bits of audio content that come up over the course of my life that I think you might find interesting. But the other thing I'd want to talk about is I blogged over at the Situation Room about the Wycliffe papers and saying that look, this is not something of interest to people on that secular podcast uh secular blog about sitcom writing advice. But I made this point, which I hope is helpful. The problem is if you're a sitcom writer, writing a script is not the finished product. If you're writing a novel, those words are the finished product, whereas a sitcom script is just a script, and although there's a bit of a currency to scripts and having a good script to show people what you can do, and that's all fine. The reality is you're writing and writing and writing and rewriting and rewriting stuff that may or may never be performed. The odds are it will never be performed, and that just puts me in the mind of being Father Mackenzie writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear in the song Eleanor Rigby. And therefore, I urge people, and maybe this isn't urged to you as well, to just do something to delight people that doesn't go anywhere, it doesn't need to be anything, it doesn't even need to be monetized. So I explain that for a whole year, and it is literally a year and a week, I've been putting up funny headlines at the Wycliffe Papers. And if this is all news to you, well, I've got great news, there's lots of free jokes about the Bible. It's called uh Jokes for Those Serious About the Bible, and it's a bit more niche than the Babylon B, and it's a bit less uh Trump and gun focused because those things are not terribly interesting to me, and it's a bit geekier, um, as I say in that blog post. If you don't know the difference between Elijah and Elisha or Samuel and Samson, this isn't for you, but that's the part of the joy of it. I'm doing something I love for my own crowd, and it's a good thing to do. And the reason it's exciting is because you can just put stuff out there and delight people. And so I say, um, have you considered writing something for you and an audience of people you care about? Something that you can make, produce, or print. It doesn't have to be online, it doesn't have to go viral, it doesn't have to be a podcast or a video. You don't have to commit to doing something once a week for the rest of your life, like a podcast, for example. You just write something delightful, write a short story and send it to your friends, or read it aloud to your kids, write a newsletter about your passion, which could be medieval churches, beekeeping, makrame, growing courgettes, book binding, put on a play. You don't need to ask anyone's permission. There are no gatekeepers and no one can take it away from you. The BBC can't cancel it. It doesn't need to be for anything. Taking us back to my conversation with Kenny Primrose about things being atelic. They don't have a purpose, they are the thing. It doesn't have to have series potential or be adaptable for the screen. And so that's why really I write the Wycliffe papers. It's not so that it becomes a big thing or so that I can be bought out for lots of money by the Babylon B who then get a backlog of jokes. It's not that at all. And I then I decided to make a 24-page printed version of all of the jokes from the first year. Now, it would be great if that was a money spinner, but the fact is I'm just not gonna sell that many copies of it, am I? Because I've got fifth, oh how many more gigs have I got less this year? 20 gigs, maybe 15 plus Keswick. And I'm gonna sell what 200 copies. Well, to print 200 copies of this thing, they're probably gonna cost me about four or five quid each, and I'm gonna sell them for about eight quid. So I'm making three quid, four quid or four hundred, that's about eight hundred quid. Well, I've probably spent two entire days typesetting the thing on Canva, so that's probably uh most of the money gone in terms of my time, and then the time of sort of promoting it and organizing it. But it's not about the money, it's about the joy of the thing. So, you know, printed things don't make money unless you're Stephen King, JK Rowling, Richard Osman, or the chief executive of HarperCollins, this isn't about the money, it's about the jokes and it's about the joy. So that's why I've been making the Wycliffe papers, I've been writing it every week. I tend to write it in clumps, I sort of store up a whole load of headlines and then try them out with loyal lollards. So if you become a loyal lollard, which is not dependent on this podcast particularly, but you will get access to the next batch of jokes ahead of everyone else, and you get to rate and review them. And sometimes I don't run them because I just think, oh, people didn't like that joke, and some people really do, and some people really don't. But if that again is of interest to you, then you could become a loyal lollard. Um, so that's what I've been doing, that's what I've been up to, and it is just about the joy of doing it. And the other thing I'm doing is I'm making YouTube videos for the James Carey channel, and I thought, oh, maybe I need a stand-up theologian YouTube channel in which I can sort of talk about the things I'm interested in. But I've already got a channel which has got me talking about history and going to places like Glastonbury and that kind of thing, and it's got me being funny in various guises. And I thought, well, I have another channel because those are the