The Fourth Sunday After Pentecost
Listen to the Sermon for June 21, 2015
Read the Sermon for June 21, 2015
Tag: Trust
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Sermon at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Jackson Hole ~ June 14, 2015
The Third Sunday After Pentecost
This sermon was preached at the 8:00 a.m. service and no audio recording was made.
Read the Sermon for June 14, 2015
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The Phenomenon of Faith
Christian faith means hearing and responding with trust in God when God reaches out to us, offering a promise, wooing us, and calling us into a living redemptive relationship. There is an historic pattern to the phenomenon of faith: God calls, promising to use our lives for God's high purposes. The recipient of the call expresses fear, doubt, or anxiety. Then comes divine reassurance. Finally, there is a faithful response. We see it in the life of Abraham and Sarah, Moses and Miriam, Jeremiah, Mary and Joseph, the Apostles, and others through the ages.
We also see it in the life of Jesus. In his Baptism and Transfiguration there is the call. In the wilderness there is the question and divine reassurance. In the cross there is the faithful response. He does not allow the warning of friends nor the threat of foes deter him from what God has called him to do and the promise before him.
In his book, Living Faith While Holding Doubt, Martin Copenhaver writes, “There are times when we must make a 100% commitment to something about which we are only 51% certain.”
But faith is not a momentary phenomenon, an act at one point in time. Faith is a long-term trust, a committed, continuous response to God’s promises. Out of real doubts and deep questions, Abram ventures forth with God. The venturing forth does not erase those doubts and questions. Rather, he gathers up his doubts and stumbles on trusting God into a future on the basis of nothing but the promise.
God told Abraham that he and his descendants would be a blessing to all the people of the earth and that the promise would last forever. The old Rabbis said that when God promised Abraham that his descendants would be like the dust, he was referring not only to numbers but to the fact that they would outlast those who trampled upon them. Given the way some in the three great Abrahamic faiths have fought one another for centuries, it is a wonder we have survived thus far.
St. Paul tells us that all who trust God like Abraham are his descendants, not just those who have his genes (Romans 4:13-25). Jesus shows us that the way of the cross is the way of faith. “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34).
When God calls, how do you answer? With doubts, anxieties, fears? You are not alone! But can you listen beyond those obstacles to God's reassuring voice, calling you to trust him to lead you through them, perhaps even to use those obstacles as bridges into the future where he is trying to get you to go with him? Can you say, I'm 51% sure, Lord, but I'll trust you with the other 49%?
There is a beautiful prayer by Thomas a’ Kempis that expresses the heart’s desire to live with faith in God:
Write thy blessed name, O Lord, upon my heart, there to remain so indelibly engraven, that no prosperity, no adversity shall ever move me from thy love. Be thou to me a strong tower of defense, a comforter in tribulation, a deliverer in distress, a very present help in trouble, and a guide to heaven through the many temptations and dangers of this life. Amen.
In our Lenten journey together with our Savior, let this prayer be on our lips and learn from him what it truly means to trust in God.
I’ll see you in Church!
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Managing Our Fear in the Pursuit of Faith
Last weekend, Dr. Richard Blackburn, Executive Director of the Lombard Mennonite Peace Center, was at Christ Church Cranbrook to lead a Healthy Congregations Workshop. The guiding principles of this workshop are derived from the work of Dr. Murray Bowen and Rabbi Edwin Friedman in family systems theory.
“Family systems theory postulates that the operation of the emotional system reflects an interplay between two counterbalancing forces – individuality and togetherness.” Of particular significance is their study of how anxiety affects any emotional system and the individuals in it.
Anxiety is the response of an organism to a real or imagined threat and is present in every person and relationship. Acute anxiety is a response to a real threat and most people usually adapt fairly successfully to acute anxiety. Chronic anxiety occurs in response to imaginary threats and often strains people’s ability to adapt to it.
An emotional system may be a family, a company, a sports team, a governmental entity, or a congregation. Individuals find ways to adapt to the anxieties of the family systems from which they come and bring those behaviors into other emotional systems.
Two key objectives of the workshop were to help each person explore and manage the anxiety in his or her life and to learn to recognize and appropriately respond to anxiety at work in the emotional systems in which they are involved.
