On Trust

"On Trust"

Psalm 131 (TRUST Stewardship Campaign)
March 7, 2010

O LORD, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy
myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is
like the weaned child that is with me.
O Israel, hope in the LORD from this time on and forevermore.

In the most recent episode of the TV show THE OFFICE, Jim and Pam are in the midst
of having a baby together, and in this episode where Pam just refuses to go to the
hospital, at least not until after midnight so that they can have two full nights stay
there—really, actually, Pam is scared that she won’t be able to do it, to be able to go
through the rigors of giving birth—and so after that initial refusal, she relents and goes
to the hospital and the baby finally comes and seemingly all is well. But no—the anxiety
and worry don’t end there and like I am sure all first time parents, they almost
immediately become anxiety ridden again because the baby won’t latch, won’t take to
Pam’s breast to feed, and so once again, despite their extreme exhaustion after a 19
hour birthing process, they are consumed with anxiety, with worry about what this might
mean, though, of course, in the real world sometimes latching doesn’t happen, and
babies must then be bottle feed, which is not that big of a deal. Though I have
obviously never gone through that experience, it really struck a chord with me, because
it seemed as if Pam saw it as somehow as a judgment on her, that if her new baby didn’
t latch to her, didn’t accept her breast, then it was a sign that the baby wasn’t going to
bond with her, maybe not trust her, maybe not ever connect with her. But, of course,
Pam also didn’t believe she could go through the birthing process as well, didn’t know
whether she could get through the difficult work of bringing a beautiful child in this
world—ultimately, she didn’t trust herself, she didn’t believe that she had it in her to do
this work and to do it well.

Pam’s personal struggle with trust—trusting that she could do what she didn’t think she
could do, trusting that her child would latch, or that it would be OK if the baby didn’t
latch—that issue of trust is something I think a lot of us struggle with. I’ve always said
that the most miserable people I meet in life are those who cannot trust, who are always
so deeply suspicious of others, of the universe, that they cannot bond, dare I say it,
they can’t seem to latch onto life, and the good things of life Please, don’t
misunderstand me: I know that there are times when we get the rug pulled out from
under our feet, that we find out that there are people we believed in who weren’t worthy
of that belief, that there are moments when trust is misplaced and betrayed, but I have
never, ever met anyone who whose trust in others, whose belief in others or life, was
always betrayed, which is the way so many of these folks feel has been done to them.
Sure, it may feel that way for someone, but feelings are not always a good barometer of
reality, and truly, I have never seen a more miserable kind of people who believe,
against all the evidence, that nothing or no one is to be trusted, not even God. That is
a hard and toxic choice, and one that will destroy people and relationships faster than
anything.

Nonetheless, we’re not going to go too deeply into that issue today, because today we’
re going to begin this stewardship sermon series, this stewardship campaign on “A
Sabbath Trust” with the very question of what trust actually is, of what it means to
actually trust another human being, or the universe, or God. Definitions are important
here, and key to this four week stewardship series, because we can’t go forward
without knowing what we are looking for and who we are being asked to become, in this
invitation to live a trusting life. Not surprisingly, I’m explicitly connecting the issue of
trust to our year-long journey with the concept, the gift of the Sabbath, that invitation to
rest in God, to put up our weary feet up and to allow God to carry us the rest of the
way, or at least for awhile. As I’ve said before, Sabbath and Sabbath keeping, whether
it’s on Sunday or Tuesday, or for half a morning on Friday—it’s a radical idea, a radical
invitation to another way of living in a world that says that what defines us, what makes
us, that says to us that who we are is what we do, and that if we cease doing, we will
cease being. Sabbath is an explicit answer to that lie. And at the heart of Sabbath is
this profound truth that we can really, really trust God in this life, and that we can take
time for ourselves, for our families, for the things that ultimately matter, because God
will do the rest. There is enough, enough money, enough time, enough love to go
around, Sabbath says to us, this great and eternal gift from God, and we can count on
God to do what we cannot do while we rest, for that hour, that day, that week,
whatever. It might not all be up to us, is what Sabbath keeps saying to us, over and
over again—some of this, not all of it, but some of this work, this life, this love, is God’s
work, and we’ve got to get out of the way, out of God’s way, if its ever going to get
done.

