Proper 22, Pentecost 19
October 3, 2010
Luke 17:5-10
One of my guilty weekend pleasures is reading Date Lab in the Washington Post Sunday Magazine. Each week, Date Lab reports about two people who have been set up by the paper on a blind date. There is always a brief bio about the two people, based on their answers to questions asked in their applications for Date Lab. One question that often appears is what superpower they would pick if they could. No one has ever mentioned it in Date Lab, but I think this morning’s Gospel story includes the superpower my husband might choose if he could. The power to miraculously transplant trees.
Jesus tells his disciples that if they had faith the size of a mustard seed, they could uproot mulberry trees. He says something similar in Matthew’s Gospel, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it would move; and nothing will be impossible for you.” It’s one of the many passages in the Bible that tend to make us feel like failures. We must not have enough faith because we can’t uproot mulberry trees or move mountains. We can’t pray well enough to heal the sick or protect our loved ones from danger. We can’t trust enough to rid ourselves of anxiety. Plenty of things are impossible for us.
When my mom was sick, I did a lot of praying. I prayed for God to be with her, to be with me and our family. I prayed for her to make it through surgery and chemo. I prayed for her to get better, to be with us one more Mother’s Day, one more Christmas. But there were also a lot of times along the way where I felt too sad or worried or angry to pray. And I know this doesn’t sound particularly rational, but after she died, I felt like maybe it was partly my fault. I felt like if only I’d prayed enough or prayed for the right thing she might have lived. If only my faith had been stronger.
And it doesn’t sound so far off from what the disciples felt. Sure they look faithful to us, having left their homes and families to follow Jesus. They’ve been subject to ridicule and persecution, wondering where their next meal will come from and where they will sleep that night. And yet, here they are begging Jesus to increase their faith. In the Gospel of Matthew we hear them kicking themselves when they aren’t able to cure the sick and cast out demons. Clearly they too feel like they are lacking. They too feel like they are inadequate. And who can blame them? They must feel like the perennial Clark Kents to Jesus’ Superman.
And at first glance, Jesus’ answer to the disciples is not terribly reassuring to any of us. “C’mon people, if you’d just have the teensiest bit of faith, you’d be able to do great things!” Does he really need to make them feel – to make me feel – even worse?
But maybe I’m just projecting onto Jesus that shame and guilt-inducing tone when he speaks these words to his disciples. What if instead, Jesus speaks these words in a voice of encouragement and love. “With faith the size of a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it will obey you!”
In The Message translation of the Bible, when the disciples ask Jesus to increase their faith, he answers: “You don’t need more faith. There is no ‘more’ or ‘less’ in faith. If you have a bare kernel of faith, you could say to this tree, ‘Go jump in the lake,’ and it would do it.”
Read this way, it sounds like a promise – a vision – for the disciples and for us. God doesn’t want us to feel inadequate in our faith. God wants us to know that the presence of faith – in any form, any size, any strength – is enough when the giver of that faith is as big and powerful and loving as God is. Even a teeny, tiny bit of faith can uproot trees and move mountains! The disciples already have what is required. And so do we.
In the first week of Sunday school, the younger kids heard a Godly Play story about the church year. I used a pared down version for the Day School at our Wednesday chapel and the kids were surprisingly riveted. The words are beautiful, I think, and captivating. The story talks about the 3 great times of the Church year (Christmas, Easter and Pentecost) and the times for getting ready to come close to the mystery of those times (Advent, Lent, and the season of Easter), and the “great, green, growing Sundays” that make up the rest of the year. And some of the last words of the story are: “It is all here. Everything we need.”
Can we trust God to believe that with regard to our faith too? That God has already given us everything we need?
Of course, any self-respecting superhero can’t just sit back and revel in their superpower. They have to use their cloak of invisibility or their x-ray vision or their spidey sense to vanquish evildoers and save the world. So also, we cannot just rest in the knowledge of our mulberry tree and mountain-moving superpower. Instead, we’ve got a role to play with our mustard seed sized faith.
Daria Bergin-Hill sent me a link to a great episode of Krista Tippett’s Speaking of Faith on NPR where Krista is talking to Rabbi and writer Sandy Sasso about the spirituality of parenting. Sandy says that our faith – our soul – is a lot like our muscles. “If you don’t exercise your muscles, they atrophy. If you don’t exercise your soul, it atrophies too.”
Maybe Jesus is telling us that rather than working at (and worrying about) increasing the size of our faith, or being rid of all our doubts, or being able to answer the impossible questions of life, we should take whatever little seed of faith resides inside of us and run with it. God calls us to be active participants in the work of miraculous transplantation.
Of course, it probably won’t be easy and it usually won’t happen overnight. And the results from acting on our faith may not be exactly what we expect. In fact, at least in my experience, we are almost certain not to get the result we expect.
With my mom, there was no miraculous healing. But my family learned how to communicate with one another – how to share our fears and our sorrows. We finally understood that we could make mistakes and say the things that are hard to say and our relationships would still be intact. We experienced miracles very different from the one I’d hoped for. The miracle of joyful time together. The miracle of seeing grace in pain, and beauty in death. The miracle of learning that even the fragility of life somehow points to God. The miracle of being able to empathize more fully with other people in pain.
God has given us all the faith we need to take the ordinary, the mundane, the things that block our path and cast us in shadow, and uproot them to make way for something new and wonderful. It is nothing less than absolute transformation Jesus is promising us. If we can just stretch ourselves, we just might reach an entirely different reality.
So, where is the mulberry bush in your life waiting to be uprooted and transplanted by your new-found super power?
