Trust Matters
Jay Rowland
Jeremiah 17:5-10 (New Living Translation)
There’s a scene in my favorite comic strip, Charles Schulz’ Peanuts:
Charlie Brown is outside to practice kicking the football. As it happens his nemesis Lucy is also outside with a football. But she’s not playing with anyone. She’s sitting still as a stone, holding the ball in place for any kicker to kick it.
But there’s no other kids around to kick it. Only Charlie Brown.
And Charlie Brown wants nothing more than to have a chance to kick a football with all his might.
Lucy knows this somehow. And she is eager to lure Charlie to take a run at it, then pull the ball away at the last second, then see Charlie Brown launched into the air instead of the ball, carried by his momentum, until gravity drops Charlie Brown to the ground with a loud thud, followed by his plaintive, “argh”.
It becomes a recurring scene. Every year as summer turns to fall, Charlie Brown is outside amid the falling leaves ready to practice kicking the football again. And of course Lucy is outside too. Just sitting there, holding a football to the ground, not paying attention, just holding the ball ready for anyone to run up and kick it into the sky.
And even though past experience proves that Lucy cannot be trusted, we know Charlie Brown will trust her again. He just can’t help it.
“C’mon Charlie Brown. I won’t pull the ball away this time,” Lucy says. “Trust me.”
“Good grief,” Charlie Brown mutters to himself. And with that he takes another run at the ball Lucy is holding.
“The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked …”
(Jeremiah 17:9 NLV)
When I was a child, I wished so hard that Lucy would leave the ball in place JUST ONCE so that Charlie Brown could finally kick it. I never realized back then that this familiar scene from my favorite comic strip reflects a human dilemma that is played out in some manner in the world every day.
By that I mean the dilemma of trust.
The history of the world and the history of God’s people, it seems, is a long history of vacillating trust in God. As if God would be like Lucy with Charlie Brown, waiting to mess with us.
Generation after generation, day after day, it seems, God’s people play out this human dilemma: whether to trust our lives and our common good to God’s well-established record of care and faithfulness or whether to trust more in ourselves alone to make our own way in this often unfair, uncaring world.
Far too often we impulsively choose to trust only ourselves without pausing to consider the trustworthy Love of God and God’s faithfulness both of which have a very good track record.
Far too often, especially the past few years, the result of our over-reliance on self-reliance is unnecessary harm disrupting individual lives, families, relationships, neighborhoods, communities, and now even the planet. Too often lately the result of self-reliance is a blurring of the common good in favor of individual freedom and individual rights. That’s the world we’re navigating through today.
* * *
The prophet Jeremiah was called by God to be God’s spokesperson to the leaders of Judah, God’s chosen people. The situation that was playing out then was that the leaders of Judah sort of declared their independence from God--as odd as that sounds. I’m sure it started out innocently enough. But somehow the leaders, much like our leaders today, were determined to establish security, strength and peace whatever buzz terms were most appealing at the time. They were working hard to show “the world” that God’s people wouldn’t let themselves be pushed around, but were standing tall and making their own way in the world.
The collection of verses in chapter 17 features a mixture of poetic verse and poetic imagery sharing God’s care and God’s wisdom to God’s people through Jeremiah. Wisdom the leaders of Judah ignored.
Judah’s leaders felt compelled to match wits with their superpower neighbors (Babylon & Persia) in spite of their neighbors’ superpower-economies, superpower-production capacity and superpower-militaries. Unfazed by their overwhelming vulnerability, Judah’s leaders put their confidence not in God’s care but in their own clever schemes and alliances designed to protect their tiny nation by playing off their mighty neighbors against each other. Meanwhile Judah’s religious elite endorsed and even practiced the idol worship and the cultic acts—in the very Temple itself—practiced by their superpower neighbors hoping to earn some political equity on the world stage.
How smart! How savvy! Never mind that idol worship and those cultic acts were in clear violation of God’s most sacred trust and covenant made with the people of Judah.
As it turned out, Judah’s leaders dramatically overplayed their limited hand, provoking one of their superpower neighbors, ultimately leading to the destruction of Jerusalem, the Temple, and everything they cherished. They clearly succeeded in securing their independence from God. No consolation as they were taken captive to Babylon. How’s THAT for independence, eh? So much for their clever schemes and religious posturings designed to leverage their own security, prosperity and peace
But it didn’t have to be that way. I think we have a tendency to invoke the Angry God of the Old Testament—that God was so ticked off at God’s people that the invasion and destruction was God-ordained—an inescapable fate. No! This was NOT a foregone conclusion, otherwise God would not have called Jeremiah in the first place. Sure God was ticked off, but even so, God faithfully warned the people through Jeremiah of the many dangers they were unleashing.
But Judah’s leaders chose to ignore God’s repeated warnings--ignoring Jeremiah, dismissing him as a crazy religious zealot.
And so they were taken captive to a foreign land—UNTHINKABLE—where they remained for the next fifty years. And so there was now going to be division among God’s people—a natural result of the distance between the relative few—the intellectual, political, religious elite who were deported—and the vast majority of Judeans left to literally pick up the broken pieces. Learning how to worship without a Temple and how to live as God’s faithful people under the military occupation of a foreign (super)power.
