All Saints Sunday - November 2

God Trusts Us

We are celebrating All Saints Day today. All Saints Day is one of the seven principal feast days of the church… the most important celebrations we share in our worship life together. As many of you know, it actually fell on the calendar yesterday, November 1. All Saints Day is the only one of the seven principal feasts that we are allowed to transfer from its actual day to a Sunday so that we can celebrate our day, All Saints Day, together as the saints of the church.

All Saints is also one of the days on which we focus on baptism. For reasons that I hope are obvious, it’s a great day to be baptized, to be brought into the communion of saints. And today we will baptize Sarah and welcome her into the Body of Christ, the household of God, the communion of saints.

When we talk about baptism, we often talk about covenant—the baptismal covenant. We will all review and renew our baptismal covenant within the context of the baptism service. Covenant is one of those words we really only use in the church. Basically, it just means contract. A contract between two parties. In this case the two parties are God and each of us. The baptismal covenant is a contract between anyone who is baptized and God.

I was at a service yesterday at the local synagogue and one of the rabbis who spoke sort of indirectly helped illuminate for me one aspect of covenant. And that is trust. Our baptismal covenant with God is sealed and bound by trust. It is not enforced by the threat of penalties as most civil contracts are. Trust—only and profoundly—trust seals and sustains our covenant with God.

We are often called upon to put our trust in God. And in the baptismal covenant we do. We place our trust in God’s abiding love and care for us, as expressed by Jesus at the end of Matthew’s Gospel. “I will be with you always to the end of the ages.” We express our trust that God will keep God’s promise to us, the promise of eternal life with God. We trust God’s will for us, as best we are able to discern that will. Our trust in God binds us to God in covenant.

But have you ever thought about the other side of it? How wondrous and momentous it is that God trusts us?!

Our baptismal covenant is also sustained and sealed by God’s trust of us.

God trusts us. And God trusts us with a lot.

God trusts us to be faithful. God trusts that we will be faithful.

And, especially within the context of the baptismal covenant, being faithful means living as the Body of Christ. God trusts us to be the Body of Christ. How to do that is described in the words of the baptismal covenant. We are to gather together, as a body, for prayer, study and fellowship. We are to be the voice of the Body of Christ, proclaiming the Good News of God in Christ to the world. We are to be the hands and feet of the Body of Christ, working for justice and peace for all human beings. God trusts us with the work of the Body of Christ. God trusts us to be the Body of Christ.

Our covenant with God is bound and sustained, not only by our trust in God, but by God’s trust in us.

God trusts us to be saints!