Of course, for so many of us the hardest area of our life to trust God with is our
finances, our checkbooks, and it’s not because we don’t mean well, it’s not because we’
re selfish, or something like that. I know very few people that don’t see themselves as
inherently generous people, with whatever they’ve got, and often times that is true—we
give what we can give, and that’s the truth of it. And yet, the difficulty comes not
because of our well-intentioned hearts, but with what money means to us, what it
symbolizes for us—for me, it means security, for you it may something else—power,
prestige, survival, whatever. Money is never just money—the digits on the page, on
the screen, they mean nothing other than the meaning we give to them, the power we
hand over to them, the power we hand over to our savings accounts, our mutual funds,
our checking account, our IRA’s, whatever. Trusting God in that area is never just
about trusting God with our money, and trusting that there will be enough after we give
to what we care about, including this place, but it’s about dismantling what the money
symbolizes for us, the security, the survival, the power, that we have placed onto that
money and recognizing that we can rest from our worry over whether or not there will
be enough, whether or not we will survive, or be secure enough, or we’ll lose our sense
of place in this world without our money behind us, or beneath us. Trusting God with
everything, including that thing that seemingly anchors us in this world, our finances,
that’s always a challenge, because of the scariness of what it means to give away that
thing that represents our security, our survival, our power, our very place in this world.

And yet, over and over again, God keeps telling us to trust, to trust the Divine that
holds us, to trust the one who created us, and who will never let us go. It is what the
writer of Psalm 131 expresses so beautifully here, because the text is so powerfully
introspective, so inwardly focused. The psalmist isn’t going to look elsewhere, to the
hills, to the forces supposedly coming over the hills to rescue him, nor will he ponder
too deeply on what he cannot know, the great and marvelous things that are not his to
really understand—there is, after all, mystery, in this life and in this world. Like a child
who is moving on, latching onto a different kind of nourishment, the psalmist is moving
beyond his fear, beyond the fear that he won’t be rescued, that God won’t be there for
him, that the universe is against rather than for him. He’s gone beyond Pam, our Pam
from the TV show THE OFFICE, because his soul is at rest, at peace, because he
knows and trusts the one who gave him birth, gave him his life, his Mother, the living
God. And, then most beautifully, he tells the listeners of the song he is singing here to
hope in the Lord, to hope in this God whom they can trust always. And, of course, trust
and hope…they are so intertwined, so wedded to each other that it’s almost impossible
unravel the two from each other. In fact, one of the definitions of the word “trust” is
“confident expectation of something; hope.” Trust is almost another word for hope, so
close are the two tied together.

And yet, let’s face it, it’s a hard thing, to hope and trust in this life, especially when the
times are tough, and one wonders whether one has misplaced that trust, that hope in
God, in the future. In a story that is printed in your bulletin this morning, and one that I
actually used here in another sermon in 2006, Frederick Buechner tells of his own
struggle with his daughter’s anorexia, that physical and yet psychological illness. He
writes: “I remember sitting parked by the roadside once, terribly depressed and afraid
about my daughter’s illness and what was going in our family, when out of nowhere a
car came along down the highway with a license plate that bore on it the one word out
of all the words in the dictionary that I needed most to see exactly then. The word was
TRUST. What do you call a moment like that? Something to laugh off as a kind of
joke life plays on us every once in a while? The word of God? I am willing to believe
that maybe it was something of both, but for me it was an epiphany. The owner of the
car turned out to be, as I’d suspected, a trust officer in a bank, and not long ago,
having read an account I wrote of the incident somewhere, he found out where I lived
and one afternoon brought me the license plate itself, which sits propped up on a
bookshelf in my house to this day. It is rusty around the edges and a little bit battered,
and it is also as holy as relic as I have ever seen.”

You might have guessed that I love that story, I love that story because of how human
and beautiful and how drenched it is with ordinary holiness. But the epiphanies, the
revelations, they do come in this life, even to us—there are moments in this life when
we see God telling us to trust, when we divert our gaze from the hills, from the check
book, even from our family and friends, and we get a glimpse of God reminding us over
and over again to trust in the One who created us, and from there we can we begin to
more fully and more realistically trust those other things, those things in our life that do
deserve our trust, our friends and family, the world around us, and, yes, even our
checkbook, when put in its truest perspective. Hopefully, over the next couple of
weeks, as we learn to let go and trust God more fully, with our finances, surely, yes, for
this is, after all, a stewardship campaign, but ultimately to trust God more fully with
everything in our lives, as we learn these things, we can let God more fully into our
lives, creating more and more space for God to work wonder in our lives, or at least see
more of the wonder that is already there, all around us. Amen.