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It was early January of 20, and two late in the day when my dad's sister and I decided we would back pack up a trail to a top of a plateau in my home state of Arkansas and

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spend the night. The journey was more difficult than we planned. The sun set quickly and it grew quite cold. The air was so dense with mist . It was hard to see even with our headlamps

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, the leaves and the rocks on the trail grew slick. When we got to the top, we realized that the three person tent we thought we had brought was a two person backpacking tent Which so recently

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after Christmas celebrations is more like a 1.5 person tent . And though we had packed a freeze dried meal , we apparently had not packed the stove by which we would turn our crunchy pseudo food into real mac

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and cheese. We dropped the backpacks that somehow felt heavy but which clearly held nothing And we forced our way into that 1.5 person tent contorting ourselves to make it work, moisture seeped in through the walls.

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The cold wind howled and we crunched on freeze dried mac and cheese and maybe because of the wilderness, the sudden real ness of our frailty or maybe because of our physical closeness. Someone suddenly spoke what was

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so deeply on all of our hearts. I'm not sure who gave voice to it. Mom is turning 70. Soon My mom is eight years older than my dad and as she neared 70, we could

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all feel a threshold approaching Not because 70 is so old, but because in my mother we were confronted with how young it is. Yet we'd all been too many funerals of people in their 70s. As

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a child, I thought they lived full complete lives . But now everything in my soul screamed not enough . Not nearly enough. More time, please God ! Much more time squished together. And all of

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us weeping. We spoke about the passage of time , the reality that someday we would not all have one another, the heartbreak of loss, the crushing reality and unfairness of death. As we spoke,

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there was no easing of the pain, no lessening of the feeling of impending unimaginable loss. But we named our fear and as I have to learn again and again, when a fear is named honestly before

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God, alternatives previously unseen. Present themselves? It seemed that night in the howling wind, in the wild, missed in the naming of our fear, God drew close and an alternative to fear presented itself

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in the form of a question I felt more than heard. Can you trust? Can you trust? Can you trust that whatever time you have left with loved ones will be filled with the deep and abiding

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, steadfast, unshakable grace of God. Can you trust that when the times do come for goodbyes, as they inevitably will? But somehow the goodbyes themselves will be marked by the deep and abiding steadfast,

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unshakable grace of God. Can you trust, ultimately in God God who gave life to all creation God , who loves all creation fiercely enough to face death . God who turned death itself into a place of

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life. Can you trust? There are many concepts associated with this day and this season of lent mortality , repentance, morning reconciliation, Gordon Lathrop helps us see that this season is also profoundly about trust.

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He says that in the face of death our faith offers a simple radical claim of hope. God can be trusted. So during lent, we strive to entrust the truth about who we are, our mortality

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, our sin to the truth about who God is , and we strive to do so by re routing our trust in that mysterious story that proved God's trustworthiness . The story of jesus christ and him crucified.

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The idea that we are called to trust in this season, likely does not sound radical to you. Trust God has become a trite phrase, noting passivity , even apathy, lazy calls to trust that God

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has a plan, have no doubt characterized some of the worst pastoral care. So, let us remember that the trust required of us in this season, linton trust is something more complicated, more challenging and

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more powerful than the concept of trust often thrown around . Whereas we often talk about trust as something that brings calm and soothe the soul linton trust agitates us awakens us with Isaiah to injustice moves us with the

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psalmist to see the weight of our own sin and cry, Have mercy on me. O God. For when we trust that God is present in this world, Working to redeem every wrong we can no

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longer stand complacent or comfortably complicit. Whereas we often talk about trust is something that allows us to feel safe. Clinton trust calls us into struggle into peril , calls us with paul into ministries of great endurance

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, affliction, hardship and calamity for when we recognize that christ's own trust in God led him to the cross. We can no longer think that our trust should keep us safe, comfortable and successful. And

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whereas we often talk about trust as something that is earned when another person measures up to our standards in linton trust, we surrender even our standards, our criteria of measuring to God that they might be transformed

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, that we might discover with paul, that precisely when we look to all the world to be unknown . We are well known to be dying. We are profoundly alive to be sorrowful. We know the

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deepest joy to have nothing. We may indeed possess everything. For when we trust that there is wisdom in the folly of the cross, we learn to expect that what we have clung to as wisdom may

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be revealed to be folly so understood in these terms , can we trust with all the humility, courage , willingness to act, honesty and openness to being transformed. It requires, can we trust God?

