Planting Mustard Seeds?

20 Pentecost, C p 22, October 2, 2016
Lamentations 1:1-6  Psalm 37:1-10
2 Tim. 1:6-14     Luke 17:5-10     

       A  waiter is a person who serves food to customers at a restaurant or other eating establishment. 

  So what if I am in a restaurant at a table and my waiter comes to my table and stands there waiting without saying anything.  And so things get rather uncomfortable with him just standing there, so I ask him if he could take my order or get me some water.  But what if he replies, "I am waiting to sit down in your seat and I am waiting for you to serve me.  I deserved to be served by you."

  What's wrong with this scenario?   Well, by the definition of the roles within the context, I am the customer and he is the waiter.  How is it that he expects to be waited on by me?  I would be happy to do it and even if it violates the roles but I am not an employee of the restaurant and I would not know immediately all of the procedure for even serving the waiter. 

  Jesus told a parable to indicate how we can be confused by our roles in our relationship with God.   God is the creator and the owner of the world and yet we pretend that we want to be in that role.  Even though we did not create the world, and we cannot sustain the world, we can feel entitled to be treated as those who own the world.

  Though we may be offended with the language of slavery; Jesus used the example of the slave who wanted to be treated as the owner to illustrate how confused we can be about our role in life vis a vis God as the creator and owner of all things.  As a servant of God, it is our role to have faith.  It is blind of us to wrongly demand that God be our servant and exercise faith towards us when God truly has faith toward us and has served us by creating us and sharing with us all of creation.

  Jesus was pointing out how childish we can be when it comes to faith.  There is a difference between being childish and childlike.   Childlike is the attitude to wonder and exploration that we can have in life.  People of faith need to be childlike in having this sense of wonder in the exploration of the goodness of our lives and our world.

 Sometime childlike behaviors carried out by adults can be childish.  Children like magic;  they like stories about marvelous things happening.  A child also likes and needs positive reinforcement.  A child likes instant gratification of needs. Children need encouragement and congratulations for even the things that they need to do.  We congratulate children for eating, for walking, for putting on their clothes;  we give them reinforcement to perform acts which will enable them to become independent adults.

  At some point it should be unnecessary to give praise and congratulations to an adult who is performing normal self-maintenance tasks. 

  In the life of faith, it should be unnecessary to be congratulated for doing things which are just plain good and excellent.   It has come to be that charity and faith are now regarded to be heroic acts rather than the normal practice of the virtuous lives.  Too often we have become so pampered that we want to be congratulated for doing good things for our lives.

  The parables of Jesus give the secret to the uncanny success of faith.   Casting a mulberry tree into the sea by faith defies logic.   What was the uncanny success of the church?  A crucified prophet takes over the Roman Empire.  How unlikely was that?

  How did it happen?  Daily and moment by moment, mustard seed acts of faith.  These small house churches just began spreading one by one in neighborhood by neighborhood.  People shared their experience of the Risen Christ and the excitement of the Holy Spirit in their lives.  The accumulation of millions of millions mustard seed acts of faith brought about the conversion of the Roman Empire.

  We may be childish in wanting things to come with instantaneous success.   And if things don't come easy and instantly we might just give up and without exercising our faith deeds, we cannot accumulate the resume of faith that result in the sea change events to occur.

  The secret of life then is mustard seed faith; just keep on keeping on doing faithful deeds and those deeds of time, talent and treasure will eventually build character and accomplish some wonderful outcomes.

  A parish church seems like a very ordinary unsung human achievement; there are so many different churches and our own may not seem so big or imposing or important.  But we have been around for sixty years here at St. John's.  We stand on the shoulders of many forgotten, unknown, and unremembered deeds of faith of people in our past who just gave without fanfare or recognition.  But they have given us the foundation and they handed us the baton of the local Episcopal tradition for us to carry in the lap of the race that given to us in our time.

  The message to us today is for us not to become weary in doing the little and obvious faithful things which lie at hand for us to do.  We don't need fanfare or congratulations from God for doing things which are just plain good for us and our community.

  Fortunately we have each other to encourage each other.  One of my favorite roles as rector is to be able to thank you, even though I know that you perform deeds of faith for God and for the good of our parish.

  Let us be inspired today to continue in this wonderful Gospel of Christ and perform the mustard seed deeds of faith.  If we do this, we may look back someday and say, "Wow, did God really do that through us?"  Amen.