If I Can’t Trust You…

I grew up in a generation–one of several generations–that was taught to seek out a policeman (and they were almost exclusively men) if we were ever lost or separated from my parents. Oddly, I don’t remember my parents ever giving me that advice. But a kindly officer who gave a lost child an ice cream cone and perhaps a ride atop a police horse before reuniting them with their parents was featured in many a picture book.

In that same era, there was a house about two blocks down from my elementary school that had a little poster in the window, showing the outline of a house with a handprint in the middle of it. It was supposed to signify that that was a safe house to go to if you were locked out of your own house or lost or otherwise in trouble. Because I boarded the school bus at the edge of the school playground and got off at the bus stop just three houses down from my own back door, I never had occasion to need to knock on that door.

Fast forward a quarter century. I had been ordained but not yet called to a full time ministry, so was working for a temp agency. One week I was assigned to a small two-person graphic design firm. Friday afternoon rolled around and both partners left before the end of the day. One of them signed my time card for the temp agency and told me to lock up when I left. I protested, “but how do you know I’ll work until 5:00?” “Oh, you’re a minister,” she replied. “If I can’t trust you, who can I trust?!” She’d clearly never heard of Jim Bakker.

Fast forward another three decades, and here we are a quarter of the way into the 21st century. It is openly acknowledged among a widening segment of the population, what parents of children of color have always known, that police officers too often present a danger to children in trouble, rather than safety and security. It seems like a really bad idea to encourage children to knock on a stranger's door, simply because a particular symbol appears in the window. Scandals involving clergy of all denominations, ranging from sexual abuse to fraud have only multiplied in the years since that graphic designer insisted she knew she could trust me based on my identity as a minister alone. And this week, when I did a search for children's stories about trust an interesting thing happened: most of the books that were recommended were about how to be trustworthy, not about who to trust. About how to learn to trust yourself not about how to trust others. I did come across one highly acclaimed book about not trusting fish that looked spot on for this morning, but alas, its release date isn’t until April 25. Maybe I never hit on the best search parameters, or maybe the world is such a dangerous place that it’s really, really hard to know how to talk to kids about trust. Just like it’s really, really hard to talk to adults about trust.

From deep fakes to plain old deceptive dating profiles, from scammers and phishers who pretend to be me to try to get gift cards from you to politicians to make campaign promises without the least intention of keeping them, and from auto mechanics, car salesmen, and other non-automotive-related vendors who regularly cheat women to healthcare providers in every segment of the field who violate boundaries, confidentiality, and bodies, our lives are filled with people we shouldn’t trust. People who take advantage of our trust. People who, taken altogether, over time, might bring us to believe we can’t trust anyone. Should not trust anyone.

There is always a chance that any person may betray us, deceive us, let us down when we really need to be supported. There is no uniform like that of a police officer, no symbol like a poster in the window of a supposedly safe house, no profession like clergy that can guarantee that the wearer of the uniform, the denizen of the house, or the member of the profession can be trusted.

We’ve tried to mitigate that lack of certainty, creating whole industries to protect ourselves: background checks, nanny cams, Ring-type video doorbells, McAfee Antivirus, and so on. When it comes down to it, however, none of our safeguards and precautions is 100% effective, and we still have to make a decision–to trust or not to trust. And because none of our strategies for preventing fraud, deception and betrayal is 100% effective, the question of trust becomes a matter of faith.

Opting out of trust altogether is tempting. If we never give anyone our heart, it will never be broken. If we never give ourselves to a friendship, we’ll never be betrayed. If we never join a church or other organization, we will never be disappointed. If we never enter into a business transaction, we’ll never be cheated. Oops, that last one is impossible. Unless we have the means and the skills to go completely off the grid, the need to enter into business transactions is a daily occurrence. The thing is, the others are almost impossible, too.

Eventually, without our conscious permission, we give our hearts away. And while we can snatch them back again in a desperate attempt to avoid all possibility of heartbreak, that ends in heartbreak too, for what might have been. We can withhold ourselves from all possible friendships, refuse to throw our lot in with any organization, for fear of trusting the wrong people or institutions but that leads to such a depth of loneliness and isolation as to be dangerous to our health, and is in itself a breach of our own trust to tend ourselves well, in the ways of wholeness and vitality. If we are to live full, productive lives of both meaning and joy, we must find our way beyond self protection and isolation, fear and suspicion. That continuing and lifelong process is, I repeat, a matter of faith.

We sing now together our song of thanksgiving…

David baulked a bit when I insisted that we sing that hymn this morning. You might be wondering about it too. It’s a Thanksgiving tune with Thanksgiving lyrics. But it’s also on point for a discussion of trust.

We sing of the prophets, the teachers, the dreamers,

designers, creators, and workers, and seers;

our own lives expanding, our gratitude commanding,

their deeds have made immortal their days and their years.

I love all the Thanksgiving hymns for different reasons. I love this one because it invites us to broaden the scope of our thanks giving beyond the fruits of the harvest, to encompass the people we are thankful for. I’m all about broadening the scope of gratitude at Thanksgiving–filling our cornucopias with symbols of all our blessings, as you remember from last fall’s service. And today, when we consider trust, I appreciate this hymn because prophets, teachers, dreamers, designers, creators, workers and seers–these are people we want to be able to trust, people who historically we might have automatically counted among the trustworthy. Still, we know that no profession, no category of people is without individuals who will break whatever trust they are offered.

There are theories and self-help guides and workshops to help us learn to trust ourselves to make sound decisions about trusting others. Lists of red-flags and databases of bad actors that may, probably do to some extent, help us avoid misplacing our trust. Still, as the full name of this month’s Soul Matters’ theme–the Practice of Trust–reminds us, trust takes practice. And even with the theories and guides and databases, opportunities abound for us to misplace our trust and bring ourselves into harm’s way. So from a faith perspective, I think the answer to “if I can’t trust you, who can I trust?” doesn’t lie systems or lists but rather in the last verse of that hymn:

We sing of community now in the making

in every far continent, region, and land;

with those of all races, all times and names and places,

we pledge ourselves in covenant firmly to stand.

In community–in church, 12 Step Groups, neighborhood associations, parenting groups, open heart surgery survivor support groups, I’ve heard great things about the community to be found in CrossFit gym–in community we learn who we can trust and how we can trust and how to be trustworthy. We learn it through observation of others in the community trusting one another and being trustworthy. We learn it through the unfolding of our relationships within the community. We might get it wrong sometimes. We might place our trust in the wrong person when we venture outside our familiar, intentional circles. It might even be from time to time that someone within our familiar, intentional circles is not worthy of the trust we have placed in them. But communities at their best have a self-preservation based interest in supporting and sustaining trust. So if we ground ourselves in community, community we are now and continually making and remaking, then, through practice and observation, we build our capacities both to identify people worthy of our trust and to take the risk of trusting even when it’s not a sure thing.

We may, each of us, have someone of whom we can say, as Linda Pastan does in her poem Faith, ‘if you told me something completely different tomorrow than you’ve even told me before, ‘I would believe you/as I've always done before.’” I hope each of us has someone we trust that much in our personal lives. For all the other times and in all the other circumstances that confront us with decisions about who to trust, may we trust in community and within community. The community adrienne maree brown describes: the community of people who already feel like home, who reveal in hard work, who let children teach, who listen to whales. If you can’t trust me, or a police officer, or the safe house down the block, that’s whom you can trust. Amen