An example from the story of our faith is the reaction of the Hebrews when Moses was on the mountain and did not return to them as soon as some expected (Exodus 32). Aaron was left in charge of the people while Moses was away. The people gathered around Aaron and expressed their anxiety about the delayed return of Moses. Instead of responding to the anxiety of the people from grounding in the divine values and principles that shaped them as a people and him as their leader, he reacted by abdicating his leadership role and instructed them to make a golden calf, which they could worship. As a poorly defined leader, Aaron let the anxieties of the herd take charge and proposed a quick-fix solution to the imagined problem they brought to him. When Moses confronted Aaron about what he did, he blamed the people instead of accepting responsibility. He even went so far as to give a completely passive explanation for the idol’s existence: “So, I said to them, ‘Whoever has gold, take it off’; so they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!”
Moses himself failed in leadership in the face of the fears of the people at Kadesh-barnea. When the spies brought back a fear-laden report from the land God had commanded them to enter, the people said, “Our brothers have made our hearts melt in fear” (Deut.1:28 NIV). Instead of responding to their fear of an imagined threat from the reality of God’s promise of protection, Moses reacted by caving in. The result, as you know, was that the people had to wander around in the wilderness until that faithless generation had died and Moses was not permitted to enter the Promised Land.
Contrast these two examples with the leadership of Jesus during his temptation in the wilderness, where he responded to Satan by managing his own inner being, during the occasion at Caesarea Philipi when Peter urged him to take another path than the one that would lead to the cross, and during his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane when his struggle with anxiety was so intense that he sweated blood.
Maybe Lent can be a time for us to search ourselves and discover the anxieties that interfere with our life in community and our ability to remain calm when others around us are losing their heads. When we do that, the life of the emotional systems of which we are members become healthier and we become more human, because we make better use of the uniquely human part of our brain that allows reason to overcome the reactions that come from the more primitive parts of our brains.
I am aware that many of the things that emerge from those more primitive parts of the human brain are necessary for survival. But when we are faced with imaginary or even potential threats, we have the God-given resources and opportunities to more fully express our humanity. And, as St. Irenaeus once said, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive; and to be alive consists in beholding God.” It is God who calls us to live our lives from divine values and principles so that we can build up the Church, advance God’s reign on earth, and embrace God’s vision of a creation restored in God’s Son.
That’s a worthy objective for the observance of a holy Lent.
I’ll see you in Church!
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What I Am Giving God This Year ~ My Trust
I'm reflecting on the custom of gift-giving, which is grounded in God's greatest gift to us. We spend a lot of time selecting just the right gifts for our loved ones. And what shall I give to God? Advent provides me with the opportunity to consider that question.
Today, I'm thinking the gift of my trust is something God would value.
John the Baptizer had the task of pointing others to a greatness into which he himself did not enter. That required a great deal of trust on his part. In a Bible study course on the gospels, when we came to Matthew 11:2-11, the passage where John sends his disciples to ask Jesus if he is the Messiah, the question arose, “Was John having second thoughts? Did he have doubts that Jesus was the long-awaited anointed one?”
I don’t think John was having second thoughts about Jesus. I think John realized his particular task was just about complete. His fate was sealed. The last thing he needed to do was to send his own disciples to Jesus so that they could join in following him. It was not John but John’s disciples, therefore, who needed convincing that day. So they said to Jesus: “Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?” And, Jesus reply was meant for them that they might believe – as eyewitnesses to his Messianic work: “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. And, blessed is the one who takes no offense at me.”
Someone tells of how from the windows of his house every evening he used to watch the lamplighter go along the streets lighting the lamps. But the lamplighter was blind. He was bringing others light that he would never see. Like the lamplighter, John had to trust that his work had a purpose beyond what he could see with his own eyes.
Trust! That’s something I want to give God this year. But it is a costly gift.
It is so easy to fall into doubt and fear. It is so tempting to back away and agree, “You’re right, it’ll never work, let’s take the safe way, the familiar way, the heavily traveled road.”
When I turn my life over to God, I give God leadership. Doing that means I will advance even though I do not know where God will lead me. It means I have to reshape my thinking to make my thoughts large enough for God to fit in! I have to let the size of my trust set the size of my aims and objectives in life so that my expectations match God’s abilities.
One of the things my Father and I always did together at this time of year was to string lights on the roof of our house. At first, my help was confined to checking the bulbs. Then, later, I could stand on a ladder and hang the ones under the eves. Finally, I was allowed to get up on the roof. But that required assistance. I needed a boost getting up and help getting down. The booster and the helper was my dad. If I wanted to help put up the lights, I’d have to trust him not to drop me. Because of that experience, I knew Dad could be trusted not to drop me.
The everlasting arms of God are even more trustworthy. They undergird all of us. They boost us up and they keep us from falling. Blessed are we when we trust God above all others.
I’m giving God my trust this year.