April 20, 2008

Since confession is good for the soul, I must confess that I didn’t get to putting together this sermon until last night. There has been so much death and loss these past days, what with Margaret Bishop’s anticipated passing and Harriet Brown’s unexpected death, and tending to those needs pushed to the back burner this need for today’s sermon. Trust me, I don’t make it a practice to leave the sermon to Saturday night! I have a long time friend in ministry who prepares his sermon Sunday morning beginning at 5:30! That may work for him, but not for me. For weeks I knew where I was going with this sermon, “Troubled Hearts, Trusting Hearts,” but I didn’t know exactly how I would get there. I hadn’t mapped out the sermon. But the good news is in God’s grace and midnight oil, I got there. And by God’s grace it came together, not despite the recent death and loss, but through the death and loss which has dominated the recent days in the life of our families and our spiritual family.

These all too familiar words of Jesus are spoken during his farewell discourse with his disciples. He speaks to them of his dying as the moment of his glory. They are facing the death and loss of their beloved Jesus, and their hearts are troubled as his departure approaches.

I have no doubt that every last one of us knows from experience the power of death and loss and the weight of grief that follows. Emily Dickinson used the words the “hour of lead” to describe how grief weighs us down like lead. I remember Lois in the first church I served as pastor back in suburban Chicago. Her son died of mysterious causes which see considered foul play and the authorities considered suicide and grief’s “hour of lead” took her down, too. Over the following years her health deteriorated until finally she died of a broken heart that never found a way out of grief.

Grieving the death and loss of someone we loved is heavy. It troubles the heart and we can’t wish it away or wipe it out or hurry it on. During the darkness of grief and bereavement I have once in a while used these words from the Christian Celtic community in Northumbria England. They said to us, Do not hurry as you walk with grief; it does not help the journey. Walk slowly, pausing often: do not hurry as you walk with grief. Do not be disturbed by memories that come unbidden. Swiftly forgive; and let Christ speak for you unspoken words. Unfinished conversation will be resolved in Him. Be not disturbed. Be gentle with the one who walks with grief. If it is you, be gentle with yourself. Swiftly forgive; walk slowly, pausing often. Take time, be gentle as you walk with grief.[1]

Walking slowly and gently through grief is important, but it’s not the remedy. Jesus tells us, as he told the troubled hearted disciples, the remedy, the healing for troubled hearts is to believe in God and himself, is faith in God and himself, is trust in God and himself.

Yes, death and loss trouble our hearts, but the real question is, “Why does death and loss--or why does the death and loss of anyone or anything of deep value to us--unsettle us, disorient us, disturb us and trouble our hearts?” When it comes right down to it, I come to believe it’s because we believe in a God who is too small!

As John Shea says, we need a vision and image and understanding of God that blows our mind. A God we can joyfully acknowledge but not fully comprehend. A God who refuses to be confined to our pigeonholes. A God bigger than the boxes into which we attempt to squeeze God. A God and Christ our understandings can not contain and a God and Christ we must come to trust without fully understanding. A God and Christ who quiets our troubled hearts the more and more we trust. If we don’t trust, our hearts remain troubled.

“Trust in God always,” says Jesus. “Trust also in me. Trust me when I tell you there are many rooms in my Father’s house. And I go to prepare a place for you and I will come again to receive you to myself, so that where I am, there you will be also.”

To our troubled hearts in whatever our life experience may be, Jesus tells us to trust God and trust himself. Trust God and trust Jesus.

Trust God is bigger in love, in truth, in life than our minds can ever conceive of or figure out.

Trust God’s eternal love for us. Trust Jesus makes room in God’s house for us. Trust the house of God is the house of love, for God is love--extravagant love.

Trust God wants nothing more than to enter into relationship with us. Trust Jesus is the way.

Trust God reveals the truth of his house of love. Trust Jesus is the truth.

Trust God has a life for us to follow as the path. Trust Jesus is the life.

Trusts Jesus is the way into the reality of God’s house of love. Trust Jesus is the truth of god made flesh. Trust Jesus is the life of God made visible and available.

Trust God is love and trust Jesus is the manifestation of God’s love in human life. Trust Jesus is the human way this God of majesty and mystery chose to get close to us.

Trust God in Jesus is a God of extravagant love and excessive grace.

Trust God loves you right now as much as God ever has and with a love more than you can ever imagine.

Trust Jesus when he says, “The one who believes in me will also do the works I do and will do greater works than these.”

Trust you will be a living reminder of Jesus Christ as you walk the path of the One who is the way.

Trust, says Jesus, trust his works and the works of the Father continue to go on through our own self-giving love, and that even greater works shall be done.

Trust that when we ask anything of Christ, it shall be given. And trust that the first and foremost thing we should of Christ is how to do as he has commanded, ask how better we can love one another.

Trust that in the dying and risen Christ death is not the end but just the beginning.

Trust this way-giving, truth-giving, life-giving God in Jesus Christ will never be defeated and never leave us or forsake us, and will love us in life and love us forever.

Trust in God’s house of love there are many rooms, many dwelling places, many mansions, and not a limited few.

Trust God is present in every day miracles of love and caring and compassion. Trust the living Christ is present in every hope and every quest and every aspiration of those who seek after God and hunger and thirst for a taste of God.

Let your troubled heart become a trusting heart, and let your too small God become the God who will blow your mind

Filled with so much trust in God and Jesus as the way, the truth and the life, why should our hearts ever be troubled?

[1] From Celtic Daily Prayer