February 27, 2005
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
When Joy had her surgery about ten days ago, I was sitting in the waiting room along with about a half a dozen people. We all had brought books and newspapers to read, laptops to work on, and we all had the uneasiness of waiting to hear from the surgeon. And just like clockwork, separated by a matter of minutes as it was like all the surgeries started at the same time are now ending at the same time, surgeons started to come out one after another to inform each loved one on how the surgery went.
Before Joy’s surgeon came out, I overheard what the other surgeons were saying to the others in the waiting room. I wasn’t eavesdropping as much as the doctors were more excited to talk with those waiting to hear reports. One person was having knee surgery and it looked like more surgery will be needed. Another person was asked to step outside to look at some x-rays. Finally when Joy’s surgeon came out, she said, “Is there someone here for Joy Ng?” She told me that the surgery went well and there were no complications.” I was relieved and thanked God.
But I wondered what the others in the waiting room were thinking. When we go into surgery, we literally put our lives in the hands of the physicians. Whether we are sitting on the dentist chair or being treated with some experimental drug or relying on a friend to get us out of a jam or even hanging on for dear life waiting for a rescue vehicle to get us out, we say, “my life is in your hands.” We are placing absolute trust in the other person.
We trust that he isn’t going to place us in deliberate danger or cause us undue pain. We trust that she is going to do the best for us. When we put our life in someone else’s hands, we are saying that we’re willing to yield to this person’s decisions for us.
Today we are talking about yielding to God, offering everything we have and are to God’s care. But sometimes, we often think about placing only a specific concern, a particular situation, or a so-so problem into God’s hands for him to heal or guide or discern. Now this is not all bad because we’re still turning to God. But sometimes in our minds we separate out what we want to give to God and what we want to keep for ourselves. In other words, we are in control of where in our lives we want God’s influence and where we want to be self-sufficient. We want to decide what we place in God’s hands and what we will keep tightly close in ours.
Trusting Moses
In the Exodus passage for today, we meet the Israelites in the midst of their forty-year journey in the wilderness. For forty-years, they literally placed their lives in the hands of Moses, who was operating at God’s command. They have gladly left behind centuries of slavery, but now they’re having second thoughts about this “in God we trust” commitment they made long ago. After all, they went from slavery to a desert. What kind of Promised Land is this? When they couldn’t find available water, they began grumbling among themselves. They started questioning and quarreling with Moses.
Now before they got to this camp where no water was found, they had witnessed the frogs and the gnats and hail and locusts and other plagues as well as the Passover. They saw those who were pursuing them swallowed up in the Red Sea while they got safely across to the other side. When they were hungry, they saw manna falling from the sky to sustain them daily. They saw the Lord going before them as a pillar of cloud in the day and a pillar of fire at night. They had so much evidence to show that when they put their lives in God’s hands that God will provide for them. But like any group of people, they started to grumble.
And now they were becoming anxious, which often happens when we as human beings are not in control of a situation. Their imaginations began to run wild. They were tired, thirsty, and hungry, as anyone would be at the end of a long journey. Then they exaggerated their misery by accusing Moses of bringing them out of Egypt to kill them, their children and livestock with thirst like none of the previous times when God provided for them ever made a difference.
They didn’t want to put their lives in God’s hands anymore.
Trusting Ourselves
We know that trust is not something that you can just make happen. Being trustworthy requires someone to consistently over a period of time be there or follow through with their promise before we would say so and so is trustworthy. Although God provided for the Israelites, they still became anxious and worried about where the water is.
So the people began putting their own parameters on what “providing for us” means. They put God to the test by demanding water right then and there. They wanted a 24/7 Costco Warehouse God whose sole purpose was to satisfy their needs, and the people of course would have the final say in what they needed. God would now be more like a butler, and if they didn’t like what he handed them, they would send him back to the kitchen for something else.
The Israelites adopted an “if-then” mindset: if they liked what God was offering them and he provided for them in a way they found satisfactory, then they would follow him. If they didn’t like what God offered, then they would grumble that God didn’t care and had abandoned them.
In this season of Lent, how much of your life would you trust God with? Would you place your entire life in God’s hand like you would do when you trust your life in the hands of your surgeon? Would you only trust God with those things that are really not that important in case you think that God won’t come through for you?
What happens when we don’t trust God is that we begin trusting ourselves exclusively. We desire to control the events around us to become self-sufficient and self-reliant, needing “nothing from nobody.” We won’t trust anybody except ourselves. We come to believe that the only person we can really trust is ourselves and not even other people.
This is a true story. There was a weight judging competition in England where the challenge was to guess the weight of an ox. As you might imagine, it was very difficult—if not impossible—for a single individual to guess the weight of the ox. But that’s the point of the competition.
It occurred to the British scientist that the crowd as a whole might do better. So he studied the estimates of 800 people at the competition—people who were smart, not so smart, old, young, and representative of all types of professions. Their collective estimate was 1,198 pounds.
The actual weight of the ox was 1,197 pounds. The study was on how large groups are often smarter than isolated individuals, and how collective wisdom shapes economies and nations. A crowd can be surprisingly smart and effective—even when members of the group are lacking intelligence or experience. The point of this interesting illustration is that when we trust each other rather than trying to become self-sufficient and self-reliant, we become actually smarter.
