May 25, 2008 + What does it take to trust? + Frank Alton

Isaiah 49:8-16; Psalm 131; Matthew 6:24-34



MP3 File

Last night Judy and I went to see Indiana Jones with our daughter and her family. As I stood at the concession stand I looked around the lobby of the theater. Everywhere I laid my eyes there was an over abundance of visual stimulation. TV screens, giant posters, signs with the menu, special offers and directions; and people everywhere. And that was before the wild ride of the movie even began. I couldn’t help but think about how sharply all that contrasted with the image of the Psalmist who wrote: “I have calmed and quieted my soul.”

Tomorrow the nation celebrates Memorial Day when we are invited to honor those who died in the pursuit of peace and freedom – our own or that of others. There have always been those who have questioned whether all those deaths really contributed to peace and freedom, and whether war is even an appropriate way to seek those ends. It seems that there are even more who question that today. To hold that question does not give us permission to forget or ignore those who have died in war. We owe a great debt of gratitude to soldiers, whether we agree with the wars they fought or not. But our questions make it more complicated.

I believe that the three Scripture passages we just heard speak to that complexity. As I worked through them I realized that accessing peace requires deep trust whether we find ourselves in noisy movie theaters, in places of desperate emotional darkness, in the midst of a terrifying call, or in situations of war – whether we consider that war legitimate or not.

The Psalmist uses the image of a child who has fed at a mother’s breast to speak of the kind of trust associated with peace in our souls. But the text is not clear as to whether the child has been recently weaned from the breast or has just finished a feeding. In that ambiguity lie resources to deal with the complexity.

In the Gospel, Jesus suggests that people’s participation in the abundant life of God is blocked by worry and anxiety. He doesn’t use the image of birds and flowers to argue that release from anxiety in our souls comes from being unaware of the complexity but from participating in the life of God.

Finally the Prophet Isaiah addresses those who are able to access peace in their own souls by offering them a vocation that offers peace and freedom to others who are stuck in dark prisons because they don’t know they can get out. Let’s examine each of these more closely.

There is a bumper sticker that says, “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs – you clearly don’t comprehend the situation.” At first reading that does not sound very consistent with the Bible. Doesn’t the Bible call us to find calm in the midst of chaos? Well, yes. But often we have tried to do that by avoiding or denying the chaos rather than honestly finding calm in the midst of it. That part is not biblical.

Psalm 131:2 says, “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.” I have it on good authority though not from personal knowledge that a mother experienced in breast feeding knows that a two year old weaned child is not the ideal picture of calm. More likely that child would be pulling on her blouse to look for her breast, perhaps singing a little song to her breast, grabbing a handful of what she’s eating, showing her a doll, and tugging at her earring. Any mother knows that a weaned child is not a model of calm.

What mothers know from experience is confirmed, or at least debated, by language scholars. The Hebrew word does not literally mean “weaned” but instead means “dealt well with, dealt with bounteously.” That sounds more like a child who has just finished nursing. A recently weaned child who is quiet in despair because he or she knows crying won’t do any good is very different from a child whose calm is born of satisfaction, trust, and sufficiency in the availability of mother’s milk.

The prophet Isaiah picks up a similar image: “Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you” (Isaiah 49:15). In Hebrew, the words for compassion and womb come from the same three-letter root so that one implies the other. God as nursing mother does not communicate sentimentality, but im­mediate biological urgency.

Neither a nursing child, nor a recently fed child, nor a weaned child is completely calm. Nor is the mother! Nursing children whimper, cry, scream, and sometimes bite. Breasts that are not suckled on time ache, swell and leak. All children step on their mothers’ bladders as they crawl over them, and tear their bodies as they exit the birth canal. If God is like a mother, she is intimately connected to us, intensely aware of our experience and our needs and incapable of forgetting. The implications for the portrait of God and God’s children are significant.

The picture the Psalmist paints is a combination of regret, lament and grief on the one hand, and peaceful hope and joy on the other. (Psalm 131) Perhaps the psalmist’s lament is, “I am beat down, O Lord, by all the forces of life. I have tried to subdue my emotions, but my heart is sobbing like a child.” (Texts for Preaching Year A, p. 158) That might be combined in the same person with an understanding his or her relation to God and to the larger world that hasn’t led to false pride, such that there has descended on this person’s innermost being a marvelous peace. To trust ones soul to God may require both parts: struggling with regret & grief over the losses & failures we’ve had to face in life and accepting our worth before God and the limits of our humanity and mortality. Soul work is difficult, but it is the way to find peace and quiet in the midst of all the noise of the world.

