Kendall's Notebook page 14
Sermon: "Trust and Covenant"
By: Kendall Brown
Text: Mark 6: 1-13
July 6, 2003, Communion Meditation
In today’s lesson, we find Jesus giving his disciples a pre-mission briefing. His instructions to travel light are clear. We, who struggle to keep our own travel bags under the 40 pound minimum on most major airlines, can hardly imagine traveling in the stripped to the bare bones fashion that Jesus required of his disciples.
The disciples’ mission was also a learning exercise. Jesus wanted his followers to learn what he already knew. Trusting God was the ground for everything that he did. He wanted his travelers to travel light, not even carry a bag, so that the only load they carried would be one in their hearts – trust in God. When the disciples arrived in a town hungry, thirsty and tired, Jesus wanted them to know that God would provide for them. When the disciples were welcomed, they were to learn that the welcome of villagers was God’s welcome. He told them to move on quickly when they were not welcomed – trusting that God would take care of those who were inhospitable to the disciples.
The opposite of trust is not distrust or a lack of trust. From today’s story we learn that the opposite of trust is the attempt to control and to provide the security that control brings. Most of us like to know where the next meal is coming from. Keeping things under control is making sure that we have adequate provisions or the means to provide them. We would think of ourselves as being deprived and with our lives totally out of control if we did not know where we would be sleeping tonight or if we even had a place to sleep. Our comfort zone ha little room for not knowing where our next meal will come from. We like having things a little more under control.
Jesus wanted his disciple to know that that sense of control is basically an illusion to begin with. We fool ourselves in our confidence about our next meal when in fact we might not be alive to partake of our next meal or in good enough health to enjoy it. This is the reason for beginning each meal with a grace, thanking God not only for the food but also for the fact that I’m still here to eat it. God gives each of us life, which is much more than food. Many of us forget to thank God for our food, not to mention thanking God for our being here to eat the food. There is solid Biblical foundation for the practice of saying grace in today’s story of the disciples who from meal to meal had to trust God that the next meal would be prepared and waiting for them.
This past week brought me an up front and personal time for reliving and relearning the lesson of our lectionary this same week. Last Monday night, the President of your congregation visited me to talk about responding to the events about which he spoke earlier in this service. John told me about a special meeting of the Consistory planned for the following evening. In our discussion, the question of my presence at this meeting arose. Given that the purpose of the meeting was to attend to business that was very much the church’s business to attend to, John wasn’t planning on my attendance. However, as we talked about this question, he did open the door to my presence if I felt strongly enough about it. There is an old hymn entitled, “Once to Every Man and Nation.” It felt very much to me like one of those moments. Basically, the decision was a choice between either trusting or trying to control by being present.
I opted to trust. There are joys to be found once we do trust that we will never know or experience if we don’t trust. The joy in this past week for me, and it is a deep and abiding joy, is this morning, knowing that the lay leadership of this church and this congregation are incredibly trustworthy. I would not know that as deeply and with as much certainty if I had attended the meeting.
Between Monday night’s conversation with John and the meeting Tuesday night I talked with several of you about the meeting. Some of you raised your eyebrows a little when you learned that I would not be attending the meeting. A couple of you even remarked, “Are you sure you don’t want to attend?” Indeed, I wasn’t sure of a lot. But that lack of certainty and sureness is what faith and trust is all about.
Henri Nouwen, a popular 20th century Jesuit teacher and theologian, taught that spiritual growth is a series of disillusionments. Egocentricity fills us with illusions of self-importance from which we must be disillusioned in our spiritual journeys. Placing our security in power and wealth is a fundamental illusion of the human soul unguided by a heavenly spirit. Thinking that we are in control in all of the places where we have no control at all is a wide spread and oft-found illusion which stands in need of disillusionment by the power of trust.
I might have attended last Tuesday’s meetings operating under the illusion that my presence would help me keep everything under control and to my satisfaction. Had I attended, I would still be DWI, driving while illusioned, thinking I was still in control. When we are driving under the illusion of control, we never learn the depth of trust and trustworthiness that is all around us. I would not know this morning, what I now know, about the trustworthiness of my congregation and its leaders.
Sometimes trusting feels like walking along the edge of a cliff on a gusty day not knowing for sure if the next gust will be strong enough to blow you over the edge. The disciples knew that feeling as they went off on the journeys trusting the hospitality of strangers in strange places. On this fourth of July, I remember the stories of George Washington, who trusted that his rag tag army could eventually bring down a much more powerful enemy force and whose personal conviction became imprinted on all future coinage in the country – in God we trust. Jesus trusted God’s will and love even as he was betrayed, denied, deserted, arrested, and sentenced to death.
At the Last Supper in the upper room Jesus called his disciples together and trusted them to be his covenantal partners in his mission on earth. He was betrayed by one. But it never was in his hands to control whether or not he was going to be betrayed by one or the whole crowd. Nothing that he might have done could have controlled what Judas did. Covenant and trust go hand in hand. Covenanting is glued together by trust and is impossible without trust. In our United Church of Christ, which we celebrate this week as our church meets in Synod, covenant is a fundamental theological principle. I don’t believe that any other denomination takes covenant and trust quite so seriously.
We are in a minority – a very small minority – in the larger worldwide Christian movement, but I think a very important one. In most places where Christians organize themselves and call themselves “church,” they do so in an authoritarian way. In most Christian churches grounded in authoritarianism instead of in covenant-keeping and trusting, the minister would have never stayed away from last Tuesday’s meeting. Imagine a Catholic priest, or a Greek Orthodox priest, or a Mo. Synod Lutheran, or an Episcopalian priest, or even a Methodist minister doing that. It wouldn’t happen in those other Christian authoritarian settings. Church government without the minister present is forbidden, if not in de facto practice, in most cases by church law. One of the great gifts of being in the UCC is the ever deeper levels of trust that we are compelled by our theology to let the spirit lead us into. There is a new life to be found in that trust and for all intents and purposes that new life is the life of Christ offered to us at this table of covenant and trust.
On this Fourth of July and Synod week, I also have to mention that our ancestors in faith working out of their covenantal theology also gave the world the democratic system of government. The Separatists in 16th century England maintained that each local congregation had the right to call by election its own pastor. This was a radical, revolutionary and seditious idea in those days. The Separatists were driven out of England. They went to Holland, a land of religious tolerance in those days, before eventually coming to North America, by then known as Puritans, our ancestors in the UCC.
The form of church and town government cultivated by the Puritans in the 1600’s mentored the writers of our country’s constitution in the 1700’s. Covenantal theology underwrites democratic philosophy in our history. As we come to this table of covenant and trust, rejoice in all the gifts given to you, our country and the world by those who have gathered in covenant at this table before you.