Learning to Trust

Learning to Trust

Isaiah 65: 17-25, Luke 21:5-19

I don't like the way things are going in the world today but I am learning to trust God. Admittedly, I am learning to trust God the hard way. Who knew that trust could grow from despair?  I am, quite frankly, losing hope that human beings can live in peace and create a world that is safe and blessed for everyone. As my despair for human achievement grows my trust in God grows even more. Oddly enough this does not mean that I would turn away from the world but rather that I am given new courage to face the world as it is and to understand that my part is not to save the world but to be faithful to the One who is saving the world. With so much sadness and fear, disharmony and untruth, violence and hatred about, it is tempting to just give up and forget about it but there is another way to cope, to live, to be faithful.

One of the desert fathers told this story to a young brother who was so behind in his work and prayers that he despaired of ever catching up and considered just quitting altogether. This is how the story goes:

A man had a plot of land that had become a wilderness of thistles and thorns. He decided to cultivate it and said to his son: "Go and clear the land." But when the son went to clear it, he saw that the thistles and thorns had multiplied. He thought, "How much time shall I need to clear and weed all this?" and lay on the ground instead, and went to sleep. He did this day after day. When his father found him doing nothing, the son explained his discouragement. The father replied, "Son, if you had cleared each day the area on which you lay down, your work would have advanced slowly and you would not have lost heart." The son did what his father said, and in a short time the plot was cultivated.

I am learning to trust God. I suppose some would think that trust is based on something tangible, something proven but this trust that is growing in me is nothing more than a promise, an outrageous promise at that. When the prophetic voice recorded in Isaiah 65 states joyously that God will create a new heaven and new earth and that there will be peace and love everywhere and no one will harm anyone else on God's holy mountain it was a voice that was speaking to people who knew little of joy. They were the ones who some fifty years before returned from exile to rebuild Jerusalem but still Jerusalem was nothing like it was in the glory days. Life was hard and there were powerful, sad memories. Infant mortality and premature death, war and the destruction of homes, possessions lost after a lifetime of work, the very things that the prophet now claims will be no more.

It would be easy to dismiss these words as just wishful thinking, a way to cope with a terrible time by simply pretending that it will all be worth it one day for somebody if not oneself but that would be to miss the point entirely of what it means to trust God and the joy that resonates in the words of this prophetic voice for now and not just someday. For this voice speaks of the belief that God (despite the evidence) is in charge and that all things will ultimately be shaped by God's loving will and in the meantime God is with us for the journey to the promised land.

So why is it taking so long? I don't know. All I know is that as I am slowly relieved of everything I have depended upon; that a powerful trust in God is growing in me; and that the less I can depend upon myself the more I can trust God. I think it must not be unlike what Chesterton said about why angels can fly: Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly. I read somewhere that baby eagles learn to fly by being dropped in mid-air and there is nothing left to hold them or to hang on to. They discover their wings and fly.

It is God who gives us wings to fly. I know that's crazy (we don’t have wings and we never will) but sometimes it is my experience anyway that metaphors are more real than facts. And we will need those wings for even though it is in God that we place our trust it is in our own lives that God will create the peaceable kingdom. It is not our part to see or to build the whole thing but it is our part to do and be our part. It is tempting to think that the little things will mean nothing before the systemic problems of humankind but the truth is, I believe, that even though the little things can be done without seeing big changes, no big changes will happen without the little things. It is not for us to clear the earth in one mighty swath but rather it is for us to clear the ground we walk on, one act of kindness, of justice, of peace at a time. And we are encouraged not discouraged by the overwhelming sense of disaster all around us because we know in our hearts that God is the future and that God is good and that nothing good is ever lost to God. How can it be otherwise? Either we believe that God made all that is and loves what has been made; was there at the beginning and will therefore be there at the end or we don't believe it. Someone once said to me what seemed a reasonable enough question one time. The question was: How can you believe in God? My answer was also, I think, reasonable (and a revelation to me), though it was in the form of a question as well. I said, How can you not believe in God?

I am learning to trust God. It is, I believe, the truest way of the human spirit because as we learn to trust God we are also learning about who we really are and what our hope and joy really is. Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Swarz collaborated on a word that expresses this human spirit infused by a growing trust in God. They wrote

when the thunder rumbles

Now the Age of God is dead

And the dreams we've clung to dying to stay young

Have left us parched and old instead

when my spirit falters on decaying alters

And my illusions fail,

O go on right then

I go on again.

I go on to say

I will celebrate again another day

I go on

If tomorrow tumbles

and everything I love is gone

I will face regret

All my days, and yet

I will still go on  . . .on 

To say that human life on earth is a challenge is not sufficient. It is an on-going struggle simply to go on living with something to hope for. What I am learning is that all the things I hoped for were illusions. Even love (which for me is at the heart of the meaning of life itself) is suspect. Do you remember that beautiful song by Joni Mitchell?

I've looked at love from both sides now,

From give and take, and still somehow,

It's love's illusions I recall

I really don't know love at all.

Even TS Eliot's words begin to make sense to me:

I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope

For hope would be hope of the wrong thing; wait without love

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. (East Coker, Four Quartets)

It turns out that trusting God is the only thing that is real. It is hope and love that is more than hope and love. It is the hope that still remains in hopelessness, the song that never stops singing whether we still hear it or not, the love that is present when we have lost everything we love. It is waiting. It is an expectation. It is endurance. By your endurance, Jesus said, you will gain your souls. (Lk 21.19) Of course you can't just take my word for it because trusting God is not something you can do until you do it yourself. And I am not even sure that I can even do that until I simply can no longer not do it. As long as there was something else I could hope for or love or depend upon I could turn away from this waiting for God but I can no longer turn away from the waiting. I am learning to trust God.

I wanted to change the world but now I only want to know the God who is changing the world even now, creating a new heaven and new earth a peaceable kingdom in my heart and in the world that I cannot begin to see and can only just barely believe. The wars and earthquakes and famines and plagues will have their time on earth but then they will be gone and God will remain. There will be a day when there will not be a brick left of this beautiful Church in which we stand this day but there will never be a day when God is not present and standing with us. Our own lives and the lives of those we love will come and they will go and in the coming and in the going God will be there. We may never know what God can and will do but if we learn to trust God we might just be a part of what God is already doing.

I am learning to trust God. I am learning to trust what I cannot see; what I dare not hope for; what I may never know. Thus saith the Lord: Before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear. They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain. (Isaiah 65.24,25) Therefore be not afraid or discouraged but let us live faithfully our part in God's future that is already present in the hearts of those who are learning to trust God.