Fifty years of separation from home, community and neighborhood to ponder (not that anyone did) how their actions and their choices, their greed and self-righteousness and arrogance worked out. Fifty years to ponder deep wounds and divisions inflicted upon their community and nation.
The poetry here in chapter 17, the image-rich poetic wisdom from God underscores what scholar Ronald Clements calls “the inner human dimension of choice and individual responsiveness that lies within every human historical situation. … the essential dimension of individual responsibility and decision-making in the flow of events.” (Clements, Jeremiah: Interpretation Commentary, p.108-9)
It seems to me that we are now living through a similar experience today. We are in many ways experiencing the consequences (on a large scale) of inner human dimension of choice and individual responsibility and decision-making.
Walter Brueggemann writes, “a destiny of either life or death is determined by the object of one’s trust. … the metaphor of the withered shrub or watered tree … emerges in a culture that characteristically is desperate for water (which) makes clear that trust is a life-and-death matter. No tree or shrub can survive without water. There are no viable substitutes. Likewise, for Judah (there is) no viable substitute for genuine trust in Yahweh” (Brueggemann, Exile and Homecoming; A Commentary on Jeremiah, p159-60. Emphasis mine.)
Here is what makes the Hebrew scriptures, the Old Testament, particularly the prophets, such a tremendous resource for us, a treasure of wisdom from God. For therein we discover numerous experiences of our ancestors’ epic failures and the wisdom that comes from such failure. When we ask that our imaginations to be filled and guided by the Holy Spirit of God, we have access to a wealth of human-divine interaction; experiences and lessons upon which to draw, and from which to learn; experiences which can help shape our future AND deepen our trust in God’s ways and God’s faithfulness. For there we see numerous experiences of God’s faithfulness on display through the hardest events and periods God’s people have had to endure.
I know sometimes we’re convinced that all the chaotic events of the recent years as they continue today are unprecedented, or new or unique to this generation. And in some ways this is true of course. But in many ways it is also clear that so much of the struggle beneath the surface “issues” is about a very basic human dilemma (trust in God vs trust in Self) playing itself out among us.
* * *
As I was thinking about all of this, I found myself remembering a game you may have heard of or played. It’s sometimes played as part of an ice-breaking activity for small groups or as a team-building exercise. Or in a church youth group. It’s called Trust-Fall. For those who’ve never heard of it, you are paired up with a partner. This partner stands a couple of feet directly behind you, behind your back so you cannot see them. You are supposed to let yourself fall backward, keeping your body straight like a plank. (And you’re not supposed to ask, “ready?” before you fall back, but I’m sure that rule is ignored as a matter of routine.)
The person standing directly behind you is supposed to catch you so that you do not hit the floor. Then you trade places. This game lets you experience the emotional (and even the physical) dimensions of trust, the raw vulnerability it takes to let yourself fall backward, and risk falling hard to the floor, trusting the person behind you that you cannot see is ready and will catch you to keep you from falling to the hard floor.
It’s hard to say which role is more nerve-wracking: falling backward--trusting that the person behind you will catch you, or the role of having to catch another human being when they fall. In both roles, in my experience, the mind fills with chatter--questions and doubts. I’m sure folks who have been invited to participate in this “game” have said, “Nope. NO WAY. Not doing this.” And I get it. Totally understandable.
Given the vast changes and shifts happening in our lives and in our world, obviously we’re all doing our best to make our best decisions and choices, and to allow our institutions the necessary leeway required to function. And we can and do quibble with our leaders’ motives and integrity, the key for our sanity and for our hope is to invest as much if not more time cultivating trust in GOD. Not as some escape from life’s harsh realities and conflicts, but in order to build up our spirit and build the spiritual, mental and emotional resilience required to live in these uncertain times.
Scenes like this from Jeremiah and from the history of Judah are indispensable to building trust in God it seems to me. Here we can meet and collectively remember God’s faithfulness to God’s people shown in the midst of dire historical events and periods. Not to dismiss the unique and dire events and period confronting us today, but in order to avoid being overwhelmed; in order that we might learn how to function, or better yet, how to live with hope, with excitement, and with confidence. Not confidence that humanity will magically or suddenly change and behave and get our act together, but to remember that God has a way of bringing a unfaithful and untrustworthy humanity along God’s way. Not through divine coercion but through the ways of Love and Trust and Community, and through our personal gifts and experiences, and through the diversity of the Body of Christ that is the church and the communities of faith in every neighborhood, every city, every state and every nation on earth.
But on those particularly bad days, when it seems like all hope is naïve or lost amid human cruelty and ignorance, it may come down to a moment when we just have to learn to fall back, to let go, to just let ourselves fall. Not to “test God” but to let go of all the stress, all the anxiety, all the agony … just let it all GO, live to see another day, and trust that God is there and will be there to catch us when we fall.
I keep thinking about Brueggeman’s comment “ … a destiny of either life or death is determined by the object of our trust.” Sometimes we have no choice but to trust in flawed, human leaders. But even then, especially then, remember to trust God. You do have that choice.
For people like us who live by faith in God, trust in God truly is a life-and-death matter. That’s what it means to BE people of faith. Thanks be to God. Glory to God.
