By The Rev. J.C. Austin
It always amazes me how little a story requires in order to be told. There’s a whole genre of six-word stories, which are exactly what they sound like: an entire story told in just six words. Stories like, “Found true love; married someone else.” Or, “Strangers. Friends. Best friends. Lovers. Strangers.” Or, “It’s behind you! Hurry, before it…” And if pictures are worth a thousand words, then even a two-second video can tell a sweeping narrative. I came across one like that not long ago; it’s not even two full seconds, but you don’t need anything more to get the entire story.
As the video begins, you can see that the characters 
in the video are work colleagues trapped together in the dystopian hellscape of a corporate team-building training day in a soulless conference room. The back wall, which isn’t really a wall but one of those terrible accordion room dividers, is littered with yellow Post-It notes from a previous exercise that probably contain their “hopes and dreams for a better future,” or at least the ones that they’re willing to reveal to their supervisor.
In the foreground, a woman is standing on the conference table, facing the camera with an anxious expression on her face. Behind her, in two lines facing each other, is the rest of the team. Their arms are outstretched, fingertips touching, bouncing up and down in unison as they chant and smile at each other and the woman’s back. Yes, it’s the dreaded trust fall.
If you’ve ever been in a particularly earnest youth group or a semi-dysfunctional workplace, you’ve probably encountered the trust fall. It’s a supposed team-building exercise in which one person in a group faces away from the others, usually while standing on a table or chair or stool to get some elevation, and then falls backwards, trusting in the group behind them to catch them so they don’t fall and hurt themselves.
The exercise is designed to show the person falling that they can trust their teammates, and to show the teammates that if they work together, they can take care of each other and keep each other safe. What makes the video great, though, is that (of course) is not what actually happens. As the team behind the woman are pumping their arms in anticipation of the fall, another colleague enters the room from the side, carrying a tray of coffee and snacks.
Immediately, the team drops their arms and abandon their positions, desperate for an influx of caffeine and sugar to get them through the training. Naturally, as soon as this starts to happen is when the anxious woman makes up her mind to trust them and begins to fall backwards, plummeting like a felled pine tree off the table and out of view behind it with nothing (and no one) to stop it. All of her colleagues, except one woman who covers her mouth in shock, fail to even notice anything went wrong, so focused are they on the arrival of the treats.
The video is almost certainly staged, but it’s still true; and in just those two seconds, this video tells a whole story if you’re paying attention. This is a group of people who need to develop trust but don’t have it; that’s why they are doing this in the first place. This is a group of people who are untrustworthy; that’s why they are so easily distracted from literally protecting the bodily well-being of their colleague by the appearance of some tepid office coffee in white Styrofoam cups and some off-brand cookies in plastic wrap.
And this is a group of people who work for a company that wants to manufacture trust rather than cultivate and earn it. We know that because trust falls themselves are a gimmick, one that promises to be an intense and revelatory experience that provides a revelation of the power of trust, but in reality, as one study in Psychology Today drily puts it, “there is little evidence that this trust spills over into day-to-day life.” That’s the fundamental flaw behind trust falls as a tool for building up a sense of team. Trust is not something that can be concocted or imposed or coerced or even discovered; it can only be given and earned.
This passage from Jeremiah is all about trust. The prophet is writing at a time in which Israel is feeling vulnerable and is conflicted over who and how to trust. The Babylonian Empire is in an expansionist mood, and is eyeing Israel for its key location on the trade and conquest routes between Babylon and Egypt to the south, the Mediterranean Sea and Greece to the west, and a cluster of smaller but wealthy kingdoms to the north. The King of Judah in the land of Israel was getting nervous, as were his people, about the Babylonian threat on the horizon. He was not impressed by the advice of the prophets, who counseled him to trust in the steadfast love and power of the Lord.
But the king of Judah turned to something a bit more tangible: the Pharaoh of Egypt and his army. The king believed that, by forming an alliance with the Egyptians, together they could keep the Babylonians at bay. So that’s what he did, feeling that even an alliance with an old enemy like Egypt was still more reliable, more trustworthy, than pinning his hopes on the Lord swooping in from on high and wiping out the Babylonians for him.
Jeremiah’s prophecy here is a response to all that. Jeremiah is notorious for being a bummer, even as prophets go. He’s the Bruno of the Hebrew prophets, if you’ve seen the recent Disney animated movie Encanto. It’s a wonderful film on many levels, playing off of the tradition of magical realism in South American literature to tell the story of a family in Colombia that narrowly escapes an armed conflict that decimates their village, thanks to a miracle that gives the mother’s candle magical qualities that blast away the men chasing them and create a magical house for the family and a mountain enclave to protect them and other refugees from outside threats.
Over the years, the children of the family are given a magical gift by the candle when they come of age: one has superhuman strength, one can heal anything instantly, and so on. Bruno is given the gift of seeing the future, which turns out to be a dubious gift. He seems to mostly see bad things coming for the family and the other villagers, and he tells them what he sees to warn them.
