Download Sermon TextSeptember 21: Holding Fast to Trust
Rex McKee
Holding Fast to Trust
Saint John the Baptist Episcopal Church
September 21, 2025
The Reverend Rex McKee
In the name of the One who remembers injustice, who invites us into courageous stewardship, and who calls each of us from every tribe, language, race and orientation to live lives anchored in trust.
‘Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure.’
This collect, appointed for today, originates in the early Western church, first appearing in the 7th-century Gelasian Sacramentary and later in the Sarum Missal. It was translated and adapted into English by Thomas Cranmer in the 1549 Prayer Book and has remained in Anglican use ever since.
It gives us voice to a longing that transcends doctrine. It is a longing to trust what is eternal in a broken world saturated with chaos, anxiety and illusion. I understand trust as more fundamental than faith. Trust is relational. It requires vulnerability, courage, action, surrender, and hope.
Scripture overflows with invitations to trust:
‘Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight. Proverbs 3:5–6
‘Trust in the Lord and do good; dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness.’ Psalm 37:3–5
Robin Meyers, in ‘The Underground Church’, tells a parable that makes this vivid. He writes about a life jacket: You can believe that a life jacket will float you can affirm its buoyancy, recite the materials it’s made of, even proclaim its lifesaving capabilities. But ‘‘trust’’ happens only when you put it on and jump into the water.
Faith without trust stays in the boat, or on the dock. Trust gets wet.
To hold fast to trust is to live as if love and justice are not only possible but inevitable. Not because we see them fully now, but because we trust the One who promised.
Jürgen Moltmann: Hope is revolutionary it drives action for justice and renewal. Trust grounds us in God’s presence so that hope does not collapse into despair.
Hope is grounded in the resurrection, always future facing, it is trust that calls us out in this moment an encounter with God’s faithfulness.
Our Amos reading this morning is a thunderous cry against a society that has replaced trust with transaction:
‘Hear this, you that trample on the needy…buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals.’ ‘Surely I will never forget any of their deeds.’
Divine memory is justice. God remembers the exploited not to shame us, but to summon us.
Economic injustice should not be over simplified as policy failure it is a betrayal of sacred trust. It says, ‘I trust profit more than the Provider.’
To trust God is to trust that there is enough, that the poor are worthy, and that sacred liberation is possible. Trust is activated when we refuse to normalize chaos and injustice.
I ask myself every day, where is there Trustworthiness in this broken corrupted world?
Jesus’ parable of the dishonest manager in Luke is unsettling. A manager is caught squandering his employer’s property. Facing dismissal, he acts swiftly: he reduces the debts owed to his master by others.
His goal? To keep his job, to secure favor and shelter after his job ends.
What strikes me is that the master commends him not for his dishonesty, but for his shrewdness. Jesus says:
‘The children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.’
Streetwise people are smarter in this regard than law-abiding citizens. They are on constant alert, looking for angles, surviving by their wits. I want you to be smart in the same way but for what is right using every adversity to stimulate you to creative survival, to concentrate your attention on the bare essentials, so you’ll really live, and not complacently just get by on good behavior.’
The lesson isn’t to imitate corruption. It’s to recognize the urgency with which we must act when we realize the world is out of alignment with the values of God’s reign. The steward knew the system he was in and when challenged quickly adapted with an urgency of now to make a different kind of economy possible, one based on relationships and mercy.
Jesus continues and sharpens the message:
‘Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much… If you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own?’
Jesus calls us to ‘‘moral imagination’’ to be as creative, intentional, and strategic in the service of compassion and justice as others are in the pursuit of self-interest.
Jesus calls us to use worldly wealth for mercy. As disciples we are called to loosen our grip on possessions and to practice radical generosity. We are called to forgive and show mercy in alignment with God’s abundant grace. Jesus makes the choice plain: ‘You cannot serve God and wealth.’
Jesus is not condoning fraud but summoning us with urgency to engage wise stewardship in God’s economy.
We are invited to ask: How do I use what’s in my hands to build the beloved community?
Can I be trusted to act for others even when no one is watching?
This is not a call to reject money, but a call to examine our loyalty.
Do we serve love or do we serve profit?
Do we trust in God’s economy or the market’s?
