Trust, in what?

Karen Sloan 28/06/2020

Readings - Genesis: 22:1-14, Matthew: 10:40-42

I was reading the paper the other day, and the ongoing numbers of Covid-19 patients worldwide, almost 10 million. And the numbers in the United States in particular.  While we seem to have done a pretty good job of containing it here and stopping its spread, the US is a different matter.  Partly it comes down to the leaders in each nation, and no matter what you think of Trump he has done a terrible job of dealing with the pandemic, although he’s not alone.  Look at the president of Brazil and the numbers there.

But it’s not just the leader, it’s also about the population at large and how they respond.  Maybe for them and us it’s also about trust.  Do we trust what the leaders are telling us.  Do we trust that they have our best intentions at heart.  Do we trust in the science that is being provided, the public health guidelines recommended, trust in the medical system and the nurses and doctors who are treating us,  and the trust between each other that we in fact want everyone to stay well. 

Trusting the process without really seeing the end product.

I think our faith is like this, a trust in things unseen but deeply felt,  and experienced.  That there is something below the surface going on, a presence that gives life and light where there is darkness and despair. 

Rev Dr. Robin Meyers point out that early Christians did not believe a set of rules, but had trust in the way of Jesus, trust in the God or spirit or breath that he pointed to, and trust in the journey without seeing the final destination.  As Meyers says in his new book, Saving God from Religion, “Faith is not about believing but about trusting, the opposite of such trust is not doubt but anxiety.  We are anxious in proportion to our lack of trust.  This is not to say such trust is naïve, or that it protects us from suffering, tragedy or the certainty of death.  Rather we lean into life, sowing the seeds of kindness and compassion and trusting that final outcomes are not ours to arrange but the spirit of God’s to complete."

I love that, sowing the seed of kindness and compassion, driven by an unseen but felt urge to give life rather than death, love rather than hate, peace rather than violence, and acceptance rather than judgement.

These were the tools used by Jesus, and he calls us to use those same tools, and to trust that the spirit is universal, in all things now and forever. The reading from Matthew today reinforces this idea.  I trust in the life of Jesus as my guide and that I am to participate with the spirit in this life. As the reading says, “The person receiving (or welcoming) you receives me and the person receiving me receives the one who sent me.”

But I don’t want to focus on the gospel reading really, but the reading from Genesis, which I have a rather large problem with. And it comes down again to that word trust.

Do I trust that it speaks to me in ways that are life affirming? Does it speak to me of the God I trust and that I see in Jesus?

The reading, and we read it in full today, leaves me cold.   Somehow in our modern world, with child abuse, mental illness and people who do terrible things based on some belief that God has spoken to them, it seems a passage that could do more harm than good. I recently was visiting a hospital patient who had killed his dog and slit his own throat because of voices he thought were from God calling him to do it. A terrible combination of his image of a judgemental and violent God,  and his mental illness.

So, I was tempted to just ignore it.

But I also felt as though I wanted to confront it head-on.  For its these sorts of passages that can do so much damage to so many people.

So here goes!

There are many commentators who use the passage as some sort of reflection on trust and faith. That Abraham shows his trust in God by being prepared to murder his son, Isaac, and the amazing Yahweh rewards Abraham for this by ultimately withdrawing the request.   Instead a ram is sacrificed in his place, ensuring the future of the Israel nation was preserved.  In some places its celebrated as a foundation story and a watershed moment for the Hebrew people.  But it’s not just for them. It also seems linked to our heritage, particularly to Paul, and leads Christians to believe that God would send his son Jesus to his death as a sacrifice to save us all from our sin. If he can kill Isaac, why not Jesus.  It was a seminal test of trust for Israel and it’s been a seminal test for us. 

Even the philosophers have had a go with the passage.  Kierkegaard, wrote a whole work on the meaning of genuine faith using it, calling it “fear and trembling”.  When God asks things like this of us he believed we can only leap wildly across the chasm of our doubt and fear, trusting that God will catch us.  And by leaping we discover the true meaning of faith. It makes you think of the saying, stepping out in faith. 

Yet all of this makes me shiver. 

Somehow for me trusting in a God who wants Abraham to commit murder, seems misplaced. Just like trusting in a God who needs a payment of his son to gets us back onside seems horrendous.

So, what’s wrong with this passage, and many of the writings about it.

In my eyes anyway, and I hope yours.

One, it is not historical, not accurate and not believable, as any parent would know.

Secondly, where is God in all of this, out there somewhere directly traffic, intervening just at the moment Abraham was about to slit Isaacs’s throat.  If he is out there, where was he when innocent people were being slaughtered in every terrible place in every terrible decade and century we have had. 

Thirdly, if faith relies on this type of act, this type of trust, no wonder there are so many people who think our faith is absurd and crazy. We have a secular society working hard to protect the rights of children, women who suffer from domestic violence, people with mental illness and those without financial support.  How do we deal with a text like this?

And the real problem is that it is not the only passage like this in the bible, the bible is inherently violent. If you think it’s just in the Hebrew scriptures, take a look at some parts of Matthew or Revelation.

So, after that small tirade, do I still trust in something unseen that I call God.  Well yes, but of course it comes down to how you see the scriptures, and more importantly how you see God, particularly in the 21st century. And sometimes the scripture, written by people throughout the ages, need to be vetted.

As Marcus Borg has said of the biblical tradition and its writers…

 ‘...it contains their stories of God, their perceptions of God’s character and will, their prayers to and praise of God, their perceptions of the human condition and the paths of deliverance, their religious and ethical practices, and their understanding of what faithfulness to God involves’ (Borg 2001:22-23).

