Trust Me!

Trusting God should be a simple task for any person of faith, yet, the truth is that we often find ourselves struggling to do so. Too much life gets in the way. Events and experiences pile up, becoming sure signs that even the promises of God are suspect.

Then along comes Jeremiah.

No context could be more hopeless than that of Jeremiah. A massive army from the north surrounded Jerusalem. The country was laid waste. It was only a matter of time before there would be a complete collapse of everything that ever was Israel. Doom was inevitable. 

But Jeremiah engages in a real estate deal, buying land that was already in possession of the invaders. That is complete lunacy. What is he thinking?  He is living into hope. What appears complete madness to conventional wisdom gets turned on its head by faith. Jeremiah lives by faith, not reason. God assures the prophet that all shall be well. The prophet trusts God to be true to God’s word. There really is no other option than to trust God. 

Somewhere, as we struggle to understand Jeremiah, we may hear the faint whisper from Christ our Lord, Oh ye of little faith…

In utter honesty, I do not think any of us can imagine going through with a deal like Jeremiah’s—certainly not on a vague sense that God wants us to do so—we need something concrete, something with which to shore up our doubting hearts and troubled minds. 

You’re in good company—even St. Peter wrestled with massive doubts about the efficacy of Jesus—hence, he had a knock-down-drag-out with St. Paul over what was needed to be a member of the Jesus community. Peter, unlike Paul, did not trust the simple gift of grace—believe, and all shall be well—so he added become a Jew to the requirements, basically shoring up the Resurrection with the Torah. Peter could not fully trust the good news to be as good as it was.

So many of us understand the world as it is as out of control. We feel our more cherished institutions crumbling on their foundations. We suspect that we cannot really rely on things and people we have relied on forever. With our diminished hopes for our world, how can we trust completely insane promises of goodness, grace, and God found in the Gospel? We seek crutches, helps, and supports wherever we can get them. Moralism, ten simple rules, a 20-Step guide to truth, etc. come into play, moving away from Jesus and the promise of salvation held in the simple fact of resurrection. We can’t trust Jesus to be the Christ.

Because that is the essence and nature of our faith—trust—to be a follower of Christ is to base one’s life wholly on the absurd notion of resurrection—that on the Third Day, Jesus defied death itself, rose, and ushered in the presence of the New Creation. Faith trusts the reality of that absurdity as the absolute assurance that all can be well, no matter what the experience.

How do we get there?

Try to understand the nature of Jeremiah’s faith. He was a man literally consumed by the presence of God—that is what it is to be a prophet. He knows every action, every thought, every word he utters comes in and through the presence of God. That explains some his most ridiculous actions—check out the yoke he wore around Jerusalem. But it also explains his hope. He knows his life and the lives of everyone around him are in the hands of God. Therefore, there need be no fear of any human entity or power, for there is nothing in the realm of humanity that can match the power and will of God. 

Jeremiah knows this because of the manner in which God called him—I knew you before you were born…God had his eye of Jeremiah from even before the beginning. But this is not power meant to destroy the person, but rather to assure the person that they are loved, cherished, and kept by God because God values them. In other words, a child of God is a beloved of God, just like any child born to capable and healthy parents. 

Love lays the foundation for faith.

Faith then lays the foundation for hope. 

Knowing he is loved, Jeremiah trusts that love to see him into whatever the day may bring. Nothing he experiences will nullify or negate the love God holds for him.

The question for us is to likewise trust that we God’s beloved. Then we can face the world as it is, for what it is, with the assurance that all shall be well. We can face the news of the last few days—alarmingly repetitive of news earlier this summer—of normally tranquil places torn by violence, of seeing senseless killing, and of no real answers coming from those in charge. We can rise from bed each morning because God loves us. Nothing can really or truly touch us. Kept by God, we are safe in God.

Knowing that, we can follow Jeremiah’s example and act on our faith. At a recent meeting, I raised the issue that touches every congregation in our presbytery—the greatest need every single church shares is the need for more people; but do we spend enough time with the inverse of that question—does the world need any of us? We believe the answer to be “yes,” but how do you inform someone else of their need for you without falling to absurd arrogance or presumption? Yet, the truth is, as riots in Charlotte NC, for example, reveal, our neighbors do need us. We have the gospel of reconciliation. We have the message of grace. We have the means to healing. The more we are able to trust the presence of God and the efficacy of God’s love to see us through whatever is before us, then the more able we will be to risk engaging a world as torn and chaotic ass ours. The more we can engage, the more we can become builders of the kingdom. The more the kingdom us built, the better chance for peace and wholeness to become lasting.

That’s a tall order.

But it is our hope.

Jeremiah knew that.

He bought a piece of land.