Faithfulness: Great and Small

October 2, 2022 (World Communion Sunday)
Lamentations 3:19-26; Luke 17:5-6
Faithfulness: Great and Small
Rev. Kerra Becker English

Great is God’s faithfulness.
God’s steadfast love never ceases.
God’s mercies will never run out.
God’s provisions are both abundant and wonderful.
A little gratitude for God’s faithfulness can be perspective altering.
This story that begins from a place of deep lament and despair - out of affliction and homelessness - can turn toward a quiet hope for the future – with God’s help.
God’s got this. Right?
Right.
But what about my faithfulness?
How big is it?
Not that big probably.
I’d like more of that sure confidence please.
Maybe a little more trust.
If I’m honest, maybe a bit more power.
If I had more faith, maybe I would be more perfect.
Maybe getting to a perfect faith isn’t meant to be the goal.
But the apostles close to Jesus and his capacious faith were also left wanting… more.
Jesus, who, like God, is also BIG on steadfast love and unending mercy
confronts the apostles with his incredibly bold teaching about sin and forgiveness.
Let me share with you the few verses that come before the request from the apostles we just read:

Jesus said to his disciples, “Occasions for sin are bound to come, but woe to anyone through whom they come! 2 It would be better for you if a millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea than for you to cause one of these little ones to sin. 3 Be on your guard! If a brother or sister sins, you must rebuke the offender, and if there is repentance, you must forgive. 4 And if the same person sins against you seven times a day and turns back to you seven times and says, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive.” (Luke 17:1-4)
He told them, there will be occasions where you sin,
            and by sin here I think he means that we will fall short of doing the most loving thing.
We all sin. It happens. On bad days, or from missed opportunities, or whatever.
We fail to show the largeness of the love of God.
He doesn’t say if, but WHEN we fail, Jesus reminds us not to take the others down with us, especially those who are child-like.
Don’t set a bad example.
That’s solid advice.
Try to teach your children to do better.
He also says to forgive others.
If someone close to you sins, you’re supposed to tell them that you noticed,
not pretend like you didn’t see a thing.
Then, if they repent, forgive them.
It all seems hard. Impossible really.
To be that open, that vulnerable, that understanding.
To forgive all those times is either a mark of amazing love, or foolish futility.
It is in that context that the apostles turn and ask Jesus to increase their faith.
If we are going to be in the business of God’s mercy, we are going to need HELP.
H.E.L.P. Help.
Humans aren’t like God.
At least not every day.
Jesus, you better be bringing us some increased faith, some extra faith, some faith we didn’t know we had before.
I’m not sure we’re going to make it in this plan you’ve proposed.
MAYBE I can forgive those people out there, the ones I don’t know all that well.
MAYBE I can try to put on my best behavior in front of kids.
But then you want me to forgive a brother, a sister, a parent, a child, a partner, a friend?
Those are the hardest ones, Jesus.
We want to hold tightly to those grudges.
And this faith you are talking about means that we have to let them go.
Then Jesus addresses his apostles with the words we know,
but sometimes don’t know how to explain,
“If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.”
Faith the size of a mustard seed.
The faith that moves mountains and mulberry trees.
The faith that is bold enough to demand obedience.
The faith that none of us are sure we have.
It’s not a shock to be told we have less faithfulness than God.
That’s a given.
It might not even surprise us to think of our human faith as small.
That’s realistic.
But to think of it as mustard seed size seems insulting.
These are the apostles we’re talking about here,
the ones who left livelihood and family to follow Jesus.
But the translation from Greek to English is a bit ambiguous.
Is it that we might not EVEN have faith the size of a mustard seed -yet?
Or is it SINCE we have faith, even faith as tiny as a mustard seed,
 we can do these amazing things like uproot a whole tree and have it throw itself into the ocean?
It’s a slight, but possibly important issue of translation that I’m not linguistically gifted enough to weigh in on.
Nevertheless, what I do think we are meant to learn from this question and Jesus’ answer is two-fold.

• The seed of faith is always about potential. Seeds are a sign of what we “could” grow to become, and
• Faith is about movement. Faith obeys the call to get up and do something. Moves mountains, uproots mulberry trees, sends Abraham and Sarah to a new place, inspires Mary to say “yes” to mothering the Divine. You get the point. Faith is active.

“Increase our faith,” they say.
Make it bigger.
I think Jesus is saying to the apostles, you already have everything you are going to need.
You ARE the seed, with all the potential to die to the shell around you and grow into all your possibility and potential.
You ARE capable - of moving even the most stubborn system with the light of God’s love within you.
With just a little faith – the mountains MOVE.
It may be slower than you think, but those tectonic plates shift.
With just a little faith – the tree is lifted up, roots and all.
Families can change, and oceans of tears baptize the newness that can emerge.
Increase our faith, we pray.
Perhaps our faith doesn’t need increasing or perfecting.
Maybe it just is.
Maybe it was in us all along.
It could be dormant – waiting for a moment to grow, or change, or move.
But when that moment comes, we can be ready for it.
Or we can marvel at it.
Faith my friends – moves mountains.
Faith – is weird enough to imagine a tree being uprooted and walking itself into an ocean.
Jesus can come up with some strange metaphors sometimes, at least ones strange to our hearing.
Great is God’s faithfulness.
But dare I say that human faithfulness is pretty awesome as well.
Because we participate in the faithfulness of God, maybe a little can go a long way.
What will you do this week to nurture your own little mustard seed of faithfulness?
How can you grow, or change, or move in the direction of God’s love?
Really let this question seep into your prayers and watch the faith within come alive. Amen.