October 3, 2010
Luke 17:5-10
One of my guilty weekend pleasures is reading Date Lab in the Washington Post Sunday Magazine. Each week, Date Lab reports about two people who have been set up by the paper on a blind date. There is always a brief bio about the two people, based on their answers to questions asked in their applications for Date Lab. One question that often appears is what superpower they would pick if they could. No one has ever mentioned it in Date Lab, but I think this morning’s Gospel story includes the superpower my husband might choose if he could. The power to miraculously transplant trees.
Jesus tells his disciples that if they had faith the size of a mustard seed, they could uproot mulberry trees. He says something similar in Matthew’s Gospel, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it would move; and nothing will be impossible for you.” It’s one of the many passages in the Bible that tend to make us feel like failures. We must not have enough faith because we can’t uproot mulberry trees or move mountains. We can’t pray well enough to heal the sick or protect our loved ones from danger. We can’t trust enough to rid ourselves of anxiety. Plenty of things are impossible for us.
When my mom was sick, I did a lot of praying. I prayed for God to be with her, to be with me and our family. I prayed for her to make it through surgery and chemo. I prayed for her to get better, to be with us one more Mother’s Day, one more Christmas. But there were also a lot of times along the way where I felt too sad or worried or angry to pray. And I know this doesn’t sound particularly rational, but after she died, I felt like maybe it was partly my fault. I felt like if only I’d prayed enough or prayed for the right thing she might have lived. If only my faith had been stronger.
And it doesn’t sound so far off from what the disciples felt. Sure they look faithful to us, having left their homes and families to follow Jesus. They’ve been subject to ridicule and persecution, wondering where their next meal will come from and where they will sleep that night. And yet, here they are begging Jesus to increase their faith. In the Gospel of Matthew we hear them kicking themselves when they aren’t able to cure the sick and cast out demons. Clearly they too feel like they are lacking. They too feel like they are inadequate. And who can blame them? They must feel like the perennial Clark Kents to Jesus’ Superman.
And at first glance, Jesus’ answer to the disciples is not terribly reassuring to any of us. “C’mon people, if you’d just have the teensiest bit of faith, you’d be able to do great things!” Does he really need to make them feel – to make me feel – even worse?
But maybe I’m just projecting onto Jesus that shame and guilt-inducing tone when he speaks these words to his disciples. What if instead, Jesus speaks these words in a voice of encouragement and love. “With faith the size of a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it will obey you!”
In The Message translation of the Bible, when the disciples ask Jesus to increase their faith, he answers: “You don’t need more faith. There is no ‘more’ or ‘less’ in faith. If you have a bare kernel of faith, you could say to this tree, ‘Go jump in the lake,’ and it would do it.”
Read this way, it sounds like a promise – a vision – for the disciples and for us. God doesn’t want us to feel inadequate in our faith. God wants us to know that the presence of faith – in any form, any size, any strength – is enough when the giver of that faith is as big and powerful and loving as God is. Even a teeny, tiny bit of faith can uproot trees and move mountains! The disciples already have what is required. And so do we.
In the first week of Sunday school, the younger kids heard a Godly Play story about the church year. I used a pared down version for the Day School at our Wednesday chapel and the kids were surprisingly riveted. The words are beautiful, I think, and captivating. The story talks about the 3 great times of the Church year (Christmas, Easter and Pentecost) and the times for getting ready to come close to the mystery of those times (Advent, Lent, and the season of Easter), and the “great, green, growing Sundays” that make up the rest of the year. And some of the last words of the story are: “It is all here. Everything we need.”
Can we trust God to believe that with regard to our faith too? That God has already given us everything we need?
Of course, any self-respecting superhero can’t just sit back and revel in their superpower. They have to use their cloak of invisibility or their x-ray vision or their spidey sense to vanquish evildoers and save the world. So also, we cannot just rest in the knowledge of our mulberry tree and mountain-moving superpower. Instead, we’ve got a role to play with our mustard seed sized faith.
Daria Bergin-Hill sent me a link to a great episode of Krista Tippett’s Speaking of Faith on NPR where Krista is talking to Rabbi and writer Sandy Sasso about the spirituality of parenting. Sandy says that our faith – our soul – is a lot like our muscles. “If you don’t exercise your muscles, they atrophy. If you don’t exercise your soul, it atrophies too.”
Maybe Jesus is telling us that rather than working at (and worrying about) increasing the size of our faith, or being rid of all our doubts, or being able to answer the impossible questions of life, we should take whatever little seed of faith resides inside of us and run with it. God calls us to be active participants in the work of miraculous transplantation.
Of course, it probably won’t be easy and it usually won’t happen overnight. And the results from acting on our faith may not be exactly what we expect. In fact, at least in my experience, we are almost certain not to get the result we expect.
With my mom, there was no miraculous healing. But my family learned how to communicate with one another – how to share our fears and our sorrows. We finally understood that we could make mistakes and say the things that are hard to say and our relationships would still be intact. We experienced miracles very different from the one I’d hoped for. The miracle of joyful time together. The miracle of seeing grace in pain, and beauty in death. The miracle of learning that even the fragility of life somehow points to God. The miracle of being able to empathize more fully with other people in pain.
God has given us all the faith we need to take the ordinary, the mundane, the things that block our path and cast us in shadow, and uproot them to make way for something new and wonderful. It is nothing less than absolute transformation Jesus is promising us. If we can just stretch ourselves, we just might reach an entirely different reality.
So, where is the mulberry bush in your life waiting to be uprooted and transplanted by your new-found super power?
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