Lent II Year C |
St James’, Peace River |
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The thing that we have to confront most of all, in these early stages of Lent, is God's faithfulness. It's there in each of the Scriptures that we read this morning. Abraham begins to question whether God can keep his promises – and God makes a solemn commitment, a covenant, not because he wasn't going to do what he said but because Abraham needed to believe it. The psalmist takes up the refrain “wait for the Lord,” because that's what God's people experience: if we wait – when we wait – we discover that God always comes through. The New Testament readings carry the same theme, although with a shadow behind it. Paul writes about our hope, our expectation, that God will transform both us and our world; but he also writes with sadness about how easy it is for human beings not to see beyond the ends of our noses. Jesus, in the gospel of Luke, looks ahead to achieving God's purpose and fulfilling the prophetic words, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord,” - but he says that while weeping over a city and a people that should trust God's faithfulness, but don't. It's no surprise that we see this pattern repeated this morning, because it comes up virtually everywhere in the Bible – it's one of the recurring motifs, a minor-key counterpoint to the great story God tells about his world. Part of the story is that people just don't believe the story, or the God who tells it. That pattern is fixed early on in the story of Israel, when God's people wander forty years in the desert – a journey that seems to be designed to teach them how to trust and depend on God, but ends up showing us just how hard that is to do. And of course, one of the echoes of that 40-year journey is our 40-day journey through Lent, as we also try again to learn to depend on God, and inevitably fail. Why is it so hard? When we have a God who has chosen us, called us, revealed himself to us, given us so much, taken us to new places, loved us so deeply – why is it so hard to trust? In a sense that is the question the whole Bible poses to us, and I hope you won't go away today thinking it's been answered. Keep asking yourself that question, because it will be part of your story as long as you live: Why is it so hard to trust God? There are some easy and obvious answers, they just don't go all that deep. It's hard to trust someone you can't see, someone you can't be 100% sure is there at all. But just saying that raises some big questions for us. Is it really true that we aren't sure God is there? God has made it as easy as possible for us to meet him, to experience him, to get to know him. The evidence is all around us, in this amazing world, in the story of Jesus, in the ways Jesus continues to be alive and present and real to us, not to mention in all those human beings in this church and outside it, who reflect to us God's image and continue to show us what their Maker is really like. All we need to do is say “yes” to all that, to believe and trust it like Abraham did. But we still wrestle with an uncertainty, a sense that God is hidden, a possibility that all the evidence might in the end point in another direction. I guess that's why we call it faith; even though we would never treat any other person who had been so faithful to us with that degree of skepticism. And when we get to that point, we realize that we haven't really answered the question, and we will have to keep asking it: Why is it so hard? Another of the easy and obvious answers is that we are always reluctant to trust, because it means giving up some degree of control over our lives. To trust God is to say that we don't know, and that we don't have to know, what will happen to us. Most of the time, when we willingly trust another person like that, there are limits: right now, you are trusting me for about 12 minutes to lead you somewhere in this sermon that you didn't have to approve in advance! But we also have much deeper experiences of letting another person in to share our lives, not knowing what will happen when we do that – but doing it willingly because of what we believe about that person's goodness, because of how much we trust them, and because we believe that they love us and want what is best for us. But that poses an even more curious question. If we are willing to open our lives in blind faith to another human being, why do we hold back so much when it comes to God? Put God and even the best person you know on the balance scales, when it comes to goodness and trustworthiness and wanting what is best for you – and God wins, hands down, every time. Yet it is still so hard to trust God, and we haven't answered the question. We might, though, have found one insight which will at least give us something to think about as we continue to ask, “Why is it so hard?” Trusting another person is scary, and the more you trust, the scarier it is. I believe this is true even when you are confident in that person's basic goodness. In fact – this is going to sound paradoxical – the more someone loves you, the scarier it can be to trust them. That's because you know you are going to open up your life to them more completely, that you are going to set fewer limits, that they are going to discover the real you, and that who you are is more likely to be changed by who they are. Apply all that to God, and you'll see where I'm going with this. One line from Psalm 130 jumped out at me this week because it captures what I'm trying to say about God: “There is forgiveness with you, and therefore you shall be feared.” Why would we be afraid of forgiveness? Because if we trust God, if we respect God's infinite patience and faithfulness, we know that we are going to be forgiven in ways we can't stand. We are going to be forgiven for mistakes we would never admit to anyone else; we are going to be forgiven even for aspects of our character we thought were strengths; we are going to be forgiven for everything. We are going to have open up our lives in a way we've never done before, to lay bare the honest-to-God “real me”, and then to see who we thought we were changed, by a God who loves us in ways we never dreamed of. This is the scary God who is described in that eerie scene in Genesis, the deep and terrifying darkness that descended on Abraham and the fire pot and flaming torch that passed through it. This is the holy God whom Isaiah thought he saw on his throne in the temple, who was so awesome and terrifying that he cried out “Woe is me!” This is the heart-wrenchingly loving God who hung and suffered and died on a cross, so appalling that no one who actually cared wanted to be anywhere nearby. This is why it's so hard to trust God and to depend on his faithfulness – because if you do, he will take you seriously. And no, that's not the answer to the question, “Why is it so hard?” It still doesn't make sense that we turn away from God, or try to set limits on just how much we will trust him. Yes, it's gut-wrenching scary to open your life up to someone who will turn it inside out. But when you line up the people who are trying to do that next to the ones that aren't, it's not difficult to see which group is finding more meaning and fulfilment and purpose, which group is discovering new possibilities in themselves that they couldn't have imagined, which group lives in a basic attitude of peace rather than anxiety. That doesn't mean that it's plain sailing: depending on God is not a sure-fire route to a problem-free life or worldly success, in fact usually it's the reverse. God does not promise to take us out of the world, but to walk through it with us – and on our good days, we recognize that is what we need, and it is all we need. On all the other days, it's still hard. But asking ourselves why it's so hard – confronting our fear of being loved and forgiven and changed – is the best gift God has to offer us, because it is the only way for us to find the true light in the darkness, and the true companion for our journey. * |
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