The Episcopal Church of the Epiphany

Proper 22–B

Gracious God, Your love for us surpasses all our hopes, desires and knowledge. Forgive our failings to trust You, and help us to come to that trust so we can experience Your peace. We ask this through our brother, Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.

The thing that God desires most from us, the greatest gift we can give God is our trust. God wants us to trust His care, His presence, His love come what may. True trust brings a way of life, a way of being, and it does not demand that life be a certain way before it is given. But this is hard for humans; it has always been hard. We see that in many stories in the Bible. The purpose of the stories of the Bible, some fictional, some legendary, some factual, is to tell us who we were truly were created to be and who God is. They tell of God's deep and longing desire to be in a special relationship with us. The kind of relationship that God desires to have with us however, demands our trust. And so these stories are about our struggle to learn to trust God and our struggle to be in the kind of deep relationship that God desires, and also our struggle to be in the kind of relationship with each other and God's creation that we are meant to have. Our struggle to trust in a loving, caring, and merciful God is most especially intense when we encounter suffering in our lives.

Some of our Bible stories describe how humans have a tendency to believe that God brings on our disasters, our traumas, perhaps because we have done something bad or because God is perhaps testing us. It's kind of amazing how prevalent this thinking is. I recently had a very devout and faith filled friend who has two young children say, that even though she knows this is wrong thinking, she still, deep down, has a tendency to dread that God may test her faith by causing a disaster to happen in her life. She said, "Oh I hope God doesn't test my love for Him by taking the life of one of my children." We might think that this kind of thinking is corroborated by the book of Job. That is if we understand this story incorrectly.

This book is one of the fictional stories in the Bible, and it is an attempt to understand suffering and continue to trust in the midst of it. It is a very profound book and speaks very deeply to our relationship with God in the midst of suffering. Things get very bad for Job, and later in the story he ends up railing against God. But what gets affirmed is that God allows this kind of anger and questioning in the midst of Job's pain and suffering and, in fact, God even praises Job for it. Because Job is in honest and deep relationship with God in his struggle to bear and understand his suffering. Deep relationship sometimes involves anger and questioning and struggle. Human beings continue to struggle, as Job did, with the reasons behind their suffering and why God "allows" evil to exist in this world. It is a deep part of our journey of faith to struggle with this question. We shouldn't deny it, but openly acknowledge our confusion, doubt and even our anger and pain.

Hopefully, what we will come to if we honestly struggle with these questions is what Job came to, deep peace and a deeper trust in the mercy and love of God than ever before. Hopefully we will come to trust what the author of the letter to the Hebrews was telling his community: While we still may experience suffering, we can be sure that Jesus completely understands what we are going through. God sent Jesus to show us that God is deeply and intimately with us in our suffering and cares for us. He became part of this world through Jesus. He entered into exactly what we experience.

Jesus was in relationship with some people who loved Him and wanted to follow Him and learn from Him. But others hated Him and wanted to destroy Him. They wanted to see Him fail. He entered a mixture of positive and negative relationships. But He embraced all of it, and was eventually killed. But though it seemed to destroy Him, it didn't. In fact, the opposite happened. Jesus was resurrected. Jesus literally came back and was able to walk and talk with the people who loved Him. He was able to touch them, in a state that was transformed by his suffering."? That God will bring about this transformation for us is what we are called to trust.

This friend of mine who is afraid that God might test her love for Him by taking the life of one of her children has not come to trust, deep in her being, that the way she loves her children is but a dim reflection of how much God loves us. God loves us infinitely more than the greatest of all human loves. That love that she has for her children comes directly from God's very being. We were created in the image of God. We were created to be in relationship because God, at His very core is relational. That we were created to be in relationship means that we were created to love. That is what it means to be created in the image of God. We are to be communal beings and live in right relationship. The stories of the Bible tell the stories of how human beings struggle to become that, people who live in right relationship. Those who questioned Jesus about divorce had not yet learned what this entails. We cannot be in right relationship unless there is equality between people. During the time of Jesus men and women were not equal.

The man was the ruler of the family and the woman was his Property, and he could get rid of her for just about any reason. The woman however could not do the same. If her husband divorced her she had to find another man to take care of her or be destitute. Jesus was speaking to the injustice and inequality in this situation; it showed a severe hardness of heart. Two people cannot become "one flesh"if inequality exists. One cannot use, abuse and take from someone else's humanity and be in right relationship. I truly don't think Jesus would insist that people stay in abusive and destructive marriages. Rather, Jesus was calling for relationships in marriage to be one of equality, where the two people are essential to each other, and so to discount or discard one's partner would be akin to doing the same to oneself.

But good marriages don't occur easily and naturally. They take a lot of work and commitment. There is often pain and struggle in learning to be in such an intimate and committed relationship. Children in Jesus' time, along with women, were considered of considerably less value. They also had no voice and no power. The disciples showed this fact by trying to prevent children from approaching Jesus. This story about children came right after Jesus gave his answer about divorce. It is interesting to note how often children are the ones who are affected the most by what kind of relationship their parents have. When inequality exists and relationships become toxic, children suffer the most, and are often the least considered.

I was recently told of a husband and new father that said adamantly "children come first."He said this while being quite unloving to his wife who had just gone through childbirth. It was as if she didn't matter. What this man failed to understand was when father and mother express love and care for each other, children are happy. They feel safe; they know their home will be in tact and will provide them safety and a place to grow and be nourished. Children gravitate to places and people where safety is provided and love is expressed. That is why children wanted to be in Jesus' presence; they were able, more than the adults around them, to experience in Jesus the great love and safety of God.

That is why Jesus said we must be like a little child, because a child innately knows, tusts and gravitates to that kind of love. To be like a little child is to need and gravitate to that kind of love. And Jesus was teaching that we are to learn to give that kind of love to each other. I think there is probably no way we can begin to trust God's love for us until we enter the struggle of learning to do that.

But we must expect that this kind of intimacy and commitment, this kind of relationship is not easy. It will, by its nature, involve struggle, and it may also involve suffering. Because relationships are not just for nurturing. Learning to be in right relationships will carry both comfort and pain; comfort in the sense that they nurture us, but pain in the sense that they will challenge us. Relationships are not just to make us feel good and give us a sense of value. They are also the ways that God has chosen to change and transform us. They are the ways by which we will come to trust God's abundant love for us, despite whatever may happen in our lives. And like Job, when we have gained that kind of trust, we will come to great acceptance and peace. Amen.