Seen, and Loved: Sermon for Proper 26C

This weekend’s gospel passage includes the well known story about Zacchaeus encountering Jesus on the road to Jericho. It’s a staple of probably every children's Sunday school curricula you've ever encountered. And then there's the song, which, if you are like me, you have a compulsion to sing the minute you see Zacchaeus’s name. It has been an earworm for my entire week. We have heard it and we have sung it countless times. But that also means that we may need to shake off our familiarity with this story and really pay attention to what is said—and not said—in this familiar tale.

I wonder if one of the reasons why this story is so popular with children is that it is deliberately silly-- intentionally so. A grown man, probably used to being catered to due to his wealth, hauling himself up high into a tree while wearing what to American eyes is a dress. The comedic potential is undeniable.

But I also wonder if children don't love the story because at its base there is a beautiful, welcoming truth: that Jesus looks upon all of us, no matter who we are, how big we are, or how much other people think we might need correcting, and truly sees us, knows us by name, and wishes to spend time with us. No matter how old we get, experiencing that kind of not just acceptance but treasuring fulfills our deepest human longings. someone who will never give up on us.

The story of Zacchaeus expands upon the theme we heard in last week’s gospel. Jesus once again encounters someone who is considered an outsider from decent society by virtue of their collaboration with the occupying Roman empire. In both last week’s parable and this week’s encounter we see Jesus talking about or with tax collectors. We see here in this story with the promises of this tax collector what we hope was initiated by the tax collector we met in last week’s parable: not just acknowledging one’s sins before God, but promising restitution and just dealing where before there was exploitation and corruption.

This setting this time is in Jericho rather than the temple. I remember hearing about Jericho in my Sunday school days, when Joshua lengthy newly arrived armies of Israel around its walls, blowing a trumpet repeatedly, until the walls came down and the Israelites were able to take the town and make it there. By the time of Jesus’s lifetime, Jericho was a wealthy city, where King Herod had a palace, which means it was also the city in which the apparatus of taxation was particularly powerful. Zacchaeus is described as a “chief tax collector,” so he is well placed within that system, possibly notorious even among the townspeople.

All the markers are there to assume that Zacchaeus is corrupt to the bone—and yet there he is down mixing among the crowd that is gathered to see this wandering holy man, and he even behaves in the most undignified manner, running ahead of the crowd and eventually climbing the tree in order to merely get a glimpse of Jesus. Once again, the tale is more gently humorous than mean-spirited. Could it be that the crowd is the one wrong about Zacchaeus?

There are lots of details in this story that are surprising. Even with the crowd all around him, Jesus looks up and sees Zacchaeus perched precariously in his tree. Jesus then invites himself into Zacchaeus’s home. Then and now, that was a pretty significant breach of etiquette. Furthermore, by doing this, Jesus shows that he does not care about one of the Pharisees’ main complaints, first mentioned in Luke 5, that he consorted with known sinners and tax collectors.

Yet even the mere idea that Jesus would seek fellowship with him moves Zacchaeus, whose name means “pure in heart” in Hebrew, to publicly proclaim a scrupulous concern for living compassionately among his neighbors. That way of living involves being righteous toward the weak and powerless and seeking reconciliation with those whom you have harmed. Zacchaeus is, as we were first reminded, a very powerful man, regardless of his physical height. He is a man of public prominence. If he embraces Jesus’s insistence of walking the path of mercy and demand for restorative justice for love of those on the margins of society, who knows how many other people we will be affected by his example? If that isn’t what salvation is, I don’t know how else you can define it.

Yet—look closely. Neither Jesus nor Zacchaeus make any mention of sin. At the very end, Jesus says that salvation has come Zacchaeus’s house, because the Human One has come to those who are “lost.” Zacchaeus defends himself against the murmuring of the crowd calling him a sinner by promising publicly to give half of his goods to the poor, and to recompense anyone he may have cheated fourfold. But he uses the PRESENT tense in the original Greek. He says he GIVES half his goods to the poor, and that he compensates those he may have harmed four times over.