things I'm interested in, and I need to combine them and think about them and talk about them. So that's what I'm doing. That's the other thing I'm going to be doing over the summer is making videos that feel a bit like Carrie's Almanac, they're about history, but also a bit about comedy, uh, and hopefully that will be of interest to some people. And again, it's experimenting with the art form. And although I could just put the audio from those videos up here, like I did last week, what I don't want to be thinking about is the how the audio works in relation to the video. So the media are very different. YouTube is very different from a podcast, the podcast is intimate and has a structure of its own. Whereas a YouTube video, you slightly have to front load things. And even though these are vlogs on YouTube, which have a little bit of a rhythm of their own, they don't really translate in quite the same way. So when this podcast finishes, which is this episode for this season, then you might want to go over to my YouTube channel if you want to keep hearing from me and thinking about what I'm thinking about, and in take part in the conversation there, and you can also leave comments on my Facebook group for the um stand-up theologian. So that would be my advice to you. That's what I've been up to, that's what I've been thinking about. If you want to follow how I'm getting on with the lab, which is my sitcom center forensics lab, and writing about writing, then uh do let me know. And I've also been planning workshops on how to write situation comedy, and I'll be doing some one-off QA's and then some uh Zoom workshops, a few in-person things, and then hopefully in the autumn I'll be doing you know, a cohort of 12 come through a class for a month for a 30-day period, and we just do like a bit of a sitcom boot camp type thing and see how that goes. So those are my plans as well as a whole bunch of other things that I do, including continuing to tour the stand-up theologian uh show God, the Bible and everything in 60 minutes. I'm running that until uh Michael Miss term, half term, so essentially till the end of October, and at the end of October, I shall stop doing that show because I will have done it quite enough by the end of October. I enjoy doing it, I will enjoy doing it until then, but I suspect I will rather not want to do it beyond that, and I don't plan to do any gigs in November or December or January and hopefully not even February because gigs are exhausting. The actual gig itself is not, the gig is fun, but driving normally involves three to four hours, sometimes you know, only one or two hours, but normally two, three, four hours. I have to admit that on the M25 on a Friday afternoon, I have genuinely questioned my life choices and worked out why on earth am I here doing this? It's not fun, and so I want to take a clear break from that, and then I'll I might come back next year with a new touring show. It might be about sitcoms and writing sitcoms, and also how sitcoms are life and what we can learn about ourselves, and it be an evangelistic show, the gospel according to a sitcom writer, and that essentially life is a sitcom unless you want it to be a movie. And that takes us back to the very, very first episode of the Stand Up Theologian podcast. So I have closed the loop. This podcast is gonna stop for a bit, it will return, and if you just keep it open in your podcast app, as it were, a new episode will appear. I might do an announcement, but the best way to do it is just to subscribe to the Wycliffe papers, and that will keep you up to date with what's going on in my life. And you could subscribe to the Almanac, but I'm taking a little bit of a break from that at the moment as well. But I'm not terribly hard to find on the internet, if I'm honest. I've also got an Instagram which I don't use very much, and I might do more on that. So that's one for another time. So there we go. Life is a sitcom or is it a movie? Uh I keep making the same mistakes again and again. This podcast in itself is almost like a sitcom episode, isn't it? Where I can't stop doing it. That's the thing about sitcom characters, they can't stop doing the thing, even when they know they're doing it, they are powerless to stop doing the thing. And someone trying to stop themselves from doing something is funnier than someone just going mad and doing the thing. I was listening to Martini shot, a very short, very entertaining little podcast by Rob Long, who is a showrunner in America about the only one who isn't on the left, and ironically, is currently going through um uh Bible college to be an Episcopalian minister. So I was like, oh dear, I backed the wrong horse there, in my opinion, but there we go. But he was saying that it's much funnier for someone to try not to do a thing than to be unable to stop doing a thing, and I think that's a very good comedy principle that I hadn't really thought about before. So, Everyday a School Day. In fact, that would be the name of a sitcom about homeschooling that I would love to make called Everyday a School Day. That's a good name for a show, isn't it? So, all of these things I may get to at some point. I'm only 50, I've probably got another 25 years worth of decent work left in me. I'm not going to retire because what would I do in my retirement? Read books and talk about it. Well, that's what I do for a living anyway. So I will be back in the autumn, ideally in September. I will be stockpiling lots of