God Trusts Us

12/21/11 God Trusts Us GUMC Youth

Last time we got together, two weeks ago, I said that we live in a culture that just kind of assumes that everyone is a Christian, that we live in a "Christian nation." When I say that our culture does this I don't mean to say that it is a good thing, like many other people might. I am not at all convinced that it is a good thing to think of America as a Christian nation and I will tell you why. When we say, "We live in a Christian nation," it is all too easy to get blinded and tricked into thinking that what is Christian must be American and, even more dangerously, that what is American must be Christian. If we tried, we could probably make a pretty good list of things that we do as Americans that are completely acceptable in the eyes of the culture that, when we look at it through the eyes of the gospel, maybe we shouldn't do.

My point for bringing this up over and over again is not to give America a black eye. I am glad to live here and not somewhere else. I am not anti-America in any way. I am, however, so radically and completely pro-Jesus that I refuse to take my cue of what Christianity is all about from what I see in American culture. With that in mind, I have been trying to focus on things that Christmas teaches us that are more important than what we might imagine from looking at our secular culture during December. Last time, we talked about how, because at Christmas we celebrate the coming of God into our world, the Creator becoming a creature, Christmas is actually the center of all of space and time. Tonight, I want to talk about how Christmas shows us just how much God trusts us, which is a pretty amazing thing.

Now, when we ask the question, "Does God trust us," it seems at first glance that we can only take our answer in one of two directions. The first way we can look at it is to say that, because we are such sinful people and God is so holy, it would be hard to imagine that God really trusts us. It seems that every single time God entrusts anything into human hands, things fall apart. God calls Abraham and he starts telling lies to keep himself out of trouble. He calls Moses and he makes excuse after excuse to get out of doing what God wants him to do. He takes David from a small farming town and makes him one of the greatest kings that Israel ever had, and yet he responds by committing adultery and murder. There is no end to the examples we could put forward of how human beings continually let God down because they keep doing stupid things. Not only that, we can all look into our own hearts and see that we are all capable of doing stupid things, even if we don't do them all the time.

If we want to look at things from this angle, we could say that there is probably no greater example of why God should not trust us than the crucifixion. When God, in all his love and mercy, comes to meet us where we are, what do we do? We nail him to a cross. Back in the 90's, a singer named Joan Osborne asked the question, "What if God was one of us?" That question isn't an abstract one for us Christians. In Christ, God actually did become one of us. What if God was one of us? We have shown by our actions that we would kill him. If the very coming of love into our midst could only provoke anger and hatred from us, why should God trust us?

Now, we could look at it from a completely different point of view, one that our modern culture might like pretty well. After all, we don't need to look very far to find that the view that human beings are basically good and trustworthy by nature is amazingly common. Never mind the fact that human beings consistently commit horrible crimes against each other, never mind that our world seems to be continually torn by war, human beings are basically good. Even though it is clear where I come out on the issue of the inherent goodness of humanity, let's try to take it seriously and see where it leads us in this question, "Does God trust us?"

Now, if human beings are basically good and trustworthy, then the answer to the question whether God trusts us is a resounding "Yes!" And why not? After all, I do what I can to be good and trustworthy and I am sure that many, if not all of you do what you can to be good and trustworthy people. Being "good people" is really important to our culture today. What is interesting is that, because our whole culture teaches us to be fixated on ourselves, we sometimes don't realize how much we get in our own way to be good, especially because everyone around us seems to be doing the same things. I have some friends who have committed to giving away quite a bit more of their money to their church and other causes than the average person. Once, some friends said to them, "Boy, I wish I could give more, but I just don't have enough money to do it." The fact of the matter is that these same people who wanted to give more "go out" every weekend, which is a kind of code for, "going out to eat at a nice restaurant and getting a few drinks (and alcohol can be expensive)" which costs a lot of money if you do it all the time. The fact of the matter is that these people have plenty of money to give if they wanted to, but because they have believed the lie that says they have to spend all their money on themselves and they look around and see everyone else around them doing it, too, they simply can't see it.

Even if we put those kinds of situations aside, how many of you would say that there are people in the world who are not good people? How many of you would say that there are people you go to school with who are not, to all observers, good people? How many of them, if asked if they were a good person, would say "no?" Probably not any, or very very few of them. We all know people who are not good people, and we can see that human evil is a very real problem in our world, but we really want to believe that human beings are, at their core, good. Why is that? I am more and more convinced that it is because we want to convince ourselves that we are good people. After all, if I were to ask you, "Are you a good person?" you would probably say, "yes," right? What would you have to do before you would consider it possible that maybe you weren't as good as you would like to think you are? We desperately want to say, "Yes, God trusts us," because we want to think of ourselves as people that are worthy of trust, as people who are good enough for God to rely on.

So, we have two ways of looking at things. One of them says that God trusts us because we are trustworthy people, but can only say it by pretending the Bible doesn't say what it says, or by pretending it doesn't mean what it so obviously means. The other view says that God does not trust us because we cannot be trusted. This view takes the failure of humanity very seriously, but that seems to be a pretty depressing view of our situation and our relationship with God. In fact, it actually makes God seem kind of stupid, since he can't seem to figure it out that human beings keep messing things up, that every time he tells them to do something, they seem to find new and creative ways of sinning in the middle of it.

