Trust Me is the name of a brilliant short story written some decades ago by John Updike.  In a dozen or so pages, he weaves together several stories about Harold, who explores the mysteries of trust.  We meet 4 year old Harold at the edge of the swimming pool with his father’s arms outstretched; we follow him through a harrowing air travel experience with his first wife and a ski trip gone bad when he takes his girlfriend up the big chair lift too soon; and the story winds up with a confusing and funny anecdote about stumbling home from his son’s house after eating a hash brownie, and staring at a dollar bill, consumed by the motto he finds there about trust.  Religion comes up frequently in Updike’s writing; in his longer novels, there’s almost always a church and a pastor dropped into the plot someplace, and in Trust Me, through these various memories, we see Harold struggling with whether trust is ever really possible between flawed human beings, and what a challenge it is even to trust God.

There are plenty of ways one might choose to describe the purpose of the Bible.  I think one reasonable summary is that it’s a story of people struggling to trust God.  I know that the Bible can be intimidating, written so long ago and in a very different place than our own; and yet along with the sacred texts of the other major world religions: the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching, the Bible is undoubtedly one of the most important books in human history, and it’s the one that we claim as our sacred text, and it is often misunderstood.  So I take the time, periodically to preach a sermon that may not be inspirational or motivational, but is simply about understanding the Bible a bit better.  Today’s will be one of those.

Isaiah 12 is our text for this morning, and as I say in the sermon title, you might call this short chapter a summary of the Bible in six short verses.  The context is this:  God’s people in Jerusalem are the inheritors of an important culture with a rich history.  But in recent generations, under the influence of corrupt rulers, God’s people have forgotten who God called them to be.  They have neglected the most vulnerable ones among them, they have forgotten their values, and their kingdom has crumbled and scattered.  Only a remnant survive an onslaught from the Assyrians; but survived they did, though bruised and defeated.  God was deeply grieved to when the people wandered away from the covenant they shared; but God’s anger has given way to forgiveness and mercy, and God has redeemed them, and welcomed them home.  It is in this moment that today’s scripture emerges, saying:  “You will say in that day, “I will give thanks to you, O Lord, for though you were angry with me, your anger turned away and you comforted me.  Surely God is my salvation; I will trust, and will not be afraid…”

This is really the story of the whole Bible:  that God gathers together a people, shows them a way to a rich and full life, and invites them into community with God and one another; but inevitably, some temptation, some quick fix, some idol, some gambling app of the ancient world convinces them that there is a better way than God’s Way…so they turn from God, they place their hope for salvation in something other than God, they suffer and struggle fall away…and eventually God welcomes them back, with a curious question:  will God’s people ever learn that God’s way is better?  Will we ever learn to trust?

You can see this story playing out over and over again in the various narratives of the Bible; let’s go on a short journey through the Bible and its stories:

The Book of Genesis begins with the creation of the world, God calling it good, and an invitation to Adam and Eve to trust God’s goodness by living in the Garden and avoiding the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But they can’t trust God; so they eat the fruit, are expelled from the garden, and the story of human struggle begins.  The rest of the Book of Genesis recounts the strife and difficulty of a young human family as they try to embrace God’s repeated invitation to become the fathers and mothers of a great nation, but keep falling away…

The Book of Exodus is the central story in all of the Old Testament.  In that story, we meet the Hebrew people, enslaved in Egypt by Pharaoh.  Pharaoh trusts no one, and is obsessed with the fear that he will never have enough.  So he has enslaved the Hebrews in an endless effort to secure his power.  God sets the Hebrews free to show them that there is a better way than Pharaoh’s way, and gives them the Law a new way of life in which they are to trust God and care for each other; God even sends daily bread raining from heaven to show them that they will never be hungry; but like in the Garden of Eden, there is a warning:  do not collect more of the bread than you need for the day; share and do not hoard, and there will always be enough.  But the people can’t do that, they try to store up the bread, and they beg Moses to take them back to slavery in Egypt; they would rather trust their lives to the greedy, anxious Pharoah, than place their trust in their abundant, generous God.  So resistant are they to freedom with God that they melt down their jewelry and create a Golden Calf, an inanimate object to worship and serve.

