Trusting God

December 19, 2010 (Advent 4)

Isaiah 7:10-16

Matthew 1:18-25

Mary is young, promised in marriage to a man named Joseph.  And she gets pregnant.  We’re not told how she discovered this.  What was the first sign?  Did she throw up one morning?  Did she miss her period?  Back aches or leg aches in the middle of the night?  Those are early signs.  Signs the mother feels and knows.  But for many others the sign would have been her growing fullness.

Now the story is told with great delicacy.  She and Joseph had not yet “come together,” says Matthew.  She was pregnant, we’re told, “through the Holy Spirit.”  But let’s pause here a minute before rushing on.  If you had a daughter who was 14 and in a relationship with an older man, what would you think if you found out she was pregnant?  

Joseph knows how to read signs.  At some point, he finds out his young bride is pregnant.  And he assumes that his life has become part of the familiar plot line of the cuckolded husband.  But Joseph is noble and decent.  He responds to the sign of Mary’s untimely pregnancy by protecting her.  He intends to end their engagement quietly and without drawing any undue publicity to the situation.  We are impressed at how he responds to signs of Mary’s pregnancy.  Yet he’s misreading the signs.

Exhausted, disappointed, confused, Joseph goes to sleep.  In a dream an angel comes to him with a message: Go ahead and marry the young woman, for she has conceived this child by the Holy Spirit.  Name the son Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins”  

When I wake up after having a crazy dream, it takes a minute to get my bearings.  In the darkness, I settle on who I am and where I am.  After a few minutes, I can say, That was one crazy dream.  Maybe the sausage stuffed in oysters stuffed in mushrooms was the wrong late night snack!  Joseph wakes up, and in a breathtaking act of trust in God, takes Mary home to be his wife.

ISAIAH

While Joseph is still asleep, Matthew alerts us as readers that Mary’s story is woven together with an older story.  “All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet [Isaiah], “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel (which means God is with us)”.

Matthew borrows these words from Isaiah 7 and stitches them together with the beginning of his gospel story about Jesus.  So you need to catch the flavor of Isaiah 7 to hear how Matthew is telling his story.  Isaiah 7 is all about threat.  Two kings from the North, Rezin and Pekah, team up against vulnerable Judah, and against King Ahaz.  His kingdom, his city, his life are under imminent threat.  

During the initial US bombing of Bagdhad, there was an Iraqi Public Relations Minister who became a favorite of mine.  With a city exploding behind him,  he insisted that the Iraqi military was more than capable of defending itself.  He reminded me a bit of the Black Knight in Monty Python’s Holy Grail.  Even with his arms and legs cut off, he’s still confidently challenging his assailant.  Well, Ahaz is NOT a cool customer under threat.  He’s sweating and worried to death.  Isaiah says that “the heart of Ahaz and the heart of his people shook as the trees of the forest shake before the wind” (7:2).

God invites King Ahaz to a life of trust in the midst of threat.  The two aggressive kings will not destroy Jerusalem.  And so God says to Ahaz, name a sign, any sign you want, and I will give it to you so that you can trust.  What kind of sign would you ask for if the sky was no limit?  A somersaulting Kangaroo?  A Mets World Series? 

Under threat, Ahaz declines God’s offer.  He doesn’t need a sign.  And he quotes from Deuteronomy 6:16 in order to sound pious, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”  Turns out Ahaz is impressively religious, but he doesn’t trust God in the midst of threat.  He has taken matters into his own hands and struck a partnership with Assyria.  There is really no need to rely on God.

Unfortunately, the legacy of Ahaz is alive and kicking in our hearts and lives.  We know how to use Bible language without believing it.  We know how to take religious poses without trusting God.  We are often frustrated and unimpressed with the life God offers us; with Jesus’ call to sacrifice, forgiveness, sharing, and healing; with the obvious sinfulness of religious communities like ours.  None of us are immune from cloaking our lives in religious clothing that masks an utter distrust of God’s goodness.

Ahaz doesn’t want a sign, but God gives him one anyway.  The sign involves a young woman and a child born to her.  Now this is extremely cryptic in Isaiah.  Neither woman nor child is named.  Most interpreters guess that the woman is either the wife of King Ahaz or the wife of Isaiah the prophet.  Regardless, the point is clear.  Before the child is old enough to tell right from wrong, these two aggressive kings from the North will be destroyed.  Within two or three years, the threatening powers will be no more.  There’s no reason to fear.  You can entrust yourself to me, says God.  This child shall be for you a sign in the midst of threat.

So Joseph and Mary bring a child into the world in the midst of threat.  This child gets a name -- Jesus.  And we are invited, along with them, to trust that the sign of this child is enough.  This child is the sign given to us that trust in God is the best way to live.  And this sign, this small child, is all God has to offer you.  If you would like something more, or something else, I am afraid we as a community will have nothing to offer you.  There is no proof.  There is nothing like evidence.  There isn’t anything solid you can point to in order to convince yourself or others that God exists, or that God shows up in Mary’s womb, or that God was fully present in the life of this child, or that the entire world, including you, is an object of God’s love and delight.

