Series: May 2026
Speaker: Rob McClellan
Today's Sermon
“Wisdom of Ordinary Time – Trust”
Wisdom For Ordinary Time - Trust
We just celebrated the flames of Pentecost, that symbol of the Spirit’s presence. Now the smoke has cleared and we are faced with a sort of absence, not an absence of God per se, or of Christ, or of the Spirit, who we say can be with us at any moment. As we say in our sacred stories Sunday School class, what was once in one place in time is now in all places and times. The absence upon us is of big moments and celebrations. From Pentecost until Advent, the time leading up to Christmas, there’s not much in the church’s calendar. Have you ever seen a liturgical calendar? Let me show you…
This is a representation of the church calendar we use to teach our young ones. It’s color-coded, one piece for every Sunday, and quite helpful: The purple represents seasons of special preparation for holy days, which are in white. This one is called Lent, readying us for Easter. This one is called Advent and readies us for Christmas. In some churches, including ours, the décor shifts to blue this time of year to distinguish Advent from Lent. Red (ouch!) is for the fire of Pentecost. You’ll notice the rest, and the vast majority, is green, which we call ordinary time, and, of course, these are only Sundays. Most of life is lived out in the world on weekdays.
It looks as though there is one lone white Sunday here, but that’s just the Velcro. The piece fell off. We’ve been robbed of one week of ordinary time, which happens, you know. Life is moving along, it’s all under control or at least not out of control and with nothing big to experience or plan and then, “surprise,” something big happens or is foisted upon us.
Most of our time is lived in the ordinary—waiting in line at the grocery, waiting for the next vacation, seemingly moving backward in line at the DMV. We tell our stories and we tell history through big and exciting moments and events, but we live mostly in the time in between, and those times can be just as joyful and heartbreaking, maybe more so, than the dramatic moments. It’s the simple moments of pleasure that make up most of life’s joys, just as it’s the weeks well after a loved one has gone that it gets the hardest.
How shall we think about this most of the time? The green symbol the church uses for ordinary time can be helpful. Think of it as growing season. Picture the fecundity of nature. Imagine cultivating our lives, doing what we need to bear fruit we’ll use both for the grand feasts of celebration and for rations during moments of great peril. More importantly the growing times are meant to carry us through the ordinary of our lives, yet in faith, just as in life sometimes we fixate on what we need for the big and dramatic rather than the regular and unremarkable. According to scripture, Jesus was only on the cross for 6 hours, the rest of the time, he was teaching about everyday things, healing everyday people, and the vast majority of his life was apparently not remarkable enough to warrant a single story.
This next series is entitled “Wisdom For Ordinary Time.” Ordinary Time may have been named because of the ordinal numbers, counting the Sundays of the calendar, but I like the play on words. This is an attempt to give us what we need to get by day to day. What do we need to carry us through the balance of our days with balance, integrity, to help us show up in love? Today, we lay the foundation and that foundation is trust. It’s an ironic start to a series ostensibly about wisdom because trust is an acknowledgement of the limits of what we know. We trust where we cannot know completely and in most of life we only know incompletely. We never have all the information. We do the best we can with what we have and hope or trust it will work out. Listen to how the wisdom literature of the Proverbs and the Psalms urge us to trust:
Proverbs 3:5-6
5 Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
and do not rely on your own insight.
6 In all your ways acknowledge the Lord,
and the Lord will make straight your paths.
Psalm 37:3-7
3 Trust in the Lord and do good;
live in the land and enjoy security.
4 Take delight in the Lord,
and the Lord will give you the desires of your heart.
5 Commit your way to the Lord;
trust in the Lord, and the Lord will act.
6 The Lord will make your vindication shine like the light
and the justice of your cause like the noonday.
7 Be still before the Lord, and wait patiently [for him];
do not fret over those who prosper in their way,
over those who carry out evil devices.
The most obvious question is trust that what…? We do not here tout, as some do, the belief that if we just trust in God nothing bad will ever happen. If we did, we would blame every misfortune on a lack of trust, a lack of faith, as some indeed do. Neither do we say that if we trust we get everything we want. It might appear the Psalm is saying so: “Trust in the Lord and do good…and the Lord will give you the desires of your heart” (37:3-4), but “The desires of the heart” is the operative phrase. There’s a wide gulf between everything we think we want and what the heart desires. The heart, of course, is a metaphor, by which our ancestors meant the entire inner life. Beyond our immediate physical needs, our hearts desire love, acceptance, and the ability to offer the same to others. Part of what it means to trust is to assert that we can find these things at the heart of every moment.
