Sermons for the Month
What is Faith
Pentecost 18
DATE: October 7, 2001
TEXT: Luke 17:5-10
"To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN
So Jesus has been teaching his students what "following him" will involve; stuff like "carrying the cross," about giving oneself over completely to the love of God and in loving service to others; and then one day they come up to him and say, "you know, Lord, you're gonna have to give us more faith!" Makes sense to me! Haven't you ever said to yourself, "I guess I just need more faith," or, "I sure wish I had as much faith as so-and-so does…" And Jesus replied, "If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, 'be uprooted and planted in the sea,' and it would obey you." Wh-a-at?? How does that address their request? What does mustard have to do with faith, and why would I want to move the mulberry tree? I'd be willing to bet that I'm one of the few people here today who has first-hand experience with mustard, and I mean beyond putting it on your hot dog at the ball game. Mustard plants grew wild in the fields of our farm while I was growing up, and every summer my parents and sisters and I walked through the ripening grain to find and uproot the large stalks of mustard. It was hot, dusty, "buggy" work; invariably we kids would begin to complain, and then just as invariably we would get "the lecture" from my Dad, complete with visual aids. Stopping and opening one of the tiny pods of the big plant, he would show us the tiny seeds clustered in it, reminding us that EACH ONE of the hundreds of seeds on just one plant would grow into another big plant with hundreds of seeds, each one of which would grow into… well, you get the picture. So did we. O.K., so a mustard seed is a tiny little thing with big potential. So, even a teensy bit of faith has the potential to grow, right? Except that's not exactly what Jesus says. He says, "If you HAVE the itty-bittiest particle of faith, that's enough to make things happen." For a long time, that just didn't make sense to me. And then one day, something clicked. "Faith" is like a computer! Now, the Lord knows, my knowledge of computers is … well, the size of a mustard seed; but in my mandatory "intro to computers" class in nursing school, the instructor said something that makes sense of Luke 17:6. As he described it, in an attempt to explain why computers are essentially stupid, he told us that a computer is simply a huge number of very tiny switches, each of which at any given point in time is either "on" or "off". Every bit of information stored by a computer is encoded as a particular arrangement of 0's and 1's -- "off's" and "on's." No matter what a computer is doing -- printing a term paper, generating your electric bill, guiding a satellite into planetary orbit, or sending your kids' picture electronically to Grandma and Grandpa, in each instant, every millisecond, each individual tiny switch is either 0 or 1 -- not stuck halfway, not "2" -- either it is off or it is on. When we say "MORE" faith, as did the first disciples, perhaps we are thinking of "faith" as a quantity, like "I have a faith of '4' right now, but I think I need at least an '8'", or "my faith tank is down below a quarter, I'd better ask God for a fill-up." But what if "faith" is more like the computer, in which faith only comes in one quantity, the size of a mustard seed or a microcircuit, and at this instant in time, when I say "NOW" -- it's either "ON" or it's not. Then, we're not asking for MORE faith; what we really desire is "LONGER" faith, for more and more moments of "ON" as we journey through our days. Please understand that "faith" as it is used here is not referring to the reality of our eternal salvation, which is NOT a "now-you-have-it, oops-now-you-don't" affair. God is steadfast in His covenant with us, and our salvation depends upon his promise, not upon our feelings. By "faith," here we are talking about our response TO God, of our "faithfulness," our confidence, our obedience, our trust. It's knowing that because He lives, we also can, in the words of St. Paul to Timothy, "take hold of the life that really IS life," "relying on the promise of God who saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works but according to his own purpose and grace." Even a millisecond of faith is a gift of grace, through the power of the Holy Spirit, and not something we muster up in ourselves, by scrunching our eyes closed and thinking the "right" thoughts. It's a tiny seed planted, or a tiny switch IMPLANTED by the Spirit, and when that seed is there, when that switch is ON, that's FAITH, and in this instant it is all that we need!! Of course, when the next moment comes, we'll need it again, and THAT's what we're praying for -- that God will keep faith going in the face of THAT moment's challenges, temptations, shakiness, and then in the next moment, and the next, and the next… lo-o-o-onger faith is what we need; for this very moment, what we have is sufficient. We've all experienced this in our everyday lives. When we're faced with a big project -- a master's thesis, say, or a major new responsibility at work; or a fall housecleaning; or nine months of pregnancy followed by umpteen hours of labor -- do we try to get the whole thing accomplished in a single session? No, we do not! We break down the task into smaller parts; we take it one closet at a time, we plod along day by day, and eventually the day comes when we have the degree, we complete the project, we hold the child in our arms. Now put that into the context of the life of a disciple. Do I have "enough faith" to follow Jesus, with all that that entails? Do I have a lifetime supply of courage, of strength, of patience; of self-sacrificing devotion, of wisdom, of love? Good golly, NO! But just for this instant, in His grace and by the Spirit's power, yes I do; and so do you; and so we pray only that in the next moment, it will be given to us as well. The future belongs to the Lord, and as Paul writes to Timothy, "I know the One in whom I have put my trust, and I am sure that He is able to guard until that day (that is, until the end of time) what I have entrusted to Him." What about the mulberry tree?? Well, of course we don't want trees transplanted into the ocean. Jesus is using an exaggerated figure of speech here to say that seemingly impossible things become possible, as God wills, when faith is operating. And the mustard? You know, every summer we pulled out ALL the mustard; and every summer, there was MORE mustard! Did we miss some? Knowing my dad, not likely! It must have been that the mustard in the surrounding farms had little tiny seeds to share. And so do we! Like mother Eunice and grandmother Lois, used by the Spirit to sow the seeds of faith in the boy Timothy; and like Paul, there when the young man Timothy was discouraged, doubting, afraid, to remind him of the faith he had received, and to encourage him to practice it, moment by moment, to hold steady, to endure -- we are given the seeds of faith in order to share them. "Faith" is ours, in THIS moment, else we wouldn't have bothered to be here; tiny, but mightily powerful. God grant it to increase, for each and every one of us, and all of us together, and let's always be reminding one another, encouraging one another, to "rely on the power of God" in this NEXT moment, and in the next, and the next, and the next. God only KNOWS how much we will grow, how much we can do, and the people we will become! AMEN