If you have gotten to know me at all over the last six months, you can probably tell that I don't quite fit into either group. On the one hand, it is clear that I don't think that human beings are, by nature, good. Yes, God created human beings good, but if that is the last word, we have forgotten the whole story of the Fall and the countless examples of human beings not being what they ought to be that we find in the Bible. And yet, though I feel that way about human beings, I didn't title this message "God Doesn't Trust Us," but "God Trusts Us." Unless I am being sarcastic (which I'm not), I must think that God actually does trust us. If that sounds odd, hopefully it will make more sense in a minute.

This is the whole reason why I had us read the passage from Luke's gospel where the angel speaks to Mary and tells her that she is going to be the mother of Jesus, of God when he stepped into his creation. Have you ever thought about how much God must have trusted Mary? There is so much that can go wrong in a pregnancy, especially two thousand years ago. God is saying to Mary, "I trust that you are going to take care of yourself throughout this whole pregnancy, I trust that you are going to be able to stand strong when people make fun of you for getting pregnant before you got married (because you know the truth that they don't and maybe even can't understand), I trust that you will make a good mother, that I will even allow you to raise Jesus, the God who created you." There is not a single parent in the history of the world who could say with absolute confidence, "I was a perfect parent." They might say, "I did the best I could do," or "In spite of all my faults, my kids turned out alright and that's all I can hope for," but I have not met anyone who would say, "I did everything right as a parent, every single day." And yet, here we have God entrusting the raising of Jesus into the hands of this ordinary, fallible human woman. That is pretty astonishing.

Once we begin to see that God actually might trust us at Christmastime, we start seeing that trust all over the place. Think about it; God comes into our midst, lives his life, has a teaching and miracle-working ministry, but he doesn't stay forever. Jesus eventually leaves. He is killed, raised from the dead, but within two months, he ascends back to his Father and is no longer among his disciples in the personal and physical way he had been before. At the end of the Gospel of Matthew we read what has come to be known as The Great Commission. "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age." And then he leaves, he ascends to heaven.

Do you see what Jesus has done? He was raised from the dead in glory, he did not have to leave, but he did. He left the ministry that he, that is God himself, started, in the hands of ordinary people like you and me. Not only that, as we talked about a few months ago, it is a pretty odd group of people that he entrusts his ministry to. The one that we usually remember is that he trusts his ministry in the hands of people like Peter who denied him three times on the night he was betrayed, but that is not all. He also trusts it in the hands of people like James and John who were hot-tempered, impulsive people, and people like Simon the Zealot and Levi the tax collector, people from two groups that hated each other so much, it is amazing they can even be in the same place at the same time without violence, and Thomas the skeptic. When we look at the people that Jesus actually trusts to carry his message into the world, we realize that they are just like us, weak and broken people who have made a lot of mistakes. It is true that he sends his Holy Spirit to strengthen those disciples, but it was in their hands nonetheless.

So, what about all the failures of humanity that we pointed out earlier and are on nearly every page of the Bible? I mentioned that there are some who might say that because we are so unfaithful, God does not or at least should not trust us, but that isn't what I believe. That is because when I look at the failures of all the people in the Bible I don't just see them but I see something else, too. I also see God's plans not hindered by it. The sin of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, the disciples and a host of others did not stop God from doing what he was trying to do.

Here is some good news. We can look at the Bible, the whole of Christian history and even people in our lives today and see that God can do mighty things when people wake up and listen to him. It comes as no surprise that God moves when people are faithful, but does God only use our successes? What about our failures? Can God use them, too? It is clear that God absolutely does use our failures, and sometimes uses them as the most powerful expressions of his grace. We all know Peter denied Christ three times on Good Friday. After he was raised, Jesus asked Peter if he loved him, but he didn't just ask it, he asked it three times. It is almost as if Jesus was undoing those denials. Jesus showed Peter that those denials from back then did not stop him from being his disciple right now.

To give another example, look at the crucifixion. Was there ever a more evil act of humanity than the betrayal and murder of the Son of God? Was there ever a greater failure of human beings to respond in faith to what God was doing? In all of history, the single greatest failure of humanity is in the crucifixion of Christ. And yet, that astonishing failure did not stop God from using that very moment as the most profound expression of his love for us. The crucifixion has been so completely transformed by God, so completely used by God for his own purpose, that many people find it very difficult to appreciate the human evil expressed in it.

The point is that God is not afraid of your evil. That doesn't make your evil good, and he is still going to work with you to get rid of that evil, but he is not afraid of it. In fact, it is very likely that he will take your biggest mistakes and transform them into the the means by which you are bound all the more tightly to him. When I look back and see all the times I have made mistakes, I realize that God's grace is bigger than all of them. That God is powerful enough to use me, even when I am weak and broken and can't seem to get my act together.

God trusts us, even if we don't think he should, because he knows something that we often forget: That we are his children, that he loves us with a love that will not let us go, that he will not abandon us, even if we might want him to. So, when you go back home and back to school, remember that God has given you a mission, a great calling that you can't get out of even if you wanted to because God trusts that you can do great things, and that he can use even your failures for his glory. So go and be bold, for through his Holy Spirit, God himself dwells in you and has made you his own. Let us pray.

AMEN