A Loving Promise

“Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” [Luke 12:32].

I’ve shared this story with some of you. It was originally related to me by Jane’s father, B.P. Albright, Sr., when I was his daughter’s 19-year-old fiancé (we were 20 when we actually married). You see, knowing that we would have finished just two years of college by the time we said our vows, both sets of parents promised that after August 28, 1971, they would continue to provide for Jane and me in the same manner as they would have if we had not decided to marry. To be sure, we’d have little income—my summer earnings, and my work-study job at WFU’s Reynolds Library—and Jane had only modest savings, but hey, we weren’t worried.

In a conversation with “Mr. Albright”—that’s what I still called him at the time— several months before the wedding, I allowed that Jane and I weren’t just lovesick dreamers. “We know you can’t live just on love,” I had quipped to him, thinking he’d admire my maturity.

Instead, he said, “Have I ever told you about the day that I left home, at the height of the Great Depression, to go to Georgia Tech?”

“No,” I said, wondering what his question had to do with our forthcoming nuptials.

He continued, “Well, times were worse than tough. But my mother and father wanted desperately for me to go to college, and they assured me that somehow, they’d make it work.”

He added, “And so, on the day that I departed for Atlanta, my parents drove me to the bus station. My father shook my hand. Mother hugged my neck, kissed my cheek, and said, ‘Phil, all I have to give you is this twenty-dollar bill and a mother’s love.’”

Mr. Albright then looked at me with mist in his eyes and said, “… And it was plenty.”

The power of a loving promise—it should never be underestimated.

A loving promise—that’s what Christ offers His followers in the Gospel reading appointed for this Sunday [Luke 12:32-40, RCL, Year C]. Contextually, Jesus has set his face toward Jerusalem, with its inevitable cross. As the Lamb of God travels slowly toward Golgotha, He continues to teach his disciples and a larger group as well. Any in the group who have ears to hear and eyes to see know that dark days lie ahead. How is all this going to work out? In the face of such powerful opposition, how will He and they manage? The disciples and the larger group who follow after Jesus are in need of something—they need a loving promise, for they are afraid and bewildered. And so, He tells them:

Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” [Luke 12:32].

Some would argue, however, that the kingdom Jesus promises sounds a bit like “pie-in-the-sky.” Some might even argue that He’s delusional. He’s told His followers not to worry about what they will eat or what they will wear.

Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them” [12:24].

And, as I mentioned in last week’s meditation, He’s pointed to the flora:

Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these [12:28].

All that sounds nice, yet some of us think, “But Jesus, really, don’t we have to be practical? Don’t we have to deal with the real world? Some of us have mortgage payments to worry about. Have you seen what the market has done to my 401(k)? And Jesus, in your day, you walked to Jerusalem. We drive cars! Have you seen the price of gas lately?”

Some 20 years ago, the Session of the little Presbyterian church that helped our parents raise my brothers and me contacted a young out-of-town minister for some advice. The church, first organized in 1793, had enjoyed average weekly attendance of 300 or more during the ’50s and ’60s. And yet, as the 21st century dawned, the numbers had dwindled to 30 or so for worship on Sundays. Recognizing that the church was in trouble, the Session outlined the situation for the young minister, provided him with the church financials, and asked what they should do.

His “opinion letter” was brief and terse. Essentially, he told them to read Luke 12, and since they had about $250,000 in their “rainy day” fund, they should keep no more than $50K on hand, and give the rest to the poor. They responded that his advice was “too impractical.” They’d continue to manage on their own; thank you very much.

Can we see that “managing things on our own” is exactly what gets us into the difficulties that most of us face? As strange as this sounds, I’m convinced that Jesus doesn’t want us to live practical lives; He wants us to live faithful ones. He also recognizes that when one allows society to set the narrative, to define the normative, one may find practicality; one will never find faith. Jesus knows that if His followers are to be faithful, then they will need to change their hearts and minds. Changing their hearts and minds requires faith; and Jesus knows that faith isn’t something or some power that one draws from one’s inward self. Faith requires a loving promise.

On His way to Jerusalem, Jesus offers some nice-sounding little proverbs:

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” [12:34].

We think to ourselves, “Now that’s one I need to write down in my “faith journey” notebook,” or perhaps, “That’s one that I’m going to commit to memory.” But you see, Jesus doesn’t want us to memorize His proverb. He doesn’t want us to underline or highlight His statement in our study Bibles. He doesn’t want us to display the text on that new electronic sign in the church’s front yard. He wants us to live by faith and not by the careful plans that our meager minds can conjure.

Jesus is worried about where our hearts are (sort of like Yahweh’s question to Adam in the garden, “Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9)). Jesus knows that the only way we can live faithfully is to jettison the practical fear that causes us to compete for what we think are scarce resources, to purchase and horde because of real and perceived supply-chain difficulties, to strive for self-assessed success and security—the kind of security that we really value because we think that we’ve worked hard for it and deserve it.

Practical fear causes us to think that if we can just buy one more self-help book, if we can complete one more seminar on parenting, on personal finances, or on “coding in the 21st century,” if we can just come up with that engaging LinkedIn profile, then we’ll then have the answer to all our questions. Practical fear causes a dying congregation to hang onto the “rainy day” fund, all the while ignoring that within the lives of the poor around them, it’s been raining for 40 days and 40 nights.

Jesus knows that the only way He can get us to jettison our practical fears is if He supploes us with a loving promise. And He does just that. We are not to be afraid, He allows, for it is “[our] Father’s good pleasure to give [us] the kingdom.”

It boils down to faith, and faith boils down to trust. In the early 1930s, did it make practical sense for Phillip Albright to rely upon the loving promise of his parents? The world was dark and foreboding. In late August 1971, did it make practical sense for Jane and me to rely upon our mutual loving promises? No, it did not, even when we also had the powerful and loving promises of our parents. It did take a special form of faith to step up onto the bus and ride away. It took a special faith for Jane and me to “tie the knot.”

And yet, Jesus wants us to understand that while faith spawned by those sorts of loving promises—the sort that sends one off into the unknown, the sort that joins two naive twenty-year-olds into one—is wonderful, and beautiful, and rare, it actually pales in comparison with the sorts of loving promises that are provided to us by an almighty God, a God who loves us so much that He became incarnate in the created world, where he lived, and died, and was raised again from the dead.

Listen closely: Jesus is reminding us that God’s loving promise precedes faith. The promise always comes first. Faith is the step that follows the promise. For years now, I’ve been taken with Frederick Buechner’s description of faith:

Faith is the word that describes the direction our feet start moving when we find that we are loved. Faith is stepping out into the unknown with nothing to guide us but a hand just beyond our grasp [from a meditation/sermon entitled, “Follow Me,” found in Buechner’s provocative monograph, The Magnificent Defeat].

For all too many of us, practical fear lies within our hearts. Yet can we see that just beyond our meager grasp is the promised hand of Christ Himself? It only takes one step. We have a choice: left foot, or right?