The crowds see Zacchaeus one way. Jesus sees Zacchaeus in another way—as a beloved brother (as evidenced by the language calling him a “son of Abraham”). Perhaps Zacchaeus has been “lost” because he has been discounted and abandoned by the assumptions of the community. Once again we are reminded that God’s sense of justice and ours are different, because God sees clearly where we see only “through a glass darkly,” in the words of Paul in the 1st letter to the church in Corinth. As we are reminded over and over again, God is especially concerned about those who are “lost”—whether through their actions or the actions of those around them. And some of those who are lost are not lost through any actions of their own-- but by others denying them as being worthy of remaining in the flock. It's not OUR job to judge this-- it's far beyond our pay grade.

How does this apply to our world? 

Good grief, how does it not? 

Our society is filled with self-righteous people casting out all kinds of people based on their assumptions about them being unworthy, or calling them sinners. Our society is mired right now in casting all kinds of slurs at people who are different than us, or who disagree with us—and ironically, at the same time, excusing all sorts of bad behavior on behalf of those whom they perceive as being “like them.” We see people who are differently abled mocked. We see it when people with accents are mocked or thought of as stupid when they speak. Parents at school board meetings screaming at teachers and administrators. We hear it in attempts to shame people, even children, who do not conform to rigid expectations about their identities or clothing styles or hairstyles or body art. None of which has anything to do with the person anyone is inside—in the place where God sees us and loves us most clearly.

I heard off a pastor asking the kids in his youth group how they thought God saw them—and the overwhelming answer was that they thought God was disappointed in them or angry with them for their imperfections, much less failures. And I remember feeling the same way in those fire-and-brimstone churches I attended as a child. Our kids already have a hard enough time growing up—and many of us have a hard enough time getting through the days in which we do not hear a kind word. And we see the bitter fruit such hate and division has as drug-abuse and suicide rates skyrocket, as school shootings proliferate—even among our children! And this week, we had a school shooting right here in St. Louis, which is why I am wearing this orange gun violence stole. We celebrate and encourage violence and hatred and bullying far too much. And often in doing so, we push others out-- beyond the margins of who is in and who is out.

There is a reason why Jesus constantly reaches out to the margins—and encourages us to do the same as his followers. And it is simply because the judging of others has never won anyone’s heart to God—not really.

Our world is too filled with cruelty and name calling toward other people based on no other evidence than how they identify themselves. There is no doubt that one of the greatest plagues of our modern time is refusing to really see each other- to see each other, to honor the divine spark in each other without questioning who is worthy and who is not. Just like that lawyer who asked Jesus "Who is my neighbor?", we want to know what the limits of the people we have to acknowledge as our neighbors are. But what this world needs is radical acceptance and radical empathy. We are called to lend our strong backs to those bent over from bearing burdens we have no idea that they are carrying..

Too many of us—and it seems to be growing!-- are far too comfortable with failing to honor each and every person as fellow human beings. Too many of us are far too inured to each other’s pain and suffering. Some even take pleasure in the suffering of others, especially those different from them, and see that suffering as justice, and I am not just talking about the criminal justice system.

Embedded within this story is a call to action to us—to examine our own minimization of others. To examine our failure to truly see each other—especially those who are far outside our familiar circles. And even more, to examine our silence in the face of others being minimized. We are not called to simply "like" Jesus-- we are called to BE like Jesus. We are the face of Jesus in the world.

I invite you to think back to the last time you experienced such a feeling of companionship, comfort, peace, and contentment. We live such hectic lives now, it can be easy to forget to make time for each other and to spend time with each other, sharing companionship and enjoying the presence of those we love and giving people the benefit of the doubt. And as we've been talking about prayer the last few weeks, to think of how to apply that same intentionality and loving kindness in our time spent intentionally in communion and prayer with God.

As always, our lives as disciples don't come with an instruction manual-- other than our commitment to follow in the example of Jesus. So this week, I hope you get find the chance to slow down, look up, look around, and share the love of Jesus with those you see. It is the best and only way to be disciples of Jesus in word and deed.


Preached at the 505 on October 29 and at the 10:30 Eucharist on October 30 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.


