trust and cost

Proper 18 C 2010
Jeremiah 18:1-11;
Psalm 139:1-5, 13-17;
Philemon 1-21;
Luke 14:25-33


Trust in God is hard for me.

That may sound like a surprising admission from a priest. But trust in God has been a lifelong, ongoing, and unfinished project for me.

I envy my youngest daughter’s trust who, when she was three, jumped down the basement steps into her mother’s arms. But then I remember that when I was three I fell down our basement steps while my own mother watched helplessly. I still have dreams that end with my tumbling down a set of stairs.

Today’s Collect asks God to give us the gift of trusting with all our hearts. For me, and I suspect for many of us, that trust is not a simple religious sentiment, but something that we wish we had but must admit that we often do not. That we struggle with trust is understandable—life gives many of us good reasons to struggle with trust.

But we want that sense of trust, we want our lives to be transformed by that trust. And we want that transformation in the face of what God calls us and empowers us to do.

Today it is Jesus himself who presents us with a sharp challenge to trust in God. Jesus turns to us and speaks challenging words, words that I even hesitate to explore in a pulpit for fear that they will drive some people away. Hating father and mother, hating children, carrying crosses, giving up all possessions—Jesus says clearly that admiring him is easy, but following him is hard. One contemporary writer says that Jesus has many fans, but few real followers. So Jesus gives some practical examples of “counting the cost”—make sure you know what you are getting into if you wish to be my follower.

After serving here as rector for 15 years, I have seen us move from being a church who defined ourselves in terms of how we do our liturgy to being a church who tries to live what our liturgy means. Instead of talking about “the right way to do things”, we began to speak of “what does the Gospel call us to do?” “Who is our neighbor and how do we welcome and serve them?” “How does Christ call us to renew our lives?” These questions are hard but they are open questions and they are the right questions, they are Gospel-based questions. Some of the results of engaging these questions are in our midst—renewed outreach to the poor, outreach to women in the sex trade, dental services to the poor, a growing Hispanic presence, an urge to deepen our lives of prayer and discipline, new members with new vision and new hopes. This journey has not been easy. My life was in some ways much easier in those years when I first arrived. Our life together was not as challenging. Sometimes I have wondered if I have asked too much of Saints Peter and Paul, and perhaps even of myself.

But then I hear Gospel texts like this one, and I feel again that strange urge—to learn again how to trust God and to live a Gospel that is not so much soothing as it is challenging. Even as the seasons of our lives change, and as one old rock ‘n roller sang we “find ourselves seeking shelter against the wind”, I find I still love the wind and I hope that we may always be a church that can ask and act on hard questions. I think that is our only hope as a congregation for the future: to fearlessly allow the Master’s words to move us, kindle us, and sometimes disturb us. Count the cost—yes indeed. Many people try out a Gospel path, but now as in the beginning of the Gospel adventure people do fall away when they count the cost. May we be among those who trust and stay.

It is the Old Testament that gives us a note of gentle hope.

Jeremiah goes down to the local potter’s workshop and watches the potter at the wheel. Have you ever seen a potter work? I am always amazed at how many times the pot seems to grow and take shape, only to be touched and collapsed by the potter and spin again from a shapeless lump of clay. I always wonder why one shape is suddenly acceptable to the potter, why she chooses that moment and that shape over all the others. But the potter knows. And the potter makes all the past shapes, curves, flaws, and false starts into part of the pattern. Nothing is wasted.

We can trust the divine Potter to have an artist’s way with us, to make all our stumbling attempts to be a follower of the Master part of the final lovely product. At least, we can long for that trust, and ask for it as a gift. And the gift of trust will be given.

It takes humility to admit that we have a long way to go, that our trust and our faith is small or weak. But that’s a good place to start. God isn’t very interested in finished products. The potter cannot work with a lump of stone or steel. When we pray each day, “Today I begin again to be a follower of you—what would you have me learn and do?”, we allow the divine Artist to make of each of us, and our life as a church, a lovely and surprising work of art.

And we learn to trust that even if we fail and fall, the Potter can make us new.