John 14:1-14
During this past Lent, I was invited to speak at Ben’s parish in Lynchburg for their weekly Lenten program. A committee of St John’s members had come together to discern what the community needed most, and they came out with a program entitled “In Spite of It All: Spirituality For When Life Gets Hard.” Each week, guest speakers responded to a question, and as the speaker for their final session I got a doozie. How do we trust God in spite of the mistrust in our culture and communities? Maybe one of the biggest and most important questions in our life of faith in this day and age. How do we trust God, in spite of it all?
I went back and forth for weeks about how best to address the question. Should I talk about specific moments in scripture when someone trusted God, even when things were bleak? Should I talk about times in my own life when I needed to trust God, and times that I failed to do so? Finally, I let the Holy Spirit nudge me in a direction, and I think it was the right one, if only because it was a message I needed to hear for myself.
How do we trust? Those are the first four words of the larger question, but it is also a massive and fundamental question all on its own. I shared with the group one theory of trust that has always rung true for me since I first heard it. Popularized by research professor and author Brene Brown, it is known simply as the Marble Jar Theory.1
Brene tells the story of her young daughter who comes home from school in tears. She tells Brene that something embarrassing happened, and she told some friends about it, and by lunch the whole school knew and was laughing at her. This young girl swears she will never trust anyone again, and as Brene tells it, she was tempted to agree with her. “Trust no one but your momma” is what she wanted to say. But instead, she pushes back, knowing that a life without trust would bring her daughter nothing but pain.
Brene tells her daughter that trust is like the marble jar in her classroom. When the class behaves well, the teacher adds marbles to the jar. When the class behaves poorly, the teacher has to remove some of those marbles. A full jar means a reward for the whole class; an empty jar means missing out on something fun. Brene says that when our friends do things that show us they are trustworthy, they’re adding marbles to the jar. The more marbles in the jar, the more vulnerable we can be with that person.
Brene asks her daughter if she has any marble jar friends, and she immediately names two. When Brene asks how she knows they are marble jar friends, her daughter surprises her with her answers. One friend always saves a seat for her at lunch, and if there aren’t enough she slides over to share a seat with her. The other remembered all the names of her many grandparents when they all came to her soccer game. These little moments, these seemingly simple acts of friendship are each a marble in the jar, and they add up.
Brene was so impacted by this conversation that she followed up on it in her research. The data showed again and again that trust is built in small moments over time, through repetitive acts of care and vulnerability. A coworker who asks how your mother’s chemotherapy is going. A neighbor who is always willing to stop what they’re doing to watch the kids while you run out for more cold medicine. A parent who really listens, and only gives advice when you ask for it. One of the number one things that came up in her research was people who attend funerals. We remember the people who show up for us in grief, in loss, people who go out of their way to drop off a casserole or who take a half day from work to attend a weekday funeral for someone we love. We remember the acquaintance who came to the visitation unexpectedly, and the friend who came to our kid’s dance recital. Those are marble jar moments, and they make trust possible.
So how do we trust God? What do marble jar moments look like with love itself, a being and a force entirely different from and entirely surrounding us? It’s a tough question, but it is what Jesus is asking of his disciples, and by extension asking of us, in our Gospel passage today. Believe in God, believe also in me. Many translations render that as Trust in God, trust also in me. The words we translate as faith and belief in English are really more similar to trust in the original Greek. We often talk about our beliefs more like opinions, something internal to us. But trust is inherently relational; you cannot trust abstractly. You need some marbles in the jar, and you need someone else to put them there. So when God asks us to trust, it is not abstract. We are being asked to entrust ourselves, our vulnerabilities and our limitations, to God as revealed to us in Jesus.
When I spoke with the group at St John’s about building trust with God, I reminded them that we can’t trust someone we don’t spend any time with. We need to engage in the relationship, we have to show up, or the marble jar stays empty and the faith stays abstract. So how do we show up with God?
Jesus today reminds us that we have all the marbles we could ever need in the story of his life. By reading the Gospels, by spending time with the stories and getting to know God as God revealed Godself in Jesus, we find a God who is trustworthy, who is tangible and real and present. Not an abstraction, not a pile of theological concepts, but a person we can be in relationship with. A person we can learn to trust.
We show up with God whenever we engage with the scriptures, alone and in groups. The Bible is a collection of stories told and preserved by people who were trying to figure out how to trust God, and all the moments they succeeded and all the moments they didn’t. We show up with God whenever we spend time with fellow Christians and listen to their stories, when we notice the marble jar moments when God has acted in and through the life of someone we know and love. And we show up with God in prayer, when we take the risk to share a tender part of ourselves with God and listen for the ways God loves and honors that risk.
There will be moments in your life of faith when the marble jar feels awfully empty. I know that I have had those moments and even seasons when I didn’t exactly feel God had earned my trust. The temptation is to put the lid on the jar and screw it tight, to stop giving God and the world the chance to empty us any further. But a closed jar cannot be filled. A closed life can’t be filled either. When Jesus spoke the words “Trust in God, trust also in me” it was the night he was betrayed, spoken to the very people who abandoned and denied him. He knew that after his death, they would have plenty good reason to close themselves off. But with some of his final breaths, his last moments with them, he asked them not to. He challenged them to stay open, to remember him and all that he had shown them. And when they struggled to do that, he came back to them in their locked rooms and their dejected retreats to toss one more marble in the jar, to remind them that it is worth staying open to the God that will always come back, no matter how far we push him away.
Whether your jar feels plenty full, or cavernously empty, I hope you’ll keep it open. I hope you’ll keep showing up, and listening for the clink of a marble. Sometimes it sounds like a friend’s testimony or the songs of the birds greeting the dawn. Sometimes it sounds like a passage of scripture that rings true in a new way or a hymn that moves us deep in our spirit. Sometimes it happens in the silence of prayer, where vulnerability begets intimacy begets trust. Sometimes it happens here, in the fellowship and the breaking of the bread and the words our savior taught us. And isn’t that worth showing up for?
Mother A Writes 