Trust - The Rev. Brian Petersen
“Abraham believed, therefore he was young; for he who always hopes for the best becomes old, and he who is always prepared for the worst grows old early, but he who believes preserves an eternal youth.“
-Soren Kierkegaard
These words come from the Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, from his book Fear and Trembling, which is a meditation on the story of Abraham and Isaac from Genesis chapter 22 that we just heard. In this mediation, Kierkegaard wrestles with the notions of faith and belief – what does it mean to believe in God?
I think if you asked 10 different people this question, you might get 10 different answers. For some, belief is a very simple thing – an intellectual assent that a statement is true. To believe in God is to say “yes, God exists”, and many don’t go much further than that.
As all of you know, I have 3 kids who are pretty far apart in ages - 24, 16, and 6. One of the practical consequences of spacing my kids out like that is that they each experienced the stages of growth on their own – which means that we ended up recycling a lot of the classic kids toys, books, and movies with all three of them. And that also means that I’ve seen the movie The Polar Express about 100 times.
There are differing opinions on The Polar Express - some people think it’s kind of creepy, and I’ll say that the original book is many times better than the movie. But if you’ve seen the movie, you know that this simple kind of belief – believing that Santa Claus exists is what keeps you pure, and questioning belief is a sign of becoming an unbelieving and boring adult.
It’s this binary, black-and-white notion of belief that also causes people to struggle with how they fit into the church. I’m pretty sure that if you asked people their favorite part of a Sunday worship service, very few would say that reciting the Creed is their favorite. And for many people, the Creeds are a real barrier – because to say “I believe” or even “we believe” implies a sort of intellectual certainty that many of us aren’t willing to give. Can you say the Creed with your fingers crossed behind your back?
In our Episcobasics class last Sunday, Deacon Gigi gave us some great insight on this – we say “we believe” in the creed because belief is a collective thing, not just about individual assent. You don’t necessarily have to believe all of it, because we believe it together. The statements of the creed describe the collective understanding of a great cloud of witnesses stretching back through time. It’s not a pledge of allegiance, but rather a prayer and an exercise in communal storytelling.
But there’s also another way to understand belief, that gets to the root of the Biblical concept of faith. In both Hebrew and Greek, the words for faith are action-oriented words that imply trust. Belief, in the Biblical sense, is not a one-time checking off a box but a process, a practice that is rooted both in our act of trust and in God’s faithfulness.
Belief in God as trust in God is a lot different from simply acknowledging God exists – it means that we trust in God’s goodness, and have the faith that this goodness will be present in every situation we encounter, even when the available evidence might be quite contrary.
Kierkegaard called his book Fear and Trembling because he saw Abraham’s faith this way – a belief that comes through fear and dread, that is willing to wrestle with God, to be confident that God’s righteousness will prevail even when the situation looks impossible.
Some people have rightly pointed out that the story of Abraham and Isaac, understood only as a morality lesson about obeying God no matter what, is actually pretty immoral. After all, if God would require someone to sacrifice their only child, is that a God worth following?
But what if Abraham’s faith is not about blind obedience (“God said it, that settles it”), but about a relentless trust, a belief that God’s goodness will prevail beyond his limited perspective and understanding? A radical trust that, in Abraham’s own words, “God himself will provide the lamb” (or in the King James Version: “God will provide himself a lamb”). This sort of trust was not cultivated in a moment, by making some sort of statement of belief. For Abraham, it was a journey where he had to experience his own failure to trust God, often with bad consequences (as we heard last Sunday in the story of Hagar and Ishmael). The belief beyond belief that Abraham demonstrates comes from a hard-fought battle with doubt and disappointment.
What would this sort of trust, this sort of belief, look like for us today? We seem to be facing times where the evidence of God’s goodness isn’t always readily apparent. It’s easy to believe in God when things are going well: when the church is a respected, stable, and influential institution in our culture. When we are blessed to live in times of prosperity and security. It’s not so easy when those things begin to fade. We wonder where God is in all of this, if perhaps God has checked out and left us alone.
The book our Deep Dive Book Group is reading, For Such a Time as This, reminds us that times like ours are not unprecedented. That these are times that test and challenge our faith, yes, but they are also times of great opportunity. We might be called just for a time such as this, to put belief into action by believing in what seems impossible – that God’s righteousness and grace are greater than the perils and harm that we see all around us.
This type of belief is closely connected to hope. Hope isn’t pie-in-the-sky thinking or wishing that things will all work out in the end. Hope, like faith, is a pre-disposition and an action - a decision to hold onto the bigger picture of God’s promise even when everything else falls apart, when nothing makes sense (as Abraham surely experienced). And paradoxically, it’s this hope that transforms darkness into light by bringing God’s promises into reality,
This hope is what animates our action, meaning that every little thing we do to bring transformation really matters. As Jesus says, we can do the little things like giving cups of cold water to those who need it, without growing tired or frustrated when it feels like we’ll never solve the problem of thirst forever. Because through faith – through belief that goes far beyond black or white thinking – we can audaciously trust that these cups of water will make a difference, that we are working with God’s help to bring about a world where those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be filled.
Abraham’s story shows us that the path to trusting in God’s promises might lead us through doubt and uncertainty, but that God is ultimately faithful. I don’t believe that God tests us so much as that God uses our trials and tribulations to bring us closer in trust, to give us the hope that will strengthen us for the very real work of bringing healing and wholeness to the world.
It’s not, as Kierkegaard says, about hoping for the best or preparing for the worst - both these paths will lead us to disappointment, frustration, burnout. Instead, through trust – audacious trust – faith that works itself out through fear and trembling, that holds to God’s promise and refuses to let go – we find the strength and courage to forge into the abundant life that God calls us into.
