Pip: If you've ever wondered what pesto, the Cold War, and the Book of Isaiah have in common, Fr. John has done the research, and the answer is more coherent than it has any right to be.
Mara: This episode follows a single sermon that moves from the origins of a national motto to the harder question underneath it — the difference between believing in God and actually trusting God. Let's start with that journey from Virgil's kitchen to the gates of Jerusalem.
Sermon: Trusting God or Just Saying So
Pip: The sermon opens with a question about national identity, but it's really asking something more uncomfortable — whether "In God We Trust" is a conviction or just text printed on currency.
Mara: The setup begins in an unexpected place. Virgil, writing a pesto recipe around 50 BC, produced the phrase that became America's first de facto motto. As the sermon puts it: "out of many, a single color — color est e pluribus unus — and if we shorten that and add proper grammar, we have the phrase e pluribus unum, which the founding fathers added to the Great Seal of the United States in 1782."
Pip: So the founding motto was essentially a salad metaphor. And it held for over 170 years until the Cold War made atheism the enemy and "In God We Trust" became the official counter-move in 1956.
Mara: That shift sets up the sermon's real question. The motto changed, but the sermon asks whether the trust behind it changed with it. And the answer comes through Hezekiah, king of Judah around 700 BC.
Pip: Hezekiah is a useful case study because he's not a villain. He kept the religious observances, ran the temple, did the visible things — and yet Isaiah records God saying, essentially, I've had enough of your burnt offerings.
Mara: The problem was that Hezekiah believed in God but didn't trust him. When Assyria threatened, he sought an alliance with Egypt instead. The sermon quotes Isaiah directly: "Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help and rely on horses, who trust in chariots because they are many — but do not look to the Holy One of Israel or consult the Lord."
Pip: It took the Assyrian army standing outside Jerusalem's gates before Hezekiah actually prayed. Which is a very human timeline for getting serious about trust.
Mara: And the sermon draws that line straight to the gospel. Jesus's invitation to "take my yoke" gets read not as shared labor with a partner, but as a replacement — setting down the yoke of sin, self, and fear, and picking up the yoke of discipleship instead.
Pip: The question the sermon lands on is precise: not "do you believe?" — the congregation already answered that by showing up — but "do you trust him enough to remove all those yokes and put on his?"
Mara: It closes with Thomas Merton's prayer, which holds the tension honestly: "I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me." Trust, the sermon argues, doesn't require certainty. It requires the desire to follow, and Merton's prayer suggests that desire itself is already a form of faithfulness.
Pip: In God We Trust — lip service or a way of life. That's the question left sitting in the pew.
Mara: The thread running through all of this is the gap between profession and practice — saying the words and living the weight of them.
Pip: Belief is the easy part, apparently. Trust is where it gets costly. We'll see what Candle in a Cave brings next time.
Candle in a Cave 