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Luke 17:1-10
Be on your guard! If another disciple sins, you must rebuke the offender, and if there is repentance, you must forgive. And if the same person sins against you seven times a day, and turns back to you seven times and says, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive.
Is it any wonder that the disciples immediately say, “Give us more faith?” I mean, that’s a tall order, to not only take your friends to task for their “sin”, a pretty subjective term in our day and age, but then also to forgive people whose sins are aimed at you, and forgive them seven times over? Have you even been watching the election, Jesus? Have you seen a single episode of Scandal, or How to Get Away With Murder? That’s not the way it works. What you ask seems ridiculous – our lives dictated by forgiveness, patterned on being loving, hopeful in the face of such despair and evil…it seems impossible without some superhuman amount of faith…
It is important to note that there’s some ambiguity in the language here…at least in Greek. When Jesus answers their request for more faith by saying, “You don’t need more faith”, evoking the image of a tiny mustard seed, the Greek is unclear. The statement could be read like this – “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed (and you don’t)”, but it could just as correctly be translated like this – “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed (and you do).”
The mustard seed imagery is disappointing because when it comes to the amount of faith we have, we need more, bigger, something on the scale of miraculous or incredible. And yet the great twist that visits us in this story today, is that in our culture of prosperity and wealth, we see more and more often bringing us less and less. Many recent studies have shown that an increase in personal wealth does bring some happiness, but only to a point. Once your basic needs are met, there is an inverse ratio between more money and increased happiness. And the same is true of faith. If we think our faith “grows” as God proves to be faithful, which means God does what we ask God to do, then we’re setting ourselves up for some disappointment. That’s not faith, that’s certainty. And certainty makes God into just another force of nature. I don’t have to have any faith in gravity, or the sun rising in the east, it just is. But I do have to have faith that I can be a good parent, or partner, or citizen, or that I can even be a good person in a world that sometimes seems like it has lost it’s mind.
Life is full of complexities and uncertainty. Even though it’s just supposed to be simple stuff like finding a job that is totally fulfilling and pays really well, or finding the one “soul-mate” in all the world that is just right for you, it’s not simple at all. And faith is what allows us to take the smallest seeds, the one example you have of a good relationship, or a moment of clarity or a time of genuine love and to hold it…to water and tend to it so it grows in us, feeding our moral imagination that we might get a tiny bit more of the picture God is trying to paint in our hearts.
There are times in which being forgiving, being compassionate or loving, even seeking justice, all of the things I’m “supposed” to do as a faithful person, there are times they are not my natural impulse. There are times when I see a bumper sticker on someone’s car and immediately draw them out of the circle…based on a bumper sticker. And I have been known to almost completely discount someone’s worth based on their choice of political candidate. As my wife says, I can be pretty “judgy.” Now, I usually don’t do this out loud, but I do it often in my heart, which Jesus teaches us is the same as saying it.
That’s why I think that the metaphor of slave and master is here, though it may be problematic to us at a time in which slavery, thank God, has become incongruent with Christianity, though not without a big fight that is still going on. The Bible refers the slavery as if it were a natural fact of life, for it is in Jesus’ time, and, particularly in Paul’s letters, we see slavery used as a metaphor for how Paul relates to Christ. With this question to his disciples, Jesus reminds us that we sometimes have to be subject to our faith, as if submitting to a higher authority. We have to practice it like we are obeying it, otherwise we can get caught up in our own cultural, social or political bias to make our decisions, or we act out of our anxiety or prejudice, which can quickly get us off track. Faith, Jesus teaches us, isn’t anything about quantity, just as God’s love isn’t anything we achieve. It is about practicing it, obeying it even, trusting in our faith values even when our hearts are broken or we see absolutely NO evidence that love is stronger than hate, or that goodness will prevail over evil. That is the time to break bread again, to drink from the cup of kindness and remember who we are and whose we are.
So as we prepare for communion on this World Communion Sunday, sharing in this ritual of remembrance with Christians all over the world, I want us to think about the things that happen right here, you know, the “little things” you all do, like…being reading partners in schools, fixing a meal for people at the Day Center or delivering this food to the food bank, a kind word to someone who is hurting, bringing socks to put on the feet of strangers, praying, writing letters to people in prison or cards for those dealing with illness…all small things, all acts of faith. None of us believes that these single acts will change the world, or end hunger or heal a broken heart…but I hope all of us trust that living our faith in these ways helps one person, or two, or five, and also helps us practice being faithful…it helps water the seeds of our faith. Faith is like a muscle, and like all muscles we can define it by getting our 30 minutes of exercise a day, as an act of discipline building resistance to a world that will fill us with less soulful things if we let it. That’s why we need this community right here, this church…as a place to practice being Christians. Because faith is putting one foot in front of the other, sometimes out of sheer obedience, and walking toward a future we do see yet but trust that God is fashioning. Faith is training ourselves each day to look for opportunities to be God’s partner and co-worker in the world. Faith is submitting ourselves to the seeing that the challenges put in front of us — whether solving a problem at work or forgiving someone who wronged us — are actually opportunities that invite us to grow as disciples and witness to God’s presence and goodness in the world…a world where even the smallest amount of faithful goodness can move mountains.