As I worked on this sermon early in the week I planned it as my “swan song” at St. Margaret’s, but as it was taking shape I received an e-mail from Susan asking me if I wouldn’t like to preach on my last Sunday here, which is September 3, so here it is one week early.

I have a theory about preaching and that is that every preacher has just one sermon to preach and that every sermon is just a variation of that one sermon. The theme may change every now and then over a lifetime with major life changes, but apart from that the theme is pretty consistent. I had wonderful chance to test out this theory when I served as Deployment Officer in the Diocese of Pennsylvania and later here in Washington. In that office I interviewed every priest who felt he or she would like to serve in the diocese, so that I could advise the Bishop that I thought this priest would probably do well, this one should be avoided at all cost, this one would do well but not at this parish. Most of these were very enjoyable interviews, and they gave me a chance to test my theory. I would tell each person about my theory and ask, “If there is any truth to my theory, what would your one sermon be?” After a nervous laugh and a minute of silence the clergy usually came up with an interesting and astonishingly honest answer.

Of course when you ask a revealing question like that you also leave yourself open to the same question, “O.K., and what about your one sermon?” After being asked the question a number of times I had a ready answer, but I think it was an honest one. “My one sermon,” I would say, “is that God is trustworthy and our life is a process of learning to trust everything to God, so that our lives can be a channel for God’s love.” Let me say it again. God is trustworthy and our life is a process of learning to trust everything to God, so that our lives can be a channel for God’s love.

So there it is, and here is my sermon, conveniently falling into three points. The first point is that God is trustworthy. This point is well made in some words by the Prophet Hosea who writes, “Come, let us return to the Lord; for it is he who has torn, and he will heal us;... Let us press on to know the Lord; his appearing is as sure as the dawn; he will come to us like the showers, like the spring rains that water the earth.” What a great analogy! Just as we can be certain that each morning the sun will rise, so we can be certain that God’s love is there for us day by day. Just as some ancient people felt they had to perform certain rituals to make the sun rise each morning, people throughout human history have felt that they had to go through certain ritual acts to placate God, to be sure that he would take care of them. But Hosea and his people knew that was not true, but that God is trustworthy, as trustworthy as the morning sunrise. Hosea ends this invocation from God to his people, “For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” The word which Hosea uses for “steadfast love” is the Hebrew word “hesed,” one of the great words in the Bible. It means divine love, love which is not dependent on our being loveable or deserving, love which, as the poet wrote, does not “alter when it alteration finds.” God desires this kind of love from us because it is the love with which he cares for us. That kind of love, of course, is the kind the New Testament talks about, in John for example, where we read of God “so loving the world...” It is undeserved, steadfast love, love showing the trustworthiness of God, love as constant as the morning sunrise or the spring rains. I can talk about God’s trustworthiness because I have witnessed it in my own life. In times both of joy and of pain I have found that God is there.

God is trustworthy, and our life is a process of learning to trust everything to God. Living out the second point is not easy, in part because we spend so much energy trying to control our lives and destinies. There is something in me that wants to be so right, so well behaved, so pious and upright that God will have no choice but to give me an exceedingly high position in the heavenly hierarchy - just a little down the line from Peter and Paul and Francis of Assisi, and just a little ahead of Martin Luther and the Wesley brothers.. I also want you to think so well of me that you would second my nomination! I know it sounds very silly, but don’t we all have some of that ambition in us, ambition to control our own lives and destinies? St. Paul points out this truth about trusting in God when he speaks of Abraham’s faith that he would be “the father of many nations,” and how that faith was tested when Abraham and Sarah in their old age didn’t have even one child. They longed for some kind of biological guarantee, at least one child of their own, but they had to wait and to trust the matter to God. Then when they finally had a son, Abraham had to face that dreadful temptation to give up that one human assurance in the form of his son Isaac. Trusting our lives and the things we value most to God does not come easily to us, and yet it is the step we need to take again and again, learning that we can not control our friends and those close to us, that we can not control or cure the addictions that threaten ourselves or our loved ones. Surrendering our own pride, our willfulness, our attempts to control is the basic step in learning to trust in God’s steadfast love. Our life as Christians is a process of learning to trust everything to God, so that in the end we can trust him with our very lives in the face of death.

The final point of my one sermon has to do with the hoped for consequence of our learning to trust the God who is trustworthy, and that is that our lives can be channels for God’s love. This truth about being a channel of God’s love was illustrated for me in a play on television I saw some time ago about a bitter old man who was forced to be responsible for a young boy whose life had been scarred by abuse. We discover that the man’s bitterness stems from the loss of his own wife and child years earlier. The old man finds himself responding to the boy, despite all of his old pain. But it is only as he is able to surrender his grief for the long dead family that he is able to be a channel of healing love to the boy. He tells him that his wife and child will always be with him, but that he has been able to put them to rest, as the boy can put his own pain to rest. God is trustworthy and our life is a process of learning to trust everything to God, so that our lives can be a channel for divine love.