He Will Act
As I prayed for God’s help in bringing His word to our Parish before last Sunday, I was struck by the fact that our lectionary readings for that Sunday were the very same ones that shaped the worship of Christ Church Anglican in its first service twelve years ago. This alone was cause for pause, reflection, and thanksgiving, but even more striking was the content of these readings. The unifying thread for each was that the life of those who live in relationship with the loving God we know is one of walking by faith. Of particular importance to our Parish, on our first Sunday and now, is Psalm 37:5 “Commit your way to the Lord: trust in him, and he will act.” So I would like to briefly reflect on this verse in hopes that we would be reminded of God’s repeated, known actions for us, his people, in history and at Christ Church Anglican, as we look ahead to what is next.
For most of us, and I can say with certainty for me, being reminded that God is the one who acts and we are the ones who trust is, at first, a hard word to receive. It is hard because it means that the perfectly natural forms of human effort we turn to in times of great difficulty could never be effective without God’s acting in them. Frenetic human activity, whether it takes the form of imagining a better world in which we had our own way and would not make the same mistakes as others, seeking out guilty parties to blame, or some form of beating ourselves up for what we could not have known, is not the way of God. Our primary responsibility, a responsibility that is really best understood as a gift, as followers of the living God is to follow his actions, to wait expectantly in faithful anticipation of those actions, and to trust. It is worth acknowledging the difficulty in moving forward in faith this way, in the way of trusting that God will act once again for us, instead of trusting in the devices and desires of our own hearts.
Yet, there is no denying that, though it may not be easy, moving forward in trust and faith is the way of God and the way of grace. God does not call us to a life of faith and trust in order to stifle us, keep us down, or do us harm. On the contrary, God encourages us to live this way because it is when God acts that we come to know him as the good, kind, gracious, and loving God that he is, and it is when God acts that holistic and sufficient solutions to our problems become reality. We know God is a deliverer because he delivered his people Israel from bondage and slavery in Egypt. We know that God is merciful because he dealt mercifully with his servant David in spite of David’s repeated unfaithfulness. We know that God uses seemingly incomprehensible, impossible situations, such as captivity in a foreign land, to redeem, restore, and return his people to right relationship with him because we see it in the life of Israel. Above all else, we know that God alone is capable of turning the cross into the empty tomb.
God alone is capable of turning death into new life, and we know that this is true because God has already done it in Jesus Christ. It is exactly this promised and completed act of God, the transformation of death into life, that the Christian clings to, it shapes the whole trajectory of our lives as Christians, and it is where we place our hope as individuals and as a Parish. So we as a Parish again place our trust expectantly in God’s activity instead of our own. We do so remembering that there is truly nothing God can not do for us because there is nothing that God has not done for us.
Christ Church Anglican is a gifted Parish, and those gifts have, without question, played a significant role in bringing us the growth, abundance, and influence that we are blessed with and enjoy. Yet, who among us could really say that this has been the result of human activity? God has used us for his good purposes, but it is God who has used us, and not the other way around. Times in which God’s people are left wondering how something could happen, how a seemingly clear path ahead could go so far off-script and times when a kind of death seems ever-present are exactly the times when Resurrection, new life, and new beginnings come just as unexpectedly. We commit our way to the Lord, who can do and has done infinitely more than we could ask or imagine…because he acts.
In Christ,
Father Matt