Trusting

The key is knowing who to trust.

Hi friends! Thanks for being here. If you haven’t subscribed yet, give it a try for free. Paid subscriptions come with extras and fund ministries beyond the walls.

If you have friends who would like to be part of this community, please send them this week’s edition of The Woodlands using the button below:

And before we turn to today’s reflection, here’s some news I really excited about:

A Full-Hearted Life is now available!

Click the image or the button below to order A Full-Hearted Life: Following Jesus in This Secular Age. And it would be a huge help if you would share the image below or a photo of you and your copy (once you get it) on social media.

Okay, now for today’s reflection:

Trusting

Even the very best preachers tend to have just two or three sermons. I don’t mean that they keep reading the same text over and over. Instead, they take up certain themes again and again.

The themes could be love or grace, mercy or justice, or some other topic. And to be clear, these themes are deep and rich. Several lifetimes in the pulpit won’t exhaust them.

From what the Bible tells us, John the Baptist had just one sermon: get ready for the Messiah’s arrival. And like every preacher I know, John discovered that some of his listeners just didn’t get the point. Apparently, this got under his skin. So, he shouts to the crowd: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” (Luke 3:7-9)

Motivated by fear of a harshly judging God, people began pursuing the path of moral self-improvement. They figured that God is essentially a moral accountant. When the Messiah comes, he will add up the balance sheet of our lives.

Photo by Joseph Chan on Unsplash

If the number of your moral acts outweighs the number of wicked ones, you’ll be in the black with God. So, they scurried to stop sinning. Maybe they did their neighbors a big favor and started pointing out their sins, too.

Now it’s not as if John had no interest in the moral law. Quite to the contrary, the Baptist was pretty keen on doing the right thing as individuals and insistent that communal life should be built on a foundation of justice.

But you see, he understood that personal and communal righteousness were fruits of a deeper spiritual transformation. The Messiah is after a change of heart. Any behavioral course corrections will emerge from a new heart that only the Messiah can give us. Or, as John put it, “Bear fruits worthy of repentance.”

Getting ready for the Messiah starts with repentance. And what we need to repent is the path of moral self-improvement. John is telling us that we’ve got God all wrong. We’ve got ourselves all wrong. When we walk the path of moral self-improvement, we trust our own will to make ourselves acceptable to God.

John is saying something more like this: you’ve been trusting the wrong person. Your own will is going to let you down. You’re finite and imperfect. Paul put it this way: “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (Romans 7:15)

Photo by Vitolda Klein on Unsplash

Repentance involves admitting our powerlessness to get it right every single time. To admit that we could make ourselves perfect in the eyes of the perfect God by the force of our own will is an illusion. Instead, we entrust our lives to a power greater than ourselves to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. Repentance is a course correction in who we trust.

A new life emerges once we present to God what Henri Nouwen once called our unadorned self. Once we drop the pretense that we can make God love us on the basis of our moral achievements. We begin to trust that God loves us because that’s who God truly is. God is trustworthy.

The Messiah is not coming to function as God’s moral accountant. The Messiah is coming to change who we are—to restore us to who we truly are—at our very core. He will raise up children of God from the very stones. He will change our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh.

Mind you, this exchange all happened before John began to believe that Jesus is the Messiah. And once he did, he was clear that his own followers should take up with Jesus. He even said that he should decrease and that Jesus should increase.

And then John ran afoul of King Herod and wound up in the royal dungeon. Doubt began to creep in about Jesus. After all, Jesus was not exactly the clean cut, ascetical type.

Jesus was a regular party guy. And it’s not just that he ate and drank enough for religious leaders to call him a glutton. It was the company he kept. Tax collectors. Women of ill repute. Deadbeats. Cynical hipsters. Shady hedge fund managers.

So, from his darkened cell the Baptist sent some of his followers to put the question directly to Jesus himself. Are you really the Messiah? (Luke 7:20) Frederick Buechner paraphrases Jesus’s response like this:

You go tell John what you've seen around here. Tell him there are people who have sold their seeing-eye dogs and taken up bird-watching. Tell him there are people who've traded in aluminum walkers for hiking boots. Tell him the down-and-out have turned into the up-and-coming and a lot of deadbeats are living it up for the first time in their lives. And three cheers for the one who can swallow all this without gagging.

We don’t get to hear firsthand how John responded to this. But it stands to reason that he believed. To know Jesus as the Messiah is to be changed by him down to our toes. From that point forward our lives will begin to resemble the love we see in Jesus. We will begin to bear the fruits of repentance.

Photo by Torsten Dederichs on Unsplash

John’s words to the people of his day are just as relevant to 21^st Century Christians. More than a few of us assume that God relates to us principally as a judge. We are on this planet for a relatively short time. Our purpose in this life is to reach the level of moral achievement needed to meet God’s approval. When we make the grade, God lets us into heaven. Hell awaits those who don’t pass the test.

The late Tim Keller called this the Good Rules version of the Gospel. But the Gospel is Good News. News reports what has already been done, not what must be done in the future. The Good News is that in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God has already restored us to relationship with God and with all of God’s children.

Jesus shows us that God resembles the prodigal son’s father, not the grim reaper. God runs to us in our boneheadedness and embraces us even when we could use a hot moral shower.

God’s embrace heals us. God does not stand at a distance, waiting for us to clean up our act. God invites us to a heavenly banquet before we have time to change our clothes and wash our hands.

John himself had said that the Messiah would come baptizing in the Holy Spirit and fire. He meant that God would transform us.

In Jesus God bridges the infinite gap between our finite, messy lives and the infinite, perfect glory of divine life. God holds us accountable, but not with wrath. God holds us accountable with mercy. With compassion.

In Jesus, we see that God’s mercy is not judgment withheld or softened or diverted. Mercy is the healing, reconciling love of God poured out in shameless extravagance. God’s love transforms the lives it touches. God’s own mercy flows through God’s beloved. That’s what a life that bears fruit worthy of repentance looks like.

We feed the hungry. Clothe the naked. Visit the sick. We house the homeless and release the captive. We forgive offenses, hold each other accountable for love with love, comfort the afflicted, and afflict those whose comfort comes at the expense of others.

This is hard, sometimes dangerous, and frequently heartbreaking work. Jesus’s way of mercy can give each of us second thoughts. But it is the only way out of the prison of a hardened, lifeless heart.

What’s Next at The Woodlands Podcast?

The Rev. Pamela Dolan on her book Contemplative Gardening

An Advent/Christmas Series

Bishop Rob Hirschfeld on spirituality, wellness, and mental health (in 2025)

And, of course, more Ask Me (almost) Anything. Got questions? Hit the button and send them my way:

Upcoming Speaking Events

Bishop Reynolds Forum, St. Andrew’s, Sewanee, January 16, 202

Book Reading, Sewanee School of Theology, January 16, 2025 (available via livestream)

Preach, All Saints’, Sewanee, February 9 and Easter, 2025 (available via livestream)

Speaker, Diocese of Iowa Clergy Conference, February 18-20, 2025

Preacher and Speaker, Diocese of Louisiana Convention, Fall of 2025

You can schedule a virtual event or an in-person event with me by clicking the button below. My colleague Holly Davis will get back to you quickly.