FAITH IS ALL ABOUT TRUST

COLBY MARTIN: GOSPELS OF LUKE AND MATTHEW CONTAIN TALES ILLUSTRATING THE POWER OF TRUSTING GOD

Have you every actually done a trust fall? I’m confident you know what it is in theory, but my sense is that trust falls are like political contentment: We know it’s a thing, but very few have experienced it.

I come from a religious heritage where the word “faith” is heralded as perhaps one of the top three most important words humans must reckon with (sadly, the other two are probably “sin” and “hell,” but we’ll save that for another day). However, in the specific tradition I was raised in — conservative Baptist — faith was used as a synonym for belief. In other words, when I was told to “have faith,” it was shorthand for, “believe these particular statements.”

Yet there’s another dimension to the concept of faith within the Christian tradition that I didn’t learn about until much later, and it has more to do with trust than belief. Seen this way, faith functions more as a verb (something we do) than as a noun (a thing we posses). For many Christians, I get the sense that our faith is like a belief fall, where we stand there, arms across our chest, with the firm belief that if we fell backward then we’d be OK. But that’s it. That’s all we do. Stand there and believe really hard.

A trust fall, however, is meant to actually put that belief into action. We don’t just believe we’ll be OK, we actually fall backward in trust.

As I see it, faith-as-trust is not only closer to how the first Christians conceived it, but it’s also much more — how to put this — useful? Helpful? Good?

In order to say more about the idea of faith-as-trust, I’m going to pull from a few stories from the Gospels of Luke and Matthew.

First, there’s a Roman military leader who had the world’s most powerful political empire at his disposal, yet when his beloved servant fell sick, he turned to an itinerant preacher from the backwoods.

Second, there’s a story of a woman stuck bleeding for 12 years who exhausted her life savings in the medical world to fix her, only to be left broke and still bleeding. When neither money nor science could save her, in desperation she reached for just the hem of Jesus’ garment.

Third, there’s a mother whose child was possessed by evil spirits, and when her own religion (Canaanite) failed her, she risked crossing cultural boundaries to seek out a Jewish rabbi for help.

Finally, the last story is about a woman known only as a “sinner,” shunned and labeled by her community, with no one on her side. She barges into a dinner party one evening and throws herself at Jesus’ feet to wash them with oil and tears.

In each of these stories, the storyteller describes the actions of the individual in question as being “faith.” Furthermore, each story ends with an event of healing or being made whole — or, how the word sometimes gets translated into English, “saved.”

To the Roman centurion, Jesus says: “I tell you, even in Israel I haven’t found faith like this,” and the sick servant is healed.

To the woman stuck bleeding, he says: “Your faith has saved you. Go in peace,” and her bleeding stops.

To the religiously different mother, he says: “You have great faith. Your daughter will be healed,” and so it happened.

And to the woman called “sinner,” he says: “Your faith has saved you. Go in peace.”

Letting go

We might hear these stories and think the connection is something like this: There is a powerful God who can snap his fingers and heal people. And sometimes, if you believe the right things, or believe hard enough, then God will snap those divine digits and blammo, you’re all set.

But if I’m being honest, I find such explanations deeply unsatisfying, and not at all consistent with my own experiences in life. Not only does it put way too much pressure on us to get it right or to do better, but it also props up a view of a God who can do the healing thing whenever, but who withholds it until us finite, limited, poor creatures can get it right.

I’d like to offer an alternative way to understand and process these stories. As I read them, I can’t help but notice how all the individuals involved are at the end of their respective ropes. They’re exhausted from the perpetual disappointments and hardships of life. Specifically, these are people witnessing the limitations of political systems, money, science, religion and society.

Does that sound familiar? Can you relate?

For me, this is an example of the particular (i.e., these stories that happened 2,000 years ago) illuminating the universal (i.e., the things that happen to all of us). I’ll bet we all know what it’s like to feel utterly let down by the powers that be. I know some of you have seen firsthand how the medical world has severe limitations. Who among us hasn’t felt as though there’s never quite enough money to fix things? I can’t be the only one who’s exhausted so many resources looking for answers and satisfaction and yet still feel trapped, strapped and empty.

What about religion? Have you given your life to a certain set of rules and rituals only to be met with shame, rejection and loneliness? And I’m sure many readers know all too well the pain when your own community slaps you with a label as a way to exert their power and control over you. In so doing they shun you and remind you of your place, which always seems to be on the outside looking in.

I wonder, then, where that leaves us. What do we do when life’s systems and institutions and other humans make promises they can’t keep, and give us sand beneath our feet to stand upon whilst calling it stone?

Returning to our four stories, I’m struck by how all four characters did the only sane thing left: They let go. They let go and threw themselves into a posture of trust. They stopped trying to control it — which is only ever an illusion anyway — and turned instead to Jesus. Which, another way to say that is, they turned to unconditional love. To compassion. To grace.

And upon meeting such love and compassion, they were met with healing. Wholeness. Or what the Bible simply calls “salvation.”

I used to believe that believing the right things was faith. And I used to believe that this faith would save me (aka grant me eternity in heaven after I die). But the more I read the Gospels, and the more I understand fait-has-trust and salvation-as-wholeness, the more I think that heaven is the experience of living life as one big trust fall, casting myself upon the love and compassion of a God who will always catch me, always hold me, and always bring me back to wholeness.

Martin co-founded Sojourn Grace Collective, a progressive Christian church in San Diego. He is the author of “Unclobber: Rethinking Our Misuse of the Bible on Homosexuality” and “The Shift: Surviving and Thriving After Moving From Conservative to Progressive Christianity.” You can reach him at colby@colbymartinonline.com.

As I see it, faith-as-trust is not only closer to how the first Christians conceived it, but it’s also much more — how to put this — useful? Helpful? Good?

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