Trust

Jesus said to his disciples: “Do not be afraid any longer, little flock, for your Father is pleased to give you the kingdom. Sell your belongings and give alms. Provide money bags for yourselves that do not wear out, an inexhaustible treasure in heaven that no thief can reach nor moth destroy. For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.” (Luke 12.32-34)

In what is probably considered Georges Bernanos’ most famous novel, The Diary of a Country Priest, he tells the story of a young priest who has been stationed in the countryside where he attends to a group of difficult parishioners. As the story moves along, the priest has internal and external struggles, culminating in his dying from stomach cancer at the end of the book. 

His final words from his deathbed is what makes the book all the more memorable. The dying priest utters these last words, “All is grace.” With those words, Bernanos reveals his own as well as the priest’s own realization about life with all its difficulties. It is that whatever the appearances to the contrary, the love and mercy of God are still there. His grace is at work in all things.

Supposedly, Bernanos borrowed the phrase from Saint Therese of Lisieux who was reported to have said the same thing from her deathbed. Interestingly, when Bernanos’ own death came, he uttered the same words as he left this world, “All is grace.” Like the character of the poor country priest that he created in his book, he had come to see that God is not absent or removed from the messiness and the misfortunes of life, but instead is very present, his grace always permeating the moment.

It is a good verse for us to remember as we look at the scripture that has been selected for us on this Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time. We find ourselves in the latter half of Chapter 12, having heard the first half last Sunday in the parable of the rich fool who built bigger barns, propelled by his own voracious appetite for more possessions and blind to the reality that none of them would follow him into the grave.

Truth be told, the first part of what we have today is a continuation of that section. Oddly, it is conjoined with three parables about being ready for God’s return and reclamation of all of creation. At first glance, it would appear that the first part should have been included with last Sunday’s reading and the three parables should stand alone today.

I tend to agree with that train of thought. However, the argument can and is made that the judgment of God as emphasized in the parables is already anticipated in the story of the rich fool who finds himself suddenly face to face with the harsh judgment of God who says to him, “You fool!” The condemning words make it clear that the rich man did not live in expectation of the eventual judgement of God, but lived in the moment, eating, drinking, and being merry.

Rather than address those three parables–a worthy cause for sure–I want to draw our attention to the first part of the selection where we find Jesus telling his disciples that they “should not be afraid, for their Father is pleased to give them the kingdom.” In these two verses, we find Jesus reiterating the message of the story of the rich fool, urging his disciples to “provide money bags for yourselves that do not wear out,” an obvious reference to the deep pockets of the rich fool that will mean nothing in the end because he did not share his wealth and instead chose to keep everything for himself.

Here, we hear Jesus repeat that it is far more important for a person to provide for “an inexhaustible treasure in heaven that no thief can reach nor moth destroy,” a strong dismissal of the rich fool’s misplaced priorities in his pile of wealth that will hot save him in the end, urging his followers to think beyond the here and now, seeing that investing in eternity is going to be a much bigger payout than whatever wealth is secured during our short lifetime on earth.

Again, inexplicably, we find a short passage about the birds in the air and the lilies in the field being skipped over, the perfect bridge to Jesus’ words that follow next, “Do not be afraid any longer.” As a result, we can say with assurance that the scalpel that was used to splice the scriptures for these two Sundays was not a sharp one for sure.

Fortunately, most of us are familiar with the skipped verses about God’s care and concern for even these little ones in his creation, the feathered birds and the beautiful lilies in the field. Jesus concluded those verses with the words, “They don’t sow. They don’t harvest. They don’t have a storeroom. They don’t have a barn. God feeds them! You matter considerably more than birds.”

With knowledge of these preceding verses, the segue to Jesus’ urging his disciples not to be anxious makes perfect sense. He has asked them to “not seek what to eat or what to drink,” the worry of the world, but to trust that the Heavenly Father knows what they need and will provide for their sustenance. With that trust in place, they won’t need bigger barns or a trust fund to alleviate their anxieties in this life. They have something far better.

In many ways, it is the same challenge he issued to his disciples when he sent them on their missionary journey, telling them to take little to nothing for the trip, but instead to trust on the hospitality of the people with whom they visit. It is the same message. There is no need for anxiety. Grace is everywhere. It will find us.

