Today’s gospel consists of two paragraphs, and for most people who read them, those two parts seem to come from opposite universes. The first paragraph talks about the incredible power of faith, while the second urges humility. In the first paragraph the believer is able to move mountains, in the second he is no more than a lowly, submissive servant. The tone and message of these two paragraphs is so different that it’s legitimate to wonder how they can be part of the same teaching sequence. But of course, upon further review they absolutely belong together. If people have great faith or great success in whatever endeavor, if they are moving mountains as business people or changing cultures as non-profit leaders, but are not also humble, they become arrogant and self-destructive. It’s especially sad when that happens to leaders of the church. Some pastors who almost literally moved mountains, building small church empires, have fallen because they forgot the second part of this equation, that even the most gifted and charismatic people are servants of God. On the other hand, if people are very humble and unselfish but do not know about the power of God, they tend to sell God and themselves short. So faith and humility are a wonderful pair, the yin and yang of spirituality. One needs the other, and one without the other is incomplete. End of sermon!
O.k., I still got eight minutes… So, let us take a look at faith first and explore one of the most incredible passages in the Bible: “If you have faith as small as a tiny mustard seed,” Jesus says, “you can say to this tree, ‘be uprooted and planted in the sea.’” Great! I don’t know about you, but to me this sounds like something straight out of Harry Potter’s bag of tricks. It wouldn’t surprise us if what Jesus describes here were an exercise taught at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. “How to uproot a tree and plant it in the sea…” This is how it’s done. Let’s put our wizard hats on and have a Harry Potter party!
But seriously, it makes absolutely no sense, uprooting a tree and plant it in the sea. It serves no purpose, other than showing off what a good wizard you are. And I believe that’s precisely the point Jesus’ is making in a back handed way. He’s saying, “Faith, my dear friends, is not magic!” He is telling his disciples spiritually hungry followers, “If you are only interested in faith for the sake of showing off, you came to the wrong guy! You don’t need more faith. Use what you have! All you need is faith the size of mustard seed, and everybody has that!” And he is saying the same thing to us: you don’t need more faith, people of St. Peter’s! Realize what you already have and use it!
The late American mystic Thomas Merton, this incredibly wise man, once wrote about prayer the following passage which might as well be applied to faith in general: “In prayer we discover what we already have. You start where you are, and you deepen what you already have, and you realize that you are already there. We already have everything, but we don’t know it and we don’t experience it. Everything has been given to us in Christ. All we need is to experience what we already possess.” Our trouble often is that we ask for more and more and, like children on Christmas, barely notice what has been given to us already. Each one of us has been given a seed of faith, and with those seeds we are able to move the mountains in our lives. Jesus says that.
Last week someone moved a mountain. Something special happened in a courtroom in Texas. It was in the case of the police officer who returned home from a double shift and fatally shot a black man who was watching TV in his own apartment; apparently the female police officer thought he was an intruder; apparently she thought it was her apartment. The crime happened last year and made huge waves; the trial concluded on Thursday. Many people in the African American community, including the victim’s mother, applauded the sentence and said it was a sign of justice which was not necessarily expected. And given the checkered history of justice for minorities, we can’t blame them for expecting so little. But something else happened at the end of that trial which deserves our attention even more because it was a faith-filled gesture, it moved mountains, in the language of the gospel. This is what happened: the brother of the victim asked to address the police officer, a young white woman and relayed to her that his brother probably would want to forgive her and that he would want her to turn to Christ. And then, just stopping short of proselytizing, they embraced one another and hugged and comforted one another, the victim’s brother and the perpetrator. That doesn’t happen very often, not in Texas and not in Pennsylvania, not in fiction or non-fiction! It defies stereotypes. It moves mountains.
I thought it was pretty remarkable, a moving moment for sure. The gesture pushed aside the powerful narrative of racial injustice; it also overcame the powerful human desire for revenge. Instead, this young man saw a human being, not a criminal. That’s an example for how a little mustard seed of faith is able to move mountains of distrust that have been erected between communities, bringing people together.
To expand of Thomas Merton’s wisdom… We often forget the powerful seed of faith that we have when we are confronted with the mountains of life – aggressive disease, awful injustice, the grief that comes with a sudden loss, the overwhelming feeling of hopelessness when you are up against dementia, mental illness or addiction. Any gesture that provides hope, faith, love, help, compassion in those situations is able to move what seems unmovable, and make heavy burdens more bearable. It won’t happen through Harry Potter Magic or the faith healer that shows up once to say a powerful prayer. But it may happen through the servants who come and stay and bear some of the pain and offer their presence as a gift from God, their prayers as steady companions. Sometimes our Stephen Ministers move a mountain, maybe by just an inch. Maybe they don’t even recognize it, because they are just being faithful servants who do what God asks them to do, see the gospel for today. It’s a pretty humble ministry because it happens outside of the spotlight, in the recesses of people private lives and mostly private pains. And each time we get discouraged by the overwhelming burdens some people have to carry, each time we come to Christ asking him to “increase our faith,” he is saying to us, “I have already given you faith my dear, small maybe, but powerful. Find it, use it, let it shine, let it heal, let it set people free. It is there.”
Amen.