Coming closer to God

Dear People of Christ Church,

I hope your Ash Wednesday is yielding some fruit for the beginning of Lent. We just finished our noon service, and will have another at 7 pm. I'll see you then.



There are some marvelous ways of coming near to God this year here at Christ Church, and I hope you'll take advantage. I'd like to share something with you I wrote in this space a few years ago-about this quote from Jeremiah.



Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit (Jeremiah 17:7-8).



Lent is a season of evaluating. We are asked to take a critical look at the way we live our lives. It's specific; Lent is emphatically not about 40 days to remind ourselves that we are sinners. It is, the words of our Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, a time for a tune up; like checking out all of the parts of the car to see if they operate correctly, Lent is a time to look at all the parts of ourselves and ask if they are working effectively.



Do you need to make more time to talk with your spouse? What about how you take care of yourself? Do you need to eat better, or exercise more? Do you need to give more money to global poverty relief or to community organizations, or your church? Where are you in your family relationships? In your work?



One reason it's so hard to do this work of self-evaluation is that we are afraid of what we might find. We're afraid we won't be able to change (or, perhaps more frightening, that we will). I think that's why I find today's text about trust from Jeremiah so compelling. It's almost as if the very grammar of our language can't accommodate the magnitude of God's intimacy with us. All of our usual ways of thinking will have to go. We tend to think of trust in terms of transaction; when someone has disappointed us, we say they have to "earn" our trust. If you do something nice for me, then you deserve my trust. I then give you my trust-as if it were a set of keys. I can then take the keys back-or, more aptly, change the locks-whenever I want. Christian faith is different. The love of God is so broad and so deep that God's very self can be our trust and God's promise can be our hope. We can become constituted by the trust of God-that trust can be as part of us as the blue in your eyes or the brown in your hair. That trust can permeate each cell. As Jeremiah writes, our roots will spread wide and our leaves stay green, even in seasons of drought.



That trust gives us the courage to take stock of our lives and to know that God will love us and be with us no matter what we find. The love of God isn't just something that makes us feel good; it empowers us to love each other and ourselves more deeply. It gives us the boldness to make change in the world and in our lives and catches us when we fall. It impels us outward as well as inward. What does it look like? The answer to that question is up to each of us to discern for ourselves. I think it is something to do with living courageously. A priest I know told me a story about a teenager who was going to be baptized. When she asked him why he wanted to be, she thought he would say something about pleasing his mother, or pleasant ritual. But he told her that it was because he wanted to know that the future could be different from the past. That faith in God's power of transformation for the future is as good a vision as I can imagine of what it means for God to be your trust. What is it for you?



Blessings,

Sara+