October 3, 2010
Today, we continue our journey through Luke with Luke chapter 17. Has anyone else felt like this has been a tough trip as we’ve been preaching through Luke? Luke is rough. Especially in August and September, we’ve been dealing with some of Jesus’ most challenging teachings. And, let me just tell you up front, today it doesn’t get any easier. Next week will be better, but not today.
Our Gospel lesson today is Luke 17:1-10, and it’s pretty challenging. Instead of reading it as a whole, I want to walk through it and talk about it piece by piece. I think this will help us really get what Jesus is trying to say. Jesus starts out with a warning.
1 One day Jesus said to his disciples, “There will always be temptations to sin, but what sorrow awaits the person who does the tempting! 2 It would be better to be thrown into the sea with a millstone hung around your neck than to cause one of these little ones to fall into sin. 3 So watch yourselves!”
Apparently, Jesus takes integrity and mentoring and parenting pretty seriously. A millstone is a huge rock slab used to mill or to grind grain into flour. Jesus sounds a bit like the mafia here: “You mess with my kids, and you’re going to be sleeping with the fishes. Capisce?!”
When we dedicate or baptize children, we make commitments to them, and it’s not just the parents. The whole church makes a commitment to these children. Let me just read for you what we have promised to do for our children. For every child we baptized or dedicated, we promised:
To care for them through loving attention and prayers
To teach them the Bible and to guide them into the saving grace of God
To guide them to church and to worship each week
To restrain them from harmful friends or habits
To bring them up in the care and instruction of the Lord
To teach them to love justice and mercy and to walk humbly with God.
To live as examples for them to follow
To surround them with loving Christian community
To invite them to use their gifts in service to the church and the world
To help them live as faithful followers of Jesus Christ.
Jesus says it would be better for us to die a slow and painful death at the bottom of the ocean than to neglect these promises. I know - that’s tough. “So watch yourselves!”
Jesus moves on to a new topic:
“If another believer sins, rebuke that person; then if there is repentance, forgive. 4 Even if that person wrongs you seven times a day and each time turns again and asks forgiveness, you must forgive.”
This little saying actually pretty hard. First of all, if someone wrongs you, you can’t just let it go. Jesus says to “rebuke that person.” Now Jesus sounds like a cowboy: “Y’all don’t take no crap off nobody!” Maybe we need to refer to other places in the Bible for the appropriate attitude for this “rebuking.” For example, our Epistle Lesson today: “If another believer is overcome by sin, you who are godly should gently and humbly help that person back onto the right path” (Galatians 6:1).
Within the past weeks, I’ve experienced this text in two different ways. I confronted a few people who I think need to correct their action, and a few people confronted me regarding some ways they think I could use some correction. Let me just tell you - neither of these is fun. Confronting conflict is difficult and painful. It takes courage for everyone.
But confronting the conflict or sin is not enough. We have to forgive. We have to be reconciled. When other people do us wrong, it can be really hard to forgive. God’s forgiveness for us is what fuels our forgiveness for others. Listen to how Paul puts it: “Make allowance for each other’s faults, and forgive anyone who offends you. Remember, the Lord forgave you, so you must forgive others” (Colossians 3:13).
... even if it’s seven times in the same day. Yikes, that’s hard!
So the apostles, the people who would later lead the church as it spread around the world, say, “Show us how to increase our faith” (Luke 17:5).
They’re like, “Dude, that’s some tough stuff. Take care of kids or drown in the ocean. Forgive people - even if they hurt you again and again and again and again. I don’t know if I can do that. We need some kind of supernatural help here. We need to go back into training. We need some kind of deep faith to be able to pull this off. This is dangerous. This might even be impossible. Jesus, you’ve got to give us more faith.”
If there’s one thing we need more of, it’s faith. I think we would all agree that we need more faith, right? Pastors are always talking about more faith. More faith, more faith. You’ve got to have more faith. What does our church really need? More faith. All we really need is more faith. And we all agree. We nod our heads and say “Amen.”
OK. Let’s do a little practical experiment. Hold out your hands as far as possible. Go ahead and hit the person next you if you have to. Now, imagine that this is the full extent of faith. If we could quantify faith, this is full-faith - as much faith as it is possible to have.
Now, try to quantify how much faith you actually have. If you had to estimate the “size” of your faith, how big would it be? Is your faith the size of a beach ball, a soccer ball, a baseball, a golf ball, maybe the size of a bean or a pea? Now remember that. Go on and show your neighbor. Look around and tell someone, “I think my faith is about this big.”
So it’s possible to have this much faith [arms out]. And we have this much faith [hands in] - maybe a soccer ball worth of faith, or maybe you’re just beginning and you have just about a soy-bean worth of faith. And we all agree we need more faith. The real key to life is more faith. We should all say the same thing to Jesus, “Show us how to increase our faith.”
Except for one thing. Today, Jesus seems to disagree.
When the future leaders of Christianity asked for more faith, Jesus said,
“If you had faith even as small as a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘May you be uprooted and thrown into the sea,’ and it would obey you!
