Trust Issues

Rebecca Sheridan
Sunday, March 1, 2020
Matthew 4:1-11

Do you have trust issues? Let me answer that for you, yes, you do.  We all do, as our reading from Genesis reminds us today.  I’ve often wondered, “Why did God have to put that tree in the garden, or why did God tell Adam and Eve not to eat from that tree?”  As a parent of toddlers, I know that anything forbidden is the most attractive object in the room.  “Don’t climb on that.” “Don’t jump on that.” “Don’t touch that” means the moment I turn my back, they are doing that very thing I asked them not to do.  If I don’t draw any attention to the thing I don’t want them to have or play with, they don’t notice!  If God didn’t say anything, would Adam and Even have been content to simply pass on by and eat other fruit and not worry about that one tree?  We’ll never know.  What we do know is, this story about human failure is descriptive STILL of our reality today. It describes our inability to do what God asks us to do, and our tendency to listen to other people (or snakes in this case) rather than listen to God.  
The thing is, Adam and Eve’s temptation was not just to eat a piece of forbidden fruit. The temptation goes much deeper, into a trust issue with God.  We have trouble trusting anyone and anything, including God.  The snake convinces them to put their trust in something other than God.  Temptations are things that draw us away from our relationship with God.  Adam and Eve have trust issues.  We have trust issues still today – whether it’s wondering about fake news and alternative facts or wondering if it’s a real post or a Russian troll on our social media pages or if that person coughing next to us at a restaurant just had a tickle in their throat or the coronavirus!. And, if you look at the number of people today who say they are not religious or claim to be atheists or agnostics, it seems we still have trust issues with God today.  Unfortunately, we can list some legitimate reasons that people ought to not trust the church today:  clergy abuse scandals, the way some people have been treated by the church including women, the GLBTQ community, and immigrants, when we say “all are welcome” and then don’t take that claim seriously, we damage not only people’s trust in the church but people’s trust in God.  It’s very important as Christians that we be honest with others about our shortcomings as individuals and as a church to point people back to God, rather than to ourselves – God is the one who is to be trusted, not us.  When we sing “return to the Lord your God” during Lent, it is a reminder to all of us that Jesus came to repair the trust that has been broken in us from the very beginning with Adam and Eve.  Lent is a time where we seek to rebuild trust between God and others, to trust that God IS gracious and merciful, abounding in steadfast love.  That God is the one who absolutely can be trusted.
Enter Jesus, who is baptized and anointed by God to share the good news of the kingdom of God in word and deed, but is driven by the Spirit into the wilderness for a period of preparation before he begins his public ministry.  First, it is important to note that Jesus is able to do what Adam and Eve are not able to do – trust in God, and rely on God’s word and power to sustain him against the temptations of the devil.  Jesus trusts God and calls us to trust God, too.  Jesus does what we can’t always do, as Paul describes in our Romans lesson.  “By one man’s obedience, the many will be made righteous,” Paul promises us.  We all face temptations. We know what those temptations are. Regular worship calls us to confess those temptations and the times we have given into temptations to God.  Yet the free gift of the grace of God forgives us our sins and helps us move beyond our temptations to place our trust in God once again.
Today is the first Sunday of Lent, and we began Lent on Ash Wednesday with an invitation for us to consider growing spiritually in three specific ways:  prayer, fasting, and sacrificial giving.  My colleague describes Lent as a time of “spiritual spring cleaning,” which I think is a helpful image for us to have.  In worship, we put our focus a bit more on confession and repentance, and we think about what we might give up or fast from for Lent, what we might take on as an extra prayer or devotional practice.  We may strive to give more generously of our time as a volunteer or of our financial resources with a special offering to our church or other nonprofit.  All of these ideas are great ones to consider for our spiritual spring cleaning to prepare for Easter.  But it is important to go back to the story of our original parents to remember that there is an underlying trust issue in our souls that we cannot mend on our own.  Lent is not just about doing extra things for God, it is primarily about remembering what God has done for us through Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross.  Spiritual practices in Lent – prayer, fasting, and sacrificial giving, are means to an end, to help us place our trust more fully in God.  We strive to have our lives point back to God and to help others trust in God more fully, too.
It is interesting to note that Jesus’ answers to the devil’s temptations mirror the first three commandments, which are all about trusting God instead of oneself or other things.  1) You shall have no other Gods before me 2)You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain and 3)Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy – the devil tries to tempt Jesus into relying on something other than God: bread, misusing God’ s name needlessly by pointlessly jumping off a high tower, worshipping the devil rather than God.  The temptations we face today I think are similar – the temptations we face like Adam and Eve are not as simple as refusing to eat a second dessert or have just one cigarette (not that those are easy temptations for us to resist!). The root of temptation is to distrust God who is love, who is good, who is grace, who is redemption.
The whole point of this temptation story is that God can be trusted, and Jesus as God’s son can be trusted!  Jesus can do what we can’t – trust God fully.  All of us at some point or another have been disappointed by trusting someone or something that broke our trust. Jesus points us back to those first three commandments so that we might remember who is truly worth our trust, our worship, our service, our time, our everything.  Adam and Eve couldn’t be trusted to follow God’s ONE rule.  Jesus is able to trust God fully, not giving into temptation, so that we might be able to trust and rely on him and HIS strength, not our own, when we feel weak, when we are tempted, when we want more than anything else to break the rules.  Whatever you have decided to do this Lent – prayer, giving something up, taking something on – may it lead you to trusting God more fully.  Amen.