February 21, 2021
/The First Sunday in Lent
1 Peter 3:18-22 | Psalm 25:1-9 | Mark 1:9-15
The Rev. Bradley Varnell
Verse 1 of Today’s Psalm grabbed me. To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul; my God, I put my trust in you…at the heart of the spiritual life is this simple, yet incredibly difficult move: putting our trust in God. Throughout the story of Scripture what we see and hear over and over and over again is the struggle of God’s people to trust God fully and completely. To totally hand over their lives to God’s ways and God’s laws. The prophets speak out repeatedly against the people’s inability or unwillingness to remember that God is faithful, that God will keep God’s promises even when everything seems to speak against that. The story of Scripture over and over and over again shows us that God is trustworthy. One of the reasons Christians return again and again to the Bible isn’t because God is somehow stuck there, but because the Bible is a record of God’s people doubting the promises which God has made and God, time and again, showing up and keeping his end of the bargain. The Bible is a record of the trustworthiness of God.
Scripture also shows us what trust means. Often it seems we use trust and belief interchangeably. I trust in God because I believe God exists. But this isn’t how Scripture works. Most people in the United States – most people in the world – believe in God or some higher power. Yet how many of us trust God? How many of us move beyond accepting the existence of God and trusting that this God is who Scripture and tradition says he is? Belief doesn't always ask much of me. My belief in gravity doesn’t really make any claims on my life, doesn’t really guide how I live my life. It’s a given, I accept it, and I go on. Trust, on the other hand, seems to ask a lot of me. Trust makes certain demands – if I trust someone, I act in a particular way. If I trust John to print the bulletins, I don’t come up here on Sunday morning and print them off myself. If I trust my friends when they say they love me, I tell them when they’ve hurt me, instead of assuming that their desire is really to make me feel bad. Part of trusting someone is trusting that what they say matches how they act. And so, it is with God: the spiritual life is an invitation to trust that what God says matches what God does. It live in light of the fact that the God who speaks and acts in Scripture, in the people of Israel, in Jesus Christ is not a God who deceives us, but a God who only speaks the truth.
In our Gospel lesson today, Jesus is baptized, Mark tells us that “as he was coming up out of the water, he [Jesus] saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, ‘you are my son, the beloved, with you I am well pleased.’” Before Jesus was tempted, before he began his ministry in Galilee – he was baptized and heard God say to him “you are the beloved, with you I am well pleased.” Mark makes the point that it is Jesus who sees and hear this, not the crowd, not John, just Jesus. Jesus hears these words and immediately the Spirit drives him into the wilderness and the start of his ministry. Jesus spends 40 days in the wilderness tempted and tried. We don’t hear much about this period in Mark, but part of the temptations, as we see in Matthew and Luke, are temptations to cease trusting God and rely instead on his own power. Jesus withstands these temptations, spending 40 days living more deeply into the reality that he is the beloved. I like to imagine that Jesus spent all this time learning what it meant to trust that he really was beloved by God.
Jesus leaves the 40-days and immediately begins his ministry in Galilee preaching the Good News of God, healing and casting out demons. Throughout his entire ministry Jesus’ life is one long witness to what it looks like to trust, at the very core of your being, that you are beloved by the Father in heaven. Jesus is what it looks like to not simply believe in God, but to trust God. This isn’t always easy, even for Jesus. One of the most poignant, human points in the story of Jesus’ life is his prayer in the Garden of Gesthsemane. Jesus knows death is approaching, he prays to God to rescue him, but even though Jesus wishes his future could be otherwise, Jesus still trusts in God. The disciples, too, struggle to trust. As Jesus is crucified those closest to him flee in terror…yet at his resurrection Jesus doesn’t castigate them, rather, he invites them, once again, to trust in him.
Believing God exists can provide little comfort in the hard moments of life. What gets us through isn’t the knowledge that God is in his heaven, but that God has left the heights of his existence to journey with us when the power goes out and the water stops. The crucifixion looked like the end, but it wasn’t. Trusting God doesn’t stop the worst from happening to us, but it does give up hope, confidence that the worst doesn’t stop God.
Trust isn’t something we simply will, though. Trust is something we give ourselves over to. In many ways, trust is a gift from God, one that we have to learn to accept. Trust invites us to let down our walls and our guards and our need to be in control. Trust in the God of Scripture requires we cease trying to be our own gods. This Lent, my hope is that we all come to a deeper trust in God, that we allow the story of God revealed in Scripture to shape us to look more and more like Jesus – people who live out of trust in God, who allow that trust to unleash the love of God in the world. The greatest Christians living and dead aren’t the ones who have elaborate belief systems, or who know the most theology. They are the ones who have a quiet trust in God, a trust that enables them to move mountains. Jesus came, lived, taught, died, and rose again not to give us a nice theology we can think about, or a group of people to hang with on Sundays, but to show us what it means to live lives trusting that we are God’s beloved. That life of trust may lead to death – but the God we are invited to trust in, the God who calls us beloved, is not stopped by death. The life which trust makes possible is life without end, and it is this life that we are invited to. Amen.