It is with a great sense of relief
that I can stand here before you this morning and say “soccer season is almost
over.” Not that I haven’t enjoyed taking
my daughter to the practices and watching the games, or that I’m not proud of
her and of her teammates for the hard work they have put in and the improvement
they have made over the last couple of months.
But it has been a big commitment of my time. For some reason it has worked out that all of
the practices and most of the games have been on evenings when my wife works,
so it has mostly fallen to me to be the chauffeur and the cheerleader. There have been days when Meg has dropped
Risa off at my office at 4:00, where she’s watched TV on the computer until
5:00, at which time I’ve helped her get into her soccer gear and delivered her
to the practice field at 5:30, gone home to make a salad, picked up a pizza,
returned to get Risa at 6:30, swung by for the baby sitter, dropped the two of them
off at home, stuffed some pizza in my mouth and returned here to the church for
a two-hour vestry meeting at 7 o’clock.
I’m sure many of you know what that’s like.
So when you and I wish we had more faith
and a stronger relationship with God, when we imagine our lives more abundant
with the grace of Christ, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we want our names
recorded in the church’s calendar of saints.
We’re not necessarily asking to be missionaries or martyrs, or miracle-workers,
or leaders of great movements of religious renewal. We might just be asking for the faith to get
through soccer season. We might be
praying for the faith to get through the loss of a job, or the death of a
parent, or a diagnosis of cancer. Maybe
we did start out with dreams of a doing something really important and
impressive for God, and instead we found that the ordinary trials of life ask
us for more faith than we think we’ve got, and we wish we had more.
When the disciples of Jesus him to
increase their faith, the Gospel of Luke doesn’t tell us exactly why, but from
the answer Jesus gives them, you can guess that they want to be more like
him. They want something like his spiritual
greatness, or at least his miracle-working power, and they think that the
reason why they don’t have it is that they don’t have enough faith. This attitude is still common today. The world is full of people who say, “if only
I had more faith,” meaning “if only I believed in God harder,” or “if only I
had more positive thoughts,” or “if only I wasn’t so afraid;” and then you can
complete the sentence with any number of counter-factual results—“I wouldn’t
have gotten sick,” or “I could have changed my ex-husband” or “I would have the
glamorous, successful life I was supposed to have.”
Now this may seem kind of
insensitive, and go against the grain of our habit of taking everything that
Jesus said extremely seriously at face value, but Jesus turns this idea of what
faith is into a joke. If anyone in this
room found that they suddenly the faith to obtain their heart’s desire, would
he or she really use it for something as silly and pointless as uprooting a
mulberry tree and planting it in the ocean?
Again, for Jesus, the notion that if we only had more faith we could be
something that we are not, and make our should-haves, and would-haves, and
could-haves come true, is a joke.
But at the same time Jesus says
something important about faith—something positive. And to illustrate his point he refers to his
old friend the mustard seed. Now there
can’t be a lot of faith in something as tiny and insignificant as a little
round mustard seed. But a little
teensy-weensy amount of faith is all it needs.
All it needs is enough faith to sprout.
And then God goes to work. God
gives rain and dew for the moisture it needs.
God gives the soil to anchor its roots and feed it with nutrients. God gives it sunshine and carbon-dioxide from
the air so its little leaves can make food.
And the mustard seedling has the faith to receive what God gives, not
trying to be something that it’s not, but just growing, a little more every
day, until somehow, miraculously, that tiny mustard seed becomes a large shrub,
twice the height of a man, in a single season.
We imagine from reading the Gospels
that Jesus could do anything. Maybe he
could have uprooted a mulberry tree and planted it in the ocean—if he’d wanted
to. But we don’t really know, because
although he did do amazing things like walk across the stormy lake and feed
five thousand people with a few loaves and a few fish, he only did those things
because that was what God wanted him to do in that moment. He never did them to promote himself or to
test the limits of his power. He did
them to show the greatness of God, and to help people.
Faith is the radical act of
surrendering one’s life to the will and the purpose of God, and with faith we
can do incredible things, because it is God who does them. And
just a little faith is enough, because what God gives is enough. Instead of asking why God didn’t give her
something bigger and better, the faithful person says, “thank you.” “Thank you, God, for your gifts. Now—how can I use these gifts to serve you?”
The fall Stewardship Season begins
today at St. John’s, and the theme we’ve chosen for this year’s program is
“Sharing in Abundance.” This is taken
from a passage in 2nd Corinthians where Paul urges the church at
Corinth to have faith that God is able to provide them with abundant blessings. What that means in practical terms is that
each of them can trust that they will have enough, not only for their own
needs, but that they will also be able to share in the good works that all of
them are doing together. This passage,
like the gospel today, speaks to the truth that, to be really happy, to have
full human lives we need something more than the bare necessities of
survival. And we need something more
than to accumulate a surplus in the form of money in the bank and closets full
of clothes and garages stuffed with knick-knacks and toys.
We have a need, not a passing whim,
but a core spiritual need, to be of service.
We need to have a share, a part to play, in doing something good,
something good that’s bigger than we could do by ourselves. So when we talk about “abundance” in
connection with Christian stewardship, what we are saying first of all is that
we are committed to being a community that serves, that seeks to be faithful to
the will and purpose of God and to gather together the gifts we have received
and put them to work for the good of others.
And we are also saying that every one of us is blessed with enough to
contribute something important to that work.
We may not end up revered as martyrs of the faith. We may not be called on to spend our very
life’s blood in God’s service. And maybe
we will. But in any case, God is able to
give us enough, and more than enough, to make a difference.
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