Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Luke 13:31-35
It is Lent, so in the spirit of the season I can confess to you that there are many things I would rather not do for God, things that I feel frankly unwilling to do. I would not, for example, be willing to go serve as a missionary in Siberia. I would not be willing to sell my house, give the proceeds to the Salvation Army, and live on the streets. I would not be willing to wear one of those sandwich board signs saying “the end is near” and preach repentance to people on the downtown mall. I would not be willing to hire a band and turn this service into a rock-and-roll-Jesus praise service. I don’t know how I would respond if God actually appeared to me in a vision and commanded me to do one of these things, but I know that I would not feel willing to do any of them. And I’m sure all of us can easily think of things we would be unwilling to do for God.
With that in mind, though, this Gospel passage just leaps out at me. Jesus laments over Jerusalem because the people there are not willing. But what are they not willing to do? Engage in heroic acts of virtue and sacrifice? Stand up to the might of Rome? No. Listen again to what Jesus says: Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing. Forget about frightening feats of love and courage: the people of Jerusalem are not even willing to let God shelter them and comfort them, not willing to let God take them under her wings like a mother hen protecting her young.
We know that the two great commandments Jesus gives us is to love God with our whole being and love our neighbors as ourselves. We know that such love demands action on every level, from the personal to the global. And the world desperately needs more of such love. But in the life of faith, in the spiritual journey that we are all on, there is something that precedes such love, something that makes such love possible. I think Jesus is pointing to that something in this Gospel. And I see that something firmly underlined in our first reading from Genesis.
Abram (soon to be Abraham) has a moment of existential angst. He is an old man with no children: he sees no future for himself or his family. And the LORD appears to him in a vision, brings him outside to look at all the stars of heaven, and tells him, So shall your descendants be. And then comes one of the most consequential verses in the entire Bible: And [Abram] believed the LORD, and the LORD reckoned it to him as righteousness. Let that sink in for a moment. According to the story, what makes Abram a good man, what makes him right with God, is that he is willing to believe God, which in this case means he is willing to trust God. Can it be that, first and foremost, God just wants us to trust her?
I feel certain that the answer to that is yes. After all, I can stand up here and preach all day about how important it is to love, but why would you heed my words? In a world where our daily lives can be filled with pain and struggle, a world where diseases wreak havoc and children are being bombed in Ukraine, we might question any message about the power of love. Even if we believe that love is a good and beautiful thing, how can we fully give ourselves to it? Doesn’t it make more sense to grit our teeth, build our walls, and do everything we can just to protect ourselves and make it through the day? How can we justify dropping our defenses and making love paramount in a world like ours?
What Scripture teaches and our tradition affirms is that we can justify it by believing God: believing that God exists; believing that Jesus reveals the truth: God is love; believing that Christ is alive and resurrection is real; believing that this life in this world is just one part of a much greater story; believing that God’s loving providence will never ultimately be defeated and that, as Julian says, “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and manner of thing shall be well.” This is the belief, the trust, that Jerusalem lacks; this is the belief, the trust, we all need. In the life of faith, everything depends on trusting God.
So in a season of self-examination, we might fruitfully spend some time honestly assessing how much we do — and do not — trust God. And the aim of such self-assessment should not be to berate ourselves. After all, if our belief is imperfect, we are in good company: every biblical figure other than Jesus has imperfect belief. Even Abram’s faith is a bit shaky: he believes God, but as we can see in that reading from Genesis, he also needs lots of reassurance. And we can ask for reassurance as well. When our own faith feels weak and we are not trusting, we can pray the way the father of the epileptic boy in Mark’s Gospel prayed: I believe; help my unbelief! God will help us to believe, if we are willing to ask.
Beyond that, the most important thing we can do to show our willingness is to practice trusting, practice believing God. There is no magic formula for that: it means applying it however we need to apply it. If we are struggling to love someone else, for example, we can practice trusting by acting as if showing that person love will make a positive difference, even if we can’t immediately see it. If we are suffering from some disease or distress, we can practice trusting by acting as if God will use what we are experiencing for our good and the good of others, that our pain is not meaningless but redemptive. We just have to be willing to try it. I don’t know how you need to practice believing God: I just know how I need to. And I know how much such practice has helped me to grow over the years. I’ve done it enough to see that the more we practice trusting God, the easier it is to love. And the more we love, the easier it is to trust. It’s true; it happens. If we are just willing, choosing to believe will bless us beyond measure. If we are willing.
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