On Trusting The Universe

"On Trusting The Universe"

Psalm 40:1-5 A Sabbath Trust Stewardship Campaign Part 3 (Trusting Life)
March 21, 2010

I waited patiently for the LORD; he inclined to me and heard my cry.
He drew me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock,
making my steps secure.
He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God. Many will see and fear,
and put their trust in the LORD.
Happy are those who make the LORD their trust, who do not turn to the proud, to those
who go astray after false gods.
You have multiplied, O LORD my God, your wondrous deeds and your thoughts toward
us; none can compare with you. Were I to proclaim and tell of them, they would be
more than can be counted.

Today I wanted to speak on the topic of trusting life, trusting the universe, as we
continue in our “Sabbath Trust” Stewardship Sermon series. Of course, we began a
few weeks ago with the topic of trust in general, and then moved to the struggle of
trusting oneself, and now we are onto the work of trusting life, of trusting the universe—
and I know there are probably some questions by what I mean by that, questions I will
try to answer in a moment.

But before we go there, I wanted to share with a small part of an email I got from Marilyn
Poole, a member who is back here with us after having quite a time of it while on
vacation in their condo in Chile. Dave and Marilyn had been enjoying some
extraordinary weather there, almost unusually beautifully weather, when something
happened, something we only got to hear via the news on this side of the globe.

Marilyn writes:

Around 3:30 am of the next day all thoughts of "gentleness" were quickly erased by the
violent shaking of Carrie's house. Although we had experienced a mild "tremblor"
before, we knew that this was the real deal and we shouted "Earthquake!!!!!!" as we ran
out the sliding glass door in our bedroom. Outside Dave and I desperately clung to a
column that supports an overhang in Carrie's Spanish style house. The violent shaking
continued for what seemed like an interminable length of time. The noise was
incredible as the house and its belongings thrashed madly to and fro. The water in the
swimming pool was a loud, churning torrent, and water was propelled out of the
confines of the pool creating a sort of backyard tsunami. With visions of the recent
earthquake in Haiti, I was sure that the house was going to tumble down around and
over us.

Finally, the shaking stopped and we looked at each other in wonder. We were still
standing and so was the house. We went back inside and saw Marcos with a flashlight
assessing the damage. He assured us that this was a "big one" and kept expressing
his amazement at the extraordinarily long duration of the shaking. Since we were
earthquake rookies we were somewhat relieved to hear that indeed this was a "big
one". If this had been only a 4.0 magnitude quake - Oh My!!!!! I'd like to say that we
then did something dramatic, but after standing outside in the moonlight for a few
minutes and checking out the house, we went back to bed. It wasn't the most restful
sleep, but we did manage to sleep for a couple more hours. We didn't have electricity,
and there was nothing else to do. (email from Tuesday, March 16, 2010)

The amazing thing is that the quake was far stronger than the one in Haiti, but caused
far less damage, though Chile will spend some time trying to get itself fully back on its
own two feet, no doubt. I was really struck by the moment Marilyn describes here, that
fear that must have flooded them both in that moment—or I assume it was fear, I know I
would have been fearful—to feel the earth no longer be solid, to have what should stay
strong and stable and unmoved, all of sudden sway and crack and creek, and shift
literally underneath one’s feet. If there is one thing that shouldn’t move in this life, it
should be the ground, shouldn’t it? I mean, for those of us who didn’t grow up in
earthquake prone areas, it seems so crazy that what seems so solid is not so solid, that
actually the ground underneath our feet is not so stable, not so unyielding. But it is
movable, this ground we walk upon, of course, and for many places like Chile and
China and California, well, the earth keeps reminding those people over and over
again, in sometimes devastating ways, that what seems so rock-hard, so firm and so
constant, is, in reality, not so firm, and not so constant.

And there is an extraordinary epilogue to this earthquake, aside from the weeks and
months of work that will be required to recover from the damage done, and lifetime of
grief for those who lost a loved one to it: the Chilean earthquake literally shortened the
day. Listen to this short article from the week:

The massive, magnitude 8.8 earthquake that rocked Chile on Feb. 27 was so deep and
strong that it redistributed Earth’s mass slightly, geophysicists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory have calculated. That movement, they say, shifted the axis around which
Earth’s mass is balanced by about three inches, enough to speed up Earth’s rotation.
And the faster the earth rotates, the shorter the day. “It’s what we call the ice-skater
effect,” British geologist David Kerridge tells BusinessWeek. “As the ice skater going
around in a circle pulls her arms in, she gets faster and faster. It’s the same idea with
the Earth going around; if you change the distribution of the mass, the rotation rate
changes.” Thanks to the Chile earthquake, experts estimate, the day is now 1.26
millionth of a second shorter than it used to be—which is twice the amount that was
sliced from the day by the 2004 earthquake in Sumatra, Indonesia. These may sound
like infinitesimal reductions, says Earth scientist Benjamin Fong Chao, but they will last
forever (The Week, March 19, 2010 p20)

I sometimes wonder whether or not the events in our lives have that kind of effect upon
us, whether or not there are moments that literally change us forever, even if only in
small ways, maybe just slightly, maybe just a millioneth of an emotional inch, so to
speak. And I also wonder about a lot about people I have met over the years that don’t
trust the ground underneath their feet—maybe not literally, but they don’t believe that
the life they are living, the world that they are living in, the people they are interacting
with, they don’t think they can trust any and all of those things. What I mean is that
there are people who always think that worse is always over the horizon, who can never
seem to say a positive thing about their lives, or the lives of the people they come into
contact with. They so often live their lives with such deep suspicions about the motives
of others that they can’t bond with others, something I mentioned last week. I once had
a good friend like that, someone who I cared for deeply, but to be around him was so
painful, so trying, because everyone and everything was not to be trusted, and
everyone had to have an ulterior motive for their actions. Listen, I know people are a
jumble of motives, some selfless and some selfish, and sometimes those motives are
unknown even to themselves, but my friend couldn’t imagine that life might be as full of
light as it is shadow. Over the years, I’ve wondered what emotional and personal
earthquake, what moment in his life caused him to see the world so differently, so
profoundly negatively, that it changed him forever, it shifted the axis of his perspective
forever, and from that moment on he would never, never trust that there was any solid
ground upon which to stand—not emotionally, not spiritually, not financially.