Readings:
Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4
Psalm 119:137-144
2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12
Luke 19:1-10

Lazarus, Found: Speaking to the Soul for October 28, 2022

Luke 19:1-10


I did not deliberately set out upon the road
On which I found myself. It started from the scorn
Of classmates who belittled me.
I may have been a small man, but
I became someone everyone bowed and scraped before.
My wealth and power reduced them to silence
To my face, and I told myself it was enough.
They grudgingly sought my favor
Who had laughed at me in my youth
Once I held the power to ruin them. Yet inside,
I knew myself to still be small, and certainly
Unwelcomed and unloved.

But when I heard of the great healer and teacher
Coming to Jericho--
Who welcomed even little children--
I was filled with wonder. I needed
To see him for myself.

Ahead of the crowds
I climbed the sycamore above the road.
No one would see me here, I thought.
But when the teacher passed below,
He stopped as if he knew I was there,
And called me down by name.
Despite the disapproval of those around me,
He sought my table and came under my roof
And spoke to me with kindness.
I served him myself, and
Beneath that compassionate gaze,
The walls of my self-contempt gave way,
Echoes of years of taunts were stilled.

All my life I thought I could hide from God,
The same way I thought wealth and power
Would heal the ache within myself.
Yet I never counted on God
Pursuing me.
Loving me despite
Everything.

--This was first published at Episcopal Journal and Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on October 28, 2022.

From Silence to Salvation: The Sermon for Proper 25C

I am “I was taught to type on a typewriter” years old. Remember when you had to manually return at the end of each line? And then along came word processors, and we could ignore the end of lines most of the time.

I have been publishing writing online since about 2003, when I created a website for my students to cut down on the massive amount of paper I was having to have printed for them to be familiar with the document of American history. It was easy, and it was convenient—but also there were some technical challenges I never thought I would encounter back in the days when everything was done on a typewriter.

I once was struggling with the formatting for a blog post, and it was making me batty. In the type-setting world, being “justified” means adjusting the spaces between the words in each line so that both the left and right margins are even. For some reason, even though I was choosing “align left,” the text ended up being justified, and the columns were too narrow for that to look anything but weird. Sometimes text looks great when the words stretch evenly from the left edge of a column to the right. But other times, it looks artificial, phony. And it WAS phony. Paragraphs don’t even read well that way.

And so it was here. The gaps in some sentences yawned. The density of words per line was completely out of balance. Finally, I looked behind to the hypertext code to see that I had brought some formatting code along with me when I had copied a phrase typed elsewhere, and that had caused the entire paragraph to change alignment. I know just enough about blog coding to know that I do not know much of anything about hypertext code, but I could spot what was amiss. Once the pesky hidden code was removed, the paragraph returned to the formatting I desired: words aligned with the left side margin, but naturally proceeding across the page until no more could fit without artifice.

Later, I thought about how much our own concerns about being justified, about how we can see the fault in others without seeing our own imbalances and flaws can overshadow our ability to deal kindly with each other. There seems to be a shocking lack of humility at the root of so many relationships in our common life together. There is too often a concern about our own salvation, rather than how the way we live our lives and align ourselves alongside our neighbors affects them. We praise ourselves for our self-righteousness, and decry other people’s perceived flaws, and congratulating ourselves for not being “like them.” Yet this lack of empathy undercuts claims of being righteous in the first place. One of the wisest pieces of advice I was ever given was a reminder that we never know the hidden battles other people are fighting, so to always try to be kind.

One of the wisest pieces of advice I was ever given was a reminder that we never know the hidden battles other people are fighting, so to always try to be kind. In this gospel passage, we hear the familiar story of the “Pharisee” and the tax collector praying in the temple. Once of them prides himself on living a blameless life—apparently blameless so that he can blame others for their failings. The tax collector acknowledges his sin. Yet it goes further: the righteous one’s focus in his prayer is himself, not God. The tax collector acknowledges his sin, and prays to God for mercy.


Yet we have to be careful in this conclusion—because the second we sneer at the Pharisee, we run the risk of doing exactly the same thing he does: making assumptions about people when we fall into stereotyping. The fact is, you don’t have to be a Pharisee to fail to be humble, and you don’t need to be a tax-collector to be honest with yourself about the ways in which you have sinned against others and against God. The Pharisee starts with praising God—but praising God that he is better than those around him. Is this really a prayer, or is it a self-congratulatory monologue—one that ALL of us have engaged in at one time or another?