But they begin to blame and reject him when those things start to come true, and finally, ten years before the time period in which most of the film is set, he simply disappears, apparently having fled into self-exile. Yet after all that time he’s still a source of such anxiety and fear that there’s a whole musical number that the family sings called “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” to explain why he’s so dreaded.
That’s more or less Jeremiah’s story (though if there was a song called “We Don’t Talk About Jeremiah,” there’s no way it would be that catchy.) He is called as a prophet by God at a young age, and that’s a dubious gift, because his prophecies are mostly bad news, as God warns him from the very beginning that they will be. They are full of unpleasant warnings and predictions and long, sharp-tongued denunciations of the sinfulness, foolishness, and faithlessness of the people of Israel in general and the king in particular.
As you probably know, kings do not generally love people going around and saying repeatedly that both they and their kingdom are doomed because of their own corruption and cowardice, and the same goes for the temple priests that Jeremiah tangled with, as well. In fact, he became so vilified for his prophecies that his enemies first tried to kill him, then had him imprisoned while urging the people not to talk about Jeremiah: not to repeat or believe his prophecies and to simply pretend like he doesn’t exist. And that sort of worked, right up to the point that his last prophecy about the Babylonians invading and destroying Jerusalem came true.
The prophecy we have today, though, also came true for the original hearers. “Those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength…shall be like a shrub in the desert,” he proclaimed; “they shall live in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land.” He’s talking about the king and, by extension, the people of Judah, who are trusting in the might of the Egyptians, and the strength of their alliance with them, to deliver them from the looming threat of the Babylonians.
But to place one’s most sacred trust in other human beings like this, Jeremiah warns, is like trying to survive as a plant in the desert, in a salt land, in a place without natural water: the resources to keep you alive simply aren’t there. And, in fact, that is exactly what happens: the Babylonians defeat the Egyptians in a major battle, the Battle of Carchemish, and essentially defeat the Egyptians as a significant power in the Ancient Near East in the process.
It is as if the Judeans planted themselves in what they thought was the fertile land of an alliance with the Egyptians, only to have the Babylonians come through and salt the earth so that nothing can grow there anymore. The Israelites trusted the Egyptians to win that big battle and secure their future; that trust was misplaced.
Before that ever happened, though, Jeremiah laid out the alternative: “Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when the heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit.” There are several things that are important to hear in this prophecy. The first is that Jeremiah is not saying that if you trust in the Lord, nothing bad or difficult will happen.
He says that when we trust in God, we will be like a tree that shall not fear when the heat comes, or be anxious during a drought. But the heat and drought still come; the difference is that we don’t have to fear them, not that we don’t have to experience them. Second, he says that if we trust God, even when the heat and drought come, we will not simply survive, but will continue to bear fruit. There is a flourishing that comes from our willingness to trust God, and from God’s faithfulness with that trust.
But perhaps most importantly, Jeremiah is telling us something very important about the nature of trust that I think we often miss. The premise of the trust fall is that trust can be manufactured from a sudden, intense experience of taking a big risk and having one’s trust rewarded in a big way in that moment: when you fall backwards, powerless to catch yourself, the person or persons you trust will catch you.
But the truth is, trust just doesn’t work that way. It can be broken that way, by a sudden betrayal or simply a sudden failure, like the Egyptian army being unexpectedly routed by the Babylonians at Carchemish. But trust is not and cannot be built that way. I don’t trust you any more after a trust fall than I did before it; at most, all I know that you caught me that time, when everyone else was looking and expecting you to do so.
John Gottman, one of the preeminent researchers on human relationships alive today, says that, actually, “trust is built in very small moments, what I call ‘sliding door’ moments. In any interaction,” he says, “there is a possibility of connecting with your partner or turning away from your partner.” Trust is built, then, through hundreds of small moments of risk and vulnerability that are rewarded in turn by hundreds of small moments of presence and care and attentiveness. It is like a tree that is nourished in hundreds of small moments of thirst by the steady stream from which it drinks, so when the big moment does come, the sudden and intense experience of heat and drought, the trust is already there that will keep you calm and cared for.
There are times when it is hard to trust in the Lord. We want something big, something sudden and intense, the sensation of being caught when we are falling. The challenge of this prophecy is that trust in God doesn’t work that way. The promise of this prophecy is that it doesn’t have to.
We put our trust in God in hundreds of small moments of vulnerability and risk: when we allow God’s Word to make us question our assumptions about God, ourselves, our values, and our world; when we reach out to offer a ministry of Christ’s loving presence to someone who’s suffering when we don’t know what to say or do about it; when we give more than we’re comfortable with to support God’s work of love, justice, mercy, and peace; when we treat those who are poor or without housing as a human being to be in relationship with rather than a problem to be solved; when we meet people wherever they are with Christ’s love and grace rather than our own apprehension or judgment.
Each of those moments is another root that keeps us planted firmly in God’s soil, and that nourishes our hearts and minds and spirits from the steady and endless stream of God’s love, and keeps us steady, and bearing fruit, and ever-green, no matter how strong the heat becomes or how long the drought lasts, because God’s love and grace will always and ever be more than enough.