stuff for then. So hopefully that will be a similarly long run, but obviously I can't make any promises. There is, of course, the chance that I will be commissioned to write a sitcom for the television, which will become wildly famous, and of course, I won't have time to do all this extra stuff. On the side, as it stands, that all seems pretty unlikely, doesn't it? But I am not anxious, he says, segueing into the final part of this episode, which is a 20-minute sermon I gave to my church in the evening, which is why it's a bit longer, about the Lord's words in uh Luke 12. You shall do not be anxious about anything. So I'm going to close out with this, which hopefully is encouraging to you, and I will speak to you again soon. Thanks for listening. Here we go. Here's me at St. John's in Yeval last Sunday. Two words guaranteed to achieve the opposite of what they are suggesting. Cheer up. Is there anything more annoying than being told to cheer up? We may get the additional, it might never happen. Except maybe it already has. Now Jesus' commands might have the same effect on us, the main one in this passage being do not worry. Excuse me? How? Don't worry, have you seen the news? There are not just rumors of wars, but actual wars. Have you seen my mortgage payments and my credit card bills? And the next round of tax increases, and the level of political division, the rise in all kinds of unsavoury movements, and what is AI going to do to my job prospects and the prognosis from the doctor. Worry is not one of those things you can switch on and off. And nothing we try seems to shift it. We can combat worry with all kinds of things. Reason and fact. That's very popular, isn't it? Pointing out how life is objectively better now, that AI is a net positive, life expectancy is historically high, and death in combat is historically low. Stephen Pinker's uh 2018 book, Enlightenment Now the Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. 75 graphs that basically tell you not to worry. Safe safety, peace, knowledge, happiness. They're all on the rise. Feel better? No. Not really. How about some history? Don't worry. We've been here before in this situation. In fact, in the past it was way worse, and it turned out fine because, well, we're here, aren't we? Well, yeah, we are. Some people didn't make it. For a lot of people, it did not turn out fine. There's another version of history. It's called nostalgia. A retreat into memories of history of the 80s, 70s, 60s, whichever is your preferred decade, when you were a kid and you weren't worried about economic crashes, the Cold War, international terrorism, and the great coming ice age. Remember that? There's a new ice age coming. Everyone was terrified. These approaches don't work. And if you're a Christian, you may be doubly stressed about this because Jesus says, Don't worry. In fact, in Luke chapter 12, on uh page uh 1045 in the Bibles, he tells us not to be anxious or afraid at least four times. And then he tells you to sell your possessions and give them to the poor. How on earth are we going to do that? Here's how. Verse 31, dive straight in there. Verse 31, seek his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well. Whose kingdom? The father's kingdom, because the father knows that you need them. Now we don't talk very much about the kingdom, uh, which is a shame because Jesus talks about it all the time. Uh, we tend to think about and worry about our own individual salvation, getting to heaven in the future. But Jesus, the one who actually saves us, has saved us, will save us, is more concerned actually about now, how we live now while we wait for him to return. There are a lot of parables, aren't there, about waiting and waiting well. He's more interested in what we have been saved for. Earlier in Luke's gospel, Jesus tells the parable of the sower. And the good seed is not just the seed that survives, but that grows and is fruitful. He'll go on to tell the parable of the Good Samaritan about how to live in accordance with the kingdom. The kingdom of God is a wonderful place where people live to love and serve each other. After all, that is what we will be doing for eternity when Christ returns. What's life like in his kingdom? It's not a place where people worry. It's a place where the Lord looks after his people. After all, he looks after the ravens. Jesus paints a funny picture of ravens sowing seeds and harvesting and building barns. Can you imagine a raven building a barn, sort of raising a barn like an Amish person? And that's actually what the rich fool does in the parable just before. There's a parable just before this where somebody tears down their barns to build bigger ones. He lays up riches for himself. Why? God feeds the ravens, says Jesus. And despite what you may have heard, you are much more valuable than birds. And birds are amazing, they can fly. Have you thought about that? We can't fly. Birds can fly. I'm not even sure we fully understand how they can fly. They can fly, and yet you're more valuable even than them because you are made in God's image. You are, and he loves you, and he will give you what you need. Imagine being a guest in the house of an old friend who is now a billionaire. They invite you to their mansion, but you keep grabbing fruit from the fruit bowl and hoarding it in your room in case this friend suddenly decides to stop feeding you. Would you do that? You wouldn't do that. I wonder if we do that with God. You would accept the hospitality