Based on Genesis 12:1-4, Romans 4:13-17, John 3:1-5, 16-17
We are here in the second week of Lent reflecting on our seasonal theme of “Imagination”. Last week we imagined what it means for God to forgive all of mankind for the sin of Adam by providing a second Adam in Jesus. This week we are considering what it means to fully trust in God as we’re told in scripture that our spiritual ancestor Abram did. To help us connect with the Lenten theme are two new visuals on the altar. The first is a bowl that has been broken and then repaired using the Japanese technique known as “kintsugi”. Kintsugi takes broken pottery and employs a special technique with gold, repairing the cracks. This repair reveals the cracks to be part of the renewed whole – just like when God heals our wounds. The second item reflects this week’s focus on trust. It is a section of interconnected metal links. The interconnected links symbolize how each time we trust God or our neighbor we forge a link with that being or person. The more we trust, the stronger the chain and the more interconnected we become.
The ability to imagine trusting God is a theme in our scripture readings this week – and it is a key to our spiritual journey. We are all called to a way of faith. At each step God asks us to trust, to say yes, to put our lives in God’s hands. It’s like walking around in a pitch-dark room, afraid that we’re going to bump into something or trip or fall. We put our hands out in front of us and walk very slowly. We want desperately to have our pathway illuminated. We want to know where we are going and how we are going to get there. Yet a voice comes to us out of the darkness, asking us to trust. We want certitude, but instead God asks us to have faith. Our faith and our trust, then, are in God - not in our own cleverness, strategies, or planning, not in our status or money.
Today we heard about the beginning of the trusting relationship between Abram and God. It is some time after the Flood when we meet Abram who is minding his own business in Ur. His father and brother have died, and Abram’s life is going along like most human lives do. Out of nowhere, God calls to Abram and tells him to go off to a land that God will show him sometime in the future. God’s call includes a covenant promise that God will make of Abram a great nation and that “all peoples on earth will be blessed through you”. We’re told that “Abram went, as the LORD told him…”
Paul picks up on the trusting faith of Abram noting that “…as the father of many nations. He is our father in the sight of God, in whom Abram [he] believed – the God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not….”
This is the thread that our reading from the Gospel according to John further develops. Jesus and Nicodemus are speaking at night about who Jesus really is. Nicodemus praises Jesus’ powerful faith and trust in God that allows him to do miracles. Jesus replies to this that power comes from developing trust in God to the point where we’re willing to be obedient in all things. When you give up your own will to follow the will of God, you are made new. Instead of having control, you give up power. Instead of knowing your destination, you try to be faithful during the journey. Instead of being sure of yourself, you become sure of God. “You must be born again,” Jesus tells Nicodemus.
In order to develop trust in God, we need to first imagine that we can trust God. Duke Divinity School teacher Ellen F. Davis unpacks the trusting relationship between God and Abram in this way writing, “…The relationship endures only because two hearts are bound together through mutual trust. And trust is the very opposite of compulsion…The astonishing truth Genesis…reveals is that God chooses to relate to the world not by compulsion but by trust.
Yet trust is inherently a condition of vulnerability. You can be disappointed by the one you trust and deeply, deeply hurt. God’s own trust makes God vulnerable; God is ‘grieved to the heart’ by human evil, as the flood story in Genesis tells us (Gen. 6:6). We do not often think of God as needing to be courageous, yet it must take courage for God to stay in relationship with the world just as it takes courage for each of us to stay in relationship with God…Everyone and everything we love in this world is passing away, although later or sooner we do not know.
We have to ask: What kind of way is this for God to run the world - a way that is inevitably fraught with so much disappointment and pain on both sides? And the answer is: this is the way of love, for mutual trust is the only environment in which love is wholly free to act. We know this from the earliest intimacy, the relationship between parent and child. Trust is the only environment in which love is wholly free to act for our good.
It’s the same in the relationship between the divine Parent and the Son. The absolute trust between God and Jesus is the environment in which divine Love is wholly free to act for the good of the world. The God who is wholly Love chooses to trust us, so that the fullness of divine power may be unleashed to work through the lives of those who trust God wholly. This is what we see in Jesus’ cross, death, and resurrection: trusting love that suffers on both sides, and working through that love, God’s boundless power to save. As Christians have always seen, there is a story line that runs straight from Abraham…and God…to the cross and resurrection. It’s the story of trusting Love on which the whole world depends…
The book of Genesis puts it to us straight: sometimes being in relationship with the real God hurts like hell. Sometimes it’s bewildering: we’ll be inching along in the dark, with no vision of where this relationship is taking us. But the gospel also puts it to us straight: it’s taking us to the cross and on to resurrection. It’s taking us straight into the arms of God. It’s taking us into a parent’s aching yet indomitable love, the divine Love that will not let us go - not ever. We can put our trust in that….”
Each time we choose to trust and take a chance on God, we become another link in the chain that stretches all the way back to Adam and Eve. Each time we introduce someone else to God through our lived or spoken testimony, we create another link in the chain. Each time our trust in God is fulfilled, the links become stronger. Imagine how it would change your life to trust in God like Abram and be blessed like him. May God make it so…amen!