Text: Luke 17:5-10 New International Version (NIV)
5 The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!”
6 He replied, “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it will obey you.
7 “Suppose one of you has a servant plowing or looking after the sheep. Will he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, ‘Come along now and sit down to eat’? 8 Won’t he rather say, ‘Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink’? 9 Will he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? 10 So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.’”
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen
What – exactly – is “faith,” anyway?
We hear the word a lot, mostly in phrases or slogans like:
“Keep the faith, Baby!” or “Just have faith” or “Take a leap of faith.”
And then Jesus says to the disciples: “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed…” Does faith really have a size?
Faith, it seems, is one of those things in life that everybody thinks they know all about, but which, when you think a little more deeply, becomes much more, rather than less, confusing.
We can oftentimes get a handle on a concept better through examples than talk.
I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I came across this story many years ago in the pages of The Interpreters Bible. I believe it was a retelling of a true story…
It seems that there once was a women in the Scottish Highlands who had a son who was a typical rebellious teenager. One day, after a particularly loud argument, this son – we’ll call him “Jamie” – stormed angrily out of the house.
He never came back.
Every night of her life thereafter, this mother – rain or shine, wind or hail, fair weather or foul – would throw open the door of her house and shout out into the darkness, “Jamie! Come home, my boy! Come home!”
But he never did; and the mother, after many, many years, died – mostly, I believe, of a broken heart.
Now, here’s the question: Was that mother acting out of faith – faith that, all facts to the contrary, her son might one day return, or was she just insane?
Sometimes it’s hard to tell. In I Samuel, Chapter 1, for example, we read about the prophet Samuel’s mother, Hannah, who desperately wanted a baby. So she goes to the forecourt of the Temple, where it just so happened that Eli, the priest, was sitting there, and he observed Hannah praying. We read “As she kept on praying to the Lord, Eli observed her mouth. Hannah was praying in her heart, and her lips were moving but her voice was not heard. Eli thought she was drunk and said to her, ‘How long are you going to stay drunk? Put away your wine.’
“’Not so, my lord,” Hannah replied, ‘I am a woman who is deeply troubled. I have not been drinking wine or beer; I was pouring out my soul to the Lord. Do not take your servant for a wicked woman; I have been praying here out of my great anguish and grief.”
“Eli answered, ‘Go in peace, and may the God of Israel grant you what you have asked of him.’” (I Samuel 1:12-17, NIV)
And, as we know, Hannah did have a son, Samuel, who became a great prophet.
But the point here is that her faithful act of prayer looked to Eli like drunkenness.
Hannah wasn’t drunk. That Scottish mother wasn’t insane (in my view, anyway). These are two examples of what faith is not. But what, again, is faith?
Our Confirmands and I had a very good discussion on Wednesday about faith – I shared with them what I think is the single best description of faith, which is found in the Letter to the Hebrews, Chapter 11, verses 1-3: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the men of old received divine approval. By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear” (RSV).
The first word that leaps out at us is “assurance.” An assurance is a guarantee, iron-clad.
The second word is “conviction.” Faith is the conviction that, even though we can’t see God at work in the world, we know it’s true.
We are people of faith. We know that God works in ways that have nothing to do with physical laws and the rules of nature. God is beyond and transcends all of that.
Assurance. Conviction. Trust. Confidence. All these are elements of faith.
But is even more. Faith is also a relationship. It is a gift from God. We can’t create faith for ourselves. We can’t study to get faith. We can’t work toward getting faith. It’s a gift. God gives us faith so that we can be in a relationship with Him.
The disciples think that maybe their faith is coming up short. So they ask Jesus, “Increase our faith!” In other words, they don’t think they’re where they ought to be. Faith they already do have – after all, they’ve dropped absolutely everything in their lives and have been following Jesus around for several years now – but still, they don’t think they have enough faith. “Just give us a little bit more,” they plead.
And don’t we all feel that way sometimes? Every one of us sometimes gets that cold feeling in the pit of the stomach when it seems as though the world is closing in and even conspiring against us. Sometimes we feel like we’ve painted ourselves into a corner, and we don’t know the way out. In those moments, we pray that God will help us, sure, but we also – somewhere inside – also pray that we’ll have the faith to endure whatever comes. “Lord,” we pray, “increase our faith!”
But Jesus has a surprise for them. He tells them that faith is not a commodity that can be measured like flour. He tells them – and by extension, us – that even the tiniest amount of faith – faith the size of a mustard seed – is sufficient.
In answer to their question, Jesus gives a rather perplexing answer. He talks about servants who are just doing their duty. And I’m sure the disciples asked the same question maybe some of you asked, “What has that got to do with faith?”
By telling the disciples the story of the servants doing their duty, Jesus says that the more we “do faith,” the more we have faith, the more we are aware of that mustard seed of faith working in and through us.
Being a Christian is not just believing in some creeds or in a set of ideas. Being a Christian means accepting and following a way of being, that is unlike other ways of being.
The Rev. Will Willimon recounts something a woman once said to him: ’The strangest thing happened to me today as we repeated the Lord’s Prayer together,’she said. ‘There I was, just saying the prayer I said ten thousand times, just repeating the words without thinking about it and suddenly, “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done,” really hit me. I had been going through a tough time in my life, struggling with which way I ought to walk. Today, suddenly I was overcome with a willingness to let God’s will be done in my life, whether what God might will is difficult or easy. For the first time, I really mean it.’”
Willimon writes that this woman was “[j]ust doing her duty, just saying the words she had been taught, [and] God had increased her faith. In regard to faith, just do it! God will handle the rest.”
Sisters and brothers – as we come forward this morning to the Altar of the Lord, let us pray that our mustard seed will grow!
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.