Psalm 40:1-10--"Suspicion, Trust and Good News"

Trust. It may be one of the hardest things in the world to come by. And it’s no wonder. We have to teach our children not to trust. You know the litany. Don’t trust a stranger who offers you candy. Don’t trust a stranger who asks you to help find a lost dog. Don’t trust a stranger who offers you a ride. Don’t trust a stranger who asks you for directions. We have to teach them not to trust their friends—which is what it means to resist peer pressure when drugs or alcohol or sex or other risky behavior is involved. We have to teach our children not to trust their priest or minister, their coach or teacher and even their parents when a line is crossed from affectionate touching to sexual exploitation. We have a moral responsibility to teach our children not to trust, so it’s no wonder that trust is becoming so hard to come by anymore.

Years of experience on college campuses has taught me to teach collegians not to trust a date. Date rape is now a regular feature of college social life. It happens every weekend and weeknights too. And for God’s sake, never trust an alum for drinks at a homecoming event. Colleges are careful not to advertise that homecoming on campuses all over the country is prime time for sexual predators. But there is another aspect of not trusting that is being taught in college. The practical, pragmatic, safety-conscious parental advice to our children not to trust is being transformed by their professors into an academic and intellectual worldview. In one form or another, it has crept across the curriculum, so that even where it has no place in the subject matter, it has infected the profession and the professor. It is still all the rage after decades of dominating the academic and intellectual landscape. It is a worldview driven by suspicion. In a nutshell it says, “Nothing can be trusted.” Nothing that is written, said or done can be trusted because the motives of the doer, speaker or writer are always suspect. It is a perspective on the world that you and I have come to breathe and eat and drink and sleep: a worldview of suspicion that leads to skepticism and cynicism.

The French philosopher Paul Ricouer, a favorite of mine, for what it’s worth, coined the term that has become all the rage. “The hermeneutics of suspicion,” Ricouer said, and the academic study of literature, philosophy, political theory, and religion have never been the same since. The practical, pragmatic parental advice not to trust that we give our children in our concern for their safety and well-being has become an intellectual fetish among academics and intellectuals the world over. Don’t blame Ricouer. What he actually said was this. Careful reading and responsible interpretation require what he called a “double motivation.” The “double motivation” was this. In careful reading and responsible interpretation, you must engage in a “willingness to suspect” on the one hand and a “willingness to listen” on the other. Hear the “double motivation”? Suspect and listen. You must take what he called the “vow of rigor” on the one hand and the “vow of obedience” on the other. Hear the “double motivation”? Be rigorous and be obedient. Scrutinize the text rigorously and subject yourself to it obediently. But a not-so-funny thing happened as Ricouer’s suggestion began to circulate among academics and intellectuals. In literature, philosophy, political theory, religion, and a number of other fields, scholars and their hangers-on raced to champion the “willingness to suspect” while rejecting the “willingness to listen.” They swore their allegiance to the “vow of rigor” while refusing to take the “vow of obedience.” By reducing Ricouer’s “double motivation” to the single-mindedness of suspicion alone, not trusting has been elevated to an overriding principle and an intellectual obsession that shapes one’s every interaction and every interpretation. So it should come as no surprise that trust is one of the hardest things in the world to come by any more.

All of which leaves diligent readers of the Bible in something of a predicament. Over and over again, the Bible and the Christian tradition call us to trust. “Trust in the LORD with all your heart,” says Proverbs 3:5. “Trust in the LORD forever,” says Isaiah 26:4.” And “Happy are those who make the LORD their trust,” says Psalm 40:4. I can already hear the suspicion floating around in the gray matter of some of us. It has become second nature for so many of us. “Happiness through trusting?” we ask. “What about the times I trusted and got burned for it? I trusted, and I got cheated. I trusted, and I got used. I trusted, and I got hurt. And now this Mary-sunshine psalmist and this naïve ninny preacher say, ‘Happy are those who make the Lord their trust.’ Yeah, well. It didn’t quite work out that way for me. Thanks, but no thanks.”

