Rekindle Your Faith
"If you had
faith as a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, 'Be rooted
up, and be planted in the sea,' and it would obey you.” (Luke 17:6)
The disciples have implored Jesus, "Lord, increase our faith!" That is, “give us more faith,” a request I
would guess most of us can identify with. Haven’t we all felt at times that our
faith was inadequate? When we have doubts and questions, when we’re confused,
when we recognize that our faith is not really at the center of our lives?
Jesus doesn’t answer their request as they
put it. It’s not more faith that they
need. It’s a different kind of faith: Mustard weed faith. Mustard weed was
the scourge of farmers in Palestine. It grew wild. Birds would eat the seeds, but
only partially digest them, and then drop them everywhere. Mustard weed grew
rapidly and would take over fields and vineyards. Pulling it up did little
good, because more birds would just bring more seed from somewhere else. It was persistent, irritating, and
fast-spreading. It would be there whether you liked it or not.
It
sounds like thistles in our church yard.
We kill them, we dig them up, and
within a week or two they’ve grown back.
That's the kind of faith we need, Jesus
says, faith small and contagious enough to be carried everywhere. Not more. Not
bigger. Not even deeper. Just contagious enough to be caught, dropped, and then
take root.
I like the interpretation Kimberly Bracken
Long offers in Feasting on the Word. She
suggests Jesus is saying to his
disciples, in as loving a way as possible, that even though they still need to
grow in their faith, even with a weak and undeveloped faith, they are qualified
to do the work. In the verses just before today’s reading Jesus has told
the disciples that true discipleship required vigilance and that they were
bound to stumble so they needed to be careful and constantly on guard (Luke
17:1-4). Bracken Long suggests their response is to panic and say, “Lord, help us then! Fix the problem!
Increase our faith!”
After just that one verse about faith
telling the disciples they only need faith as small as a mustard seed, Jesus changes
the subject to being a servant. Jesus is reminding the disciples, and us, that faith
does not spread like mustard weed if we think we've got all the strategies down
just right, or if we think we control the mission and act like we do. The
mission is God's, not ours. We get to help, even as we've been helped by God’s
grace. But, we must remember, we go and
serve at the bidding of Jesus, like a family servant, not because we feel
like it or because we want to make our own ministries bigger. God is in charge,
not us.
Last year on NPRs “All Things Considered,” there was a story of a United Methodist
pastor who decided she was an atheist. The situation was scary and awkward for
her. Who could she tell? What would she
do now to earn her living? Lacking
someone to confide in, she secretly confessed to her iPhone, “Sometimes I think to myself: If I could just
go back a few years and not ask the questions and just be one of the sheep and
blindly follow and not know the truth, it would be so much easier. I’d just keep my job. But I can’t do that. I
know it’s a lie. I know it’s false.” Eventually she left the ministry.
I believe doubts are a part of our faith.
As the father of the child Jesus cured of demons said, “I believe. Help thou my unbelief.” (Mark 9:24) As John Wesley
said, “When I was young I was sure of
everything; in a few years, having been mistaken a thousand times, I was not
half so sure of most things as I was before; at present, I am hardly sure of
anything but what God has revealed to me”
The problem I think is with our current
cultural understanding of faith. The printing press provided the technological
change that led to the Protestant Reformation. For the next 500 years,
Christians became very focused on “the word.” But then we took it to extreme and identified
faith with particular beliefs. This focus on beliefs led to divisiveness.
Various humans, presuming to speak for God, came up with vastly different
interpretations of the same verse which they vehemently held to. Today, there
are over 39,000 different Protestant denominations. Martin Luther’s injunction,
“sola scriptura,” led to the doctrine
of Bible inerrancy. But inerrancy to what canon? There are 293 different translations of the
Bible on sale on Amazon. Which one are
you going to be inerrant with?
That wasn’t the definition of faith in Jesus’
day.
For
Jesus, faith was a question of commitment, commitment to a relationship with
the great, “I am.” Humans couldn’t
name God! There are hundreds of images
of God in the Bible, all valid, all incomplete. The immensity of God can not be
reduced to words. Faith is a sense of awe and wonder at the immensity and power
of the creator of the universe and, at the same time, a sense of intimacy with
the one who knows your every thought and feeling and provides care with
steadfast love. The essential component is trust, trust in the grace of God. As
Emmanuel Célestin Suhard said so beautifully, "To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda or even in
stirring people up, but in being a living mystery; it means to live in such a
way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist."
To live in such a way that one's life
would not make sense if God did not exist. Jesus was teaching the disciples
that first and foremost, faith is a way of life. Their duty to serve God is
part of the relationship, just as God’s gift of grace, which imparts faith into
them, is part of the relationship. Because it is the nature of the
relationship,
they
don’t have to worry about whether or not they have enough faith. Even a little faith
is enough to render them worthy of performing the work to which they have been
called.
There’s a certain faith that comes with
believing what you were taught as a child and sticking with the convictions
that you had as an adult. There’s something very scary and vulnerable about
saying, “I’m open to change. I’m open to
changing my mind.” It’s a very scary
place to be --to be willing to change your mind. But we need to remember it’s our
minds that are changing. God’s not changing. After all, if the disciples would
inevitably stumble and fall at times, surely we too will stumble and fall at
times and God’s grace will be sufficient.
Faith is a journey. As humans we seek to
understand. But we can never have full understanding of the mystery of God.
Doubts and questions are part of our faith journey. As long as we remain in
relationship with God; as long as God remains, “In him we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28), our faith is
sufficient. Faith the size of a mustard
seed is enough for now.
No comments:
Post a Comment