Mustard Seed Faith
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost by the Rev. Holly Huff.
Jesus’s disciples say, “Lord, increase our faith!” That sounds like a good and honorable thing to ask, doesn’t it? A question that will please the teacher, one that shows they are the right kind of disciples concerned with holy things? “Increase our faith.” Yes, he’ll like that one. Jesus’s curious answer undercuts the question, as he so often does. He says, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.” They ask to have their faith increased and enlarged, yet Jesus says a very small amount of mustard seed faith is plenty potent. Consider the pungency of a mustard seed crushed between your teeth, its zingy vitality. I start to suspect that quantifying faith (and trying to see who has more of it) is both impossible and beside the point.
Faith is not measured on bar graphs showing continual upward progress. It doesn’t fall with the stock market. Faith is relational. As modern people we’re largely stuck in our heads, worried about what we think, and the general milieu of American Christianity serves up a picture of faith that consists in believing certain statements to be facts about the universe—somewhat dubious ones at that. But faith is more than “intellectual assent to propositional truths” (Newman). Beliefs are secondary, after the fact. They are like little postcards written home as we attempt to describe to others what we’ve come to know of the living God as we open to that relationship which we discover is already within us through spiritual practices like gathering in corporate worship, offering ourselves to God in daily prayer, meeting Jesus in the words of Scripture and giving ourselves away in loving service to others. You could think of each line of the Creed as a postcard sent hundreds of years ago from our forebears in the faith, pointing us to the living God, inviting us to take the journey ourselves. “Wish you were here!” The map is not the trail, but it helps to have a good map. So beliefs as intellectual propositions have their place, and it is the responsibility of the Church to do as Paul says, to “hold to the standard of sound teaching that we have heard from [the apostles], in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus” and “Guard the good treasure entrusted to us, with the help of the Holy Spirit living in us.” (Should be noted that of course “guarding” this treasure is not to hoard it up like a dragon perched on a mountain of gold, smoke streaming from its nostrils but to “rekindle the gift of God that is within you” and share it freely, as one lamp lights another, and is not lessened.)
Still, faith as faith itself, the faith that is tiny and zingy like a mustard seed and moves the mulberry trees into the sea, the faith one writes home about, that faith is relational. Faith is faithfulness to someone, much like faithfulness in a marriage or close relationship, the trust and commitment of intimacy. 2 Timothy indicates it might have something to do with the Holy Spirit living in us! We’re well beyond the realm of written confessions of faith which at their worst can resemble nothing so much as the updated terms on your bank’s website…. “Click here if you agree.” Faith bears on the whole person, not the mind only. It’s about our relationship to God, and it’s formed in relationship to other people. Writing to Timothy, Paul says, “I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois, and your mother Eunice, and now, I am sure, lives in you.” Lois and Eunice. To be part of a tradition literally means to receive what has been handed on to you. Sometimes this inheritance of faith comes from our family. Sometimes coming to faith requires us to chart radically different paths than the ones we were raised to go in in our youth, to leave our birthright and be traditioned into a new inheritance. It is a great blessing to find our place in the communion of Saints living and the dead, all part of the grafted-in family of God around the long, long banquet table. When we pray together, we are joining our voices in the words of prayers that have been used to praise God for hundreds if not thousands of years. “Holy, holy, holy, Lord, God of power and might.” “Our Father, who art in heaven.” The faith that lived in our ancestors is shared and handed on to us, and now it lives in us, too.
What is this tiny yet mighty mustard seed faith? Faith in God is a childlike simple trust that God will care for us and give us what we need. The trust that God loves us unconditionally and acts always out of this love for our good. That’s it. That’s the mustard seed. We come to understand it and accept it more deeply over time, yes, with the help of the holy spirit living in us you could say it is planted in our hearts and begins to grow. But this trust that God cares for us is the granular single assurance that grounds us even when our lives are uprooted and cast into the sea—we find ourselves improbably planted in the sea, resting in God, the groundless ground of our being, even as we weather the many changes and chances of this life.
The mustard seed faith that God cares for us and is gives us everything we need moment by moment, daily bread right outside our tent door, that trust enables us to give ourselves to the work that has been given us to do. Ours is not the great work we vainly imagined once upon a time. But it is our work and we can do it modestly and with contentment, without clamoring for acknowledgement or thanks, offering it in gratitude to God, day by day, doing what we ought. Mother Teresa wrote that "In this life, we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love." Like St. Therese of Lisieux—whose feast day was yesterday!—we can consent to be small and weak and entrust ourselves to God just as we are, not striving to be great heroes of increasing, progressing, ever-upward faith—constant progress is a modern delusion, after all, and one that is consuming the earth and its poor—but trusting God to carry us to holiness on the “little way”, as we throw our weakness on God’s mercy.
“We can do small things with great love.” By grace our lives are incorporated into the tapestry of divine design; God’s purpose for humanity, God’s dream for all creation, is, in a very small mustard seed way, working itself out through the stuff of our ordinary lives. The kingdom of heaven, unfurling before us, at the grocery store and in the after-school pick-up line.
Mustard seed faith is trust that God is caring for us, has always cared for us, will continue to care for us. And so faithfulness to God is also faithfulness to our life, which God is giving us. Faithfulness to the people who show up in front of us day by day, loved ones and strangers each bearing the image of God pressed into their faces as distinctively as the potter’s mark in the clay.
Lord knows we forget as often as we remember. We are so easily pulled back into delusions of increasing, achieving, and winning! “Faith” gets co-opted into our self-improvement projects as the nice religious glaze over top of our ambitions, our seeking after security, power & control, affection & esteem; “God” becomes an object, an idol of the self; and we wield our “faith” as a talisman to make our lives conform to our implicit needs and wishes. If only we had a little more faith, we think, then everything would finally be how we want it to be! “Increase our faith!”
No, Jesus reassures us, the tiniest mustard seed is enough. Your Father in Heaven knows what you need before you ask. Consider the lilies and the ravens. God cares for them and God will care for you. In the midst of this storm-tossed life, God will be your strong rock, a castle to keep you safe, though all your plans may go to pieces on the shore. “Even when we are faithless, God is faithful.”
We can practice mustard seed faith. God will teach us how to get little, how to offer ourselves. Trust takes time, and you can’t trust someone you don’t know. Get to know God’s character. Is God trustworthy? Constant? Is this love truly unconditional? You can find out. This love is accessible all the time. Jesus is dying to give it to you. Engaging spiritual practices expose ourselves to God and get to know God, “in whom there is no darkness at all,” slowly come to know God as beautifully trustworthy, constant, reliable, Love. The one sure place. A mulberry tree rooted in the sea.
“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”
Amen.