We know that when we are raising up families that it is nearly impossible to do that all by ourselves even when there’s a Mom and a Dad. But when we trust our families to each other by creating extended families such as through our church, we are better equipped to parent our children wisely. We receive advice from parents who have more experience or people who can provide modeling that we can’t provide by ourselves.
We know that when we grow in the faith that we first start out just taking small steps. But we know that when we have a community of disciples who serve as coaches, encouragers, advocates, and mentors who pray for us and show us Jesus’ way, we grow into active discipleship. Later on this afternoon, our Deacons will be meeting with a number of people who have decided be baptized or transfer their membership to become members of this community of disciples we called FCBC. They will testify that they need Jesus and we all need each other to remain faithful to God’s mission. Being self-sufficient in faith is not the goal but to trust in God with our lives is.
When we trust God with our lives and receive the wisdom of Christ’s teachings, we would also become more holy to redirect our lives toward God’s plan for us. If trusting the answers to 800 people to come up with the correct weight of an ox by only one pound, imagine what it would be like when you trust your life with God. Instead of trying to do things on our own which often goes against God’s plan for us which is why we struggle so much, we go with God who will lead us to the Promised Land.
Boasting
Getting caught in this self-sufficiency trap can also be found in the New Testament. In Romans 2:8, Paul lashes out at those who are self-seeking and self-centered and who claim that they are “self-made” men and women. They are building up and puffing up themselves and have forgotten God who created them.
In Romans 5, we read from Paul that if we are going to boast, we should boast about God. We shouldn’t be boasting about how much money we make or how successful we are or bragging about what our children are doing. But as an alternative to puffing ourselves up, Paul offers three reasons to boast about God.
The first is to boast in the “hope of sharing the glory of Christ (5:2). This isn’t the kind of hope we often think of—I hope for a car for graduation. I hope I get a big bonus. I hope we get to go to Disneyland this summer. Those are wishes that may or may not come true. But the hope of sharing the glory of Christ is the knowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior and will return again. We can boast about that!
We can boast in our suffering (5:3). It does not say to boast about how sick we are, how much pain we’re in; or even how much we’ve sacrifice for Christ. That is one way to boast in our sufferings that brings us glory. Instead, we have faith that though we suffer, suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope and this hope does not disappoint us because of God’s love. One of the reasons given by the Vatican on why Pope John Paul continues to hold on to life and is suffering with his ailments is that he truly believes that in his suffering, he would glorify God just as Jesus’ suffering did on the Cross. We were never promised a pain-free, sickness-free, annoyance-free life. We were promised abundant life.
And at the end of this passage (5:11), we can boast in God through Jesus Christ. Today we live in a society where we hear so easily about Christ that the meaning of his life has been watered down. Instead of being shy or embarrassed about being a Christian, we should be boasting about our faith in Christ! We can boast and lift up the fact that Jesus came to do something amazing—die for the forgiveness of sins. Now we are reconciled with God. That’s worth boasting about!
Trusting God
On this third Sunday of Lent, these passages can be gentle or perhaps not so gentle—reminding us of who is truly in charge and who deserves recognition. We have become such an individualistic society and have become so self-sufficient that we don’t need anything from anybody. We will make our own miracles. We will boast about our successes and others will boast about us. But when we do that, we ultimately like the Israelites say to God that we can’t trust him.
The challenge for us is to place our lives in God’s hands. Like the Israelites experienced first-hand acts of God’s salvation, we too have seen the crucified Christ resurrected on Easter day and people just like us witnessed to his wounds and resurrection. We have a whole Bible filled with eyewitness accounts that God can be trusted.
If we are willing to trust our health to the doctor in surgery, we can begin to learn how to trust in God who is the Great Physician.
Trusting God with our lives can be seen in the example of a tree. Every growth upward and outward necessitates a deepening and widening of the roots. Some trees have roots that extend downward to stabilize the tree at the center and to reach the deepest source of water. The root system spreads outward to provide balance and to draw nourishment from the soil. Since the work of setting the roots takes time and energy, trees often grow slowly. But this slowly developed root system is what secures their endurance as sturdy, hardy trees. In our spiritual lives, the root system is trust.
Throughout the Bible and in the promise God made in Christ Jesus, we have witnessed God’s trustworthiness. Our own sufferings have not discouraged us but only produced the endurance to persevere. Our endurance has nurtured a strong character that witnesses to God’s steadfast love. And when we realized as a community over a long period of time—perhaps forty years or 125 years—that God is still with us, there is undeniable hope that God will not disappoint us.
Let us put our fragile lives in God’s hands to live.
Let us pray.
Dear gracious God, once more we come before you to acknowledge that we are in your hands, hands that became flesh and reached out to welcome the outcast and the overlooked. Hands that were pierced with the nails of rejection, and yet which even upon the cross were still symbolically extended in good will even to enemies. Mold us each day into a greater likeness of your Son, that we might continue his ministry of grace and love. In the name of Christ we pray. Amen.