How do I know I can trust you?
How do you know you can trust me?
Building trust is difficult, particularly during these times when the advance of artificial intelligence coincides with open corruption in government, technology, and media; times when it gets harder to know what we know, and harder to trust what we’re being told.
Building trust can involve a lot of trial and error. If we must behave perfectly to build trust, then we will surely fail, because none of us is perfect. There is no such thing as a flawless parent, or a perfectly trustworthy friend, or a spouse who never, ever lets their partner down.
We don’t have to behave perfectly. But what do we need to do, to build trust?
A basic, simplistic way of understanding trust goes something like this: if I say what I’m going to do and then do it, I build trust with my neighbor. If an investigator asks you where you were when a crime was committed and you tell the truth, you deepen their trust in you as a reliable witness. And we can always work to restore trust in conventional ways: we pay back whatever is not rightfully ours; we own up to a mistake and apologize; in the language of Alcoholics Anonymous, we make “living amends” by leading a more honest life, day by day.
In fact, amends after a betrayal can surprisingly build stronger trust between two people than they would have had if their bond had never been threatened or damaged. Think of the Japanese craftspeople who practice kintsugi when they repair pottery: they restore the broken vase by joining the shards with bright gold, accentuating rather than downplaying the new patterns caused by a painful break. The vase is even more beautiful now. The break and repair are intentionally, beautifully incorporated into its history.
This all makes good practical sense. We build trust by engaging in ordinary trust-building behaviors, including the things we do to repair a break in trust.
But I want to dig deeper. And to do so, I want to draw on the work of two ethical, conscientious researchers and consultants in the business world. (There are still some good guys around!) Their names are Frances Frei and Anne Morriss (who happen to be a married couple), and in 2020 they published Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader’s Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You. Frei and Morriss say that there are three basic ways we build trust with one another. They add that many, maybe most, of us are quite strong in one of the three ways to build trust, and weaker in at least one of the other two.
Here’s how it works. In the trust model of Frei and Morriss, I can build trust with you in three ways:
I can build trust by being authentic: when you talk to me, you are talking to the real me. If authenticity is my anchor, the thing I’m particularly good at, then you can just tell, over time and in different situations, that you are getting to know the real me.
Second, I can build trust by practicing empathy. If empathy is my anchor, then you can just tell that I don’t merely understand and support you, I care about you, and I care about your success. If empathy is my anchor, I am here to empower you, to lift you up, to encourage you. Empathy, according to Frei and Morriss, is not just a feeling, which is usually how we understand it (we might say, “Oh, I know how she feels; I’ve been there!”). Empathy in trust-building is more about support and empowerment.
And finally, third, I can build trust by having what Frei and Morriss call logic. This can also be understood as competence. If your anchor — your strongest asset as a trustworthy leader — is logic, then others just “know you can do” the job, that “your reasoning and judgment are sound.” But logic isn’t only about the neocortex. To build trust, we need emotional intelligence. People tend to trust us if they are confident that we not only know how to do our jobs, but we understand the deeper dimensions, we have emotional intelligence, we get it, we’ve got this.
Authenticity, empathy, logic: this is the trust triangle, if you ask Frei and Morriss. I like this approach, because trust is rightly understood as a hard thing to build, a challenge that follows us through all our lives; and Frei and Morriss give us a compassionate, empowering, and also practical way to build trust.
But as we take up this topic, we do well to remember that we are Christians, and that as Christians we have particular lenses we can use to view trust and trust-building, lenses that bring into focus some things and blur or obscure other things.
One lens we use to look at the concept of trust is the Hebrew Bible, and the more we read that bible — Christians call it the “Old Testament” — the more we read it, the more we hear about, metaphorically speaking, a troubled marriage. The troubled married couple is God and God’s people. Again and again, God is upset with the people because they are faithless, and the people are upset with God because God seems to have abandoned them.
In this proverbial marriage that spans centuries, we can recognize the painful themes of any relationship: betrayal, misunderstanding, broken promises, painful absences, dashed expectations. The people rage at God, and in our own Christian tradition, the central figure of Christianity takes up their cry on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?!” the humanity of Jesus screams from the cross, quoting Psalm 22.
