Pentecost 20, October 2 2016
Hab 1:2-3, 2:2-4; 2 Tim 1:6-8, 13-14; Luke 17:5-10
Brookdale
Today’s gospel passage contains two short parables of Jesus about the life of disciples. I find both of these difficult, but I’ve been wrestling in particular with the first one. In that parable, Jesus tells the apostles that if they have even a little bit of faith, they can order trees to throw themselves into the lake, and the trees will obey.
Do you believe that? We here all have faith, and probably more than a tiny mustard seed’s worth. Do you believe that we could walk out of this communion service and you or I could order a tree here at Brookdale to go jump in the lake, and it will do it? I don’t. So I imagine a conversation like this between Jesus and me.
Me: Jesus, with all due respect, what you are suggesting is just impossible. Everybody knows that trees can’t uproot themselves, walk from here down to the lake, and jump in. No matter how much faith we have, there’s no way we could do that. So why say that we could?
Jesus: I’m not trying to get you to dump trees in the lake, because God is happy to leave the trees where they are. But don’t be so quick to claim that you can’t do something just because it is impossible. People do impossible things all the time, when they have faith in God’s power to effect his will.
Me: Well, I know that there are many stories of miracles in the Bible, and saints can perform miracles. But those are special cases. They’re not for ordinary people.
Jesus: I’m talking about ordinary people like you doing impossible things. Let me point out a few examples. In 1950 you would have considered it impossible for a penniless Albanian teaching nun in India to start a worldwide order of 4500 religious. And yet, Mother Teresa of Calcutta put her faith in God and did just that.
Closer to home, in 1955, the smart money would have bet that segregation in the deep south of this country would be around for the foreseeable future. Yet in December of that year, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, and a young minister named Martin Luther King agreed to lead a bus boycott, which eventually led to the end of segregation.
Me: Yes, but Mother Teresa was a saint, and I think Martin Luther King was too. Saints have a lot of faith, not just faith as big as a teensy seed. I’m not a saint like them. Ordinary faith like mine can’t accomplish all those wonderful things. I agree with the apostles: please increase my faith.
Jesus: You’re missing the point. Mother Teresa started out with faith like a tiny mustard seed. She put on a sari and went out into the slums. She found one person dying in the road and carried him into an empty building, where she gave him water, bathed him, and let him know that somebody loved him as he died. It took some faith to do that, and as she did it, her faith grew. So she did it again and again, and the little seed grew up into a great faith. But it starts as a tiny seed.
After that conversation with the good Lord, I think I’m beginning to get it. God will put some task before each of us today. Something small. I’m pretty sure at this point in my life that he doesn’t expect me to perform an impossible task. He may ask me to be patient with my daughter-in-law, who can be more than a bit difficult. He may ask Crystal to bring residents of Clare Bridge to this communion service, enriching all of us. Whatever he asks of us will take the faith we have, and our faith will grow as we do today’s task, so that we will have a little more faith for tomorrow’s task.
So we don’t need to ask the Lord to increase our faith. We have enough faith to do the task at hand. Our job is to exercise our faith muscles and do that task at hand. God will give bigger tasks to some people as their faith grows, but for most of us, I think God just wants us to keep putting one foot in front of the other, applying ourselves in faith to the task at hand and bringing his kingdom a little closer each day.