This morning's sermon at First Presbyterian Church, Lowville, is the fourth and final one in a series on faith as trust. Working from Psalm 46, the series is based on a simple formula, "a + b = c," where "a" stands for "God is our refuge," "b" for "always ready to help," and "c" is "therefore, we don't have to be afraid." (Psalm 46:1-2) It's a formula that is found throughout the Bible, and it leads to the conclusion that faith in the Judeo-Christian tradition is trust in God—not more, not less. The point of this morning's sermon is that the formula only works if we put our trust in God. If we don't, then God isn't our refuge. We'll get no help, and we have every reason to be afraid when the bad stuff of life happens.So easy to preach. Incredibly harder to live. Most of us circle around it and around it and around it, and we never quite get there—even at the best of times. Or, actually, at the worst of times, because it is in the hard times that we discover trust or don't. Faith is not all that hard until the hard times hit. One of the things I emphasize in my preaching and in this blog is that our faith in God keeps morphing into trust in other lesser things. Some of us get caught up in our systems of beliefs and ideologies (two words for the same thing)—whether right, center, or left-leaning. For others its the proper liturgy, ecclesiology, or form of church government. Simple trust in God without the human add ons is incredibly difficult for some reason.
There's nothing new in these thoughts, but we have to keep thinking them. We have to keep trying to relax our anxieties, gently tame our desires and hungers, put aside all of the spiritual crutches we manufacture, and just go with the flow, which is to say with the Spirit. The saints and mystics tell us that when we let go of all the baggage (our yokes), the load is truly lighter. But, we keep carrying the load—the vast majority of us. We just can't let it be as simple as "a + b = c." But, if the Psalms and the whole of the Bible are any witness, it is that simple.