I mean, don’t get me wrong—I am not Pollyannaish about life, I’m not unrealistic about
how difficult, how painful, how heartbreaking life can really be—how even the normal
rhythms of life and death can devastate us profoundly, and how we can carry some of
those scars with us for a lifetime. Frankly, there are some things in life that are never
gotten over, never fully put to bed, never quite put into the grave, those things that the
philosopher and mystic Simone Weil says kill off portions of our soul. I get that reality,
but I do think that to live as if there was no hope, to live one’s life in such suspicion of
others and their motives, to not be able to trust the ground underneath our feet, to not
be able to trust that the universe is as much for us as it is sometimes against us, so to
speak, is a terrible thing to watch in another person. To me, to live this way, is to live in
abject misery, because to have no hope and to have no trust, that is a recipe for
human misery.

Our Psalm today offers something of a word of hope to those who live through a lifetime
of such misery—and to us as well, those of us who have periods of despair, wondering
whether we will ever get on our feet again, wondering whether or not the ground
beneath our feet can ever be trusted again, even after some powerful emotional
earthquake. Psalm 40 is what is called a “psalm of deliverance,” a testimony to the
truth that after the crucifixion comes the resurrection, and that if we will wait, if we will be
patient, if we will trust that there will be a morning following our deepest night, then we
will find that that our trust, our faith, will not go unjustified. The psalmist has waited,
waited in that deep pit, that overwhelming bog, waited for the moment when God would
hear his cry and answer his prayer, and for him, the day came, when God lifted him out
of that pit, when God gave him solid ground again, a solid rock upon which to stand,
and new song to sing. Patience, waiting, trusting, crying out, all of it is needed, if we
are to ever going to be able to recognize the goodness all around us, the people that
really do care about us, the life still left to be lived, the love still left to be shared with
family and friends, and hopefully, our enemies as well.

And please notice something here: I do think that a lot of people who cannot trust the
universe, or the fates, or the people around them, I do think they—and sometimes me
as well—that they and we fail to see the obvious goodness all around us. If we live
without trust, without trust that there is goodness and love and hope and something
worth living for, it is very hard to recognize that the world is blooming after the long
winter, that the trees will spring forth, that our 401K’s, if we’re lucky to have one, are
bouncing back, and the slow turning from night to day is happening all around us. Now,
I’m not talking about clinical depression, which often times has real roots in biological
chemistry; no, I’m talking about something different, a perspective about life that
sometimes gives rise to depression, but the two are not necessarily connected. This is
a spiritual problem, not a problem of chemistry, and the choice we have before us, the
choice that before the psalmist is wait and trust in God, to believe that this too will pass,
that there is hope, that God is worth waiting on, and that there will be a moment when
we too will sing a new song. To not trust in life, to not trust in the rhythms of the
universe that say that after the crucifixion comes the resurrection, is to ultimately not to
trust in the goodness of God, the God who loves us and welcomes us and embraces
us, not only in the good times, but also in those earthshaking, shattering moments in
our lives that change us forever.

For all of us, there comes a moment when we can either chose to trust that life is more
for us than against us, that despite the shadows of this life, there is also enough light
for us to make our way through it. In the book “Noble Essences,” Osbert Sitwell
recounts the story of two artists vacationing in Dieppe, France. Early one morning,
British Impressionist Walter Sickert and fellow artist, Walter Taylor, set out for a swim.
Taylor was a mediocre swimmer and was careful not to go out too far — Sickert
ventured out a half- mile or more.

Turning back, Sickert was horrified to observe his friend sinking beneath the waves.
Rushing back to shore, he was amazed to see Taylor on the beach, sunbathing.

“Good God, man!” he cried. “I saw you sinking!”

“Yes,” Taylor replied in his slow, careful manner. “I did sink, but ... when I reached the
bottom ... I said to myself ... ‘If I walk uphill ... I shall get to the shore.’ And so ... I
walked uphill ... and here I am.”

“Why,” Sickert muttered incredulously, “does anybody ever drown?”

Well, I’m not so incredulous, not so surprised as Sickert about why some of us don’t
make our way home, but there is some truth to this story, this idea that sometimes we’
ve got to make a smart decision to get ourselves out of a difficult emotional place, that
we’ve got to walk uphill, or run out of a house during an earthquake. To trust in God,
when everything is collapsing around you, when the moment being gone through shifts
our lives off axis, to trust in a world that God says is still good even in those moments,
to trust in the Creator who made the world as it is…well, that is a true test of faith. In
our year-long Sabbath, we keep being invited to trust that there will be enough, that
there will be enough time, enough money, enough hope, for us to be able to rest and
wait upon God, even if we find our self in that pit, in that miry bog. Trusting life, trusting
the universe, is ultimately an act of trust in God, because this world, this life, as difficult
as it can be, it is a good and precious gift, and something, oddly enough, God gives to
us humans over and over again, this life, in every second of the day, a second that
always includes a new child being born somewhere into this beautiful and tragic and
wondrous world. If God can trust us with yet more life, with this new life being born
always around us, at every minute, shouldn’t we respond to that trust with our own
imperfect trust in ourselves, in each other, and the world that God has made for us?
Amen.