Our whole trust

Sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent (February 25, 2024) at St. James’ Episcopal Church in Hyde Park, NY. View the scripture readings and the Collect of the Day.

James Tissot (1836-1902), “Get Thee Behind Me, Satan!”

from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=57497

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Jesus began to teach his disciples that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. from Mark 8:31-38

Edited Transcript

May only truth be spoken here and only truth be heard. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Please be seated.

This morning we had the first breakfast of our Lenten season. It was excellent. And while I was in line for the breakfast, someone came up to me and said—kind of half joking, but definitely half serious—my Lenten discipline isn't going so well. And we talked a little bit about that.

If you've ever said to yourself, gee, my Lent in discipline isn't going so well, then you know what St. Paul is talking about when he says in today's reading, "the law brings wrath." In other words, when I set myself a goal or a rule and I try my hardest to stick to it, it brings that wrath, that experience of "I couldn't do it."

Whenever we try on our own power to do the right thing, to stick with the program, we find ourselves, almost inevitably judging ourselves or feeling judged. When we try to stick with a program of our own power, of our own volition, we find ourself coming up against our human failing and imperfection.

I've been thinking about this this week. What kept coming up for me was a line from our service of Baptism.

In our service of Baptism, as you remember, there's a covenant, a set of promises we make to God and to one another. But before we take those vows, there's an examination of the candidate for baptism. And if you were baptized as a baby or as a young child, then your parents and your godparents sort of answered the examination for you. And if you were baptized as an adult, then you would've answered these questions for yourselves.

There's a question in that examination that kept coming up for me this week. It was this: do you put your whole trust in Christ's grace and love?

Do you put your whole trust in Christ's grace and love?

Now, what do you suppose the right answer is? If you look it up in the prayer book, what answer will you see? Do you suppose? Yes!

And just like all the other questions in the examination, that is a whole mouthful. Do you put your whole trust in Christ's grace and love? Yes, I do.

And we say that—or it was said for us—and we know perfectly well that if we were to look at our own lives, moment to moment, day to day, hour by hour, I am not putting my whole trust in Christ's grace and love!

Where do I put my trust? Maybe in my own skills, my health, what I'm able to accomplish in an hour or a day? That's where my trust is most of the time.

Or maybe it's in other people, in my spouse, people I feel I can count on.

Or maybe it's in institutions like the Church.

To say that I put my whole trust in Christ's grace and love. What a bold thing to say! Because invariably I'm leaning mostly on my own self and what I can do, what the others around me can do.

And yet it's what we promise to do in our baptismal covenant, to put our whole trust not in ourselves and in what we can do, but in Christ's grace and love.

This question, this self-examination, becomes important for us to reflect on with today's Gospel passage.

So before we dive in, I want to give the Gospel reading a little bit of context. If you opened up your Bible and you found this Gospel passage and you jumped back one paragraph, you would see Jesus saying to Peter,—Peter, the very person to whom in our passage today, he says, Get behind me Satan! Poor Peter.

But right before Jesus says to Peter, he says to all the disciples, Who do you say that I am? And it's Peter who says, you are the Messiah. You are the one sent by God to rescue us, to save God's people. We put our trust in you.

And Jesus says, and I don't think that that means what you think it means. Who's seen "The Princess Bride"? I don't think that means what you think it means!

Peter says, you are the Messiah. You're the one who's going to save us. You are this incredible man who can do deeds of power. I have seen you rebuke demons. I've seen you silence evil. I've seen you heal the sick. You are a powerful man. You are going to liberate us from the Romans. You are the king that God has promised who will rule over us and establish again, a kingdom on earth for God's people to be safe and free.

And Jesus says, it does not mean what you think it means.

And then, as we heard Deacon Gail proclaim to us, Jesus begins to teach them: that the Messiah, the savior, the rescuer, the all powerful liberator, must suffer and then die, and then on the third day rise again.

But the disciples are so appalled by the idea that the Messiah, the liberator, is going to suffer and then die... I'm convinced that they don't even hear "on the third day rise again."

And so Peter, very thoughtfully, kind of pulls Jesus aside and he says, Lord, you're the Messiah! Remember who you are! This cannot be.

And I think of it in the same way that a good senior warden in the Episcopal Church would kind of pull the priest aside if she was saying crazy crap during a sermon. This can't be. Think about what you're saying!

And Peter says this, and then we have this moment in the Gospel where Jesus looks at his disciples and he says, no, they need to know the truth.

They need to know the truth that I am going to suffer and die because if they are going to follow me, that's their part too. That's what it means.

Putting our whole trust in God's grace and love doesn't always mean we get what we expect or we get what we want. Jesus is telling us that the core of Christianity is this: You've got to go down in order to rise again.

The Messiah, the Savior, suffers and dies, and on the third day will rise again. And to the disciples, it is so upsetting the idea that he will suffer and die, that they can't even hear the new life.

But the invitation of Christianity is: if you want life, you have to let go of everything you've been clinging to. If you want to follow Jesus, you have to leave behind what you put your trust in and put your trust instead in Jesus and follow him. Because he will descend in order to bring up and to redeem everything.

We need to be willing to let go, to die to who we thought we were, to die to our expectations.

And I think that if you reflect on it, you might find that in small ways, we're actually doing this all the time. I have an important errand to run. I'm on my way out of the house, but my phone rings and I answer it, and it's a friend who's crying. I let go of the important thing that I was about to do, and I offer myself to the person in front of me who needs companionship.

There must be hundreds of times in a week where you let go, where you die to a plan or an expectation and give way to what has come up, to something new.

When we say yes to a ministry, even though we weren't sure we had the right skills to do it. When we let something go into someone else's hands and invite them in to try, even though we're not sure they're going to get it right.

All of these are ways that we take our trust out of what's familiar and comfortable— whatever it is that we've been holding onto—and put our trust in God. Our whole trust and the grace and love of God.

We have to let go. We have to go down in order to rise again. We have to admit sometimes—and that's what we do in Lent—that we have fallen short, that we have failed. That on our own power, that we couldn't stick with that Lenten discipline.

But put our whole trust in the grace and love of God, to bring us to new life again.

So from Ash Wednesday to Easter, I want to invite each of us to notice how are we practicing that movement of letting go, of releasing an expectation, and of surrendering to the God who is bringing us to Easter into the new life that we didn't plan, that we didn't expect, that is better than we could have asked for or imagined.

Will you put your whole trust in his grace and love? Amen.