Growing Trust in an Anxious Season

Tracy Niven
Monday 14 February 2022

Preacher: Professor Rachel Muers
Readings: Jeremiah 17:5-10, Luke 6:17-26

The prophet addresses us with the word of the LORD, a word of truth. It’s an urgent message for a time when trust seems to be in short supply. It’s a word that we need and find hard to take in.

It feels very clichéd to say that we’re in an age of anxiety, and age of mistrust, and perhaps the prophet would tell us it’s nothing new. We don’t have a lot of ground under our feet. Established patterns of life, top to bottom, have been shaken up for two years and we don’t know whether they’ll return. We’re watching the disruption of seasonal patterns, across the globe, years of drought, storms. And that’s before we get to the loss of trust in institutions, the rumours of a post-truth moment, the normalisation, at least in some quarters, of public lying. The long-range weather forecasters, or economic forecasters, or political forecasters, say “our computer models are struggling to make predictions”.

We might think, if you aren’t a little worried, you aren’t paying attention. Can we trust our leaders, can we trust our neighbours, can even we trust ourselves? The heart is devious above all else, it is perverse, who can understand it?

Wealth is deceptive and fragile and temporary. So is good reputation. That’s the words of Jesus, woe to you who are rich now, woe to you when all speak well of you. Today’s top trend is tomorrow’s false prophet. . Jeremiah said it. mere mortals will always let you down. Lead you astray and leave you stranded in the desert.

We can imagine someone hearing Jeremiah in our time and thinking, fine, I won’t rely on anything or anyone in this world, it’s safer that way. I’ll stand on my own feet. They might even say, and God will provide for me, if I have God I don’t need other people.

But it’s not that simple, is it? You can’t live without trust. The philosopher Onora O’Neill pointed out in her Reith lectures on trust, about twenty years ago. People who say they don’t trust journalists often read the news. People who say they don’t trust modern science usually take medicine when they’re ill. Now, O’Neill gave her lectures before the age of social media, and maybe now she’d say things had changed. People who say they don’t trust experts now find it easier to get away from the experts. There’s always an alternative truth out there.

But the point’s the same I think. People who say they don’t trust anyone still put their lives in the hands of neighbours and distant strangers every day, because that’s what it is to live as dependent and interdependent human creatures. Cross the road, take money out of your bank account, sit down beside somebody. Living in this world we find something to trust, because we don’t make ourselves, we don’t stand on our own feet, we inhabit a world that others make. And trust in God doesn’t take us away from the need to trust other people, because we are still creatures. We can’t live without a social fabric of trust any more than a tree can live without its roots.

Look at the crowd around Jesus, the crowd suffering from diseases and unclean spirits, reaching out for healing. We have everyday needs, for words of comfort, for human contact, for answers to our questions and rebukes to our demons. As Maya Angelou wrote, “nobody, but nobody can’t make it out here alone”. We have no choice but to stretch out, like a tree in dry soil stretches its roots out and down further and further, searching for living water. Maybe some of the crowd who came to hear Jesus assumed he’d turn out to be a false prophet like all the others, but they were desperate.

Living in community is trusting other people, placing yourself in other people’s hands. And in an anxious season, a dry season, when trust is in short supply in a community or a society, we can’t stop being dependent creatures, we can’t stop needing each other, and Jeremiah sees, it can all go wrong very quickly. In an anxious season people trust wealth, that is, control over resources- their own or other people’s. Or brute strength – their own or other people’s. Or rhetorical power or the ability to make oneself attractive or likeable, being spoken well of. And let’s be honest, trust in power over the world and other people is a good strategy, basically the only strategy, if there really is nothing more to hope for than fighting for scraps in a world where trust is always betrayed. It’s a good strategy if all the prophets are false prophets.

And that’s why it’s a very small step from ‘don’t put your trust in mere mortals’ to full-on cynicism or despair.

Think about this. The sermon of Jesus as Luke records it has a set of blessings and a set of woes. And the blessings are a glimpse of a world where there’s true prophecy, and the woes for a world where there are only false prophets, a world where all that matters is various ways of exerting power over others. The world with the woes in it can seem pretty comfortable if you’ve managed to secure some power but its roots are shallow. If you’ve got the power, you can think you don’t need trust, you can think you get by with control, and maybe for a while – right now – it won’t be you who suffers the effects of a world without trust, but eventually it will be, because the scrabble for control is a game that everyone loses, now or in the future.

So what’s the blessing like, what do we reach out for, what’s the healing power that comes out from Jesus to the crowd gathered around him, the power that flows out like the stream of living water to people who’re hungry and sad and at the end of all their resources and have absolutely nothing but that one gesture of trust?

Jeremiah says that those whose trust is in the LORD, whose trust is the LORD, are like a tree planted by the water – that is not anxious in the year of drought. What have they got, these people who perhaps most of us know, who can face the deeply anxious season without being damaged by it. Who continue to bear fruit, to offer comfort and nourishment and a calm resting place to others.

It seems that what keeps them going, those whose trust is in the LORD and who are like trees planted by the water, is not more power to control, more power to escape our vulnerability. It’s also not about giving up all responsibility to somebody else, the kind of trust that means letting someone do all the thinking and all the acting for you. Maybe sometimes we hear that religion’s like that, but that’s not what I hear in these texts.

God tests the mind and searches the heart, Jeremiah says, but it’s not some sort of deep mind-reading trick, it all turns out to be very simple, because God gives to all ‘according to their ways, according to the fruit of their doings’. Trust in God turns out to be something that’s done. It’s done, as the first psalm says, in meditating on the law and keeping it. Meditating on the law, loving the truthful word wherever we find it, living with our need to learn and be taught, in everyday situations. Discovering the joy of being wrong, because  to believe that there’s truth is to believe we can be wrong, and that’s much more encouraging than believing that the loudest voice wins.

And keeping the law turning to the neighbour and welcoming the stranger; in grasping the hand that reaches out to you for help. Not running away from what we can’t fix, from poverty and hunger and sorrow, being present, living with our shared vulnerability.

It’s an anxious season and trust is in short supply. The good news from these texts is that it flows ceaselessly, the living power of Jesus that flows to the community who reach out to him over and over again, the living water that refreshes those who meditate on the law and keep it in small actions daily, and it flows among us and between us and bears fruit and revives the earth

 

 

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