Let me tell you about someone in the congregation I serve, a friend who a couple years ago or so came to me to tell me of his struggle with a potentially devastating diagnosis for which he was undergoing testing. “I have prayed long and hard,” he said, “that everything will be all right. But I’m scared. I’m really scared. This could kill me. This could be the end, right here,” he said. We talked for a while about the plans he was making for his family—the conversations he had already had with his wife and the conversations he was planning to have with his children, and we prayed together. A week or so later, he came back to see me. The test results weren’t in yet, and he still didn’t know what he was up against, but he said that the most remarkable thing had happened since we had talked. He had continued to pray, he said, and one night while he lay in bed awake unable to sleep because he was too scared, it came to him, he said. “I had this overwhelming sense that even if everything is not going to be all right, I will be all right,” he told me. “Even if the diagnosis turns out to be devastating, even if this kills me,” he said, “I’ll be all right.” He went on to say, “I said two years ago when I was baptized that I was giving my life to God. Now it’s time for me to believe my own words and live by them. I just wanted you to know that I’m okay, and I’m going to be okay, no matter how this turns out.” We hugged each other, and he left. Now, I’m grateful to tell you that the tests turned out “all right,” but that’s not the point. The point is that in a terrifying encounter with his own mortality, while staring the prospect of his own death straight in the eye, he gave his life over to God—he trusted God, so that even before he knew how it would turn out, for good or for ill, he could say with the psalmist, “I waited patiently for the LORD; [and God] inclined to me and heard my cry. [The LORD] drew me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock. . . . [God] put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God” (Psalm 40:1-2).

In the end, the trust of which the Psalms and the Proverbs, the gospels and the epistles and the apocalypse speak, is not the trust of a Mary-sunshine naïve ninny. It is the trust of someone who in the deepest, darkest hour of her existence and his encounter with the end of existence has found that even if no one else or nothing else in all creation can be trusted, God can. It’s not as though we don’t go through our times of suspicion, skepticism and cynicism, even where God is concerned. We do. But the testimony of our lives—and even the testimony of our deaths—is that God can be trusted, so that even when it is not all right, we discover that it will be all right. “I said when I was baptized that I was giving my life to God. It’s time to believe my own words and live by them.”

My friend’s terrifying encounter with his own mortality has resulted in a confession of his trust in God much like the confession of the psalmist in Psalm 40: “I have told the glad news of deliverance in the great congregation; see, I have not restrained my lips, as you know, O LORD. I have not hidden your saving help within my heart, I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation; I have not concealed your steadfast love, and your faithfulness from the great congregation” (vv 1-3,9-10). Now let me tell you what typically happens in me when I hear that kind of confession. Remember, I’m an offspring of Paul Ricouer; I’m a child of my time, a student of my teachers and teacher of my students on whom I have pressed the willingness to suspect and the vow of rigor. When I hear a confession like the one in Psalm 40, I say, “Well, I’m happy for you. But I happen to be aware of thousands of other people, millions even, tens of millions, for whom it did not turn out so well.” I am infected and affected like all the rest by suspicion and skepticism. But if I pause long enough to listen after I have been suspicious, if I linger long enough to take the vow of obedience as well as the vow of rigor, I hear the psalmist say that this confession of trust did not arise out of sunshine and light—it rose from a cry, it came up from “the desolate pit, out of the miry bog” of suffering, disappointment, pain, addiction, misery. It was there in the desolate pit, while still in the miry bog, lying awake at night too scared to sleep that the psalmist discovered the deliverance, the saving help, the faithfulness and salvation, the steadfast love of God so real and so present that that even if it didn’t turn out all right, it would be all right.

That’s the Good News that we are called to share with each other “in the great congregation” and with our world outside the walls of the church. Our testimony will inevitably fall on mostly suspicious minds, skeptical ears and cynical hearts. But the testimony of our words and of our lives will be genuine because it will have passed the test of the “double motivation”: the willingness to suspect and the willingness to listen, the vow of rigor and the vow of obedience. We will have learned who not to trust and who to trust. And we will have learned that even if it is not all right, it will be all right. Then we can sing with the great congregation the words of an Irish psalmist, “Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart; naught be all else to me, save that thou art. . . . Heart of my own heart, whatever befall, still be my vision, O Ruler of all.” That’s trust.

This material is Copyrighted © 2006 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.