In the passage from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus reminds us that the roots of trust are found in God, and that creation offers clues about how it works. While the life of the soul is full of complexity, the soil in which that life is planted must be simple. It is literally impossible to be planted in two different soils at the same time. Jesus puts it in terms of God and mammon. Mammon refers to wealth in all its forms – money, power and reputation are the three primary forms Jesus addresses. We can only depend on one – either we depend on God or the wealth we depend on the wealth we can accrue independently of God.

To root our lives in money, power or reputation is to assure a life of anxiety. We all have experience of losing them. One moment we have power, the next moment we are powerless. One week we have a paycheck, the next week we lose our job. One day our reputation is good, the next day people are saying all kinds of bad things about us. Jesus compares it to birds and flowers. Perhaps we think it’s easier for birds and flowers because they don’t use the currencies of money, power and reputation. But maybe Jesus’ point in using the examples of flowers and birds is not that they are carefree because they’re oblivious & unaware, but that they unselfconsciously participate in the life of God, life which is pouring forth through all creation. Too much worry blocks that participation, which is why we humans often feel distant and disconnected from God. Fear closes down our hearts; worry puts up a barricade to grace. The birds and the lilies and all of nature have lessons to teach us about being unobstructed channels for the flow of God’s grace.

That’s why it renews our faith and our perspective on life to get out in nature. We are reminded of what life is really like. Last Sunday I was in Hawaii. I must confess to playing hooky from church to go snorkeling. But as a guy who is in church just about every Sunday I thought it was appropriate to go snorkeling. Whether that is a rationalization or not, being up close and personal with all those beautiful creatures with their intense colors and varied shapes, and floating in the water buoyed up by a force outside myself, brought me closer to remembering what life is about than going to church would have done. I felt energy surging through my whole being.

But we can’t leave the matter of peace and trust at the level of their nature and their roots. The word of God always calls us to bear fruit in our lives, to act on what we receive. According to Isaiah, the fruit of trust is not simply a peaceful life but a vocation of calling others out of their darkness into the light and joy of life in God. (Isaiah 49:8-16) This is important both so that what we do emerges out of deep places in us rather than superficial ones, and so that we don’t get stuck on the inner journey without developing an outer journey.

The passage in Isaiah is addressed to “the servant.” But it is never clear who the servant is. At the very least she or he is part of the people. The servant could be anyone. It is the one who trusts God’s compassion. In order for a person to be a servant who provides that kind of channel for others requires that the person’s life be rooted in the peace that arises from being deeply satisfied in knowing God’s compassion.

This servant addresses a group of exiles who had been living in a foreign land their entire lives, after their ancestors had been forcefully removed from their homeland. They had grown accustomed to their circumstances. Those who remained had mostly forgotten Jerusalem or never knew it. They had stopped telling the stories and singing the songs, so the joy that was Jerusalem had been lost to the new generation. After a while prisoners don’t even know they are captive anymore and exiles don’t know they are alienated from their homeland.

God called the servant to bring a message of hope and an invitation to trust. The servant serves as a reminder of the agreement and promises God had made with the people. The servant invites the prisoners to come out of the shadows and risk moving toward their true home. The first task of the servant is to awaken the people to the fact that there is a homeland, and then to tap into the forgotten longing for home. If he or she is successful at that, the next challenge is to overcome their resistance. The pathway home is through the desert. What they have heard about the journey makes it sound impossible. The promises given to them sound like fantasy: green pastures along the roadside through the desert and on the tops of mountains that are normally barren; guaranteed food and drink when there are no sources of either along the way; protection and strength against the scorching wind and blazing sun; and the Compassionate One who seems to have been asleep for 70 years promising to guide them by springs of water. Oh, and the mountains will become roadways and valleys will be filled in to become highways.

Likely story! The people cannot believe it. But instead of rebuking the people for their lack of faith, God invites creation itself to respond on their behalf in a manner appropriate to the fact that God has comforted the people and will have compassion on those who suffer. “Sing for joy O skies; exult, O earth; break forth into singing, O mountains!” When the people are unable to restore their trust in a God who seemed to have forgotten and abandoned them in their time of need, they are invited to reflect on their own experience: “Can one of you who are mothers forget your nursing child? Is it possible for a mother to not show compassion to the child she bore? Even if that unlikely scenario were possible, I, your God, will not forget you.”

That is a hand we can hold whether in blaring noise or dark lonely silence. That is a hope we can cling to when we have been disappointed over and over again. That is a peace we can claim even when fear is knocking at the door. Friends, let us stand up and trust in our God.