Advent Lutheran Church

"You Have What You Need"

            Grace and peace to you from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus.  Amen.

            The disciples sound desperate.  “Increase our faith!”  In fact, their plea is followed by an exclamation point – they are desperate!  What’s remarkable is the fact that they’ve made it 17 whole chapters in Luke’s gospel before getting desperate about their faith, about wanting more.  You have to wonder why. 

When Jesus called them to leave their families and their careers in order to follow him, they didn’t ask for more faith in order to do it.  When they came under attack by the religious bean counters for not following the rules, they didn’t ask for more faith in order to endure.  When a storm at sea threatened to swamp their boat, they were terrified but didn’t cry out for more faith in order to ride out the storm.  When Jesus told them to feed 5,000 people with just a few fish and loaves of bread, they didn’t ask for more faith in order to do the job.  So why now?

            It turns out that the stumbling block for the disciples, what pushed them over the edge and convinced them that they needed more faith, was the whole issue of forgiveness.  In the two verses just before this story, Jesus has told them that if someone sins against them and asks for forgiveness, they have to forgive.  No options.  “In fact,” Jesus said, “if someone sins against you as many as seven times” – the number seven representing an unlimited number – “you must forgive an unlimited number of times.”

            It is said that when it comes to forgiveness, God deals in wholesale but we humans deal in retail.  That means that as far as we’re concerned, forgiveness is fine as long as it’s a concept.  But when it gets real, when it gets personal, when there’s actually something to forgive – that’s a different matter.  These disciples know their limitations, and they decide that what Jesus is asking is simply beyond them; they need more faith in order to accomplish the impossible.

            Have you ever been deeply offended?  Not just irritated by someone cutting you off in traffic or ticked off by a rude comment at work, but deeply, personally offended?  Maybe by the betrayal of a loved one.  Maybe you were the victim of a violent crime.  Think of the grudges that you harbor deep inside, the ones you couldn’t muster up the strength to forgive even if you wanted to.  Maybe you can relate to these disciples.  I know I can.

            Forgive an offense?  We live in a culture that teaches a very different response.  In baseball, an accepted and expected response when a pitcher throws at your batter is to wait until the inning turns over, and – you know what’s coming next: sometime in the next series of pitches is going to come a fastball, high and inside.  It’s just the way it works.  The world teaches a mantra of “don’t get mad; get even”; payback, revenge, retribution.  No wonder the disciples ask for more faith.  “You want us to do the impossible, Jesus?  Fine, then give us the faith to do it!”

            To which Jesus responds: “More faith?  If you had the smallest amount of faith that you can imagine – like a mustard seed – you could tell a tree to transplant itself into the ocean, and it would obey you.  And you already have more faith than that.  I know, because my Father gave it to you.  That’s the only way you could be here, following me, in the first place!  It’s not about quantity, about needing more; it’s about using what you have, for the purpose for which you have it. 

“You don’t need more faith; you need fewer excuses.”

            Dorothy Day was one of the founders of the Catholic Worker Movement back in the 1930s in this country.  It was an effort to gather groups of Roman Catholic believers into small communities for the sole purpose of serving the needs of the poor and homeless.  It was quite successful, and in fact a number of those communities still operate today in various large cities in the United States.

            When the movement was just getting started, people would come up to Dorothy Day and say things like, “Oh, you’re a saint!  I don’t know how in the world you’re able to do what you do.  You’re really special.”  Day would bristle at those kinds of comments, and she would respond, “I’m no saint.  In fact, I’m no different than you.  If you value what I do, then get out there and do it yourself.  You can, you know.”  Day objected to compliments that set her apart from others because she saw them as a copout, a way for people to rationalize why they didn’t do more themselves to ease the suffering of the poor.

            The disciples came from that same mold.  They saw what a faithful life called for and moved to the sidelines, deciding that they didn’t have what it took to stay on the field.  But Jesus came right back at them with, “Yes you do.  Get out there.  You don’t need more faith; you need fewer excuses.”

Isn’t it the same with us?  We tell Jesus in any number of ways, “Jesus, I don’t have the faith to forgive the way you forgave.  I don’t have the faith to serve the way you served.  I don’t have the faith to put others first the way you put others first.”  To which Jesus says, “Yes you do.  Now get back out there.  You don’t need more faith; you need fewer excuses.”

Now, this isn’t going to be simply what a colleague of mine calls a “bad dog sermon.”  A “bad dog sermon” is one where the preacher stands before the congregation and wags his finger at them and highlights all the ways they’ve fallen short of God’s intentions.  In effect, the preacher says, “Bad, bad dog!  Look what you’ve done, look what you’ve failed to do!  Bad dog!”  Some of you are veterans of churches where the “bad dog sermon” was the norm.  Not here.  Yes, it’s important that we come clean about the ways we fall short, about our sins; but it’s even more important that we hear a word of God’s grace and good news.  And there is indeed good news in this story.

The good news is that you already have the faith you need.  Right now, sitting here this morning, you already have exactly as much faith as you need, the faith that leads to eternal life, the faith we heard about in our second lesson, the faith that is filled with power and love and self-discipline.  This is the faith that makes it possible for you to forgive, and not only that, but to lead the life God has planned for you.

