Community Church Sermons
Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost – October 3, 2004
At the church where Sandy and I grew up there was a little gift store from which were sold all sorts of cute little religious trinkets. There were carved olive wood crosses that came direct from the Holy Land, and little boxes of the Bible’s precious promises. There were the glow-in-the-dark crosses that we now know were laced with radium. And, of course, there were the mustard seed necklaces – simple gold chains holding a glass pendant within which was embedded a tiny little mustard seed. Those were hot sellers – those mustard seed necklaces.
And we can understand why. Of all the illustrations Jesus used to describe the kingdom of God and the life of faith, the mustard seed is the most popular. In fact, Jesus himself must have loved the image because he talks about the little mustard seed on five separate occasions in the Gospels.
“The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed which is the smallest seed you plant in the ground. Yet, when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds of the air can perch in its shade.”
“…if you have faith as a grain
of mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there!’ and
it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”
Over and over again, Jesus used the image of the tiny mustard seed to illustrate the power of faith and the kingdom.
But today in Luke 17, Jesus uses it in a way we often overlook.
First of all, Jesus warns us in this passage about the perils of sin – of living outside the grace of God. Sometimes in the Church we overcomplicate the meaning of sin. Sin is simply what happens when you walk outside the way of God. To put yourself first and live to your own needs is not God’s way. It is sin. To seek salvation for yourself, but not for your brother or sister is not God’s way. It is sin. To neglect the poor, and single mothers, and children without parents is not God’s way. It is sin. To join a church for the ride but not for sacrificial service is not God’s way. It is sin. To live apart from God who made us to live in partnership with Him is not God’s way. It is sin.
And sin kills. It kills the soul. It kills the body. It kills the mind. It kills families. It kills churches. It kills relationships. It kills the world.
Sin is a fatal disease.
So Jesus says to us in verse 3, “Watch yourselves.”
Because, you see, sin has a way of creeping up on you without your even knowing it. And all of a sudden, you’re a long, long ways away from God and the life He intends you to have.
How are you doing with the way of God? I struggle with it every day because the way of the world and the way of Marty are much easier than the way of the Lord.
But the way of the Lord is the only way to life.
So watch yourself, Jesus says.
And then he throws out a life illustration we can all identify with. Someone you know sins against you, and then says he’s sorry and seeks to make up for it. Has that ever happened to you? How did you react ?
For many of us, one sin is one too many, and we forever banish the culprit from our lives. I once had a church secretary who had one of those lists – you know the kind I mean? Begins with the same letter as my last name? Yeah, THAT list. And once you got on it, you never got off. Maybe you have a Singley list, too. But in so doing, we step outside the way of God.
But many of us can probably find it in our hearts to forgive the person for their first offense, and so we do. But Jesus ups the ante now. Let’s imagine the person we’ve forgiven then goes right out and does the exact same thing all over again. What will you do now when the person comes back seeking forgiveness?
Am I the only one here today who would be really ticked off at that?
But…being a Christian…and having just come home from worship at the Community Church where the pastor preached this really inspirational sermon on forgiveness…maybe some of us would muster up the strength to respond to the offender’s repentance by forgiving him a second time.
I have to admit, I might not be in that group. How about you?
Well, now Jesus ups the ante a third time….and then a fourth time…and then a fifth time…and then a sixth time…and then a seventh time – meaning AS MANY TIMES AS HE COMES BACK TO YOU AND SAYS, “I REPENT.”
“Forgive him,” Jesus says.
Anybody here still left in the game?
Now, I want you to notice how Jesus’ disciples reacted to this teaching.
They gasped. They choked. They got extremely nervous and upset. Just like us!
Because, you see, they had faith, but not THAT MUCH FAITH! So they said to Jesus something like, “If you want us to be able to do impossible things like that, you’re going to have to increase our faith!!!”
And that’s when Jesus said, “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it will obey you.”
It was Jesus’ way of telling us that what we need in our lives to accomplish the greatest and seemingly most impossible miracles of all is not MORE faith.
What is it?
Well, Jesus tells a story that would be appreciated by the people who lived back then. It’s about a servant who comes in from working in the field. As was the custom of the day, the servant would not be invited to sit down and eat with his master, but rather would be required to prepare his master’s meal and serve him first. And then Jesus reminds his listeners that the master would not thank the servant because he did what he was supposed to do. And then Jesus applies the story to us.
“So then you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.’”
Mother Theresa once told about a dying woman she found at the garbage dump. I don’t know if her son had thrown her there, but the woman, in her agony, complained bitterly about the fact that he was the reason for her suffering.
