Couple of weeks ago we spoke of love being the foundation and basis of how we form community especially when we are honest with each other. Last week we spoke about responding to God's call and the varied responses that that can take. Both of these have something underlying them which is brought out in the texts from today and that is trust. It is all very well to say to someone "trust me" and expect them to do just that but in reality there has to first be a certain amount of prior relationship. Just as when we respond to God there has to be a certain relationship that is present before we can just "trust". So, what to our minds constitute as trust in our everyday lives and how does that really affect our own relationships and those in the community?
The word of God to Jeremiah is, boiled down, "you cannot trust another human only trust God" (Jer. 17:5-10). This cannot surely be it otherwise we cannot live in community as we would all distrust and be paranoiac about those around us. There has to be a certain level of trust. So what is God's intentions in this passage? At least in the blessings and woes from the sermon on the plain (Lk. 6:20-26), which categorise trust, in a manner of speaking, appears to tell us who we can trust within humanity. Yet, even with examples before us it is extraordinary how difficult it is to form the bond that leads to trust. That bond must be incredibly full because of what trust actually is. I am sure we have seen videos of the "trust fall" or may even have participated. What we are doing is putting ourselves into the hands of those who are around us and believing or having faith that someone will catch us as we blindly fall backwards or forwards. Sometimes circumstances will mean that those we put our trust in are unable to be trusted on these occasions we fail and we land on the ground. Unfortunately, for many people this is what has happened with their experience of "Church". They have put their trust and faith in an institution, which is man-made, not in the Church that is of God.
We tend to do this as we put our trust in those that are around us rather than in the presence of God which is, for us, an intangible. If we listen to the reading from Jeremiah again we can see that God is speaking about this exact thing. Our faith, our trust needs to reside in God's presence not in the fallibility of humanity. We can see that in our everyday if we look at the political process, not just here in Australia, but through out the world. How can we place our trust in the institutions of the past and expect them to cope with the results of their own fallibility? How can we expect our political leaders to do something that is new and extraordinary when they have no trust in their own people? How can we expect our religious leaders to express God's will if they are unable to look beyond the dogmas of human failing rather than to trust God's unfailing love and Spirit? We cannot trust those who have let us down by a dogmatic interpretation of God's presence that excludes the other. We are so distrustful of our own that we find it hard to trust something that is intangible to us and yet is so powerful. It is only when we place our lives in the hands of those whom we can totally trust that we can begin to see what it means to have faith and trust. Our truth is what we can conceive, our trust is only as far as we can see. Trust is something that enables us to let go of our preconceptions and our strongly held understanding so totally that we place our lives in the hands of the other.
To trust is to understand a relationship so deeply that we can let go, knowing that the other person, the "other", will be their to hold us up, strengthen us, be there for us no matter the circumstance. There are often occasions when we cannot trust our own partners or family unless deep down we know categorically that they are their for us. Let me illustrate that briefly by saying have you ever told anyone anything in confidence only to have it revealed to everyone next day? That is a breaking of trust. Something that we do not have to worry about with God, but we first have to know that ourselves and build the relationship to understand that God will never let us down.
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