Lamentations 1:1-6; Psalm 137; 2 Timothy 1:1-14;
Thank you for being here today to learn together, to pray together, to share together. Thank you for sharing your faith. Please turn to page 299 in the Book of Common Prayer and join with me in the call and response found at the bottom of the page:
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Celebrant
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There is one Body and one Spirit;
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People
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There is one hope in God's call to us;
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Celebrant
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One Lord, one Faith, one Baptism;
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People
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One God and Father of all.
Amen.
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I was
watching the Twins and Yankees playoff game last night when a commercial for a
cell phone company came on. In the
commercial was a man pouring coffee into a cup that never overflowed. He said, “Switching to [this cell phone
company with unlimited gigs] gave me so much more. And I gotta say, I like more.”
Later, in another commercial, a man is driving and talking
to his wife about their relationship, about the ability to know what the other
is thinking, and she said, “Sometimes I think we don’t have enough
insurance. Then I sometimes think, we
have too much.”
By this time, the New York Yankees had too many runs. The score was 8 to nothing. It was only the bottom of the third inning
and the Twins had already brought out their third pitcher in hopes of stopping
them.
More – more – more.
Faster – bigger – better. Win –
win – win.
When do we have enough?
No. Wait. I don’t think that’s the question. Maybe the real question is, when do we KNOW
we have enough?
The disciples wanted Jesus to give them more faith. It seemed to them that to do what Jesus did and
be like Jesus was they would need to be faithfully endowed. That what they already had just wouldn’t cut
it. They thought they needed more.
Perhaps it was lack of confidence. Maybe it was doubt in their abilities. Could they have felt that they were not
enough?
I know that there are times in my life where I have felt
like I didn’t have it all together.
Selling Tupperware items that I didn’t really know, becoming a parent
and then navigating all the stages of our kids’ lives, figuring out how to be a
spouse, learning different jobs, going back to school, becoming a priest, even
learning new textile skills like this leaf felting. The list seems endless.
Most of the time I think my fears, my longings, my doubts,
my lack of self- confidence, my faulty self-awareness and feelings of
inadequacy could be overcome with more education, more patience, more
attention, more growth, more therapy, more this, more that.
You know what it’s all about? Wanting to be enough.
Wanting to know I am enough.
These Jesus Followers watched as Jesus seemed to so
effortlessly perform miracles: feed thousands, heal people of life-long
ailments, teach hard lessons, comfortably spend time with the unloved and
least-cared-for individuals he met. And
what happened immediately before today’s text might have had something to do
with their desire for more faith.
Jesus had just told them to forgive, not once or twice, but
70 times 7 times. Their desire for more
faith might have been because they didn’t think it possible without more faith.
These followers wanted to be like Jesus, and they did not
think they had enough, or were enough to live up to His expectations. They wanted more faith.
The thing is, Jesus tells them, the size of your faith
doesn’t matter when it comes to doing the work of God. The amount of your faith cannot be
measured.
I think Jesus knows that how we are in relationship with
God is so individual, so special, so unique, that it waxes and wanes over our
lifetimes. But what God wants is for us
to do the work of the faithful, with whatever faith we have, while we are
here.
Because our faith, whether it is the size of a mustard seed
or a massive mustard weed isn’t what matters.
What matters is what we do with our faith.
It’s about what we do with our faith. It is about who we serve because of our
faith. And, our faith is in God.
In some ways, Jesus explains, we are slaves, or as our
translation today says, servants. We are
slaves, or servants, of our heavenly master.
Like most servants, we know what we are required to do—to
love God and to love neighbor. We have
direction in our Baptismal Covenant. If
you would like to follow along, turn to pages 304 and 305 in the red Book of
Common Prayer. These directions are to:
·
continue in the
apostles' teaching and fellowship, through the breaking of the bread, and in
the prayers;
·
we are to
persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever any of us fall into sin, we are
expected to repent and return to the Lord;
·
we are also
supposed to proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ;
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and we must seek
and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves, which
includes striving for justice and peace among all people, and respecting the
dignity of every human being.
Those
might seem like big directions that are beyond our abilities, and
we
might think we don’t have enough faith, or we aren’t faithful enough to be able
to do or be or act in these ways.
But if we look at our lives, in the
light of this list of requirements, I bet each of us is doing more than we
realize. If we look at them, one by one,
we are definitely living out our faith.
First, we are here, in community, to
learn about God through worship. This is
where you learn what Jesus did, what he taught, what he gave to the world. Here is where we break bread and drink wine
together as a sign of our faithfulness to God.
We are in community, spending time together as eight of us did yesterday
at Mounds State Park and as many of us will do during coffee hour. Many of us spend time together outside of
church, building this community of faith and friendship. And, of course, we pray.
Next, because we have received the
strength of community through worship and fellowship, we are better prepared to
live our lives in faithful ways in the world outside these doors. We strive to
do good things, to be good people. But
the ways of the world can sometimes get in the way and we will, yes,
will, sometimes, fall into sinful ways.
The thing is, as people of faith, we know we can repent. We can come to this place and confess our
sins in community, or privately, and receive forgiveness. With that forgiveness is the hope that we can
go back into the world and not act in those ways again.
But we are human, and we fail, and we
forget. And we have our relationship
with God and each other where we can repent, ask forgiveness and try again. We might even need to forgive ourselves and others
70 times 7 times.
Here in this place, but even more out
in the world, we are expected to tell the story of God, of Jesus, of the
movement of the Holy Spirit. We are to
evangelize for Christ, sharing the stories of our lives as they are touched by
God and impacted by Jesus. We are
supposed to go out and experience the Holy Spirit as she moves around and
within us, giving us strength and courage to share the Good News.
Finally, we are to treat one another
well. The people we know and the people
we do not. We are expected to recognize
that each is created by God. Because each
is a beloved child of God, we seek justice and peace and we strive to respect the dignity of all of
God’s beloveds.
The thing about all these things is
that, according to this Gospel, we are not supposed to expect a “thank you” or
any kind of appreciation. We are
supposed to, as the Nike ad says, “just do it.”
Just do it. You have enough faith to do what God expects
you to do. Jesus said so.
Let
us pray.
Dear God, our faith
in you brings us here to express our relationship with you. We hear messages of
hope through Jesus’ teaching, messages like the one we heard today, teaching us
that the size of our faith is irrelevant to our story with you. What matters is that we have faith. Help us to see that whatever size our faith,
we are called to be and do and live in ways that reflect our faith in you to
one another and to the world. In your
holy name we pray. Amen.