By Kristin Berkey-Abbott
Luke 17: 5-10
By now, you might be echoing the cry of the disciples: “Lord, increase our faith!” We’ve had weeks of Jesus telling us how hard it is to be a disciple, how much is required. This year, our teachings have circled around the issue of money and possessions. For this week’s Gospel, we skipped right over the first 4 verses of Luke 17, which tell us that we need to forgive, and forgive a lot.
And not only that, we have to be prepared to forgive the same person over and over, who keeps needing forgiveness for the same action, over and over. For some of us, that might be harder than the need to give away our possessions.
Humans seem constitutionally incapable of letting go of our fierce grasp: on our possessions, on our grudges, on our anger and our rage. Jesus’ response might frustrate us. But maybe we need to hear the words of Jesus in a different light, a different tone, than we might be inclined to hear it, particularly after weeks of Jesus giving us hard teachings about the cost of discipleship.
Let me say again the words of Jesus, as neutrally as I can: “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.” How do you hear those words? I’ll say it again and pause for a moment for you to consider how Jesus might have said them: “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.”
You might hear them as a challenge. You might go outside and start ordering trees around as you test your faith. You might feel despair when the trees stay put or when you talk to your unproductive flowers that continue in their not-blooming or when your weeds flourish even though you told them not to. You might hear the words of Jesus as words of criticism, or worse of condemnation, and you might go away resolving to try harder to have enough faith. Maybe next year, if you have a rugged enough self-improvement plan, you can be the kind of faithful person that trees obey.
Of course, when you hear the words of Jesus, you might say, Why would I order the tree to be planted in a place where it will not thrive? One of my Lutheran pastor friends, Diane Roth, points out that the absurdity of this faith demonstration should alert us to the possibility that Jesus isn’t really suggesting that the disciples don’t have enough faith.
What if we heard the words spoken in a different tone of voice? Imagine Jesus saying them as encouragement when the disciples ask for more faith. Imagine him saying, “C’mon, guys, you’ve got this. You have all the faith you need. You’ve gone out and healed the sick and cast out demons and fed multitudes. What more do you think is going to happen? Do you want more faith so that you can do absurd things, like waste a perfectly good and well-rooted tree? That’s not the nature of what a faith filled life looks like.”
If the Gospel stopped at verse 6, it would be easier to continue preaching this Good News. But Jesus then gives us this strange teaching about masters and worthless slaves, the slave who will work in the field all day and then cook dinner and then clean up and then fix their own dinner—doesn’t sound like a worthless or unproductive slave to me.
We have thousands of years of history with the idea of slavery, so it’s really hard for our 21st century ears to hear Jesus talking about slaves and masters, even harder to think about God in this way, and even harder to use that language of worthlessness about ourselves. Let me just acknowledge that a good number of us have spent a lot of time trying to undo the messages beamed at us by our society, messages that tell us that we’re too old or too male or too fat or too female or too young or too unattractive or that we spent too many years learning the wrong things to be of any use at all. And now Jesus wants us to see ourselves as worthless slaves? Where is the message of innate dignity and worth of humans here?
I’ve seen some Bible commentators remind us that slavery in Roman times was different, just as it was among Native tribes in North America or for indentured servants. In many cultures across centuries, slaves might work their way out of slavery, so maybe we’re wrong to see the master as a force for evil. Maybe the master and slave have a system of mutual accountability. Frankly, though, I think this explanation is a stretch, and the fact that this kind of parable has been used to support slavery gives me even more hesitation.
In fact, I think it is just as likely that Jesus is reminding the disciples, and by extension us, that God’s system of accountability is very different than the world’s system of rewards. Here, once again, it’s good to remind ourselves that with God, we’re in a grace-based economy, not an outcomes/measurability/profit/efficiency economy that the world wants to use to decide our worth.
Jesus doesn’t give the disciples a self-improvement plan when they ask him to give them more faith, and that’s how we can tell that it’s God speaking. Just for fun, I did a Google search: “How can I increase my faith?” I didn’t get strange parables from the internet, but instead, I got all sorts of offers for easy 5 or 12 or 25 step plans, if I just would send some money to whatever organization put the thing together.
If we look at the two parts of today’s Gospel together, we get an oddly comforting message. If you have a brain that is constantly telling you that you’re not good enough, the type of brain that most of us have at least some of the time, we hear the sermon as one of impossible goals. But if we look at it a different way, through the lens of grace, we can hear the Good News that Jesus proclaims again and again.
We don’t need faith the size of a mulberry tree or the confidence that comes from being able to exert power over rooted objects. We just need a grain of faith, and we can do the good work that is ours to do. A mustard seed grows into one of the bigger trees and becomes difficult to root out. With faith the size of a mustard seed, we too can live lives that will be remembered, the way that the writer of the letter to Timothy remembers those who have gone before. I’ll read that passage from 2 Timothy again, and let you insert your name and the names of your mothers and your grandmothers: ”I am grateful to God—whom I worship with a clear conscience, as my ancestors did—when I remember you constantly in my prayers night and day. 4 Recalling your tears, I long to see you so that I may be filled with joy. 5 I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother ________ and your mother _________ and now, I am sure, lives in you _____________.”
God gives us the faith we need, just a small seed of faith, to do the work that is so valuable in our fractured world. To put it in an old southern saying, Jesus calls us to rise above our raising, but not to lose track of our dependence on grace, not to get above our raising.
And for those of us in a state of despair, for those of us with brains that are saying, “I don’t even have a mustard seed’s worth of faith,” well, I would say that you are here, wrestling with this text, trying to live faithfully. Take heart with this reminder from verse 7 of the passage from 2 Timothy: “ 7 for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.”
We have what we need, a spirit of power and love and self-discipline. We have the assurance that through God’s grace-filled economy, that faith will flourish, like a mustard seed. To paraphrase the Psalmist, all we need is to put our trust in the Lord, that we may be inspired to do good work—and then we will realize that we have come to a safe land where we can dwell, a land with safe pasture for us all.
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