As I reflected on the lessons in preparation for this morning, these four characteristics of Radical Trust in God emerged: Worshipping God Only, Taking the Right Risks, Pleasing God Not People, and Being Changed through Prayer. I will share how I see these four themes come out through our readings and then conclude with some final thoughts on their possible relevance to us today.
1) Worshipping God Only: All the readings point to the priority of worshipping God alone. In the Kings passage, the people of Israel were challenged point-blank to choose whether to worship Baal, as those peoples around them worshipped, or whether to worship God. In the Psalm, the “new song” we are to sing is one of utter devotion to God. Paul challenges the Galatians in the epistle lesson to be faithful to the true gospel. The Gospel reading, too, shows that the centurion, though not a Jew, was fully given to God, trusting God without reservation.
I suppose that it has never been easy to follow God. However, in some ways it feels more confusing now than ever before. Details and perspectives from a wide variety of religions, spiritualities, and other approaches to truth are available via the Internet and other sources to an unprecedented extent which can be totally bewildering to the seeker and believer alike.
And it's not just information overload. The culture of consumerism and materialist values inundates each one of us through all the media, whether traditional or social, with its priorities that are alien to full dedication to God. Jesus says quite simply in Luke 16:13: “You cannot serve both God and money.”
In everything we do as the Church, as well as in our individual lives, we have to wrestle daily to answer meaningfully the question, “What does worshipping God only mean?”
2) Taking the Right Risks: Elijah appeared to be risking humiliation, by calling on God to do the impossible – to consume an ostensibly unburnable offering by miraculous intervention. But this risk was not wild or random. It came from intuitively, prophetically knowing what God was going to do in this situation, through an indefinite, extended time listening to God's plan to bring the people of Israel back to faithfulness. Furthermore, it came from a life stance of radical obedience to God and seeing God do amazing things like this over and over.
In the same way, the faith that the centurion had, not to try to control the outcome of his slave's illness by seeing Jesus personally, was based on years of trusting God and knowing what God could do.
Trusting God for our lives always involves risk, but not whimsical or selfish risk. Rather, it is deeply grounded in our knowledge of God and how God has worked and continues to work in our lives. It means listening to God's voice and discerning God's path forward amongst all the voices competing for our attention.
3) Pleasing God Not People: In Galatians 1:10, Paul says: If I were still pleasing people, I would not be a servant to Christ. Elijah's actions speak in the same spirit as he goes about repairing the altar of God and preparing the sacrifice. Clearly he wasn't interested in winning any popularity contests. The centurion, as a military man, would also have been well-acquainted with not pleasing people.
I think our Christian culture is such that it can be easy to confuse being loving toward others and making them happy, or pleasing them, rather than pleasing God. I'm not saying that our goal should be to try to make people unhappy. But over and over throughout the Scriptures, in addition to the ones we read today, pleasing people and pleasing God are frequently at odds, and serving God requires being willing to be very unpopular at times.
Yesterday, on Facebook, one of my dear friends shared with me and others of us who preach here regularly a funny video of a church minister who had apparently struggled too long with walking the line between pleasing people and God. He departed from talking about the Scripture and just completely lost his cool. Don't worry, I'm not even remotely tempted to follow his example now. Actually, I am very grateful to you all, the way everyone has been working together so that though Bishop Terry's away, Dianne is still on sick leave, and Marie had to be out of office for almost two weeks, things have been going astonishingly smoothly. It also reminded me of how it isn't any easier for the one who preaches to live by God's word. That, as always, I speak the things I do because I need to hear them.
4) Being Changed Through Prayer: Something that is implicit in all these stories is what happens to us through a life of prayer. It quite literally changes us. Opening to God reveals possibilities and pathways that are invisible when we are closed off. This is in fact our primary need for prayer: not to change God's mind, as if we knew better than God, or God were unwilling to help us, but instead becoming more ready for what God is already prepared to do in our lives. That can be spectacular as it was when Elijah or Paul or the centurion prayed. It can be as simple but still challenging as gaining the courage to go on when our difficulties feel insurmountable.
So then, Radical Trust in God includes these four aspects: Worshipping God Only, Taking the Right Risks, Pleasing God Not People, and Being Changed through Prayer. But how do I, how do you, live these day by day? How do we make the leap from what we need to do to how to do it, and how to be it? Thankfully, our relationship with God informs both. It is through the ways we come to know God, the study groups, the personal experiences through which we slowly recognize God's voice and interventions, times of listening to God in prayer – these become the ground from which we can live lives of service with a trust that is radical.
I can't stand here today and tell you what exactly Radical Trust in God would look like in your life. I hope though that what has been shared from the Scriptures brings light as you work out for yourself, through your own relationship with God, what that means.
In closing, I'd like to leave you with this thought: the “Radical” in Radical Trust means both rooted – and in this context, rooted in God – as well as all-encompassing and life-changing. So living as individuals and as a community in Radical Trust in God changes everything.
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