Our own efforts to deny our own ragged edges and claim justification without a heaping dose of God’s grace are mere delusion. The self-righteous one thanks God that he is not a notorious sinner like that tax collector, and the minute that prayer is formed, he is condemned by it. When we look at another person, one very much different from us, and immediately make a snap judgment about them even though knowing nothing about them, we make the same mistake that that self-righteous man makes when seeing the tax collector.

The actions of the tax collector, while praiseworthy for the acknowledgment of his sins, also will ultimately run aground if he does not stick to his determination to repent, or if he fails to believe in God’s grace. This is another issue we all encounter in our faith lives at one point or another, either for ourselves or for others. We may torture ourselves over long-ago wrongs we have committed, or we may believe that God cannot forgive notorious sinners, such as murderers. But God’s grace is only abundant if it is abundant for everyone. We do not get to limit God’s grace to suit our own whims—whether for self-abnegation or for hopes of seeing others punished.

It’s when we change our focus from ourselves that we can realize that we rely not on ourselves, but on God’s abundant mercy and forgiveness. This doesn’t mean we have to shame ourselves, but at least be open to realizing that we can always improve our relationships with our fellow-beings, attempting to acknowledge our common journey toward being called to a humble spirit of repentance. What if we started with encouraging others in their particular struggles, aided in no small part by acknowledging our own? Our challenge begins with letting go of being justified.

To be honest, both men risk treating God as a mere tool: for the first man, God is a tool to look down on others, and for the second, God is a tool for getting his sins forgiven. Neither thinks about the obligation paced upon them as regards the sustaining and caring for those around them in the community. And unfortunately, this shallow self-interest is a common concern of too many who claim to be Christians, but who resist the call to be like Christ.

So what is the better way? Psalm 65 models the idea of prayer that begins with praise of God (as the Pharisee prays) from humans who know their own sins and transgressions (as the tax collector exemplifies). But then it carries forward to go beyond the prayer of either the Pharisee or the tax collector. The psalm resolutely insists that God not only forgives but blots out our sins if we rely upon God and God’s generous, compassionate sustenance. We approach God in humble silence, and as we listen, we become aware of the sure provision of God that makes our lives possible, and we are invited to join with all of creation is praising God. The way we praise God best is by allowing God’s spirit to shape and mold us.

This psalm proclaims three specific aspects of God: as redeemer, creator, and sustainer. The psalm properly starts in silence, as Ellen Davis notes in her translation “To you, silence is praise…”), and ends with shouts and song coming from the pastures, hills, meadows, and valleys, and not just in domesticated landscapes but in the wilderness itself. In all things, God’s activity is extolled: God hears prayer, blots out sins, and draws people to himself and to his Temple. Then follows in verses 5-12 a lyrical description of how God sustains and orders all of creation. The psalm ends with a prayer for the Earth’s fertility to show forth the abundance of God’s blessing and generosity. Note that the praise of God starts with silence, and then an expression of trust in God that we can lay our sins before God, knowing that God will not just forgive, but blot them from existence as we acknowledge and give thanks for God’s generous and generative power.

Our gospel reading focuses on what happens in the sanctuary, and certainly prayer is important before God’s altars. But, as Psalm 65 reminds us, unless we expand our horizons beyond our own concerns to the way all creation, including us, are invited by God into praising God best by becoming our best, most generous and fruitful selves, our prayers risk objectifying God instead of offering true worship.

Prayer that stands in awe and gratitude before God, that acknowledges and takes responsibility for our own sins, is prayer that draws us into deeper relationship with God and others. Such prayer, in harmony with all creation, invites us to give other as much grace and compassion as we ourselves hope to receive from God. Such prayer is, in itself, an act of faith and worship of God out in the world. Such a prayer becomes a way of living rather than a time set apart. And shouldn’t that be where true salvation really begins?

Preached at the 505 on October 22 and the 10:30 am Eucharist at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.

