“From Belief to Trust”
John 14:1-14
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
5/14/17
When our kids
were little, more often than not, a family outing consisted of a trip to the
woods. When we lived in Statesboro, GA, that usually meant going to the farm,
where we’d walk along the edges of sandy fields or down to the gas line on a
road that, at the time, was a shady tunnel of tall pine trees and of live oaks
with Spanish moss hanging from the branches like the corpses of ghosts.
When we lived
in Atlanta, that often meant a trip out to that magnificent granite dome called
Stone Mountain. In Mebane, we enjoyed the Eno River State Park near Durham
where we hiked, fished for blue gill, and watched water snakes sunning on warm
rocks. Or we just walked down the dirt road across from the church and wandered
through the pastures and woods of the Stanfield farm.
On these
outings, Ben and I had a running game we’d play. It wasn’t an organized
activity. It was more of a game of opportunity. When Ben climbed on a fence, a tall
stump, a rock, or a fallen tree trunk, I would stand below him and hold out my
arms. Without hesitation, he would throw his arms forward like Superman and
leap into the air. He laid himself out flat, vulnerable to whatever sticks,
rocks, poison ivy, or hard ground lay below. The pure joy for me in this was
that I knew that Ben knew that I knew that he was going to trust me, and that I
was going to prove trustworthy. And the next time he climbed on something, we’d
do it again.
Our game allowed the son to sail,
however briefly, through the air and to feel his body’s lightness in freefall.
It was a chance to see his father smile and to trust his father’s strength. It
allowed the father to demonstrate his playful yet serious love for his son, and
to feel that almost perfect delight of being trusted by his child. Such a game
had natural limits. Ben eventually got too big for me to catch him. While I
know Ben remembers taking those leaps, I’m not sure what, if anything, it still
means to him. To me, though, each leap and catch became a 2x4 in a load-bearing
wall in the structure of our always-under-construction relationship.
“Believe in God,” says Jesus; “believe
also in me.” Believe. Believing has
its place in the life of faith. Believing involves a conscious choice for an
individual to acknowledge God as a reality, even if a thoroughly mysterious
one. But any human decisions we make about God are neither the origin nor the
fulfillment of faith. This is what makes a relationship with God and
relationships with other human beings so different.
Ben and Elizabeth believed in me
because I was right there doing all the normal things that parents do. They
could see, hear, and touch me. I could make them feel happy, or angry, or hurt,
or embarrassed. (Given the right circumstances, that last one could be a lot of
fun!) Using the same criteria, however, they also believed in rocks and pine
trees, water snakes and blue gills. In all of those things, seeing was
believing. The only choice to make was whether and how to interact with them.
The disciples struggled with this
very choice. Immediately before the section of John we read today, the always impetuous
Peter declares his absolute loyalty to Jesus saying, “I will lay down my life
for you.” But when the cock crows, Peter discovers, to his heartbreaking shame,
that all he really believes in is
what he sees before him. At that moment, Peter still lacks a larger and vastly
more important aspect of faith.
Just before Peter’s empty
declaration of loyalty, Jesus says that the thing he really wants from his
disciples is for them to love him by loving each other. And that requires more
than belief. It requires trust. Trust is that larger and more important thing,
because without trust, real Love, particularly agape Love, well, it just doesn’t
exist.
“I am the way, and the truth, and
the life,” says Jesus. Trust is the path to the
way. Trust is the steadfastness of the
truth. Trust is the very breath of the
life. The ancient Hebrews called it batach,
and we see it embodied in Abraham, Moses,
Hannah, and the prophets. In the east it’s called, among other things, saddahati, and it describes the daring
faith that allows one to leap into relationships of transparent and vulnerable
mutuality.1 May Native American traditions speak of The Great Spirit
from whom all things come, to whom all things go, and in which all things
exist. In Celtic Christianity it’s called the Cosmic Christ, the Christ who was “in the beginning with God,” the
Christ through whom “all things came into being,” the Christ who was, and is,
and always will be one with God – the God who, says First John, “is Love.”
Through its first two millennia,
the Church has often used Jesus’ way,
truth, and life statement to try to shackle God to exclusively Christian
perceptions and opinions. And while I don’t think that we can claim to be the
only ones to see that which we call the Christ, I do think that we can claim,
with confident yet humble gratitude, that, in Jesus, we do experience the Son
whose entire life, death, and rising again consist of one great leap after
another into the Father’s arms. As Christians, we discover the way, the truth, and the life by trusting and following Jesus,
the one who embodies world-transforming Love.
Just as the Father calls Abram to
go, Moses to lead, Hannah to surrender her child, and David to repent, the Son
calls Peter, and all of us, to trust. He calls us to the disciplined practice
of leaping into the unknown, knowing that no matter what happens, through our
experiences of trust, God is declaring God’s presence to us.
Our leaping trust stirs the rich
compost of our lives and creates opportunities for us to witness to God’s
presence and faithfulness by living in greater dependence on God’s Love,
compassion, and justice in and for the world.
These are the “greater works” to
which Jesus refers.
This is the promise of an incarnational
faith.
Believe it or not, but trust it
with all your heart, and soul, and mind, and strength.
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