When I was a young wife and mother, worried about doing
everything just right, I used to buy lots of women’s magazines. I would stand
in the grocery store checkout line, comparing myself to my fellow moms,
wondering why my son wasn’t potty-trained yet or why my husband worked all the
time, and I would read the appealing magazine headlines: “10 Easy Steps to Make
Your Husband Pay Attention to You,” or “How to Potty-Train your Toddler in 2
Weeks,” or “Recipes Guaranteed to Help Drop 10 Pounds Before Bathing-Suit
Season.” My heart would swell with hope, and I would buy the magazine, relieved
to be taking home the answers that would put an end to all of my insecurities
and failings. Then, of course, I would eagerly begin reading the articles.
There would be a wonderful description of the problem, a bit of reassurance
that other people had the same issues, and then …(sigh) the same, boring,
unappealing advice that I could have thought of myself without buying a
magazine. To lose weight—don’t eat so much and exercise every day. To communicate
with your husband—talk to him. And so on. It didn’t take me long to learn that,
no matter how much the headlines on the front of the magazine spoke to my
insecurities, the advice on the inside was not going to be very new and
exciting. I had to learn that easy, effortless one-page answers to all of the
difficulties inherent in our relationships do not exist.
After
listening to Jesus’ difficult imperatives about discipleship, the disciples in
Luke’s Gospel were apparently just as concerned and insecure as we are about
their own failure to live up to God’s expectations. “The last shall be first and
the first shall be last;” “Give away all
your possessions;” “You cannot serve both God and Wealth,” we have heard Jesus
say to the crowds over the past few weeks. Right before today’s Gospel lesson,
there are more of Jesus’ difficult expectations for his followers, expectations
that the lectionary leaves out: “Forgive your neighbor every time she asks
forgiveness, no matter how many times she has hurt you,” Jesus tells the
apostles in no uncertain terms. And “Don’t cause others to stumble in faith or
you might as well throw yourself into the sea to drown,” he warns them. Jesus seems to be making it perfectly clear
that each member of the community is responsible, responsible before God, for
maintaining right relationships: for sharing with one another, for forgiving
one another, for supporting one another. Such a responsible role is
daunting—for the apostles and for us. “What if we can’t do these things?” they
wonder. “What if we fail? We need more faith than we have now, that’s for sure.
How can I tell if I have enough faith to be a follower of Jesus?” They cry out
in consternation to Jesus, “Add faith to us!”
The disciples
are looking for affirmation that will wipe away their self-doubts. I imagine
that they are hoping for answers from Jesus that look like the headlines in
those women’s magazines: “Ten Easy Steps to Strengthen Your Faith,” or “How to
Do the Miracles that Will Impress Your Neighbor,” or “Recipes to Increase Love
and Generosity.” We all dream of easy spiritual answers, quick fixes for our
relationship with God and with our brothers and sisters in Christ, just as we
long for quick fixes in our other relationships. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could
learn how to manage our inner resources of faith and love as easily as we keep
track of our bank accounts online? Wouldn’t it be nice if we could read an
article about someone who did so much forgiving and supporting in August and
September that he was able to take a little break from his Christian
responsibility until Thanksgiving! W.H.
Auden writes, in much more poetic terms, that we long to know that “somewhere,
over the high hill,/ Under the roots of the oak, in the depths of the sea,/ Is
a womb or a tomb wherein [we] may halt to express some attainment…”[1]
To rest, even for a moment, from shame and anxiety in a concrete sense of
attainment, that’s what we long for, isn’t it?
A sense of attainment in our lives--a sense of attainment with God, in
our faith--a sense of attainment in our relationships with each other, as a
community--that’s what we want, and that’s what the apostles wanted as they
cried out in our Gospel reading for more faith.
Jesus’ answer to them, like the
articles in the magazines to which I turned with so much hope, must disappoint
our longing for a sense of spiritual attainment. The first part of Jesus’
answer, the metaphor of the mustard seed, is more like a poem than a magazine
article. It is a double-edged metaphor, and it cuts through our thinking like a
sword, shattering the idea that faith is something that can be measured,
counted or weighed at all. First, Jesus’ remark about the mustard seed destroys
any sense of attainment that the apostles might have built up among themselves.
The “you” in this phrase is a plural you. Jesus sighs, “All of y’all put
together don’t even have faith that is the size of a grain of mustard seed!”
Once the apostles are reeling from that cutting remark, Jesus lifts them back
up again with the hugely exaggerated, cartoon-like image of the little mustard
seed faith yanking up a huge tree by its complex root system and heaving it
into the sea. In this metaphor, the concepts of big and little no longer make
sense. There is no such thing as big faith and little faith. Clearly, faith has
no size! God can work through anything, any size, any shape, even through a
bunch of incompetent doubting apostles—and even through us.
Jesus then follows with a difficult paradox in the strange little
parable of the “worthless slaves.” Although we have
tasks to accomplish in our relationships with each other and with God, when we are
successful in our loving, in our giving, and in our forgiving, we have no
excuse to get puffed up about it and gloat about our own piety. We don’t need
to look for special rewards or to tell ourselves that God loves us better than
God loves everyone else. God expects us to live mindfully and obediently in all
of the everyday tasks of our lives. Martin Smith points out that “ministry,” comes from the
Latin root for “small things,” like the word “miniscule,” for example.[2]
To do “ministry,” is to take care of small matters, to practice faith in the
small steps of our daily lives. The faith that Jesus commends to us involves
faithfulness in small things—it is not a smooth or easy life of attainment, but
a life of watchful obedience to the tasks that we have been given: tasks of
forgiveness, sharing, and support for one another.
If one of the apostles were to have
written a magazine article on the “life of faith” according to the spirit of
our Gospel lesson, I’m afraid that the article might seem just as irritatingly
obvious and as frustrating to our sense of attainment as those articles on
parenting that I used to read. The headlines might scream, “Jesus Redeems
Notorious Sinner,” but the story inside will be about a woman saving for months
to buy expensive ointment and then washing Jesus’ feet with it. Or it will tell
about a leper who walks back down a dirt road to thank Jesus for healing him. Or it will feature
an Episcopalian who spends his free time tutoring needy children and building
Habitat houses and going to endless Vestry meetings. Or parents trying to raise children who love God and neighbor. Or a politician who fights for
justice for the poor in frustrating meeting after frustrating meeting. It will
be about ordinary people and their ordinary lives, stumbling along and doing their best to stay
alert to God’s presence in and around them. "Oh, I already knew all that," we would be tempted to shout as we threw down the magazine. What we always forget, though, is the sustenance of the God who loves us, of the God who is bigger than our duties and our everyday tasks, of the God who turns our understanding of attainment upside down. While we would never invite our slaves to sit down at the table with us, God invites everyone to feast at God's table. In Luke 12 Jesus says, “Blessed are those
slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will
fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve
them.” Our sustenance is in the presence of our loving God. So forget attainment—Jesus just needs us to stay awake.
[1]
W. H. Auden, “For the Time Being--Advent”
[2]
Martin L. Smith, Compass and Stars (New
York: Seabury Books, 2007), 55.
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