Readings:

Joel 2:23-32
Psalm 65
2 Timothy 4:6-8,16-18
Luke 18:9-14

Two Before the Altar: Speaking to the Soul, October 20, 2022

“There is a crack in everything;
That’s how the light gets in.”—Leonard Cohen

The upright Pharisee, each hair in place, not a
Fringe on his tasseled loafers askew, stood
Before God’s altar and prayed to himself
Congratulations for his impeccable soul.
He knew what others thought of him.
His righteousness shone from his shoulders
Like epaulets- so certain was he of his goodness.
He checked the lock on the vault of his heart,
And nodded, satisfied. Nothing
In, nothing out, undisturbed. Shrugging deeper
Into the mantle of his own esteem,
Duty satisfied, he knew he was blessed.
Nothing had changed.

On trembling legs the tax-collector climbed the steps, aware
Of the eyes that turned his way, the stink of collusion
That clung to his fine clothes. He could still turn away,
But his heart urged him forward. No one
Expected to see him here in God’s courts,
And some sneered as he passed.
He knew what others thought of him.
Eyes downcast, he made himself small,
And beat his breast,
Pouring out his sins until his soul
Was an empty bowl, so thirsty was he for God’s mercy.
A spark of forgiveness lit the tinder
Of his heart. Cheeks wet, he resolved to turn.
In the new fire of grace and gratitude he was reclaimed.
Everything had changed.

This was first published at Episcopal Journal and Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on October 20, 2022.

The God Who Pursues Us: Sermon for Proper 24C

Let me just cut right to the chase: God is not the unjust judge.

Also: You don’t get what you pray for by badgering God until God gives in. See also: You don’t don’t get what you pray for if you rub a lucky rabbit’s foot, or if you cross your fingers, if you find a four leaf clover, or if you say the same prayer for a week or even a month.

Yet I have known people who believed all these things. I imagine many of you have too. I mean, that would be a sweet system if it worked, right? Just act like a spoiled toddler and God, the weary parent, will eventually give in.

Except that’s not how prayer works. That’s also not how God works.

So then, how can we understand this parable?

Let’s start with prayer. Jesus tells this parable, he says, to encourage us. That is literally what the phrase “not lose heart” means. To stay steadfast and faithful.

We also know that prayer is a two-way street. We forget that sometimes. I think the movie Bruce Almighty didn’t help that very much when it portrayed prayers as emails to God that were all requests for God to magically solve problems or allow the petitioners to win the lottery. Bruce, sitting in God’s chair because he has said he could do God’s job better, gets exasperated by the unmanageable number of requests and does what you should NEVER do when at work: he hit “reply all.” His “yes” to every request spawned literal chaos and rioting.

The communication link that is prayer goes two ways: from God to us and from us to God. As much as we may think that prayer originates with us, that is not so. The times in our lives when we have fallen away from the habit of regular prayer is not filled with nothingness or a vacuum. There is God, still in our lives, knocking at the doors of our hearts, placing obstacles in our path to inspire us to take up the conversation again. 

To be clear, the entire span of scripture is the story, again and again, of God pursuing these reckless humans God has made, seeking us out of love when we have gone astray, from calling to us when we are hiding in the bushes in the Garden of Eden to the extreme step of sending angels and prophets and talking donkeys and even God’s own Son to try to encourage us to walk in the ways of love, hope, justice, and reconciliation—God’s dream for our flourishing.

In giving human beings both the privilege of being made in God’s image and also bearing the responsibility of free will, God necessarily cedes God’s total claim to power. Just as even when sitting in God’s chair, Bruce Almighty can’t make his girlfriend love him again by sheer will, God allows us the freedom to respond to God’s abundant love and grace—or not. We know this to be true.

With these basic assumptions laid down, we can now take up first who the judge represents. This judge is guided by self-interest and self-preservation. His actions do not reveal a concern for anything but his own status. His focus is on the short-term, on taking advantage of his position for self-benefit and profit. He considers those who get hurt by his actions to be mere collateral damage, and acts out of pure profit motive to himself.

What if the unjust judge is the world’s systems of greed, casual cruelty, contempt, and inhumanity? The systems all over the world that excuse injustices and unethical practices with the claims that “the law” that they themselves have written do not forbid actions which expand inequality, poverty, and defenselessness before the gears of power? What if the unjust judge is the tendency we have to claim “that’s just the way it is” with a shrug when we encounter tragedy or injustice? Our tendency to claim helplessness in correcting human systems that we tend to treat as sacrosanct? Our tendency to claim there is no money to improve our commitment to the general welfare of our most vulnerable citizens while expanding corporate welfare and the ability to manipulate scarcity of resources so that they end up in the hands of the few?

