Faithfulness

Luke 17:1-10

    I took a train by myself from Edinburgh to London this summer.  It was about a five-hour trip.  I was looking forward to this time alone to catch up on my journaling, read a good book, and maybe just sit and enjoy the scenery.  It was my one chance really to be alone from traveling with my kids, husband, and mother-in-law to meeting up with my parents.  And then, a friendly looking older gentleman sat down next to me.  He had lived in Edinburgh for twenty years, but had grown up in rural England.  He was headed to Paris to meet some friends on a “summer holiday” but was stopping in London for the night.  It turned out he had also been an English literature major, and we had a lot of common interests despite our differences.  Well, there went my alone time, I thought.  I feel like this happens a lot to pastors – it’s hard to sit next to someone and not be friendly, and then four hours later you’re still in a conversation!  Of course, the conversation ended up being a true blessing of my trip.

As an introvert, I let go of my idea that I was going to do a bit of reading and embrace this person that God placed in front of me.  It just so happened, I got to see a lot of scenery, too.  It came to the point in the conversation where this man asked, “So what do you do for a living?” And I responded, “I’m a Lutheran pastor – I’m actually on sabbatical.”  This is usually where things get interesting for me.  This man responded that he had recently been invited by a neighbor friend to go to church with her. He was not a churchgoing person.  He said that she invited him in a way that was not off-putting or awkward, but that he actually might go.  “I like the idea of church and community,” he said, “If I could just get past the belief thing.”  Hmm, I thought. If only a lot of people could get past the belief thing.

This whole experience as you can see was a “God sighting” for me.  I believe that I planted a seed, just like that neighbor planted a seed, and maybe, if this guy can get “past” the belief thing, he might just find faith.  When we think about what it means to be a disciple of Jesus today, faith as a requirement of a disciple might seem so obvious that I wouldn’t bother preaching about it– we talk about actions like serving, giving, and welcoming, worshipping and praying.  To become a Christian, though, means having faith in Jesus, right?  We can also relate with the disciples in our gospel for today who doubt their faith is enough; who think they need to have more faith.  So even though it may seem obvious, and even our name as a church is FAITH, I thought it would be good to go back to the basics of having faith and nurturing our faith as a discipleship practice.

I read more of Luke 17 than is printed in our bulletin for today, because I think it is important for us to know the context in which the disciples say to Jesus, “Increase our faith!”  He warns the disciples to be on guard against sin, especially not to cause others to sin, but then he says if the offender repents, forgive.  Then Jesus goes even further and says that if someone sins against you seven times in one day, and they repent or ask for forgiveness, you must forgive.  These are difficult things to ask of anyone, aren’t they?  We might rather focus on uprooting a mulberry tree and planting it in the sea, than to try to forgive the same person over and over again in the same day.  Lord, increase our faith!

The man sitting on the train next to me (isn’t it funny, we talked for 4 hours and I forgot to ask him his name!) doubted that he had enough faith to call himself a Christian.  It’s so easy to focus on our inadequacies and failures in the presence of God.  We confess our sins weekly that we have not done everything we ought to have done, we have not measured up to God’s expectations of us.  Or we might think, like the disciples are surely thinking about that mulberry tree, if only I had more money, time, better health, better relationships with my family, and so on, more FAITH, I could really do something with my life or make something of myself.  It’s human nature to focus on what we lack.  We bring our needs to God. We need Jesus, this is actually the beginning of faith – recognizing our need.

 Here’s the interesting thing about how we read this gospel passage in English versus the original Greek.  Good old Pastor Fred Craddock, whom I mentioned a few weeks ago, says that in the Greek, there’s a hypothetical subjunctive grammatical form that is difficult to translate in English – the “If/then” clause in verse 6.  I’m going to skip over the technicalities to get to the point:  Pastor Craddock says that a better translation might be, “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, [and you do,] you could say to this mulberry tree…and it would obey you.”  When you add that little phrase, “and you do,” that changes the meaning of the sentence from what sounds like a discouragement to the disciples, “you don’t even have the faith of a mustard seed, you of little faith!” to Jesus actually encouraging the disciples that they have all the faith they need, even if it’s just the size of a mustard seed.  

Jesus tells the disciples to be on guard from sin, to not cause others to sin, and then to forgive others who sin.  They understandably feel inadequate, that they cannot do this, so they ask Jesus to give them more faith, and Jesus basically tells them that the faith that they have, even if it is only as big as a mustard seed, is enough.  And WHY is it enough? Well, Jesus is standing there right there beside them.  Our faith is enough because our God is enough.  Our God sends his only son Jesus to stand with us, to give us the faith, the hope, the strength we need to continue to follow him so that we can forgive, welcome, love, serve, worship, pray and do all of those things we have been talking about that disciples do.  At the end of the day, it’s not about how much faith we have, but about what God can do with our little bit of faith.

    I think all of us can think of a time in our lives we identify as a turning point for us in our faith journeys.  If it was not for God with us in those times, we would not be here today:  God getting us through a health scare, a miscarriage, a divorce, a tough time with a family member, a death of a loved one.  God being there for us in times of great joy – sustaining our marriage, giving us wisdom and guidance as parents, helping us change career paths or achieve a goal like getting a degree or maybe even running a marathon.  Trusting God is with us and working all things for good when unsettling things are happening in our world and in our country.  We are here today because of our mustard-seed faith.  I love this verse from Psalm 37 today:  “Commit your way to the Lord; put your trust in the Lord and see what God will do.”

Like my friend on the train, when a lot of us think about what having faith means, we think about belief – agreeing with the basic thought that God exists, that Jesus died and rose again, just as we confess in our Creeds.  We think about how we need to think and what we need to do to be a good Christian.  But here’s another Greek tidbit – the word for “faith” in Greek also means, “trust.”  I like the word “trust” better than the word “belief” because it moves us beyond the idea of thinking about God with our minds to the heart and soul of living a life of faith.  We don’t wake up and hope we have enough faith to touch the ground; gravity is there, we trust that it will be there for us because it simply is.  This is the same with God – when we move beyond thinking about God as an intellectual idea to a trusting relationship in Christ our Lord, Christ just IS there for us, 24/7, in the joys and sorrows of our lives!  We trust that Jesus IS there, right beside us, encouraging us…”If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, and you do, I can do great things through you,”  Jesus assures us.  Trust is recognizing that God can do more for us than we can ever do for ourselves.  It is not up to us to move mulberry trees.  It is not up to us alone to forgive people who are difficult to forgive, or to be on guard against sin alone – when we trust that Jesus is there, right beside us, we know that we can do really difficult things.  We trust that God is enough for us.  Our faith is enough; we ask now that Jesus helps us grow in our trust of him and what he can do through us.  Thanks be to God!  Amen.