on its own terms because you are loved, you are welcomed in, you are accepted. And if you follow Jesus and submit to him as Lord and King, you are in his kingdom. Accept his hospitality. Worrying achieves literally nothing, says Jesus. It won't add a single hour to your life. Well, yeah, but maybe it's good that we worry because then we might think of X, Y, and Z so that you'll live longer and it's stop. Don't you think that God has a plan for you? And your life? Might not be your plan, but He's got a plan. He loves you, and it's a good plan. Trust the Lord, seek his kingdom. You want a bit of luxury, and it's easy to think that that is all God offers. Bird food, chicken feed. The minimum, the value range that the Christian must be content with. And yes, we are to learn contentment. Godliness with contentment is great gain. If we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. That's pretty good. A lot of people don't have that. But the devil would love you to think that the Lord is mean. That the Lord is holding back. That was the original temptation, wasn't it? Back in the Garden of Eden. This stunning, beautiful, fruitful garden surrounded by beautiful plants and birds and delicious fruits. And the devil tries this. You do know that God's holding back. Really? We believed it. Oh we believed it. That God was holding back. It's mad, isn't it? Consider the flowers, says Jesus. Look at them. They're beautiful. They're more beautiful than the raiment of Solomon, the wisest, wealthiest king of God's people, Israel. A flower that is virtually a weed looks better than Solomon. And if that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and thrown into the fire tomorrow, that's how that's how's that for fast fashion? How much more will he clothe you? You of little faith. Do we understand how bountiful God is? The world he has made teaches us about his character. As enlightenment Christians, we like we like to look at nature as proof for God's existence. Billions of ones chances for the formation of amino acids, blah blah blah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know all that. I'm a Gen Xer. Uh, we spent decades talking about that stuff. That's not how scripture uses creation. God doesn't need to prove himself to anyone. God is. Nature tells us about God and what he is like. Nature shows us what he is God, what he is like. The beautiful flowers of the field tell us that he is beautiful and bountiful and gracious. He doesn't just create one flower. That would have been all right, wouldn't it? A flower, look, a flower. That's what that's how we do things, isn't it? You can have any colour as long as it's black, said Henry T. Ford on his cars. God's made dozens, hundreds of flowers. Honeysuckle, fox gloves, corncrackle, I had to look that one up. Bellflower, I looked that one up too. Dog rose, I've heard of that. Lily of the valley, snow drops. And it doesn't just create ravens, but kingfishers, cranes, eagles, herrings, hummingbirds, ostriches, emus, condors, flamingos, arctic terns, murmurations of starlings who make patterns in the sky, and we have no idea why they do that. We do know it's to bring glory to the Lord. This bounty, this beauty is a gift from our Heavenly Father. He is not a stony skinflint who begrudgingly gives his children the bare minimum. He pours out blessing on his children. Let us receive these blessings with open arms and open hearts, and then we can be generous like him. Why don't we want to do that? Why don't we want to do that? I think we don't want to depend on the Lord, we don't want to receive blessing from him, but to provide for ourselves. So we're free from him. So we run after those things. Who runs after beautiful clothes according to Jesus? Pagans. A stark word, isn't it? I don't think Jesus uses that word very often. Pagans, it's a warning. If we run after these things rather than receiving them, we're behaving like an idol-worshipping pagan. Pagans run after food and food and clothing, even though they've already been given them. And it's easily done. We saw it in Eden, but also we see it in Exodus. We read of how God led his people out of slavery with signs and wonders on an astonishing scale, promising them a land flowing with milk and honey, with vineyards they did not plant, and they can't wait. Moses has been up Mount Sinai for five minutes, and he comes round and they're worshipping a golden calf. I've been gone a few days. What on earth is going on? Madness, isn't it? They're being given bread miraculously every single day, and it's not enough. They'd like a god to worship, and they bow down to a pagan god. Behold, this is the God that led you out of Egypt. Oh, it's disgusting to read. It's awful. That's us. If we believe that this is all there is, and if we believe that, then we have to get what we can, and we have to get it now. And where does that lead us? Well, it leads us in all kinds of different directions. It might lead us to hedonism, to eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Uh, it could lead us to competitiveness and showing off. Whoever dies with the most stuff wins. That competition doesn't end until you die, and then you're dead. More likely, it leads to paranoia, anxiety, fear, loneliness, stockpiling and saving because it's every man for himself. Or it's about control. You need to possess things in order to take control of them, to control your life, to control the people around you. There are hints of all of those things actually