The Psalm too appears to dangle a promise of reward: “Commit your way to the Lord, trust in the Lord, and the Lord will act. The Lord will make your vindication shine like the light and the justice of your cause like the noonday” (v. 5-6). Be careful, though, for it does not reveal the timeline for the vindication nor promises we’ll live to witness it. To trust involves a letting go of outcomes. We do what we do because doing it is right and we trust that is worth it regardless of what it pays; we do it because we believe it is the best way to live for ourselves and for the greater whole.
We trust in God and God’s ways as revealed in the scriptures, embodied by Jesus, and taught by teachers across time who recognize the sacredness of all things. We trust this One and this way, believing that’s what gives us life, purpose, and meaning. Our trust is a refusal to give in to nothingness, the most devastating of dispositions. This trust is what allows us to sleep at night and rise the next day. It doesn’t mean we become indifferent, quite the contrary. It means we become engaged because we trust there is a greater something worth carrying on for. It sustains us when carrying on seems impossible, especially when we see others take short cuts or take advantage. As the Psalmist puts it, we need not “fret over those who prosper in their way, over those who carry out evil devices” (37:7). Trust allows us to do our piece and then find some peace. What a relief.
It’s amazing how many people see trust as foundational, including high performers, which is a little counterintuitive for we tend to think of them as those who can control the most. It’s not uncommon to see elite athletes cling to verses such as these, sometimes affixing them to their bodies when they perform. Professional women’s basketball player Paige Bueckers and men’s football player C.J. Stroud both cite Proverbs 3:5-6 as their favorite Bible verse, and they are among many to be sure. It’s not saying don’t trust yourself—sometimes we’ve sent that message and that’s not quite it—it’s only saying there is more, there is more. I was talking with someone this week about recovery and as many of you know, a critical piece of the 12 steps is acknowledging something beyond yourself—they use the term a higher power. In putting some trust in that something more we can find our true selves. When you encounter someone who is really insecure, it’s because they don’t know what to trust.
Trust is not something you can acquire once and for all time—we’ve erred when we’ve reduced faith to that as well. Trust is something we cultivate through closeness. Marcus Borg, great New Testament scholar, once gave a lecture series and at one point he started talking about his own faith, and despite all the academic prowess he brought to the table, he did not speak of faith as getting all the scripture passages just right or of adopting the right doctrines, as much as those things have value. Rather, he spoke of cultivating a relationship. He talked about doing daily devotions, just like many ordinary people do—whatever ordinary means—reading scripture, maybe a secondary reading or reflection, and praying, just some minutes a day, but some minutes a day. It’s about regular attention cultivating a closeness with God, which opens up a channel through which insights can flow. Don’t clog your prayers with words; cultivate closeness and openness. I’ve been recording what I’m calling “Contemplative Practices for the Soulful Life” for the church’s podcast, the WPC Daily Dose. I’ve realized that more than offering information, teaching in a traditional sense, I wanted to help people access what they can when they develop a closeness the likes of which we’ve just described.
This dynamic between trusting and knowing is captured by the quote on your bulletin. Are you familiar with Oswald Chambers? He was a YMCA man, which may have been how I came across him; I don’t remember. He founded a school in London not to train up clergy but to prepare “ordinary” Christians—there’s that word again—for mission and service. Chambers’ book, My Utmost for His Highest was one of the most influential devotionals of the 20th century. It was published in 1927, ten years after his death, when his wife compiled her shorthand notes of talks he’d given. Somewhere I have a copy, probably at my folks’ home back in Indiana so I can’t recall any of the entries. I’m not even sure I’d agree with the theology therein, but I’m struck to this day by the form – daily devotion, cultivating a relationship. Chambers once wrote, “If we think of prayer as the breath in our lungs and the blood in our hearts, we think rightly.”[1] Did you catch the turn of phrase, when we cultivate closeness, dependence on God, we think rightly, for it’s that closeness that shapes our thinking. It garners a trust that if we walk the “good road,” to use an indigenous term for the Christian Kingdom of God[2], if we walk the good road, it will lead somewhere good whether we see the full journey or not. Chambers says, “Faith never knows where it is being led, but it loves and knows the One who is leading.” If you love the One leading, you can get by without fully knowing. Trust can be hard for those for whom knowledge comes easier than love.
We begin, then, “Wisdom for Ordinary Time” recognizing the first bit of wisdom is that we do not know what we would always like to know, but we can know the One who loves and leads us. This gives us what the New Testament calls, “the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding” (Philippians 4:7). Wisdom begins with a trust that surpasses understanding and yields a peace that does likewise. When the smoke clears from celebrations and tragedies alike, when the day to day sets in, what will get us through is a trust that the One who once burned in one place and in one time can ignite in any place and any time. We can trust that.
Amen.
[1] https://utmost.org/modern-classic/think-as-jesus-taught/
[2] See First Nations Version: Indigenous Translation of the New Testament.