You Think You Need More Faith? (Reflections on Pentecost 17, Year C 2022)

 

The Lord said, “If you have the 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.” (Luke 17:6) 

One summer when I was an undergraduate, I took a job selling ladies’ shoes at a boutique in our local mall. The manager was a cranky Indonesian guy name Joe. He wasn’t a bad dude to work for, but, like a lot of bosses, he was efficient and had no time for whiney employees. On one particularly hot day when the store’s A/C wasn’t working at capacity, our lazy assistant manager started whining about the heat and asked Joe if he could take his break early. “Son,” Joe growled, “I gave you a break when I hired you!” 

Isn’t that the way it always is? You don’t get any special treatment for doing what you’re supposed to be doing in the first place. In the Gospel appointed in the RCL for Pentecost 17, Year C (Luke 17:5-10), Jesus responds to the disciples request for more faith. Just why are these boys asking for a double dip? You think they’ve formed a Disciples Union and are complaining that the work of discipleship is just too much for the faith they have? Actually, that’s probably the case. They are being asked to do a pretty tough job—deny a boat load of what they’ve always thought to be true about their religion, defy their families, walk off their day jobs, and probably get themselves killed proclaiming a new way of being in relationship to God. You’d think they’d need a LOT of faith for that, right? 

But societal marginalization, poverty, uncertainty, and martyrdom aren’t what Jesus was talking about in the first four verses which precede this reading in chapter 17. Jesus is laying out some of the very basic job requirements for Christians—requirements which are still in effect for the rest of us. 

The first is to live in such a way that the love of God is visible in your life. We’re called to be the people who make belief in Christ look like something others would want to embrace. The best way of doing this is NOT to do things which are going to make others—the “little ones” Jesus talks about—stumble. Who are the “little ones?” Our kids. People who are new to the faith or who don’t understand it. People who feel they have been left out. People who are hurting. 

The problem, of course, is that over the centuries so many Christians have been littering life’s highways with stumbling blocks. My young friend Emma, who is in high school, recently told me a classmate of hers assumed all Christians hated the LGBTQ community. Emma was quick to disabuse her friend of this notion. A Christian life can’t embrace exclusion, arrogance, anger, or intolerance. It can’t be judgmental or self-destructive. It must always embrace patience, acceptance, inclusion, justice, mercy, and understanding. And, yes, that IS a tall order and will require some faith. 

The other thing Jesus reminds his guys is the need of Christians to correct each other. I can see where we’d need faith for that. I mean, aren’t we supposed to be nice? Who wants to go around criticizing or correcting someone else? But there are some things which need to be corrected. We can’t let other people hurt themselves. We can’t let them hurt others or become “stumbling blocks.” We can’t let people believe things which aren’t true or behave in ways which alienate the folks around them. We need to correct in love—even if it means having an uncomfortable situation or causing a rift in a relationship. It will take some faith to do this. 

Jesus also tells us that we are expected to be constantly forgiving. “If there is repentance,” Jesus says in verse 4, “you must forgive. 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.” This is what Jesus tells his disciples just before they make the request for more faith. I guess these boys had gotten used to holding on to grudges—just like the rest of us. 

So: are we going to need more faith for all of this? Will it take an extra dose to avoid being a stumbling block, to learn how to correct others in love, and to forgive those who may have wounded us gravely? Jesus says no. Faith isn’t something you can quantify. You can’t say, “I have 25% more faith this year than I had last year.” Nor can you say, “I guess I don’t have enough faith.” There is no “little” or “big” faith. Faith is faith. 

I think of that scene in The Empire Strikes Back where Yoda gives Luke a difficult task to perform. The young Jedi-in-training replies, “I'll try.” Yoda responds, “Do or do not. There is no try.” Faith is like that. We believe in the words of Jesus, or we don’t. We act on the words of Jesus, or we don’t. 

We don‘t need to ask Jesus to increase our faith or to give us an extra break. We got all the breaks we’ll ever need at our baptism. Faith won’t increase over time—we’ll just grow more comfortable having it. 

Thanks for looking in, faithful reader!