Sometimes we're listening

(art by Coraline Meyers)

Jeremiah 17:5-10

There are realities that run deeper than words.  Something like love, or hope, or trust is often better expressed or understood with pictures or poetry.  What is it like to trust God? And what is it like to not trust God? 

Here is a picture of that: 

Those who trust God are like a tree planted by a river.  Their roots are deep, reaching toward the water, firmly planted in the soil, intertwined with the whole ecosystem of the wetland. The buzzing insects and squirming underground creatures, the billions of bacteria and micoorganisms, interrelated and intermingling.  Life pulsing through it all - swimming fish and paddling ducks, and singing birds, and burrowing mice; the eating and excreting, birthing and dying, sun and moon, and wind and rain, and whole vibrating energy of the thing. And here grows this tree, fed not by what it does but by where it is planted and what is nourishing it, and what it contributes there.  Blessed are those who trust in God. Alive with life’s fullness are they.

But those who trust in human strength, who turn their hearts away from their source, they’re like an isolated shrub, alone in the desert, a withered scrub in a salt bed. And they don’t even recognize relief when it comes. Cursed are they – disconnected, and starved of life, and wholeness, and interrelatedness, destined to seek and find only scarcity, contributing nothing to anything else around them.  
Surely, trusting God is better. But what is it and how to do it?
 
I find it interesting that trust has two meanings. And in this text, it is said in two different ways. 
 
Trust means assured reliance on the ability, truth, character, or strength of someone or something.  
It also means, an arrangement whereby a person holds property as its owner in name, on behalf of one or more beneficiaries for their preservation and betterment.
 
Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust IS the Lord.
 
So trusting is relying on God’s character and strength. When we trust our good friend or spouse, we let down our guard and let them in. We let them show us who they are and believe them when they do. We risk being with them in ways that put us at risk; we could get hurt when we trust. And truly, we do, because the nobody is perfect, and the most trustworthy humans we know, at one point or another, let us down. And we let them down. But we choose, anyway, to trust again, and that is how trust grows with other humans, and even with our own selves.  We risk trusting, we trust, we fail, we learn, we trust again, and so it goes.
 
But not only are we told to trust in God, we are told our trust IS God.  Trust in God is different than trust in humans, because it is trust in trustworthiness itself. It is relying on the only reliable force – our origin and our destiny, love manifest throughout creation and in the person of Jesus Christ.  
 
And that’s where that other, law-related understanding of trust is helpful to me. Because the idea that God holds something on our behalf, for the goodness and benefit of all, is a lovely sense of trust. 
 
God holds our life, holds this earth, holds the past and the future, holds our potential and our sorrow, holds our regret and our longing, holds the vast, interconnected harmony of all creation, with us, for us, for the good of us all. That means that it’s not up to us to be fantastically trustworthy - or excellent trusters - or it all falls apart. Our hope, or salvation, or value, or contribution does not depend on the good intentions and reliability of others, nor does it require the good intentions and reliability of our own often confused, sometimes sneaky, and occasionally wildly deceptive hearts.  1 John 3:20 says it this way, “Even if our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts and knows all things.”
 
To trust God, then, we need only accept that life and love and wholeness is all held for us.  We are recipients whether we choose to acknowledge it – in which case we are the tree by the stream – or choose to resist it – in which case we are the shrub in the salt flats.  
But in any case, just the same, God holds the world in abundance and life, and invites us to share in that, through justice, and hope, and joy, and peace.  And we can rely on this. We can act as though this is true, because all truth comes from God. We can live as though this is real because God is the ground of all reality. 
 
So despite our weird religious predilections, trusting God does not mean mustering confidence and suppressing sadness. It’s not about forcing ourselves into some kind of mold or changing who we are. That might as well be a shrub in a salt flat.
 
If we were to behave this way with a beloved, we would called out for NOT trusting. Withholding ourselves, guarding our hearts, and putting up a façade, so that we might not be completely known, in all our ugliness and beauty, would be called a lack of trust, and rightly so.
In a love relationship, trust is a willingness to be impacted and seen; it is openness with what’s really going on in us. Like our passage invited last week, “Trust in the Lord, O people, pour out your hearts before God...” 
 
If we trust in the Lord, if our trust IS the Lord, that means allowing the energy and the life force that comes from God return to God through us. What does this even mean? How does one even do this?
 
I listened to a description of a beautiful concert.  When the audience arrives they are distracted and chatting, bringing in with them all the thoughts and baggage of the day. The lights go down and a hush falls and they settle in to hear the music.  And once it begins, all that internal clutter and external restlessness starts slipping away. 
And soon, the cellists and violinists on the stage are reaching out toward the audience with their playing, and the audience is reaching out in silent, focused receptivity back toward the musicians, and something begins and builds, until, finally, the giving and receiving, the playing and the listening, are all participating in a transcendent moment that is encompasses each of them, but the individual egos have left the room, and they are melded, connecting in the creation and reception of this timeless experience of sharing this music together.  There is no more differentiation; all are involved in the song itself.
 
This is what God does with us. God’s life reaches out and plants us in the middle of a song, with a whole ecosystem of harmonious noise and life surrounding us, involving us, reaching for us. 
 
And sometimes, we listen. Sometimes we listen in a way that sets us free of the distractions and baggage we came into the moment with, and in our hearing and receiving of the cosmic music, we ourselves are caught up in the give and take, and we ourselves become conduits for the life of God flowing to and through us. 
We find ourselves intertwined, grounded, roots reaching deep for nourishment that feeds us even when the drought is here, part of the interconnected fabric of life to the point that when the fearsome things come, we do not fear. At least, we don’t let fear isolate us and and cut us off, like a shrub in a salt bed, curled in on ourselves, unable to contribute, receive, or recognize relief when it arrives. Fear comes and it goes; it cannot unroot us.  And when drought descends we are not anxious, because we are held and we are not alone.  And we even still bear fruit, thought we may not see it or know it at the time, because the fruit is not, after all, ours to produce, it is brought to life through us.
 
We exist inside the cycle of birth, growth, life, death, decay, and new birth, all around us, within us, through us, in which we participate, from which benefit, and to which we give. Trusting God will have us both embracing our limitations and opening our imaginations. We’ll be confessing our fears and exploring our callings. We will be both drawn into action, and beckoned into stillness.
 
We are invited to surrender ourselves to the song – let down our guard and listen deeply, let is permeate us, until our listening pulls us into the creation of the music itself, so that the moment and the life we are living moves far beyond the individuals participating, into something bigger and more real that we are caught up in, without ego getting in the way, without self-doubt, or comparison holding us back, without shame or fear stopping us from participating in the joy of living fully connected, fully with, and fully for the human beings around us, and fully part of the beauty and wonder of this glorious world and all its mysteries.  
 
May we so trust.
Amen.