Have you considered the fact that God has not only destined you, set you aside, for eternal life with him, but that he also has a very specific plan for how you are to live your life in the here and now?  Not in terms of what you are to do, your career or job – that’s up to you – but in terms of how you are to live.

The apostle Paul addressed that issue when he wrote to one of the churches he founded.  He had established a church in the city of Ephesus in what is now Turkey, and the congregation found itself wrestling with the whole issue of identity: How were they supposed to live as distinctly Christian believers when the majority culture around them was definitely not Christian?  How were they supposed to treat each other?  How were they supposed to treat non-believers in the wider community?

Paul had some advice for those early Christians, and he included it in his letter to the Ephesians.  He reminded them: “By grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God … For we are what [God] has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.”

Let’s focus on that for a second: “created … for good works, which God prepared … to be our way of life.”  You and I, Christian believers, are hard-wired to do what is right, to do good works.  It’s simply who we are, it’s how we’re built!  God’s desire for us to do good works in his name is as basic to our makeup as our need to breathe.  Serving is not just an interruption in our daily routines; it’s part of our identity.  It isn’t remarkable, and it isn’t extra-ordinary; it is, in fact, ordinary.

That’s part of what Jesus is getting at in his comment about the master and the slave.  It’s difficult for us to hear what Jesus is saying because we in the United States come to the issue of slavery with such a horrendous history.  But we help ourselves if we can put our own history to the side for just a moment and hear Jesus’ words in their original context, of a Middle Eastern culture in which some people worked for a time in order to gain their freedom.  In that context, Jesus is actually describing a relationship, one that would have been very familiar to his original listeners.  It was a relationship of accountability and mutual expectation.  The master expected that the servant would perform his duties; the servant, in turn, would expect that when those duties were finished he would be able to eat and drink and rest and enjoy the protection of the master.  No special thanks were required; it’s just how the relationship worked.

Jesus is saying that the life of faith operates in the same way.  We do good works, including the work of forgiveness, without expectation of special thanks or recognition, because it’s part of who we are in our relationship with God.  Serving is natural, part and parcel of our life as children of God.

Ask a parent who gets up with a sick child at 2 a.m.  And then again at 2:25.  And 3:30.  And 4:05.  That parent doesn’t get up thinking, “Now, what’s the least I can possibly do?  And who’s going to thank me later?”  No; that parent gets up and tends to that sick child for one reason and one reason only: it’s what love requires.  And so it is with serving and the life of the Christian: It’s simply what love requires.

That’s why Service Ministry is such a huge part of our community life here at Advent.  We offer all of the opportunities you’ll find on our website not simply because a great number of tasks need to be done, but because serving is how we live out our God-given and God-driven identity.  True, not everyone can go on a mission trip.  Not everyone can sponsor a child through Children International.  But everyone can do something, from helping out in worship to teaching our Sunday school to participating in one of our Christmas projects to the multitude of service activities that go on year-round.

God has already given you the faith that makes you able to go beyond what you think is possible to what God knows is possible. You have that faith as a gift.  You can’t earn it, can’t buy more of it; it’s a gift.  But the choice to use that gift is one we make each and every day.

I shared this story some years ago, but it bears repeating especially in the context of our Gospel lesson this morning and its point that we already possess the faith that lets us serve beyond what we think we’re capable of into what God know we can do.  It’s the story of Greg O’Leary.  O’Leary was walking home from work late one night.  He was walking along one of the city streets where the street lights are spaced quite far apart.  He was in a very dark place exactly between two of the lights when he heard a struggle coming from the bushes off to his left.  He heard the muffled cries of a young woman; it was clear that she was being attacked.

The adrenaline kicked in, and he faced a choice: should he jump into the bushes and try to save the young woman; since he didn’t have his cell phone, should he run to a nearby house and call the police; or should he simply keep on going and mind his own business?  The young woman’s cries were becoming ever-more faint, and O’Leary knew he had to act.  He jumped into the bushes and began grappling with the attacker.  They wrestled around, punches were thrown; and finally the attacker gave up and ran out of the bushes.

O’Leary sat there in the dirt and the dark, panting from the exertion.  The young woman sat off behind one of the bushes, crying softly.  Finally, when O’Leary had caught his breath enough to speak, he said, “It’s OK now, miss.  He’s gone.  You’re safe now.”

The crying stopped, and from the darkness came the words: “Daddy, is that you?”  And out into the streetlight stepped O’Leary’s youngest daughter, Katherine.

That story is a strong one for us because it’s the story of a father saving his daughter, unbeknownst to either one of them.  But let’s not draw the family boundaries too quickly.  Remember: we follow the one who redefined the family.  We follow the one who gave his very life to connect us all in one family.  In fact, we are related to each one for whom Jesus gave his life, and that means – literally – each one.

You already have the faith you need to forgive and to serve beyond what you think is possible into what God knows is possible.  The only question is: How will you put that faith into action?  Amen.