in the parable that Jesus uh told just before this one, which we looked at last week. Before the parable, he says, watch out, be on your guard against all kinds of greed. Life does not consist in an abundance of possessions. If we don't really believe in the Lord's blessing, if we won't fear him, we will worship idols who do not bring peace, and they do not bring freedom from sin. They do not bring forgiveness. These idols have nothing to offer because the earth belongs to the Lord. He made it, he commands it with the power of his voice. The idols only bring you your own desires, and it'll bring enslavement to them and disappointment and delusion disillusionment and loneliness and worry and fear. But Jesus says this beautiful words in verse 32 Do not be afraid, little flock. For your father has been pleased to give you the kingdom. Jesus calls his disciples a little flock. He is their shepherd who goes before them. He doesn't enslave us or control us, he protects us, and he leads us into the kingdom that we have been given. And we've been given it by the Father, by Jesus' father, his father. Wait, Jesus' father is our father. Have we thought about that? You're not just an invited guest into the kingdom, you are family. It's yours, it's not a legal loophole. God, the father, is pleased to give you the kingdom. He's pleased. Anyone who's given a child a wonderful gift will know what that pleasure feels like to see the joy and the delight. That's how God, our Heavenly Father, feels about giving you his kingdom. He finds it thrilling. Isn't that amazing? Jesus has all things, the whole kingdom, all the power. But he doesn't use that power to gratify himself, which I would. He doesn't. He uses it to serve and to save. He gives of his blood on the cross poured out for others. He doesn't need to grasp at the world because it's already his. And if we are Jesus' brothers and sisters, sons of the same Father, it's ours as well. And so we can not just avoid worry, but be like our Father by selling our possessions and giving to the poor. We can let go of things rather than run after them. That's what it means to give, to willingly go without something for the sake of another. Would we do that? Is that how we give? Or do we give from what we can spare? We would give more if we really knew that our brother, the Lord Jesus, has led us into the kingdom that we've been given. A kingdom where wealth is not hoarded or hidden, where there are no thieves and no moths. If you're a Christian, stockpiling money makes no sense. Sensible provision for older age, sure. Huge pension funds for lavish early retirement. Be very careful. That's dangerous. It's very dangerous. Verse 34. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. You don't want to be someone that Jesus calls a fool. If only he'd looked around, he would have seen in his fields the ravens, the wildflowers, and he would have seen that the Lord is generous, and that his bigger barns were vanity. We can live lives of open-handed generosity, not because we are rich. Most of us are not. Comparatively, maybe we are. But we can give generously, not because we are rich, but because we know that our God is abundant. The Lord Jesus is abundant. That's one of the remarkable things about his ministry is how abundant it is. How just amazing things happen around him. His first miracle in John's gospel, he turns water into wine. He doesn't just turn water into wine, he turns a lot of water into an embarrassing amount of wine. It's about a thousand bottles at a wedding that had already run out of wine. That's a lot of wine, isn't it? Jesus is abundant. The Lord is abundant. We are constantly told to believe in scarcity, aren't we? Scarcity scarcity. The word scarcity itself sounds scary. Lots of similar words, similar letters. Scarcity, conserve, save, eke out. Nature is scarce. No, it isn't. It's abundant. You can't stop nature. Many of us in our gardens are trying to do exactly that. It just keeps growing. We don't always like what grows in what places. But I was on my knees yesterday in my garden pulling up enormous thistles that had grown up. They were like tree trunks. Enormous things. God is abundant. He cares for the ravens. He clothes the flowers in splendor. So let us remember that this week. I don't know what the weather's going to be like, I haven't checked. But if you see wildflowers, if you see birds, let us just remember the abundance of the Lord. Let us remember his kingdom. Let us not run after those things like the pagans, because they're there. Let us go to the one who already has them and delights to share them with us and has given them to us. Let us follow the Lord Jesus Christ into his wonderful kingdom. Let's pray together. You are kind and gracious and you lavish us with good things. And even though we do terrible things, you still pour out blessing on us and create and maintain this beautiful world. We pray that this week, as we see the flowers of the fields and hear or see the birds of the air, that we would be aware of your abundance, your kindness, and your grace, that we would remember the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave of Himself, and that out of that wealth and that abundance, that we may be those who give to others cheerfully and graciously, because that is what you do. Would we be like you this week and forever, transformed by your spirit for the glory of the Lord Jesus? Amen. Thanks for listening. Keep in touch. Is this how it ends? Yep.