Matthew’s Gospel Story is an invitation to a life of trust

It will be completely understandable if we decide that the sign is not good enough.  Perhaps this child born to Mary is a sign too far away, a sign with too little power.  Incarnation is a community of people who acknowledge that this sign is slight.  Yet we are learning to live with this sign as enough.  Deep down, we want nothing more than for this sign, this baby, this average Palestinian Jew, this beaten and crucified rabbi, to be enough.  Enough for us.  Enough for the world.  So we witness to this good news by inviting others to come and stand by us, and squint, so they can see what we have seen.  A few comments on what a life of trusting God looks like.

1.  Trusting God means paying attention.  

Matthew’s story teaches us that what is most important to us often appears as something small.  And we’re usually not very good at noticing what’s small.  The large and powerful features of life win our attention most of the time.  Ahaz was focused on the politics of the threatening kings and an alliance with Assyria.  Mary and Joseph are not fixated on politics or wealth or influence.  They are ready to trust that God is at work to accomplish big things in their little corner of the world.

So much of what the gospel calls for in our lives is small.  Prayer is small.  Kindness is small.  Forgiveness is small.  Fidelity is small.  Generosity is small.  Cultivating a life that trusts God requires that we value what seems insignificant.  This is difficult to do when our culture trains us to give our attention to the urgent, the flashy, the successful, the powerful, the dominant.  The sign of the child is a reminder to hear what whispers, what goes unnoticed, what doesn’t demand attention. There are, in fact, signs of goodness, signs that God is present.  But it takes practices of retraining your attention.  We live and work and worship together so that we can develop capacities for recognizing God in the many small ways God is present.

2. Trusting God means living with courageous energy.

Here I want to address a problem that many of you have already identified.  The phrase, “put your trust in God” sounds like a platitude.  It sounds like something worthless and cheap, like the faux expressions of affection in a greeting card.  The problem is that trusting God sounds passive and conservative.  Don’t like your plight in life?  Just trust God.  Don’t like the way the world grinds up the poor and favors the rich, no worries, sit tight, just trust God.  You aren’t respected as a valuable human being, aren’t treated with dignity, aren’t paid fair wages, well, not much to be done, just trust God..  No, this isn’t trust.  This is cowardice and fear.  Matthew’s story of Mary and Joseph show us what trust looks like.  Trusting God is a courageous, active response to what threatens life.  It is an audacious and creative form of entrusting ourselves to Jesus’ way of life.  We live against the grain.

We’re learning together how to trust God with our lives.  Contrary to what many think this has nothing to do with encouraging a life that’s passive and docile. Trust is a robust form of resistance, an attempt to create new possibilities of life by living in community with others that expands how we can imagine living together, sharing, working, serving.  Christians who love one another, Christians who buck the stereotypes, who rupture the caricatures of what religious people look like - this is how our community can be a sign that goodness will win.  By sharing we upset the rhythms of greed.  By caring for one another we upset the rhythms of selfishness.  None of this comes easily.  It requires enormous energy and courage.  And it is impossible to sustain unless you are part of a community of healing, forgiveness, and encouragement.

3.  Trusting God means opening our lives to a new story.

None of us knows how our own particular life story will end.  Some lives end in despair and utter failure.  Other lives seem to build into a crescendo of success and approval.  If our own story is the only story that matters, we will loose heart in the face of despair.  Or we will press too hard to show others that our success is not a fluke.  Mary and Joseph are human beings who are glad to have their lives woven into another, larger, story.  You may not always think about it, but the whole point of showing up at church is to ritualize ourselves into a new story.  By encountering Jesus Christ in one another’s faces, in the Scripture read, and in the Eucharist - we are learning that our lives have been stitched into another story.

I was reading a magazine in Barnes and Noble and noticed an older man muttering to my left.  He looked to be in his late 70’s.  He sat hunched over with his head down, mumbling.  He was well dressed - brown courderoys, new and fashionable shoes, a nice dress shirt and sweater.  His hair though, was a birdnest of a mess.  His shoulders were slumped and his head was tucked down. His mumbling grew louder the longer he sat, so that I could begin to make out what he was saying:  “I hate you.  You’re worthless.  Enjoy the rest of your life.  I never loved you.  I’m not good enough for you?  You’re not good enough for me.”  This was the line, over and over again.  I wondered how long he had been saying this.  A year?  Ten years?

Others began to look at him and wink at one another.  “What a crazy old coot.  Must have lost his marbles.”  I think he’s a picture of what all of us can and will become unless our lives are woven together with a story about God’s love.  All of us live with a cacophany of voices fighting for dominance.  Some of those voices we carry around are voices of self-doubt, voices of self-loathing and condemnation.  Left alone, these voices can take over and become the only song of our lives.  This poor, mumbling man looked to me like one demon possessed, like those poor souls we read of in the gospels.  His life was accompanied by a dehumanizing, and unlovely story.  He wasn’t different from you and me.  He was an acute case of having no story to live by but his own.

So we all want a sign.  We want a miracle.  We want God to show us something, to confirm for us that it’s worth the time it takes for us to serve and love and give.  It’s worth it to trust and sing and hope.  We want a sign that we should stay in the game, and not fold.  Surprisingly, God isn’t offended by our wanting a sign.  God is glad to give us a sign.  The virgin with be with child, and will give birth to a son.  Emmanuel.  God is with us.