Whom Do We Trust? Preached on October 4th, 2020 At Wollaston Congregational Church Scripture: Matthew 21:23-32 Today we come to the fourth element of Spiritual Health: Trust. So far we have talked about Love and Belonging, Identity, Forgiveness and Reconciliation. Now we talk about trust. Ideally we begin to develop trust in infancy. Young babies know they can trust their parents and their care providers if they respond to their cries. Over time a child learns whom they can trust. Trust develops properly, if they are led in the way of careful discernment. Teaching a child they must trust everyone in authority is misleading and can become problematic. You may remember how difficult it was for religious families to believe that clergy were abusing children right under their noses. Both parents and children had been taught to respect their religious leaders implicitly. It’s really important that children learn to trust their own judgment, to be reminded that when something feels wrong it probably is wrong. At the same time, it is harmful to teach children to trust no one, or to impose adult prejudices on them. A child will rapidly learn from their parents’ or caregivers’ examples. They take their lead from our actions much more than our words. Put another way, it’s not what you say but what you do. Will a child instinctively mistrust someone who is telling them a lie? Or will they be taught to mistrust people of a different skin color or style of clothing? A parent who encourages curiosity and openness will make all the difference. In a healthy learning and growing environment children will develop their innate ability to detect truth tellers from phonies. Children who are neglected or abused as infants really struggle with issues of trust. They find it difficult to establish relationships and may grow up to have an attachment disorder. Those children who have loving parents may also suffer, perhaps because of their parent’s own trust issues, or perhaps because events intervene to damage a sense of trust. Older adults who were victims of the Holocaust as children suffer to this day. I cannot imagine how children who are separated from their parents in these times, whether through imprisonment or by immigration control, will suffer as they grow up. Discerning whom is trustworthy is not always easy even for adults. In these times, trust is becoming a major issue for many of us. Trust in news organizations, medical professionals and scientists, our political and religious leaders, the electoral process and even democracy itself are being called into question. Do you think, as I do, that we have a spiritual crisis on our hands, and that a major factor in that crisis is the issue of trust? In order to live our lives with any kind of peace and calm, we really need to know whom to trust. And since seeds of distrust are being sown all over the place, we will need to make judgments for ourselves. We must learn from Jesus’ admonishment to the disciples, in the gospel of Matthew, to “be wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matt 10:16). This morning we heard a familiar story in Matthew’s gospel. The scene picks up a storyline we visited, back in the spring, during Lent. Today we are reading this passage, through a lens of “trust.” It’s a surprisingly fitting lens. It is the day after Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey for the feast of the Passover. That was the first “Palm Sunday”: the raucous parade flying in the face of the Roman rulers. After the parade, Jesus proceeded directly to the temple, where he disturbed the peace yet again. He overthrew the money changers tables and drove out the merchants who were selling doves for sacrifice. Seeing this display, the blind and the lame came forward to Jesus for healing. The children in the temple cheered him on, even as the religious leaders tried to shush them. We knew, back in the spring, that this performance drew the attention of the chief priests and elders of the temple: the religious leaders. These are the people who have maintain a delicate peace between the Roman Empire and the Jewish temple. They cooperate with Rome by collecting oppressive taxes from the people. Their authority keeps an uneasy peace among the people, but it does not engender trust. They fear zealots who would try to overthrow Rome by force, and as we have read this morning they also fear the “crowd” in Jerusalem for the Passover. The religious leaders approach Jesus and confront him right away. They ask “By what authority are you doing these things?” they are referring to his actions the previous day. Jesus comes back, equally argumentative. He answers their question with a question: he is beginning a rabbinical debate. He is contentious but respectful, asking “What do you think?” Jesus questions the leaders about John the Baptist’s authority. John had preached a message of repentance and had many followers. His life was cut short by Herod, the unpredictable puppet king of the Jews. Herod is one authority the religious leaders need to appease. The leaders are not even comfortable answering the question about John the Baptist, since they fear the crowd. And so Jesus tells a parable. It’s an easy