June 8, 2025: "Got Faith? How about Trust?"

Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray

Another word for trust can be faith. As UUs, the language of faith doesn’t resonate with all of us, but trust is still an important foundation for how we embrace our own knowing as well as our relationships to each other, and our understanding of our place in the world.

View the video archive of this service here:

Sermon Text

Got Faith? How about Trust?

Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray

UU Church of Bloomington

June 8, 2025

READING

by Robin Wall Kimmerer, from her book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom.

“Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.”

SERMON Got Faith? How about Trust?

This June, we are exploring trust – what it is, what it means, how we build it, how we rebuild it when it is broken. Last week, we focused on how we build trust within human relationships and in community. Today, let’s explore the larger sense of trust that is beyond human relationships, the trust that is often described as faith.

Faith isn’t an easy word for some Unitarian Universalists. My husband Brian had a seminary professor who told this story of sitting next to another parent at their kids’ little league game and the parent asking the professor what he did for a living. When he said he was a professor of theology, the man responded, “Well, I don’t believe in God,” to which the professor responded, “Okay, but tell me about the God you don’t believe in.” The person explained, “I don’t believe there is some male figure up in the sky, with a long white beard, who is all powerful and all seeing and watches over me and intervenes in my life and in the world.” “Oh,” said the friend, “I don’t believe in that God either.”

This story reminds us how we, too often, confine religious thinking to narrow definitions that fail to capture the breadth of religious understanding.

Unitarian Universalist minister, Fred Muir, in his book Heretic’s Faith: Vocabulary for Religious Liberals, describes how we as Unitarian Universalists proudly embrace our heritage as heretics – questioning orthodoxy and imagining faith, religion and God outside of strict boxes. Yet, this also puts us at the fringes, and sometimes we have contributed to our own isolation – and lack of impact on the wider culture because we stop using traditional religious language.

He writes, “We are at the fringe not only by thought, but by vocabulary. We have isolated ourselves by choosing a vocabulary of faith that few recognize or comprehend. Adding to the difficulty and confusion is that religious fundamentalists co-opted the religious dictionary by assigning their definitions to these words, and pasting them into a new dictionary and calling it the official one. And we religious liberals went them one better: we didn’t say anything about it. In fact, we practically helped them. We told ourselves that was language, those were words, for which we simply had no more use. We have limited and handicapped ourselves by giving away this dictionary.”

So let me be clear at the outset. The word faith does not have to or only mean belief in God or in the supernatural. Faith is a word of breadth and depth – meant to name what it is, or where it is, we put our trust. In fact, we often use the words “faith” and “trust” interchangeably. For example: I trust in God. I have faith in you. I trust myself. I have faith that things will change. Faith is the word we use to describe ways of knowing or believing what is not measurable or provable in the same way that facts are known.

So, I’ve got a check-in question: If you are comfortable answering, I am curious, “How many of us are uncomfortable or slightly uncomfortable with the word or language of “faith?”

Many Unitarian Universalists are. And some of that is due to what Fred Muir describes as how the language of faith and religion has become more and more narrowly defined in ways that leave out many religious liberals. This has been damaging for religion overall because within most, if not all religious traditions, there is huge diversity. There are mystical, liberal and humanist teachings and branches within Christianity, Judaism and Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. But there are also conservative, orthodox and even nationalist teachings and branches as well. So, as religious liberals, it is important that we not abandon religious language to be wholly defined by conservative interpretations. It matters that we breathe renewed and expansive definitions into these words, making more room for religious diversity, pluralism, and protecting religious freedom.

So let’s talk about faith - as Unitarian Universalists. And know that when we do, it doesn’t have to be uniform – there is no one right way – because as UU’s our religious tradition welcomes nuance and questions, new discoveries and revelations, insight from science and nature, experience, tradition and scripture, and our direct experience of mystery and wonder. And even if you are quite ready to embrace the word faith – think of this as the question of where you put your trust. What is the rock – the truth – that holds you, that you go back to in moments of doubt or when all feels lost. What truth do you put your trust in?

And remember, this can be expansive and varied for each of us.

A beloved hymn in many UU churches is “My Life Flows on in Endless Song” above earth’s lamentation. The song speaks of having a truth that is like a rock that steadies us in the tumult of life. “What though the tempest round me roars, I know the truth, it liveth. No storm can shake my inmost calm while to that rock I’m clinging. Since love prevails on heaven and earth, how can I keep from singing.”

There is an articulation of faith, of trust, in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s words, “Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us…I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.” In these words, there is an articulation of trust in the earth and in its gifts, and trust in the importance of cultivating joy – even when there is much reason for despair. There is a sturdiness to this trust.

Kimmerer’s words also name the importance of our choices. When I think of where I put my faith – what I have trust in, I trust that we each have power to make a difference in the world. It might be small, but it ripples out and it matters. So, I trust that our choices matter.

This is a big question, but I invite you to contemplate it this week. What is your rock? Where do you put your trust? Your faith?

As Unitarian Universalists, when I think of where we place our trust – while we don’t all have the same answers, I remember that overall, ours is a hopeful tradition – one that seeks to see the world clearly – to articulate honestly its horrors and tragedies, but also its beauty and its joy. Like Kimmerer, choice also plays a strong part in our faith – and where we put our trust. We experience despair and heartbreak at the exploitation of the earth and human family, the reality of war and violence, and yet we still choose the values and the practices of love, generosity, joy, and beauty.

In the last fifty or so years of our tradition, we’ve witnessed the stronger emergence of trust in the earth and in our interdependence with the web of life. Informed by science and experience, we now know more deeply that we are not isolated individuals, but connected physically, in energy and in biology, to the web of creation. So, we trust that our actions and choices impact others in ways that call us to greater mindfulness about our impact.

This is a big question – where do you put your faith?

Maybe it is that everyone has dignity and worthiness. Maybe it is that love must guide us. Maybe it is that gratitude – and that beginning from the foundation of gratitude – helps a way be clear.

In words that Marcia Hart shared with me this week, from the poet Brian Andreas, he articulates this truth that “there is no future without love.”

Maybe it is to choose joy, because it is what the earth gives to us.

Maybe it is the belief that within every human being is the capacity for compassion and goodness, and the recognition that we were made for peace, for joy, for love.

So, when all feels lost, where do you put your trust? What is the truth that lives in you, that you hold onto, that holds you, through all the tumults and challenges, and through the day to day of living?

One of the beauties of our religious tradition is that it doesn’t just give us the answers but invites us to explore and discover for ourselves. We have values and history and knowledge to guide us – but the journey itself to deeper self-awareness and trust in yourself is part of the gift of these questions and our tradition that encourages exploration. It reminds us that there is a truth – a faith – that has been a cornerstone in our tradition – and that is to value the knowing, the wisdom we have within. And while there is not one answer, in the exploration may we find the tools, the faith, the trust, to help us navigate the joys and the sorrows of our lives and our world and to deepen our self-knowledge and our capacity to trust ourselves.

May this – and the strength of community – inspire in us courage and love to continue acting from our faith, from our truth.