MY TIMES ARE IN YOUR HAND

My Times are in Your Hand (April 28, 2002)

"Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me." John 14:1

Our readings this morning speak powerfully of trust. Stephen, the Church's first martyr, bows his head and prays as the mad crowd picks up their stones, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit" and then with a powerful witness to Christ he asks forgiveness: 'Lord, do not hold this sin against them." If that isn't trust in Almighty God I don't what is.

In the reading from Psalm 31, the psalmist prays "In you, O Lord, I seek refuge….be a rock of refuge for me…My times are in your hand." It is one of the great affirmations of trust in God in the Bible.

Peter writes movingly to Christians in the midst of persecution: "you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people…once you were not a people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy." All the promises of the Old Testament are now precious gifts to Gentile Christians to whom Peter was writing, shoring up their faith and trust in God for difficult times with references to the Old Testament.

And Jesus' familiar words of comfort: "Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house there are many dwelling places…."

This is the kind of truth which we have to continually remind ourselves if only because life so often apparently contradicts it.

These are confusing and difficult times in which we live. It seems each day we hear of more bloodshed in the Middle East. We have now the growing phenomenon of suicide bombers, which we first experienced on September 11 to devastating effect. Whatever one thinks of the rights and wrongs of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there can be no doubt that with the suicide bombings we have entered an area that is ethically beyond the pale.

We struggle in vain to understand this and we are shocked at it, just as Americans in World War II were shocked by the kamikaze bombers. And we have seen this idea now in young people: in Colombine in Colorado, and in Arkansas, and now in Erfurt, Germany, where Martin Luther went to university. When the person who would do you harm apparently places no value on his own life the entire situation changes drastically.

Many people are still suffering from 9/11 here in our city. Our church has become part of the hub church program of Presbyterian disaster assistance. People are coming here now for help. Larry Hanau said the other night the stories some of the people have told him break your heart. I am really glad our church is involved in this program and I am sure it will be a help to many people.

But one of the greatest helps we can give to people is the message of not giving up, of not being despondent. The Bible is full of this message and if these current crises get people to go back and read their scriptures with understanding, and then to put their trust in the God of scripture, then the church will have made an even greater impact than disaster assistance.

"My times are in your hands"

"You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood - all God's people - a holy nation, God's own people."

"Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid…"

Remember the context in which Jesus said "let not your hearts be troubled." Judas is about to betray Jesus. In John's gospel this occurs after the last supper. The shadow of the Cross is over the path of Jesus. And in that context he says to his friends "Don't be harassed. Set your troubled hearts at rest." He can say this because he affirms "You believe in God; you are to believe in me too". Faith is the transference of trust in ourselves to trust in the wholly reliable God as revealed to us in Christ.

Is this Pollyanna stuff? Not at all. The scriptures did not pretend that evil was an illusion or that trouble shouldn't be treated seriously. Jesus never said, "Don't worry, the worst will never happen." In fact, for him, the worst did happen. We should remember that Jesus lived in very anxious times. He lived among a people who had every reason to be anxious. They were a subject people, with few rights. They were heavily burdened by taxation, they had few medical facilities. Jesus didn't come and say evil was an illusion, nor did he offer a Pollyanna approach to life.

But he did teach us to call God "Father", and although it is true that not all fathers provide for their children, Jesus thought in terms of a father who cares for and provides for his children and above all can be trusted. Anglican Archbishop Donald Coggan has written that Jesus is saying something like this: "A little child in the dark is not frightened if his had is firmly in the grasp of his father's. The child is confident that the father knows the way out of darkness into the light, out of danger into security. He cares. He will provide. He can be trusted."

This is the heavenly Father Jesus talked about. This is very clear in the Sermon on the Mount: consider the lilies of the field, they sow not neither do they reap, but your heavenly Father cares for them. Are you not of much more value than they?" "Do not be anxious about the morrow, for the morrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day's own trouble be sufficient for the day."

The Brief Statement of Faith says, "We trust in God, whom Jesus called Abba, Father."

This is not a call for not taking precautions and planning. It is a call for getting our priorities straight: of what is truly important and lasting, of the great subjects of God's reign and justice, of life itself and gratitude for it and all it brings to us, and then that will give you a sense of balance, so important when things seem to be out of balance.

Yesterday there was a story in the Times about Sister Marie LaBolitta, a nun in Boston who feels betrayed in what the newspaper called a "male-led scandal" in the Church, as a person to whom one of the victims came with his story of terrible abuse, of her bold speaking out in a church culture which in no way encouraged such activity, of even asking for the resignation of the cardinal, of her encouragement of the victim to find a lawyer, and her total support for him in the trial.

And here parenthetically we must say that no church has a monopoly on clergy way-wardness - we remember for instance Mr. Jimmy Swaggert tearfully telling his TV congregation "I have sinned" - but we can say that Protestant churches which have a "call" system, such as ours in which lay people are fully involved, rather than an appointive system in which people are moved around from above, would have a totally different way of handling it.

Sister Marie said that for all she has agonized over the church in recent weeks she has never for a moment considered leaving it. "In the midst of this horror," she said, "I feel a sense of peacefulness about my ministry. I'm doing what I was meant to do with my life."

Now that is trust - powerful trust - in God.

There is a wonderful question in the Heidelberg catechism: "What is your only comfort, in life and in death?" And the answer is "That I belong - body and soul - in life and in death - not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ, who at the cost of his own blood has fully paid for all my sins and protects me so well that without the will of my Father in heaven not a hair can fall from my head; indeed, that everything must fit his purpose for my salvation."

This is one of the glories of the Christian faith. The God revealed by Jesus Christ possesses wisdom and power beyond all human imagining but never loses sight of the individual human being.

As the psalmist said so beautifully, "My times are in your hand".