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Last week in his sermon Bill Greenway gave us a powerful timely reminder. We are not called to survive . We are called to love Thinking about this call . I'm struck by the immense spiritual fortitude, the

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immense trust it takes to actually live that call to love even at the expense of survival. From my advantage point, working with churches from within our office of institutional advancement, I'm confronted with how particularly hard

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it is to guide institutions like churches like seminaries towards this call. The pressure for any institution to survive is immense survival growth and financial success are the un interrogated goals of institutions churches today are desperate to survive

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. Many pastors and leaders who were trained to theologically engage all of the complexities of our call to love . Find themselves in institutions where the central question is survival. This is dangerous concerns about crafting a vision

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for growth, capturing young adults and families, increasing social media presence. Whether to build the coffee shop in the church, whether to hide higher the business consultant and if it might be possible that the next

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pastor is young with Children, concerns like these are so utterly time consuming and tempting for our egos that addressing them can take up all of the energy of a church and a pastor before anyone is visited in

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a hospital, before anyone is fed before anyone is taught to understand the life changing beauty that has happens at the table or the font, let alone before the reign of God is proclaimed and good news,

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preached to the poor and release to the captives before the sick are healed and broken hearts mended before outcasts are eaten with and sinners forgiven and all called to repent and believe the gospel. It is not easy

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. It may not even be possible to faithfully worship and follow a god who chose love at the expense of survival with our hearts bent on surviving. When confronted with all the institutional and social pressure towards survival

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, the call to love can sound small, naive and futile in those moments. It is helpful to remember all the things jesus could have done and did not. He could have crafted a brilliant strategic plan

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for the growth of his movement. Instead, it seems he sought out hurting people. He could have befriended the rich, the powerful, the charismatic and the attractive knowing that such relationships tend to prove quite

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useful. Instead, he challenged those very people and befriended the forgotten, overlooked and despise he could have raised money when his following grew large. Instead, it seems he trusted God would provide. He could

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have capitalized on his following following achieving any number of personal dreams. Instead, he surrendered those ambitions, rejecting the temptations in the wilderness. And we know he could have come up with many convincing reasons to

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avoid the cross. Instead, when the time came he walked that path. None of these decisions were based on strategic calculations for there are no strategic calculations by which these choices are effective. Only Love would

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recognize these decisions as right and only through Trust could they be chosen? Trust is a hermeneutic that presumes that what is known at the outset at the beginning is not the full story. Trust is an ontological

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approach that presumes there are ways of knowing that cannot be evaluated until they are lived into Trust. Takes steps towards what is just right and beautiful before it is clear the road will rise to meet our feet

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on that path. Trust means facing our fears honestly , before God expecting that when a fear is named to God, alternatives previously unseen. Present themselves through Trust, Isaiah found that when we pour ourselves out

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, giving our food to the hungry and helping the afflicted would become more full than ever, like a spring whose waters never fail through trust, the psalmist discovered in the bleakest moment of guilt that the sacrifice

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acceptable to God is a broken spirit and that God's love is steadfast and filled with mercy. Through trust , paul discovered, we can be rich when we are poor, joyful, when we are sorrowing and

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alive when we are dying through trust, we too may come to understand more fully the wisdom and the folly of the cross and to know that even when we walk in the valley of the shadow of death

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, ultimately we find grace, the deep abiding steadfast and unshakable Grace of God, beloved Children of God , you are dust and to dust. You will return. We proclaim these words and seek their wisdom

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today. But they are strange words. Strange because while the whole world looks for loopholes in aging and mortality, these words are unshakably certain about where each of our lives will end. Strange because while the

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most popular self help advice of the day suggests all your problems can be cured by an immense sense of your own self worth. The wisdom of these words lies in deep humility. They are strange because in

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this time of anxiety when the church is trying to be attractive and marketable, there's nothing attractive in a marketable way about these words. But perhaps the strangest thing of all about these words is that they come

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from a passage in genesis that is regarded as God's curse on humanity. But when we come forward and mark them on our bodies and ash, they strike our souls as a blessing. And in the spiritual

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of accepting the truth about who we are christians for centuries have found neither despair nor nihilism nor apathy. But grace, deep abiding steadfast and unshakable. When we entrust the truth of who we are to the

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truth of who God is our vantage point shifts. Strange words become beautiful and what is thought to be a curse is found a blessing and the desolate path of wind, revealed to be a path of abundant

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life, So trusting in the Grace of God. Let us walk that path with christ. All thanks