But God expresses powerful anger, too. The people turn from God, again and again, finding almost anyone or anything else to fashion into a golden calf. At one point they demand a human king, so that they can be like all the other nations, and God takes offense at the idea. And then, as we follow the ages-long saga of this rocky relationship, we finally come upon the provocative prophet Hosea, whose book we opened and began reading a few moments ago.
Hosea gets brutally direct with the marriage metaphor. It’s fair to say we can even hear misogyny in the prophet’s voice. If you haven’t already recoiled from the text, you might do so now, when I repeat a bit of it: “The Lord said to Hosea, ‘Go, take for yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord.’” This is not remotely my favorite metaphor, this image of a man married to a faithless, untrustworthy wife. You may be tempted to just discard it: surely there’s a better way for the prophet to challenge God’s people!
But our tradition invites us to keep this metaphor around, so let’s sit with it a bit longer. (Just a bit. Hang in there with Hosea for just a few more moments.) After consummating marriage with a faithless person, the prophet is to name his children terrible names, names that accuse the people, names that mean things like “No mercy!”. In our day, the prophet’s children might be given names that mean “God won’t restore the rivers you polluted,” or “God won’t forgive you for selling weapons of war that destroy innocent life.” This is rough.
But the more we sit with this troubling text, the more we can recognize all of this as a trust complaint: the people broke trust with God. “Why have you forsaken me?” the psalmist yells out to God. “What?! You have forsaken me!” God seems to yell back. The vase is shattered, and so far, the potter hasn’t pulled out the fine gold sealant that would restore what’s broken to something even more beautiful than the original.
For us Christians, that potter is Jesus Christ. The business consultants Anne Morriss and Frances Frei do not offer a Christian vision, and we should not expect them to do so. But for us, Jesus can be the One who builds trust with immense skill in all three dimensions: Jesus is authentic: he is who he presents himself to be; Jesus is empathetic: he is here for us, here to lift and empower and send us; and Jesus the Word of God is logic itself: the Logos, the creative Word through whom all things have come into being.
If we turn to Jesus as our master trust builder, then we need look no further than his counsel on prayer for a primer on building trust with one another, and with our neighbor. How should we pray? The answer of Jesus to this question is quite simple, but also riveting:
First, we pray with restored trust in God, whom we call “Father,” a familial name, an intimate name. The marriage metaphor is set aside in favor of something more fundamental, more visceral: Jesus calls God Father, and we in turn are invited to do so, evoking the basic, elemental trust that develops between a trustworthy parent and their beloved child.
Then we affirm that God’s name is holy — an echo of the foundational trust that the one God established with God’s people at Sinai — and we ask that God’s kingdom come. Not our kingdom — God’s kingdom, God’s agenda, God’s presence, God’s justice, God’s peace. God’s trust.
Then we ask for enough to live today, and enough to forgive today. You and I can only forgive each other if we have first received forgiveness from God. And we finally ask that God not “bring us into the time of trial.”
“Do not bring us into the time of trial” can be a hard phrase to interpret. It doesn’t mean that we’re asking for a pain-free life. It’s more about not being abandoned during the hardships of life. “Why have you forsaken me?” wails the psalmist — and Jesus — in a desperate time of trial. When we pray for deliverance from this, we are reaching out in trust to God: please, God — please, Father — do not leave us. Save us from solitude. Save us from despair.
And then, tomorrow, we pray for these four things again: for God’s presence, and for our daily human needs; for God’s forgiveness (which we share with one another), and for salvation.
And then, the next day, we pray for them again. We can change up the words, of course: the so-called “Lord’s Prayer” is more like a prayer form, like the various and changing forms of our Prayers of the People. When he teaches us to pray, Jesus isn’t giving us a script. He’s teaching us how to build trust.
In this confusing and duplicitous age, do we need anything else, anything at all, more than this?
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Preached on the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 12C), July 27, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Hosea 1:2-10
Psalm 85
Colossians 2:6-15
Luke 11:1-13