So that is the question before us today that we will need to answer and the answer we give it will be fundamental to the way in which we live in this world. Do we believe “all is grace,” or do we not believe in God’s goodness? If we are able to find it in ourselves to believe in the benevolence of the Most High God who loves the birds of the air and dresses up the lilies in the fields and loves us even more, then we will have no need to grasp tightly in our fists the material goods of the world, fearful that opening our hands will mean losing everything we have.

On the other hand, if we find it impossible to concede that God is gracious, loving, and generous, then we will tighten our fists, refusing to let go of the earthly treasures we have, stockpiling our goods to ensure that we never have to go without, amassing more and more because we are fearful the day will come when we do not have enough.

Truth be told, it may be the most important question we ever ask ourselves for the simple reason that the answer we give will decide the way in which we live in this world. Our stance will be one of living with an awareness of the generosity of God, confident that there is no need to worry about tomorrow, or living without the belief that God is caring, filled instead with anxiety about what tomorrow may bring our way. 

Put another way, do we choose to live in a world governed by the gracious giftedness of God, or do we choose to live in a world ordered by chaos and chance? If we choose to believe in the ever-present grace and goodness of God, we move in the world light-footed and unburdened by anxiety, living in the embrace of a loving God. If we choose to believe in a God far removed from human concerns, we put our trust in ourselves, hoarding and holding onto everything we can, living in fear that our surplus will run out.

Although I disdain reductionism, I will go there for a moment. I have personally known two types of people. One type opens the newspaper and hurriedly turns to the stock market page, eager and uneasy to discover possible earnings overnight. The other type of person opens the newspaper and turns to the obituary page, noting who has passed away overnight and what is said about them.

As we can see, these are two very different ways to start the day. The first is concerned about profits and portfolios, seeing how much more wealth we can amass. The second is concerned about the passage and the brevity of life, realizing how quickly everything can disappear. Sometimes in a heartbeat, so we must choose wisely what to do with the short while that we have in the world. Each person moves into the day ahead with a different attitude, one primed by the print on the page.

More than the other evangelists, Luke is a believer in going for broke. As we hear him have Jesus say today, “Sell your belongings and give alms.” It is much the same that Jesus says earlier in the gospel when he puts before his followers the commands, “Give to everyone who asks of you and from the one who takes what is yours do not demand it back.” 

Similarly, in his second volume, Acts of the Apostles, Luke will on one occasion describe the early Christian community as one in which “all who believed were together and had all things in common. They would sell their property and possessions and divide them among all according to one’s needs.” A few chapters later he will say much the same, writing, “the community of believers was of one heart and mind, and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they had everything in common.”

In other words, the early Christian community truly had the same unconcern about tomorrow as the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, trustful that God would provide for them, believing that his grace was everywhere, freely and generously given, allowing everyone to partake, twelve bushel baskets left over when all had eaten.

Obviously, it is a high ideal and the facts show every single day how out of reach it is for most of us. But ideals exist to call forth our better angels, to move us forward away from our fears, and to force us to decide what is worth living for and what is worth dying for. It is the same with Jesus’ words today, “Do not be afraid.” It is a high ideal for a people either racing for a high built on many possessions or running away from fears of losing everything by popping anti-anxiety pills.

In one of Frederick Buechner’s books, he tells of a personal experience he had where trust was in the forefront. He wrote, “I remember sitting parked by the roadside once, terribly depressed and afraid about my daughter’s illness and what was going on in our family, when out of nowhere a car came along down the highway with a license plate that bore on it the one word out of all the words in the dictionary that I needed most to see exactly then. The word was TRUST.”

Buechner asked the reader, “What do you call a moment like that? Something to laugh off as the kind of joke life plays on us every once in a while? The word of God?” He answered, “I am willing to believe that maybe it was something of both, but for me it was an epiphany. The owner of the car turned out to be, as I’d suspected, a trust officer in a bank, and not long ago, having read an account I wrote of the incident somewhere, he found out where I lived and one afternoon brought me the license plate itself, which sits propped up on a bookshelf in my house to this day. It is rusty around the edges and a little battered, and it is also as holy a relic as I have ever seen.”

Listening to Luke’s account of Jesus’ words today, we would all do well to have a similar holy relic, reminding us that those who truly follow Jesus can only do so if they are fueled by trust, believing in their heart of hearts that God is good and that his grace is everywhere for the taking. Such believers are easy to spot. They are not loaded down with luggage or worries, and they are the first to offer a cup of coffee and the shirt off their backs.

–Jeremy Myers