parable, not difficult to understand at all. A man who owns a vineyard has two sons, he asks them to go and work in the vineyard. Picture lazy teenagers who’ve been spending too much time in their rooms. One is rebellious and disrespectful, and replies “No, I won’t go!” The other seems to be obedient, “Of course, father, I’ll go right away.” But then he doesn’t go. The first son feels sorry he was so rude and does in fact go to work in the vineyard. Which one did the will of the father? The first one of course. It’s not what you say, it’s what you do. Then Jesus tells the religious leaders that the despised tax collectors and the prostitutes will get into the kingdom of God ahead of them. John the Baptist was righteous, and trusted by the least powerful among them. Jesus, likewise, is righteous and to be trusted. Today’s crisis in trust has a lot to do with our human need to trust institutions like the state and the church, our medical and criminal justice systems. As people of faith, though, our ultimate trust is in God. That means that we trust God over institutions and individuals. We trust in the way of God over the way of the world: love over hate; non-violence over violence; forgiveness over vengeance. Or at least we are supposed to. In the end, whomever or whatever we trust is our God. To say we trust something else over God simply means we have substituted that thing for God. That thing becomes our idol. Our trust in God will depend on how our faith has matured over our lifetime. Like the other elements of spiritual health, trust is our life’s work. In the western church our understanding of God is generally formed through imagery, from scriptures and other places. Children are taught to think of God as “Heavenly Father” or “Protective Mother Bear.” These images can be very comforting, we may draw on them throughout our lives. Still, they may fail us in times of crisis. On the other hand, in the tradition of the eastern church God is seen as all-mysterious. It is understood that we can never fully comprehend God. When we learn what God is not, we grow in faith according to this tradition. Christian author, Barbara Brown Taylor describes this as a process of “disillusionment.” That is, we lose our illusions. Sadly, many people never move beyond their disillusionment. They simply lose their trust in God. Still others learn and grow. Brown Taylor says, “Did God fail to punish my adversary? Then perhaps God is not a policemen … Did God fail to make everything turn out all right? Then perhaps God is not a fixer … Over and over” she says, “my disappointments draw me deeper into the mystery of God’s being and doing. Every time God declines to meet my expectations another of my idols is exposed.” [1] It took mid-life crises in my life to push me in the process of disillusionment. These were crises like the loss of family members and friends, the terminal illness and loss of our beloved pastor, and divorce in my extended family. I’m embarrassed to admit that there have been times when I thought that God would protect me from pain. My life experiences tell me otherwise. The disappointments and crises of life have helped me go deeper in trust. I’ve learned that God does not offer protection from all suffering. But I trust in God’s companionship and compassion: that is God’s suffering with us. Like many generations of western Christians, as a child I was instructed that God is like this and not like that. Parables were presented to us as stories of morality, with only one interpretation. The great narratives of the Bible were taught as historical fact, with little room for wondering or questioning. The western church is moving on, though. Movements in Christian education, or faith formation, like the Godly Play curriculum trust that “Children have an innate sense of the presence of God.” These approaches, “[help children] to explore their faith through story, to gain religious language and to enhance their spiritual experience though wonder and play.” [2] The students are assured that all their questions and wonderings are valid. The child’s innate spirituality and sense of wonder is affirmed. Not only that, they are led to a deeper faith, in which the child can really trust in God’s love. The people, the crowd, of our story in the temple, had lost trust in their religious and political leadership. The blind and the lame, the children, the despised tax collectors, and the prostitutes, needed someone they could trust. Someone who didn’t just say, they did. Jesus was the one who they could trust. He wouldn’t protect them from pain or the great upheaval that was soon to come in Jerusalem. He was simply someone who lived a life that they could trust. Someone who would show compassion – suffering with them – even to the point of death on the Roman cross. May we, like them, remain alert and engaged, trusting our own innate ability to discern. May we, like them, discern truth tellers from phonies. And may we, like them, place our ultimate trust in God made known in Jesus. May all God’s people say, Amen [1] Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1993), 8 [2] https://www.godlyplayfoundation.org/
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