In spite of these ways that the people keep running from God, God delivers them into the Promised Land and tries to help them make a home and a life there.  In the Book of Samuel a story is told where they have settled down, and the people ask God to give them a king to rule over them; they want to be like all the other peoples around them.  God replies, “Are you crazy?”  If I give you a king, the king will take away your daughters for his harems and your sons to be his soldiers and will tax you so that he can build palaces and conduct military campaigns; don’t have a king, just trust me…but the people say again:  “No, give us a king!”

So God gives them their first king.  And the rest of the Old Testament is the story of a series of kings, some of them okay, but many of them terrible, and no matter what, over and over again, we hear stories of prophets, who plead with the people to follow the Law and live together and trust God, but continually falling away, and each time, God is there to scoop them back up when they have fallen, dust them off and say, now, let’s try again, and see if this time you can place your trust in me…

But it never works.  Then in the New Testament, we get another version of the same story, but this time it involves God’s own Son, Jesus Christ.  Jesus comes to the suffering and struggling people of the world and says to them in stories of healing, teaching, and forgiveness, “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s but to God what is God’s.”  Live in the world, but if you want to have peace, do not place your trust in possessions or in rulers or in violence because these things will never give you peace.  But come unto me, you who weary and are carrying heavy burdens and I will give you rest.  Place your trust in me.

And they kill him.  So hard it is for people to place their trust in God; the religious authorities are threatened by his revival of the Law; and the Roman authorities are threatened because the people are following him; and so they speak ill of him, and put him on trial calling him an enemy of the state and they get the masses to riot in the street and shout “Crucify him...” and even Jesus’ disciples turn away from him in his hour of deepest need.  Jesus tells them that love is a better way of life.  But they are afraid to trust him.

And yet even in this rebellion that leads to Jesus’ death…God promises that God’s love will return.  That Jesus’ living among us will not have been in vain, that even though we’ve killed him, we can try again to follow him still!  So God gives the gift of the Holy Spirit to remind us every day that life with God is possible.  The letters of the New Testament are the story of the early church; Apostles gather followers of Jesus who they pray will choose a life with God and one another, and finally experience the freedom that was promised to Adam and Eve way back in Genesis.

It is a hope that has never been fully realized, but even in the last pages of the Book of Revelation, a vision continues of what might be possible if only the people can finally trust God.  “Then I saw a new  heaven and a new earth…I saw a holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God…and I heard a voice saying ‘See the home of God is among mortals, He will dwell with them; God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.  Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”  That’s the vision, God says.  Just trust me.

There are two things I love about the way this “story of the Bible” is told in Isaiah 12.

The first is the mention of a well.  “With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation” it says.  A preacher I once heard remarked that we often think of wells in the Bible imagining a fairy tale, pretty, brick and mortar circle out of which one effortlessly drew up from a pulley the cleanest, purest, and coldest water, always at the ready to quench one’s thirst.  But the reality of an ancient well was much more challenging than that.  Most often it was a little hole in the ground, dug by hand, through which one would draw up water with a bucket, imprecisely, tediously, spilling much of the water along the way on every hoist… (credit Susan Olsen in Feasting on the Word, Year C. And yet this effort of drawing water was necessary every day for survival.  This is how Isaiah describes trust.  A well.  A daily task…far from perfect, and not an easy one.

My other favorite element of Isaiah 12 is this:  that on the day the Jerusalemites sang this song, they sang, “I will trust, and will not be afraid…”  In the midst of all of that difficult, daily drawing of water for life, these people looked back on their history and who God had been for them, and they way God had forgiven and restored them.  They had heard the same message over and over and over again, and knew what they wanted to believe:  I will trust in God and not be afraid.

In this life, we are on a journey of trust, a journey, that is flawed, and mysterious, and full of God’s grace and forgiveness…and we must try as best we can to hear the stories of those who have gone before us…so that as we live today and into tomorrow we can trust in God and not be afraid.  This is the story the Bible is telling us.  Amen.