20th December 2020
I wonder if this extraordinary year has deepened our trust in God or weakened it or left it about the same.
Going through a hard time, can sometimes make us less inclined to trust God or believe in God. We are confronted with the age-old question, repeatedly voiced in the bible too, of why God allows suffering to take place if he could stop it and if he is loving. It is to some extent an Advent question too and a subject of Advent longing that God would come and put things right: “Why don’t you tear open the heavens and come down?” It would be wrong to think that question is easily answered or to be unkind to people’s doubts or to our own doubts. Sometimes faith is a struggle, like Jacob wrestling with God.
But sometimes going through a hard time can deepen trust. I remember talking to someone once, who was going through something awful and goodness knows it would have been understandable for them to have doubts about God but she said: “No I don’t doubt God. I couldn’t get through this without God.”
It’s not easy. Trust isn’t always easy. It exposes our vulnerability and is always a risk but in very many ways we have to live by trust and learn to place it wisely.
We had an interesting discussion on trust in our Advent group and this Sunday in the much-loved story of the annunciation, trust is a theme that goes right to the heart of the reading.
There is Mary’s trust in God. She is asked to believe something that seemed impossible. Was it someone in children’s literature who objected to being asked to believe five impossible things before breakfast. She cannot understand how the angel’s message will come true. But she believes in the message and the messenger and accepts not knowing all the answers.: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”
I wonder where that act of trust came from. Trust takes time. I imagine Mary as a prayerful person who had some experience of the goodness of God to draw on and people in her life who showed her something of the goodness of God. In the end the act of trust comes from her. She is free to choose as we all are and it would be a much lesser creation and a lesser God if we weren’t. God wants us as we are and God wants us to choose Him. He graciously invites our response.
Mary’s trust and co-operation will bring vulnerability and risk. The immediate risk of exposure as an unmarried mother in a time and society where that would lead to certain disgrace and poverty and possibly worse. She is dependent on Joseph’s choice to believe in turn. And there are many scary things to come for her. The Christmas story is not as cosy as we sometimes make it appear! So there is great vulnerability here and risk.
But the trust in the story is not all one way. I mentioned a story last week from a sermon I heard years ago by a Franciscan friar about prayer. He also told a story of sitting in a train-carriage in a compartment with two young men who were being a bit loutish. They got up to go and before they went, one of them confronted the friar and said: “I don’t believe in your God.” “No”, he replied, “but he believes in you!”
Here’s a wonderfully inspiring fact about the Annunciation. God believes in Mary. God trusts Mary and entrusts her with His Son; entrusts her with himself. He puts Himself into her hands and becomes vulnerable for her. Mary becomes a partner in God’s work of salvation.
God also trusts us, believes in us and entrusts us with the responsibility to love and care for each other and to be for each other in the way that Jesus is for all of us. He makes us also partners in God’s work of salvation. God uses us to help each other. He sometimes uses us to answer each other’s prayers. He sends help by sending us.
We might feel that we fall short of that trust, far more so than Mary, so that it is God who seems to be prepared to believe five impossible things before breakfast! He’s rather like a determined mother or father who won’t give up on the belief that their child will come good and do good even when it seems against all the evidence! Who will not give up the belief because of sheer love and a determination that it must be and whose love will help it to be so in the end.
If we embrace it, God’s love can teach us to love and God’s trust can teach us to trust. “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to thy word.