Stories of Abraham embrace all of this, lying, treachery, pettiness, and then overwhelming love and faithfulness. Because they were written by people and he was human.

So, let’s leave Abraham and the reading, written not as a historical event but some sort of creative memory of a nation beginning to birth, and look at what trusting in God means in the 21st century.

Let’s leave the image of a God that would sit in the sky ordering Abraham to kill his son as a test and look at how we image God in our time and place.

The overwhelming message for us today, here and now, is that the divine presence, however we name it, is present in a universal way in all of life.  Not as a person, particularly a white male, not as a supernatural, intervening celestial being as Rex Hunt writes, and not one who judges from affair and favours those who think they have all the answers or do special things. 

But rather something quite different, which matches what we know about the world and the universe we live in.

Rex Hunt describes it as, “that creativity within us and within all of life, which makes it possible for us to love, to act compassionately and to offer a cup of water, in a style after Jesus.

My own attempt at describing God is as follows, written after being asked numerous times by my atheist, inquisitive friends a little while ago….

This is what I wrote -

“I have had for many years a growing sense that what underlines life is an energy, an impulse, a spirit that supports and nurtures us at our deepest levels and encourages us to connect with one another in love.  This presence cannot be seen, but rather can only be felt and experienced and then revealed in the way we live our own lives.  It is a presence that for me is found in all of life, from the smallest molecule of the universe to the complicated but beautiful creatures we have become. It is the creativity underlying our passage from the big bang to homo sapiens and beyond.  I am utterly convinced that this energy/spirit is what drives us to be better people, better communities and hopefully a better more just world.

I do also believe however that it’s really almost impossible to convince someone else, let alone ourselves sometimes, of the reality of God.  Sure, we can study the scriptures, taking into account the context in which they were written, explore the writings and actions of those people of faith who have gone before us, and who have been motivated to seek justice and peace.  We can embrace the natural world revelling in the beauty found there or we can share together within our own traditions, but seek the wisdom that other faith traditions can offer.

We can do all this and still be wondering.  Faith is something else, a trust that at the very depths of all there is, there is something more.  It is at the level of the heart rather than the head.  This type of faith does not hinge on certain beliefs, does not require blind followers, and does not expect that we will not have moments of doubt and longing.  It does require a commitment to all people, a commitment to community and a commitment to love. Because for faith to become real and tangible it needs is to be lived out in the world. For me this type of faith is seen in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, who reveals the something more in life, the intangible element within all things. It is Jesus who reveals God to me. But this is not an exclusive claim by any means”

So that’s me. 

Yet we all have to decide how we would describe God, how we would picture God. And Jesus.

Maybe go home and have a go. Because you all have wisdom to share, even if you think otherwise.

But rather than keep on talking, let me read you a poem from Mary Oliver that may give you some inspiration. Sometimes truth comes in a poem or a song or a story. 

Let me read the poem -

“By the River Clarion” Mary Oliver

I don’t know who God is exactly.
But I’ll tell you this.
I was sitting in the river named Clarion, on a water splashed stone
and all afternoon I listened to the voices of the river talking.
Whenever the water struck a stone it had something to say,
and the water itself, and even the mosses trailing under the water.
And slowly, very slowly, it became clear to me what they were saying.
Said the river I am part of holiness.
And I too, said the stone. And I too, whispered the moss beneath the water.

I’d been to the river before, a few times.
Don’t blame the river that nothing happened quickly.
You don’t hear such voices in an hour or a day.
You don’t hear them at all if selfhood has stuffed your ears.
And it’s difficult to hear anything anyway, through all the traffic, the ambition.

If God exists he isn’t just butter and good luck.
He’s also the tick that killed my wonderful dog Luke.
Said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going.

Imagine how the lily (who may also be a part of God) would sing to you if it could sing,
if you would pause to hear it.
And how are you so certain anyway that it doesn’t sing?

If God exists he isn’t just churches and mathematics.
He’s the forest, He’s the desert.
He’s the ice caps, that are dying.
He’s the ghetto and the Museum of Fine Arts.

He’s van Gogh and Allen Ginsberg and Robert Motherwell.
He’s the many desperate hands, cleaning and preparing their weapons.
He’s every one of us, potentially.
The leaf of grass, the genius, the politician, the poet.
And if this is true, isn’t it something very important?

Yes, it could be that I am a tiny piece of God, and each of you too, or at least
of his intention and his hope.
Which is a delight beyond measure.
I don’t know how you get to suspect such an idea.
I only know that the river kept singing.
It wasn’t a persuasion, it was all the river’s own constant joy
which was better by far than a lecture, which was comfortable, exciting, unforgettable.

Of course for each of us, there is the daily life.
Let us live it, gesture by gesture.
When we cut the ripe melon, should we not give it thanks?
And should we not thank the knife also?
We do not live in a simple world.

There was someone I loved who grew old and ill
One by one I watched the fires go out.
There was nothing I could do

except to remember
that we receive
then we give back.

My dog Luke lies in a grave in the forest, she is given back.
But the river Clarion still flows from wherever it comes from
to where it has been told to go.
I pray for the desperate earth.
I pray for the desperate world.
I do the little each person can do, it isn’t much.
Sometimes the river murmurs, sometimes it raves.

Along its shores were, may I say, very intense cardinal flowers.
And trees, and birds that have wings to uphold them, for heaven’s sakes–
the lucky ones: they have such deep natures,
they are so happily obedient.
While I sit here in a house filled with books,
ideas, doubts, hesitations.

And still, pressed deep into my mind, the river
keeps coming, touching me, passing by on its
long journey, its pale, infallible voice
singing.

Amen