My faith failed me in a decisive way, once. Of course I’ve failed at faith many times, habitually even, like everyone else, but in this case I’m talking about a distinct and early experience of failing to have faith when I was a little girl. Maybe third or fourth grade. I think this must have been the first time I ever thought about what faith was, even. Maybe prior to that time I had been content simply to accept what my teachers and parents told me, or whatever I could make out of the sermons I heard. It had possibly never been necessary for me to consider whether following the rules more or less like all the other children had constituted “faith.” I mean, I was in Catholic school and I was keeping my grades up. Isn’t that salvation? I seem to have been considered nice enough by others. Was there something extra required of me under this new category of “faith?”
The crisis I’m talking about, the failure, came in response to my teacher’s discussion of this very passage from Luke’s gospel. “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed,” I thought I heard her say, “you will be able to make trees jump into the water.” Now, I’d like to believe that my teacher presented this verse with some theological subtlety, but if she did, I certainly wasn’t listening. No, what I heard was just too tantalizing to be ignored, and if more was said it was too late for me to hear.
“What a revelation!” I thought. I was supposed to have a thing called faith, and it only needed to be the size of a mustard seed, which was apparently quite small. I mean, how big could that be? And if I had just that little thing, I’d be living confidently in a world of active divine intervention. Impossible things would keep happening every day, just as the fairy godmother promised Cinderella. It would be like wishing on a star.
Well, I was accustomed to completing homework assignments successfully, neatly, and on time, so I approached this challenge with some enthusiasm. My faith must be at least as large as a mustard seed, I reasoned, because I never got in trouble in school and that meant I was one of the good children. So I closed my eyes and prayed as devoutly as I could. I thought I had a shot at making it work for me. I mean, in all honesty, I was kind of the teacher’s pet.
So I prayed energetically. And then, it hardly needs to be said, the trees outside remained just as they were.
I’ve called this event a crisis but in truth it was the quietest little moment of giving up, of adjusting my expectations. I guess Sister Carol went on talking, but I was done with the lesson. I figured I must have misunderstood, and I tucked away that whole puzzle about what faith was, out of sight and out of mind. Either I wasn’t enough or God wasn’t, or the church was saying stuff about God that nobody believed. Each of these possibilities felt unpleasant to explore. Clearly these were questions good children didn’t ask or think much about.
This is a quiet giving up that most of us share, if I understand us correctly. We mostly live, I think, with the unspoken assumption that either we are not enough or God is not enough. Or that the church says stuff about God that no one believes. And for the most part we don’t want to know exactly where the truth lies. It’s just awkward to ask. Better to keep moving forward looking like we get it. Thus faith itself is walled off from our deepest curiosity and stricken from most of our conversations. The crisis lies precisely in our ongoing, polite, resignation. We improvise in silence and hope what we are doing is ok.
So let me say out loud that I still don’t know exactly what God will or won’t do when I pray, or when you do. And I’m still not sure what the full power of faith is, or exactly how faith comes into our hearts. I’m ready now to accept that when Jesus speaks of trees jumping into the sea he is using almost apocalyptic language, and apocalyptic language was something his original hearers understood much better than we do. Like so many vivid things scripture says about the day of the Lord, these alarming phenomena in the physical world are signs of God’s radical will to transform us.
Of course, to know those things about the tradition of apocalyptic language is still not to know for sure what the full power of faith is, or what God will or won’t do among us, and I’m convinced that we should be more curious than we are about that, and more willing to talk about God’s actions among us. But measuring our faith for the purpose of being teachers’ pets? That I’m hoping to let go of.
Faith is surely an act of God, not an act of self-improvement on our part. It’s not at all clear how we can “get” for ourselves more of something that is a pure gift. It’s not at all clear that faith—or let’s call it trust--can grow if our chief motivation is anxiety about how much of it we may or may not be entitled to possess. Just possibly, the thing we need to do about having trust in God is to trust God to work that out in us.
That is why I’m grateful this morning for the relatively tough language Jesus uses with the apostles when they ask for more faith. He is quite discouraging. The desire to have more faith ought to be something he wants to explore but honestly he is pretty dismissive here.
It’s bad enough that he tells them the thing about the mustard seed and the trees. That must have been hard on them. But then he goes on to tell the meanest parable ever. “Think of yourselves as slaves,” he begins, not too promisingly, “and do what you are supposed to do. And don’t stand around waiting to be thanked.”
As a recovering teacher’s pet, I can see that there is very little hope for any of us to look good or emerge feeling successful from this encounter with Jesus. This is bad news for straight-A students.
But look, there are better things than merit badges and brownie points in store for us in the kingdom of God. In just a few verses Jesus has done away with success and failure. He has ruled out competition and self-satisfaction. He has liberated us from judging our relationship in external terms.
Yes, we’ve had to surrender the idea that we can think of ourselves as the best servants ever, but what we’ve lost is only about as important as the ability to make trees jump into the sea. There are no teacher’s pets in God’s kingdom, and no wonder-working, tree-drenching magicians. By giving those ideas up we open a space—God opens a space within us—that is filled by God’s freedom within us. Think about Jesus’s own relationship to looking good or impressing some external authority. He went right to the heart of that problem for us. He went ahead and embraced human failure. He let the authorities crucify him, to save us. That’s a God we can actually trust.
And that kind of giving up—not the quiet resignation, but the active embrace of the gap between our understanding and God’s action in the world—that’s the gift we need. We need to become able to rejoice that God and God’s ways are utterly beyond our comprehension. That’s freedom. That’s deep love.
So let’s rejoice together. I don’t have enough faith, and neither do you. I don’t possess even an amount that’s as big as a mustard seed. I suspect that when I feel as though I do have faith, I’ve lost the deepest part of it already. Because surely, the deepest part of faith is the freedom to let go of what we think of ourselves and others so we can go where God calls us, not where anxiety pushes us. “Not according to our works,” as we hear in this morning’s epistle, “but according to his own purpose and grace.” Surely continuing to judge myself, God, and the church as though I were a goody-two-shoes in third grade is an existential mistake.
So look around at us. Look at who we are. We’re nothing special. By God’s grace we are probably enough. By God’s grace we are certainly free.
Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
October 2, 2022
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia
