We will be starting a new sermon series this Sunday. The series will be called “Trust” and comes along with the tagline, “finding the “us” in trusting God”. 
Trust is the gateway to community, it is what enables us to live as the Body of Christ together. To be a healthy church, we have to trust God and we have to trust one another. If our trust wavers in one of those dimensions, our community suffers. If we fail to trust God, we fail to take the steps that we need to in order to pursue His will. If we fail to trust one another, we fail to see what other people have to bring to the mission and how we can help them with our own gifts.
In Lutheran theology, there is a concept of “Two Kingdoms” or “Two Kinds of Righteousness”. These two are things that are “before God” and things that are “before other humans”. Essentially, we are going to take the next seven weeks to explore our trust in these two realms. We are going to ask ourselves how trustworthy God is, and how we mirror His trustworthiness in our own lives. If we don’t feel that God is trustworthy, we will fail almost automatically to trust others – but even if we feel God is trustworthy, sometimes we have been so hurt and burned that we fail to trust others.
God’s trustworthiness is exemplified on the Cross for us. In the Cross we see a God who we can trust all the way to His own death. Our trust may fail, but we are promised that His won’t. As we meditate on His trustworthiness, I hope that we find the ability to trust each other as fellow members of His Body. I am a sinner, which means that I will fail to be trustworthy sometimes, but it also means that I am placed in the perfect position in which to grow and become more trustworthy – not for my own sake, but for the sake of those around me.
Let us display God’s trustworthiness on the Cross, and let us display how that has changed us to be trustworthy ourselves – and maybe someone will ask why it is that we are so trustworthy.