Mother Theresa told the woman she
had to forgive her son. The woman became angry. But then Mother Theresa said
something to the effect, “Of course you must forgive him. He is your son.
You are his mother. It is the duty of a mother to forgive her children.”
And somehow, just before she died, the woman did offer to God her forgiveness for her son. In so doing, she set herself free to die in peace, she set her son free from spiritual guilt, and she participated in God’s redeeming work of forgiving the world through Jesus Christ.
It was her duty.
We don’t talk much about duty in the Christian Church today. And yet, faithfully carrying out our God-given duties is the heart and soul of what it means to live as a Christian. And what we seem to forget is that the duties to which we are called are usually very small and simple – like grains of mustard seed. But they have the power to change the world.
St. Augustine once said, “To be faithful in little things is a big thing.” And if I can go back to Mother Theresa just one more time today – a reporter once asked the little nun the secret of her success. Mother Theresa answered that she wasn’t called to succeed, only to try. Success, she said, is God’s business. Trying is our business. We are not called to find solutions to big problems like poverty, we are called to live the little solution of personal love that becomes an infection in the hearts of people.
And isn’t that true? Nowhere in the Bible are we called to solve poverty. But we are called to care for and love the poor among us. Nowhere are we called to establish peace on earth, but we are called to be peacemakers ourselves. Nowhere are we called to save the world around us, but everywhere we are called to forgive people, love people, welcome people, support people in Christ’s name. We are called not to big tasks, but to small duties. We are called to a mustard seed sized faith.
Yesterday was a wonderful illustration of this.
How do you bring about racial understanding and reconciliation in such a racist and unjust world as ours? It is an impossible task.
And yet yesterday, a good number of people from our church came out to welcome our sisters and brothers from the Community churches around the region. Most of them, you know, are black.
And so here were some buses and vans from Birmingham and other parts of the historically racially torn South, pulling into Tellico Village in all our vanilla whiteness. What would happen?
Well, many of you came and welcomed our friends. I was so impressed by, and proud of, the way you left your own favorite pew to go and sit next to some of our guests. You introduced yourselves, welcomed them, sang with them, prayed with them, ate a beautiful lunch with them. The choir gave up a Saturday morning to come and sing. Kitchen angels descended from heaven to prepare and serve a meal.
And when it was all over, white folks and black folks walked out to the parking lots, arm-in-arm, shoulder-to-shoulder, and heart-to-heart.
You accomplished a moment of racial reconciliation in this torn and broken world.
And you did it in little ways. Mustard seed ways. And I’ll tell you what I know about some of you. Saturday came, and you really didn’t want to come. The lawn needed mowing. Someone offered you tickets for the game. A good tee-time was available. You REALLY wanted to stay home and watch Scooby-Doo.
But you came anyways. You did what God wanted you to do. You did your duty.
And the world was made incrementally better because of it.
I want to call you back today to the duties of faith.
It is our duty to pray for each other and for the world. It is our duty to worship God every week and reorder our lives so that God comes first. It is our duty to love our wives as Jesus loved the Church, and for wives to love their husbands the same. It is our duty to care for and nurture children, even after our own have grown up and moved away. It is our duty to serve in the Church, bringing forth the gifts God gave us for the purpose. It is our duty to extend ourselves in love to our neighbors. It is our duty to tell others about the Good News of Jesus Christ and to recruit disciples for the Kingdom. It is our duty to forgive those who sin against us. It is our duty to tithe our income to God’s work. It is our duty to bear each other’s burdens. It is our duty to be morally upright, and to reflect the values of the Kingdom of God in our words, our thoughts, and our actions.
Faith consists of countless little responsibilities that, when added up, become real life miracles.
And that’s the lesson Jesus is teaching us. The greatest miracles of all are not brought about by having a big enough faith to overcome the impossible, but rather by having just a mustard seed of faith that says, “Do your duty.”
Faith is about walking in God’s way – doing what God wills – and trusting God that it is the right thing and the best thing to do.
Faith is about trusting God enough to do your duty – as a husband or wife, mother or father, as a child, or neighbor, as a citizen, or as a member of a church.
Faith is about following Jesus who came into the world, and lived among us, and went to the Cross – not because he wanted to – but because it was his Father’s will to save the world through Jesus doing so.
As we come to the Communion table today, I hope you can see how the miracle of salvation came to be. The bread and the wine are symbols of the One who truly did his duty. They are really such little things – the bread and the wine.
They are like mustard seeds planted in the earth.
And from them, trees have been uprooted, mountains have been moved, the impossible has become possible, and salvation has come to the world.