Sermon: Cathedral Eucharist Trinity 19

Preacher:

Date:

Sunday 6th October 2013

Service:

Cathedral Eucharist

Readings:

Luke 17: 5-10

Listen:

Download Recording (MP3, 13.2M)

If the messages on Twitter over past days are anything to go by, then preachers up and down the land have been angsting over today’s gospel reading; for instance this Tweet, ‘Preaching on faith on Sunday, going to be tricky’.

Why should preaching on faith be tricky? Surely it’s at the heart of things. We are of the Christian faith. The baptism service says, ‘Faith is the gift of God to his people’. St Paul says ‘faith, hope and love abide’. The disciples make a request in less than 140 characters, ‘Lord, increase our faith’. And in response Jesus quite plainly suggests that we should have faith, and, indeed, that if we had even a tiny bit of faith we could tell a mulberry tree to be uprooted and plant itself in the sea, and it would do it (Luke 17.6).

Discourse around faith has become pretty problematic, and it seems to be because we think we are in control of faith rather than it being in control of us. Following the Enlightenment we are all conditioned by the idea that ‘I am think therefore I am’, put another way, if I think it then it must make me, me. People of faith post-Enlightenment get tangled up into thinking that faith is just a religious sort of way of thinking the right things, and thinking about things to make them happen.

Faith is not an act of will or a special way of thinking about things. I can’t make more faith for myself if I think hard enough about it. Faith is a gift from God. God is the agent; I am the recipient. My faith doesn’t add to God’s glory, but God’s glory opens up my faith and turns me out from myself.

Yet, how many sincere, faithful, Christians are wracked with guilt and anxiety about not having enough faith. Not having enough faith that God will deliver them through a period of trial and turmoil. Not having enough faith that deep-seated conflict will ever be resolved. Not having enough faith really to trust the words of the Creeds or Bible. This morning’s gospel seems to reinforce that feeling. We end up asking, am I culpable for my lack of faith? Is it my fault? We beat ourselves up over phrases such as ‘O ye of little faith’ or ‘where is your faith?’

But faith is a gift of God to us, not a weapon used by God to beat us up.

This means that faith is not an act of will. My faith doesn’t increase the more I think something, or the more I want something, or even the more I believe something. You can’t get faith by screwing up your eyes, tensing your body and wanting something to happen.

Faith is a gift. We cannot manufacture or fake faith, faith is a gift of God that is open to be received by anyone and everyone. So faithfulness becomes our way of living in the spirit of openness to the gifts of God which come in many and varied ways. Jesus, using that arresting image of the mulberry tree, gets us thinking about our faith and our response to God.

The challenge of the gospel is not to think really, really hard about uprooting fig trees without touching, them as if we were conjurors or mind benders; but the challenge is to understand that, in the words of Elizabeth, ‘with God all things are possible’ (Luke).

This is what the scriptures bear witness to in the great figures of faith: Abraham and Sarah Moses and Miriam, Noah, Mary the Mother of Jesus, Paul. Their faith is revealed in their lives, their choices and actions rooted in their receptivity to God. The letter to the Hebrews sings the praise of such people and the way they live. That letter gives us a lens through which we can read this gospel reading. For the writer of Hebrews faith is less about me or you and more about God. Faith is the loving, hope filled response to God’s action in creating and loving the world, it is, ‘the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen’ (Hebrews 11.1)

Faith is about God. So often when we want more faith, what we actually want is the assurance, the feeling, the sense that God really is God, for whom all things are possible.

If faith is about me, and how hard I can want something to happen I am always doomed to fail. If faith is an act of will on our part then the god in which we believe is not the God of the gospels or of the Church. If faith is an act of my will then it is all a big setup.

Abraham was faith-filled, Mary was faith-filled not because they were more heroic than you or me nor had stronger will power. They were open, saying ‘yes’ to God in all God’s multi-faceted generous and transforming ways. This receptivity to God’s gift of faith is forged and shaped in prayer: that is why St Paul speaks of the Holy Spirit praying deep within us with sighs too deep for words. Jesus’ image of uprooting the mulberry tree is to root us back in God.

And faith cashes out in action. The plea of Jesus to his disciples in the gospels is ‘show me faith’, ‘show me the profound obedience that comes from deep, attentive listening to God’. Any vision that you or I may have for our own lives, or indeed that this Cathedral has for this site and building and what goes on inside it, must be rooted in that very attentiveness to God’s ways, open to be challenged and directed: that is real faith-filled living.

Each of us comes now to receive in faith the transforming, life giving abundant gift of God in Christ. ‘Draw near with faith’ is the invitation to receive Holy Communion, shortly because faith is about our capacity to receive God’s free gift of grace. In the Eucharist we draw near to God’s possibilities that are even more remarkable than uprooting mulberry trees, and that is breaking open the human heart to see all the wonderful possibilities that God places in our hands and root us back in him, our maker and redeemer.