OK, that’s weird. First, Jesus was in the mafia; then, he was a belligerent cowboy. Now, he seems to be writing back comic book episodes - The Attack of the Flying Trees and Our Superhero Mustard Boy!
We could go on and on about this, but the point is very simple. Just a little bit of faith is enough. Just a little bit of faith is enough to do what seems impossible.
Can you see the mustard seed in this picture? Can you see it now? What about now? It’s tiny. Mustard seeds are tiny. Do you remember how much faith you said you had? Was it a soccer ball? A tennis ball worth of faith? An egg? An acorn? That’s great! Jesus says a mustard seed is enough. My dad used to quote some hair gel commercial from back in the olden days, “A little dab’ll do ya.” That’s what Jesus is saying. Just a little, tiny, itty-bitty bit of faith is enough. That’s all you need.
So what is it that we really need. Well, Jesus keeps talking.
7 “When a servant comes in from plowing or taking care of sheep, does his master say, ‘Come in and eat with me’? 8 No, he says, ‘Prepare my meal, put on your apron, and serve me while I eat. Then you can eat later.’ 9 And does the master thank the servant for doing what he was told to do? Of course not. 10 In the same way, when you obey me you should say, ‘We are unworthy servants who have simply done our duty.’”
Oh man, this just keeps getting worse. Mafia, cowboy, bad comic book, and now, Jesus seems like a rude slave owner. But if we’re going to understand this parable, we have to do two things.
First, we have to stop thinking like 21st century people for a minute. Slaves and servants were very common in Jesus’ time. They were an accepted part of life. They could be bought and traded in the open market like cows or sheep or iron or wheat. For Jesus’ audience buying a slave was something like buying a household appliance. We wouldn’t even think of saying to our microwave, “Are you feeling OK? You look a little tired. Maybe you should get some rest. Here, I’ll warm this up on the stove.” In the same way, a slave owner didn’t even consider the feelings of the slave: “The slave is here to serve, so let him serve. That’s what he’s for.”
Second, we have to realize this parable is not trying to give us a picture of God. Actually, when Jesus is trying to give us a picture of God he says just the opposite. We read that parable this summer. The servants who are ready for the master’s return “will be rewarded. I tell you the truth, he himself will seat them, put on an apron, and serve them as they sit and eat!” (Luke 12:37)
This parable is actually trying to give a picture of us. God owns us. God created humanity out of the dirt. We owe him our very existence. But that’s not all, in Jesus God paid with his blood to win our freedom from evil and sin and selfishness. Like Paul says, “You do not belong to yourself, for God bought you with a high price. So you must honor God with your body” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). Paul often opened his letters to the churches by calling himself “a slave of Christ Jesus, chosen by God” (Romans 1:1).
It is true that we are God’s children, whom he loves. God loves us deeply, more deeply than we will ever understand. But it is also true that we are God’s slaves. God has bought us. We are His.
We can’t earn God’s favor. Obeying a difficult command is not something extra or super-faithful. Our duty is simply to obey - no matter if it is easy or difficult.
Also, here’s an important point. The difficult commands are not optional. It’s not like we can join the apostles and say, “Lord, increase our faith. Increase our faith, and then we’ll obey. Later, when we’re more mature Christians, we’ll obey. Later, when it’s not so difficult, then we’ll obey. Later, when we have more money or more time, then we’ll obey these difficult commandments.”
Jesus says, “You have enough already. You don’t need more faith. You just need to act on the faith that you have. You don’t need more faith. You just need more obedience.”
You say, “Oh, Josh, that’s tough. Oh, that’s really difficult. I don’t know if I can do it. I don’t know if I even want to do it. How do I know it will be worth the sacrifice?”
Well, maybe this story will help.
Once, after the worship service, a woman came to the pastor with a question: “What is the reward for the life of faith?”
The pastor wanted a little bit of time to think about that one, so he said, “Well, let me think about it, and I’ll give you an answer next week.” Maybe he was hoping she would forget.
She didn’t forget. She showed up the next week and came walking down the center aisle ready for an answer. “Pastor Milton, what is the reward for the life of faith.”
Pastor Milton looked her in the eye and said, “The reward for the life of faith is the life of faith.”
God doesn’t give us these commands just to test us. God isn’t running some kind of spiritual boot camp to weed out the weak believers. God isn’t an abusive policeman running around with his bully-club ready to bop people for messing up.
God is teaching us the best ways to live. God is guiding us into the most satisfying way of life. God is teaching us what it means to be human.
Take care of the kids. Make sure to teach them the right ways to go.
Deal with your conflict, and forgive each other.
Care for the poor.
Love your neighbor.
Take a Sabbath day of rest.
Be honest.
Don’t sleep around.
Do your part in the church.
Show mercy.
These are not arbitrary commands. These are the framework for the Kingdom. These are the scaffolding of the Gospel. These are the irrigation channels for God’s Spirit. Obeying these simple commands will radically change our world. Obedience to these simple commands opens the way for God to remake our world in us and through us.
We don’t need more faith. We need more obedience. Obedience enables more faith and more life. If we will just act on what we already know, if we will just put into action the faith that we already have, then we will surely become a loving community that changes our world. And without a doubt, this is the best way to live.
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