God sent God’s son into the world not as a prince or a potentate but as a humble little baby born to an unwed, teenaged, peasant mother and her bewildered carpenter of a fiancé. Jesus grew up in a duty backwater of empire in a no-account town in a no-account region on the very margins of influence from any sort of human calculation. So how hard is it, really, to imagine God as the widow, relentlessly knocking on the doors of our hearts and consciences?

Trappist priest and theologian Thomas Keating makes this observation about this parable:

God approaches us all day long, coming to meet us morning, noon, and night through people, events and our own thoughts, feeling, memories, and reactions. We accept the kingdom finally, not because we are just or deserve it, but because at some point like the unjust judge, we cannot stand the importunities of grace anymore and are forced to give in, saying, ‘Okay, take my life. I am in your hands.’”

That kind of surrender is the bravest and therefore scariest thing we can do. It means living life with wide-open eyes and a wide-open heart. It mean not just worshiping Jesus as a distant figure sitting up on a heavenly throne, but actually following him in his humble carpenter’s attire our into the world, in attending to the aches and pains and needs we see all around us, even if we have to do it one person or situation at a time. It means our obligation lies not in just performing human rituals every week for the benefit of our own souls, but instead our obligation is to those we encounter in the world. To BE the loving, healing hands and heart of Christ not just within these walls but out beyond these doors in our secular lives. By doing so, our lives become less secular, yes, but more holy.

By doing so, persevering in prayer means raising our voices and our political will in advocating for justice for the oppressed. Prayer can be prayed with our feet, walking alongside those in need. Prayer can be prayed as we provide the hungry with food and the unhoused with shelter. It means sitting in love and faithfulness with the sick and the grieving. I give thanks that this is where I see you all being most faithfully engaged in prayer—not just sitting here on Sundays, although that is important because it gives us fellowship and strength for our true prayer lives, out in the world, sustained by each other, by your commitment to this place, and always, always, by God, who honors us by calling us into partnership in bringing about God’s kingdom.

As Rabbi Rami Shapiro reminds us:

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief.
Do justly now, love mercy now, walk humbly now.
You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.

We walk alongside God, and we walk alongside each other. Let us bravely persist in prayer—and sometimes even use words. And the most important word of all is yes. Yes to God. Yes to community. Yes to following Jesus.

Amen.

Preached at the 505 on October 15 and the 10:30 am Holy Eucharist on October 16, 2022 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Ellisville, MO.

Readings:

Jeremiah 31:27-34
Psalm 119:97-104
2 Timothy 3:14-4:5
Luke 18:1-8

Prayer as Protest: Speaking to the Soul for October 13, 2022

Luke 18:1-8

Jesus tells this story: A widow: without advocate, without protector, abandoned and abused, cried out through the teeth of outrage, refusing to subside quietly, cowed by an unjust judge’s contempt. Certain that his position of privilege would insulate him from her insistent demands for justice, he tried to break her with sneering silence. Only, life bursts forth from broken things: broken fields receive seed with grace, sprout and root erupt from broken seeds, broken clouds burst forth with rain.

Two laws are at war for dominance in our hearts: one the trellis for the climbing rose of mercy, the other the trickling vine that chokes and enforces a thorny wreath of oppression in order’s name, disrespectful, arrogant before God. Too often we see human law serve as a shield for predation, substituting punishment rather than justice. God calls us to resist systems that coerce rather than empower.

Too often when confronted with oppression and injustice, we ask why God allows such things to happen. What if we saw the persistent widow as God, and the unjust judge as human society? Think about it. Because prayer is a conversation between us and God, that reversal also works, and teaches us a lesson about prayer as a two-way conversation with God.

The gospel reminds us, prayer is a way to enter into the presence of God, to be surrounded by the presence of God. This is the kind of immediate experience needed to maintain faith, more than anything else, so that when Jesus returns, faith will be found on the earth. Jesus urges us to be persistent in prayer, but that doesn’t mean for us to passively accede to injustice. So let us pray unceasingly, with unfaltering faith—prayer as action, prayer as persistence, listening to God’s call for us to stand with the powerless, to protest with the voiceless, and to align ourselves with the law of love.

This was first published at Episcopal Journal and Cafe's Speaking to the Soul for October 13, 2022.

The Faith Of A Seed: Sermon for Proper 22C

What’s the difference between a mulberry tree and a mountain?

I think we would all agree they are very different. In our example, outside of stories by JRR Tolkien, trees don’t move around by themselves, and they certainly can’t grow and flourish in salt water. Likewise, mountains that get up and move are called volcanoes and usually the way they move is by erupting and nobody wants to be around that.

But they do have one thing in common: they are both things Jesus uses to help us grasp something important about faith. In the gospel we heard just now, we arrive mid-conversation with Jesus sounded noticeably annoyed with the disciples. What our reading omits is that Jesus has just advised the disciples that they are required to forgive others multiple times, even up to seven times a day if they are repentant. This concept was so mind-blowing for the disciples that they are dumbstruck. “Increase our faith!” they beg in wonder. Jesus tells them that if they had faith the size of a mustard seed, they could order a mulberry tree to uproot itself and plant itself in the sea.

When Jesus talks about faith the size of a mustard seed in Matthew’s gospel, he says this after the disciples have tried and failed to cast a demon out a man. After they ask him why, he tells them they have no faith. But this time, that mustard seed faith he advises would allow them to tell a mountain to move and it would obey.

Interestingly, the Buddhists have a parable of the mustard seed as well. It goes like this:

A mother’s child died, and she was inconsolable. She approaches the teacher Shakyamuni, who has a great reputation for helping people in their suffering. She wails about being alone, about her heartbreak, and is inconsolable. She asks the teacher to bring back her dead child, back to the land of the living. “Certainly,” he agrees---if first she can bring him a single mustard seed from any house that has not known death. The woman goes from house to house but can find no one who has escaped mourning and loss. After weeks at her quest, the woman goes home. Her understanding of her grief has changed: it’s no longer a weight erased but a weight made bearable, because she has discovered that everyone shares this burden in one form or another. She has learned that she can share her grief with others who too have experienced loss. A shared loss is a bearable loss.

It's amazing that mustard seeds can end up causing so much inspiration when it comes to matters of faith.

In Jesus’s talk about mulberry trees and mountains and mustard seeds, whether you think about a mulberry tree, which is big, or a great mountain, which is big, getting up and move themselves around, isn’t the real miracle.

The miracle is in the faith that makes things possible. The amount of faith you have isn’t the issue. It’s allowing faith to take root and grow in your life that matters.

It reminds me of the scene in the second Star Wars movie made-- The Empire Strikes Back. Luke has gone to find the great Jedi master Yoda to complete the training his friend Ben had barely begun with him. After a slow start, Yoda has Luke stacking rocks using only the Force while doing a handstand—and it’s hard work. Suddenly, Luke realizes his ship is sinking into the water. Yoda encourages him to use the Force to lift it. Luke exclaims that there is a huge difference between a rock and a spaceship.

"No!” Yoda exclaims. “Only different in your mind!” 

And so, Luke tries to raise the ship, and at first it rises from the water, but then Luke’s concentration breaks, and it sinks below the surface worse than before. “It’s too big!” Luke gasps. And after explaining the Force again, Yoda raises the spacecraft out of the water and places it on dry land.

When it comes to faith, size is not the issue.

Perhaps the disciples get it wrong when they think that faith is quantifiable. If you think that way, a little is good, but more must be better, right?

Jesus’s answer avoids using measurements. He doesn’t say, if you had an ounce of faith, or a pound of faith, or a gallon of faith. Instead, he says, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could do the impossible.”

Jesus chooses a small seed, a living thing, to describe faith. Seeds are amazing things, too. In the case of the mustard seed, a seed the size of a period at the end of a sentence is all you need in terms of faith. But a seed is a paradox. It looks inanimate, but it is alive, and from it grows a plant hundreds of times bigger that the seed from which the plant came.

Then I wondered: what kind of faith does a mustard seed itself actually have?

It doesn’t let its smallness get in the way of doing its business. But drop it into the soil and give it some sun and water, and it gets to work.

I know this because the January I was four, my mom bought me this “kid’s garden” kit at the local TG&Y—it was a five and dime store that was around when I was very little. My mom bought this kit for me, I suspect, to keep me occupied, because she was 41 and pregnant with my sister and had two little kids who both asked lots of questions. 

The garden kit had glass jars that fit on a tray, a bag of soil, and even a wee red tin watering can. There were seeds for sunflowers, marigold, lavender, chives, and mustard. Frankly they all seemed small to me. After assembling all the jars, we put them on the windowsill in the dining room and waited. That was the hard part. Every day I would watch and watch and have to hold back from watering too much. Every day I would lose more of my mother’s lap, and every day she distracted me with these jars of dirt.

Mom had always made sure to plant one of the seeds close to the edge of the glass. And finally, after what seemed like forever but what probably about three weeks, in some of the jars I could see a tiny pale sprout from the larger sunflower seeds. Mom assured me that all the seeds, even the tiniest, did the same thing. 

The sunflower seed cracked open, and that first sprout began to spread out into tiny roots to feed the seed. Then another sprout emerged and began to push like magic toward the top of the soil. It broke the top of the soil and kept going up and up. Then it formed a few tiny leaves. Over the next few days all the other pots began bursting forth with sprouts and then seedlings. Every day they seemed to grow and grow. Finally, in the middle of June, all of them had grown into plants—even the tiny mustard seed. 

And guess what also happened? My baby sister was born. Boy, my Mom sure could time things. And luckily, the plants were at a stage when they could be ignored for a while, we got to turn our attention to the baby. But I remember how proud I was when some of my own plants were used when we made dinner—even the marigolds went into the salad! And we ground up a little mustard and put that on sandwiches.

What made those seeds grow? Soil, and water, and the right temperatures, and sunshine. But it started with the seeds doing what was inside them all along, responding to the right conditions with the will to break open and sprout.

Even the smallest seeds-- acorns, nuts, berries, even-- can become amazing plants, providing shade and food and fragrance and beauty—even medicine. It all starts with the seed breaking open and straining into roots and sprouts.

What if Jesus is reminding us of this? Sometimes, we develop a shell that prevents us from growing into what we are meant to be as disciples. We hold ourselves aloof from experiences that might crack us open, like love, fellowship, or trust in God rather than hoarding our own resources and depending only upon ourselves. Or maybe we doubt ourselves, or that we can really trust God to use us to do great things. And so, we hesitate in growing, and instead ask God our favorite request: Give us more.

But there’s no need for more. We have everything we need right here to grow in faith, to grow in discipleship. It’s all inside us, waiting to sprout.

More faith isn’t required. Instead, Jesus then makes an important point in the middle of our gospel: you don’t need to have a huge amount of faith to do this. You just need a tiny bit. Faith the size of a mustard seed can produce wonders and miracles. With God’s help, anything is possible—including transforming our tiny, grinchy hearts that get paralyzed through fear, cynicism, or lack of faith from doing what they were meant to do: act in love for the healing of the world.

Faith isn’t about knowing how to measure it. Faith isn’t about what you know. It is about how you love, and how you act on that love. And loving means leaving behind the fear that others will hurt you, even through potential grief at maybe losing them some day. It’s about investing your heart, your strength, your love, your resources in what really matters—in making the world a better place, in helping the kingdom of God to grow and flourish to give hope and nourishment to the aching world.

Jesus describes faith as a tiny seed because it is how it grows inside you that makes all the difference. Faith isn’t about flashy miracles like ordering around trees or mountains—not really.

When it comes to faith, size is not the issue. Action is what matters. Letting go of what holds you back matters. Being bold because you are on the solid rock of confidence and trust in God is what matters. A little is all that it takes—but together, it can make all the difference.

Preached at the 505 on October 1 and the 10:30 Holy Eucharist on October 2 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville.

Readings:

Lamentations 1:1-6
Psalm 137
2 Timothy 1:1-14
Luke 17:5-10