The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

When you look at the lectionary for any given Sunday, you never know what you’re going to get. Sometimes you just have to make it work.  And sure enough, the story we find today is one that might just throw us for a loop because it’s one in which Jesus gets a little testy.  And it’s not with the Pharisees, not with the rich or the powerful, but with his friends—the disciples. 

The story begins with the disciples approaching Jesus with a seemingly reasonable request: “Lord! Increase our faith!”  It’s an understandable request given the sort of things Jesus has been teaching like “Love your enemies. Bless those who curse you. Forgive even when it’s not deserved. Give without expecting anything in return. Be ready to take up your cross.

But Jesus responds to the disciple’s request with a touch of irritation— the Greek word here would suggest a bit of snark—and he tells them that if they had faith as small as mustard seed, they could command a mulberry tree to uproot itself and replant in the sea…and it would obey. 

He then proceeds to ask them whether a servant would be so haughty as to demand a meal with his master, or special praise for doing his basic household duties. 

This may strike us as a little odd because Jesus wasn’t in the habit of speaking unkindly about slaves or people of low status. Last week you heard the story of the rich man and Lazarus, where a beggar is assigned higher honor than his rich neighbor.  

And we know also that Jesus often compared the kingdom to a banquet in which all are invited—slave and free, rich and poor alike—and he often talked about how the least among us would take the high place of honor to eat with the Master. Jesus was in the business of turning hierarchies and power structures on their head, so why does he resort to conventional social structures to make this point to the disciples? 

We want to keep in mind that, throughout the gospels Jesus reserves his harshest criticisms for the proud and saves his most biting satire for the folks who need to be brought down a peg.

From the beginning, his ministry was about lifting up the humble and humbling the proud, of challenging those in authority and giving voice to the marginalized, so it’s safe to assume that there must have been an element of pride or entitlement at work in the disciple’s request to warrant this sort of response. 

I wonder if Jesus was gently, playfully poking fun at the disciples’ ongoing preoccupation with flashy signs and wonders as a measure of true faith.

They’d been asking for an upgrade in supernatural powers, at one point suggesting it sure would be nice to be able to call down fire from heaven every time someone turned them away from their home.

But the signs and wonders performed by Jesus and described in the gospels always had a point. They were always constructive. They healed, liberated, multiplied, fed, blessed, restored, and comforted.

I wonder if Jesus isn’t telling the disciples that if they have enough faith to be faithful, then that is enough. Faith, after all, is a gift.  And we don’t have any business telling God we don’t have enough, when God always gives us enough to be faithful. God always gives us enough to do something useful, to “make it work.” 

How easy it is to think we don’t have enough! These guys were in the very presence of Jesus and still they wanted more!  Theologian Walter Brueggemann said: “We all have a hunger for certitude. The problem is the Gospel is not about certitude, it’s about fidelity.”

An Episcopal priest wrote in a sermon on this text: “As so often happens to kids who grew up in church, when I reached young adulthood, I started to question a lot of what I was taught about faith and life and ever since then, doubt has been an ongoing presence in my life.  

“Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I’m pretty convinced this whole Christianity thing is a bunch of baloney. And I can’t tell you how much emotional energy I’ve spent trying to recover that initial certainty, trying to get back to the faith of my childhood.”

How often can we beat ourselves up when we think we don’t have strong enough faith? But what good is that  really?  How useful is that? About as useful as uprooting a mulberry tree and planting it in the sea. We’re not so unlike those disciples who asked Jesus to increase their faith.

What is our mustard seed? The tiny seed that could grow and make a difference.

I think the simplest things that may seem small and ordinary are sometimes the hardest things. Kindness, gentleness, forgiveness, patience, generosity. Yet I also think that these “seeds” are both terribly missing and desperately needed in our world.

St. Andrew, Peter and Paul, Mary Magdalene, the rest of the Disciples, St. Francis of Assisi, Martin Luther King, Teresa of Calcutta, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and all the saints --you and I—we all share the same Creator God.  And our God has given us all the faith we need to be faithful.  

So even if it’s just the size of a mustard seed, God will make it work.