A verse from Bob Dylan’s Absolutely Sweet Marie To live outside the law, you must be honest, reminds me that when we reject systems that are no longer trustworthy or just, we are personally held to an even deeper integrity.
The dishonest manager, though embedded in a corrupt structure, awakens to his situation and chooses shrewd action, action that disrupts debt, restores dignity, and builds relational currency.
Jesus suggests if even the dishonest can act boldly in a crisis, how much more should the faithful react with urgency, honesty, and imagination?
To resist unjust systems, to resist economic exploitation, to break with corrupted norms requires that we be fiercely honest. Transparent in purpose. Trustworthy in means. Accountable in community. Honesty becomes not just a virtue, but a survival ethic for the gospel.
God’s call does not end with being faithful, but to ‘‘be trustworthy’’. To be people others can rely upon. And to act with shrewd courage when justice is on the line.
Let us be honest: we are living in a time of profound erosion of public trust. Trust in elected leaders has been shaken by partisanship, corruption, and disconnection. Trust in law enforcement has been deeply fractured by racism and violence. Trust in media, in government, in even our neighbors, is fraying. We are told to trust no one other than the one truthful leader, reporting from agencies such as the EPA have been silenced, we are adapting to be self-reliant, to expect betrayal.
In such times, what does prayerful citizenship look like? It does not mean naïveté. It means shrewdness rooted in love. We must be cleareyed and discerning, able to name injustice, yet still act as agents of repair.
We trust God’s power to transform broken systems. We pray because we trust that God is not finished. We intercede because we refuse to accept the world as it is.
Michael Curry (former Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church)
‘Jesus tells us, ‘You cannot serve God and wealth.’ The choice is before us every day: do we live for love, or do we bow to the false god of money? When we choose love, we find life that really is life.’ (Sermon excerpts, 2018 General Convention)
Curry often reframes stewardship as the spiritual practice of choosing love over mammon.
Shrewdness in these times may mean building parallel systems of information or caring for each other when public systems fail. It means protecting the vulnerable with mercy, courage and action. It means knowing when to speak, when to protest, when to persist, and when to walk away. It means being trustworthy ourselves a counter testimony to the culture of mistrust.
‘Christian faithfulness requires that we use the very things that can corrupt wealth, power, institutions as instruments for God’s reign, while refusing to serve them as masters.’ (Kathryn Tanner (Anglican theologian at Yale) Economy of Grace, 2005)
Desmond Tutu: Trust in God’s goodness allows communities under oppression to stand firm; hope looks beyond apartheid and injustice toward the promised dawn.
Hope energizes resistance and imagination; trust enables surrender and relationship. Together they shape Christian praxis: to rise in resistance and to rest in God’s embrace.
Hope: Orients us toward eschatological future (resurrection, new creation, liberation).
Trust: Grounds us in the covenant of the eternal now… (God’s presence, daily bread, sustaining grace).
We have heard the noise this week on the destruction of the CDC and the minority tyranny that is putting our children at risk with unsubstantiated vaccination folklore and ending decades of research on cures for a host of diseases.
However, hope and resistance abound with the coalition of states that are working with Big Pharma to obtain vaccinations outside the federal system, many states including our own are committed to making vaccinations available.
Pediatricians are gaining their voice to be publicly clear on the successful history of childhood vaccinations that have saved millions of lives over decades.
Mercy, courage and action becomes the soil where trust growsin God, in one another, and in the possibility of making peace with dignity.
God is not calling us to perfected belief or doctrine. God is calling us into a trusting relationship.
Trust in the God who remembers the poor.
Trust in the God that recognizes the complexity of the human condition.
Trust in ourselves as shrewd and faithful stewards.
Trust in each other as co-builders of the Beloved Community.
Trust is courageous. It moves mountains. It is the grounding of revolutions.
There is a koan like story from the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), preserved in the Hadith. A man asked, ‘Should I tie my camel and trust in Allah, or should I leave it untied and trust in Allah?’
The Prophet replied, Tie your camel and trust in Allah.
Praise God without ceasing but secure what is entrusted to you. trust does not replace responsibility it sanctifies it. Prayer becomes a fountain of courage to act shrewdly, faithfully, and justly in a broken world.
May we live trustworthy lives so that others may trust us.
Trust in God with courage and urgency, jump into the water and God’s trusting blessing will rest upon us.
Amen.
