Sermon for the
Nineteenth Sunday After Pentecost
Proper 22 C ~ October 7, 2007
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
Are you better
than these kingdoms? …O you that put away the evil day, and bring near a reign
of violence?
+In the
Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity
This Gospel seems like a bit of a joke to me. A
mustard seed is about the smallest thing you can see with the naked eye. So,
how would it be possible to have less
faith than that? But if you have even that much faith you can do outlandish things
like moving trees and mountains. And the
disciples weren’t doing that, so they didn’t have much faith at all. Jesus is
poking fun at the disciples, and their idea of faith. What was wrong with that
idea?
Maybe it is contained in their request: Increase our faith. But that seems like
a pious, humble request, an acknowledgment that they don’t have enough faith
and they can’t get any more without Jesus’ help. Yes, there is a kind of
humility in it. But there is also an acquisitiveness, and maybe even a will to
power. We would LOVE to be able to move mountains. So just give us more faith.
The disciples thought of faith in quantitative terms. They wanted a larger
amount, they wanted MORE. Just a little more. BUT GIVE US MORE. So Jesus made a joke about thinking of
faith as a quantity at all.
Maybe the misconception our Lord was joking about was
mistaking faith for opinion. Please increase my store of correct opinions.
But, in line with my theme for this season,
non-attachment, maybe faith isn’t a
quantity of anything. Maybe to think of faith in metaphors of quantity is to
bark up the wrong tree. Maybe faith is a different category altogether. What if
faith is a direction or a process or an attitude? You can’t have more
or less of a direction. You are either
going north or not. You can’t have more
of a process, you are either in the process or you’re not. And you can’t have more of an attitude: either you are
standing in a certain posture or not.
[OK, you CAN be more
or less near a direction. Going NW is closer to going north than going
south is. You can have more of a process
in the sense of continuing the
process. You can have more of an attitude, I suppose, if you mean
perseverance in holding a certain position, or if you define attitude as a feeling
and you mean a more intense feeling, or something. But even those are not matters
of quantity: not like saying We would like to possess a larger amount of
faith.
Maybe our Lord was laughing at the irony of thinking
of faith as a kind of possession, when in reality faith is about the opposite
of possession, about letting go.
Maybe having faith is a contradiction
in terms, impossible, like moving mountains. Well, if you could have even the tiniest amount of faith,
as a possession, if faith were something which you could keep
and can increase, then you might as
well say you can tell this or that mountain to be removed into the sea, and it
would be! The point isn’t that real faith is some kind of magical power that
confers the ability to do the impossible. Maybe the point is that to think of
it a quantity of something that we can grasp and possess is a mistake.
Not that amazing things don’t happen when we do let go and trust in God and God’s
future. But it is a dreadful mistake ever to think that we made them happen by something we did, or that God did them as a
reward for some virtue we had displayed. The call to faith is a call to let go
of every illusion and every hint of self-regard: a call to empty ourselves so that we may become channels of God’s grace in
the world. It is not a calling to have
anything, let alone to have more of
anything.
Our calling to faith is a call to be faithful, like those servants who were only doing their duty
when, after a long day in the fields, came in to serve dinner to their Master. Faith is not a kind of field-work that
we do by which we can earn God’s
favor. We do not store up any amount of worthiness by faith. Faith is what we are called to be. It is our purpose in
life. One does not expect a reward for fulfilling one’s purpose. The faithful
have done nothing extra for God, they
have done what they were created to do. We are, in that sense, unprofitable, just like the slaves who
have done only their duty.
In fact, there is no way those slaves can do ANYTHING
extra for their Master, no way they can become profitable, no way they can increase their Master’s wealth. Likewise, there is no way we can have enough faith to move mountains. Faith isn’t something we have but something we do and something we become by the doing. We can
become better slaves ~ better at fulfilling our purpose ~ but we can never do more than that. We can never increase our worth, as though our faith
were a quantity of something. Grace does not pass from us to God, but the other
way. When we have done everything ~ completely fulfilled our purpose ~ we are
still worthless slaves.
But thanks be to God that the only-Begotten Son does
not consider us slaves, but friends. Faith
is the reliance on something way more impossible than moving mountains:
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS!