St Margaret's Church Prestwich

Rev Helen gave this sermon on Wednesday 17 July. Here it is for you again:

What does it mean to trust someone? I mean really trust someone, like the person you can tell a secret and you know it will go no further, who you would let look after you knowing everything will be ok. Trusting someone unconditionally is something that no one takes lightly! It’s like when you see those trust exercises like you lean back and fall and I will catch you sort of thing, never been to sure about those or when you see films like Robin Hood, they balance the apple on someone’s head and trust the arrow to be shot and only hit the arrow. If someone put an apple on my head and picked up a bow and arrow I would run as fast as I could in the opposite direction. It really is an amazing thing not only to be trusted but to trust that much. Let me ask you a question to ponder, how do you know when you can really trust someone? What does it take? I’m sure it will be different for everyone here. We are told to trust God unconditionally but I always find that a bit, difficult, think of it like this? What if I said to you that you must trust someone you can’t see, is bigger and more powerful than you in ways that you couldn’t even comprehend or understand. When you see the reading from Isaiah this morning which is an interesting one, there’s a lot of wrath and destruction in there, this is the same God who says trust me I know what I’m doing! It’s the sort of thing my dad would say before whatever he’s doing ends in disaster!

Whenever I think about trust in this way the story of Job comes to mind, someone who put their trust in God unconditionally despite what happened to him. Job is someone who has a good life, he has a home, property, his wife and children. He praises and worships God with thanks for the good things that he has. In heaven Satan claims that Job will only worship God while he has a good life but if he didn’t then he would stop. So God allows Satan to take away everything that Job has, as a challenge to see what happens. Job loses everything and curses his existence and even the day he was born, this really is Jobs lowest moment of his life. His friends come to console him but soon become accusatory making Job examine his life and what he must have done to displease God for this to happen to him. How would you answer if you were Job? Defend Gods action, curse God or lament? Job does all three sometime with confidence that God is just and would never abandon him but at other times there is doubt, serious doubt about why God has taken this from. Eventually Job demands that God come and defend these actions to him so God obliges and appears as a storm cloud. So does God explain to Job why he had to suffer and explain why God has taken from Job? Sort of, God takes Job on a tour of the universe and berates him because God has control of everything that exists in the universe and has to work with the complexities of it. God has to bring and keep order on such a large scale it’s beyond Job or anyone’s understanding or comprehension. Accepting this and trusting God has everything under control will help Job to come to terms with what his has lost, it’s all part of Gods infinite wisdom. That the explanation, it is a bit difficult to comprehend or understand but think that’s the point because if we did then we’d be God and that’s not the case, trust me I know what I’m doing! Job trusts and he gets everything back double that was taken, his property, land, wife and children not the same children different ones, if you’ve seen Good Omens you’ll understand that last bit if you haven’t then you should it’s brilliant!

Remember earlier when I asked you earlier what it would take to trust someone? Would you trust God with what Job is told? When you remember the reading from the Old testament that we heard earlier. It’s really difficult when you think of God in the clouds. Would it help if God had a human face maybe? Could God be more relatable if God was like you.

That’s where Jesus comes into this story, he is God made flesh, the logos the living incarnation of the word of God. Jesus calls God Father and knows God intimately as he says in the gospel ‘No one knows the Son except the father, and no one knows the father except the Son and anyone whom the Son choses to reveal him’, Jesus says ‘I thank you, Lord of heaven and earth’. Jesus is speaking for God here, Jesus gives God a face and makes it so humans can hear his message, listen to him and trust him. Jesus asks us to trust him, trust in his teachings, trust he will fulfil the promises that he made for the future after he has gone, trust that when Jesus said that he was going away he would return that he would and we wait patiently for that day to come, trusting in Jesus and trusting in God that one day those promises will be fulfilled.

Trust is a difficult thing and sometimes when we look in the world you wonder how full those promises were from Jesus but that doesn’t matter because he made a promise and we trust than one day he will come back and we will all be there waiting for him when he does. Trust Jesus, let him catch you when you fall, protect you from the arrow and know that he will always be there when we need him. Amen