Gracious God, just as Jesus put his trust in you, help
us to look to you for help. Amen.
“In
God we trust.” You can find that phrase on license plates, government
buildings, police cars, and printed US currency. If you want to hear my
thoughts about what that phrase is doing on our money, we can get a cup of
coffee or a pint sometime to discuss it, but that’s not the point of this
sermon. Instead, I have an even more basic question for us to ponder: what does
it mean to trust God?
Psalm 25 will be our guide as we wonder about what it means to say “in God we trust.” As Episcopalians, we have a special affinity for the Psalms. Reciting and praying with Psalms is so integral to how we worship that the entire Psalter is printed in the Prayer Book. In Morning and Evening Prayer, we pray with all 150 Psalms each month. When I plan funerals with families, sometimes they need to think about which Scripture readings to use, but they know that they want to use Psalm 23 or 121. Plus, the Psalms are the most oft-quoted book in the New Testament, so for Jesus and the authors of the New Testament, the Psalms were clearly foundational prayers. Some scholars have even referred to the Psalms as the Book of Common Prayer of ancient Israel.
In
most cultures prior to ours, people memorized things. But we have so much information
coming at us these days that it’s hard to keep it all in our heads. Almost
certainly, every person of faith in Jesus’ time knew the Psalms by heart. And I
don’t just mean that they had them memorized. Memorization is one thing. I
remember when I was in third grade, my parents were going to take us to see Disney’s
newest movie, “Aladdin.” But I had a multiplication test coming up, and I wasn’t
quite ready for it. So I crammed as hard as I could to memorize 7x9 and the
rest. Sure, I committed those numbers to memory, but they didn’t get into my heart.
Knowing
something by heart is different than brute memorization. What things have you
more than memorized, and know by heart? Maybe a recipe your grandmother taught
you and reminds you of being in the kitchen with her? Perhaps the lyrics to a
song that got you through the challenges of high school? It could be that a
hymn, Psalm, or prayer has worked its way into your heart.
We
know that Jesus not only had memorized the Psalms, but he knew them by heart.
When he was in agony in the Garden of Gethsemane praying before his arrest, he
prayed Psalm 102. In the excruciating pain and shame of the cross, he used
Psalm 22. When he sought to teach his followers about his character, drawing on
the image of Psalm 23, he tells us that he is our Good Shepherd. The Psalms
were deep within Jesus. He has a Psalm-shaped and Psalm-soaked theology.
It’s
not too late to start a Lenten discipline, and I’d suggest that you commit a
Psalm to heart. I know a priest who, when in seminary, was given the job of driving
to the airport and picking up various visiting lecturers for the seminary. Well,
one of these airport runs was a bit more special because the guest was
Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He had just gotten off a long flight from South Africa
and it was time, at least on his clock, to pray Morning Prayer and so he
invited the seminarian to join in the prayers as he was driving. When it came
time for the Psalms, the seminarian was shocked that Tutu just started reciting
the Psalm for that day without a Prayer Book. I’m not saying that we need to
commit all 150 to memory, but having a few to carry with us is like carrying
around a treasure that can never be lost or taken away.
I
bring this all up because I’m pretty confident that Jesus prayed Psalm 25 while
he was in the desert being tempted by Satan. I mean, he was in the desert for
40 days, I wouldn’t be surprised if he prayed this Psalm a few dozen times.
And, at least for me, Psalm 25 takes on a more profound significance when I
think that, through the gift of our tradition, we can pray the same prayers
that Jesus did. When Jesus was hungry, tempted, alone, and maybe even
frightened, he had Psalm 25 to buttress and comfort him. Whatever you’re
dealing with – maybe issues at work, or with family, or with your health, or
just the general state of the world – Psalm 25 is there for you as well. It is
a Psalm that helps us, in the midst of challenges and struggles, to put our
trust in God.
This
is clear from the opening line, “To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul; my God, I
put my trust in you.” The Psalm asks for God’s protection from humiliation and
enemies. As Jesus was in the wilderness, facing exhaustion, famine, and trials,
he would have been looking for God’s salvation from the treacherous schemes of the
Tempter.
A
quick word on this character referred to as “Satan.” What exactly is meant by “Devil”
or “Satan” would be the topic of a different sermon or lecture. What will help for
now is a reminder that because the evil we deal with is felt personally,
Scripture depicts this evil personably. Temptation, sin, and evil are things
that we experience not in the abstract, but rather they cause real pain, guilt,
and shame. What bothers us about the news from Gaza or Ukraine isn’t the idea
of conflict, rather it’s the very real human suffering that goes along with it.
Evil is experienced personally, and so Scripture speaks of evil as something that
is personified in Satan.
When
we are in the wilderness, sometimes our trust in God wavers. We start to doubt
that our prayers are more than wishful thinking. We worry that there is no
light at the end of the tunnel. And if our trust in God starts to wane, we
might put our trust in other places and coping mechanisms that aren’t up to the
task of being mighty to save. So Psalm 25 helps us by giving us words when our words
fail us – “My God, I put my trust in you.”
The
word “trust” means something like allegiance, fidelity, confidence, or devotion.
In other words, trust isn’t an abstract emotion or idea, it’s a commitment, an orientation,
a priority. Trust is not something we have, it is something we do. And Psalm 25
shows us what trust in action looks like in our lives.
Verse
3 says “Show me your ways, O Lord, and teach me your paths.” The salvation that
Psalm 25 envisions is not the elimination of our enemies or the solving of all
our problems. No, the Psalm asks us to be led and taught in the ways of truth.
Too often we think of salvation in terms of God being something like a disaster
relief organization that comes in and cleans up a mess for us. And, to be sure,
sometimes that’s exactly what God does. But more often than not, God is like
the shepherd of Psalm 23 who walks alongside us through the valley of the
shadow of death. God walks with us and shows us the path through the chaos.
The
question for us is whether or not we are open be being guided. Though we like
to know what the master plan is, God is much more like the GPS guidance that so
many of us use. What makes our mapping software helpful is that it knows where
we are and tells us what to do next. But it doesn’t get too far ahead of us. If
we had to listen to the full set of directions or look at the map at every
turn, we’d make a lot of mistakes, get lost, or run off the road a lot. What
makes GPS work is not that we are given the full directions, but rather that it
guides us. If you ask me how to get to St. Louis, I have no clue. I guess it’s
a bit north and a lot more west. I don’t have to be given a set of directions to
get there. I just need to be guided whenever a turn needs to be made. And when
that guidance comes, I have to trust it and follow it.
That’s
what Psalm 25 asks for – “Lead me in your truth and teach me.” Are we willing
to be guided? Can we be humble and realize that we don’t see the whole map, and
even if we could, we wouldn’t be able to make sense of it all? Instead, we can
pay attention to the call of God amidst the busyness of life. Sometimes it’s
just a word – maybe someone’s name that God would have you to check in with.
Maybe it’s a word like “peace” or “mercy” – which might be something that God
intends for you to receive, or perhaps something that God would have you share
with someone else.
If we are going to trust
God, we have to allow ourselves to be guided, to follow the path God has given
to us, to realize that we are not the captains of our lives. Instead, we are
sheep in the flock of our good, gracious, and loving savior. Yes, God will let
us wander astray. God doesn’t put leashes on the sheep. And where we are prone
to wander, we trust that our Good Shepherd will always go to find and save the
lost sheep. That’s what the Cross reminds us – that our trust in God is secured
by the love that went as far as the Cross and Tomb to find us.
This
is the foundation of our trust and is found in verse 5 – God is compassionate
and loving. I know that I say it a lot, but it needs to be repeated over and
over again because the world can be such a vicious and vindictive place: God is
love and God loves you not because of anything that you have accomplished, not
because you’ve followed the rules, not because you’ve gotten it right. God
loves you because God has chosen to love you from everlasting. In other words, God
chose to love you before you were born and so the love is unconditional. God’s
love for each of us is independent of our mistakes or our successes. There is
nothing that any of us have to do to earn God’s love and there is nothing that
any of us can do to lose God’s love. That’s what Grace means. And that is what
allows us to trust God – that God is always with us and always for us.
Where
Grace connects with our lives is that, as verse 6 proclaims, God remembers not our
sins and transgressions, but remembers us according to divine love for the sake
of God’s goodness. Yes, we all make mistakes and none of us are perfect. But
God’s love never depended on that. We sabotage our relationships with our
selfishness and fear. We undermine our mental and physical health with poor
decisions. We do the things that we know that we shouldn’t be doing and we don’t
always do the things that we know we should. We put ourselves first, we make
excuses for ourselves, and we can be lukewarm when it comes to generosity,
justice, and faith. There’s no need to deny it, we can confess our shortcomings
in faith and trust that God will not remember that about us. We don’t have to
keep up the lie of perfection, but we can let go of our sins and trust that God
does the same. We are not our mistakes. We are not defined by our flaws.
God
remembers us according to goodness and love. So we can stop trying to make ourselves
loveable and rest in the enoughness that God has given to us as a gift. You are
loved and cherished by God not because you are useful or good, but because you
are you. The message of the Gospel and Psalm 25 is that we are freed by the
power of God’s love to stop keeping score, to stop evaluating, to stop
performing, and instead we can enjoy the beauty of this world, the gift of
life, the wonders of love, and the companionship of one another.
Psalm
25 is what’s known as an acrostic – each verse starts with the next letter in
the Hebrew alphabet, sort of like a nursery rhyme that we learned when we were
younger. It makes the Psalm easier to remember, and this is a message worth
carrying with us through Lent and life. When we pray with Jesus in the words of
Psalm 25 that “in God we trust,” we are making a declaration that we trust that
God’s mercy is bigger than our sins, that God’s peace is more lasting than our
deaths, that God’s grace is truer than anything in all Creation, that God’s
love is making all things well. And that’s worth knowing by heart.
