Hilton Head Island, SC – May 25, 2014
The Chapel Without Walls
Matthew 17:14-21; Matthew 13:24-34
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Another parable he put before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his field.” – Matthew 13:31 (RSV)
Is that sermon title clear to you? Can you guess what it means? I know what I meant by it when I came up with it, but do you? Here is what it connotes: Is faith something that either you do have or you don’t have, or is it something that you do have but maybe not enough? Is faith a constant, or is it an on-and-off reality? Does our faith sustain us through certain situations, but not through everything? Do we trust God equally all the time, or unequally some of the time?
A Non Sequitur cartoon from last October is illustrative of our sermon theme for today. Two men are sitting at a bar. On the basis of a previous conversation to which we are not privy, the bushy-haired blond guy says to the thinning-hair brunette guy, “So you won’t believe anything unless you personally witness it?” The skeptic says, “That or hard, irrefutable evidence.” “OK,” says the first man, “did you need to be with Neil Armstrong for the moon landing?”, to which he chortles in triumph, “Heh, heh.” Not to be outdone, the second man says, “Alleged moon landing.” After a befuddled glance, the first man says, “’Alleged’?” The thinning-hair brunette man responds, thinking he has the last word, “I’ve seen ‘pictures’ of Big Foot too…So what?”
Some people believe everything, and some believe nothing. Most people are somewhere in between. Some have invincible faith for all occasions, and some have wavering faith under many occasions. Some believe every word of the Bible to be literally true, and some think the Bible is filled with many kinds of errors.
The 13th chapter of Matthew is what biblical scholars call a collection of “parables of the kingdom,” meaning what Matthew calls the kingdom of heaven, and Mark and Luke calls parables of the kingdom of God. In the midst of this potpourri of parables, Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all seeds, but when it had grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree.” The simile is intended to suggest that something very small (faith) grows into something very large (God’s kingdom, both on earth and in heaven).
I imagine there have always been religious entrepreneurs, people who make money from religious slogans or ideas or symbols. A lot of girls in our high school had necklaces with little glass spheres into the middle of which a small seed had somehow been inserted. The seed was, we were told if we asked, which I did on several occasions, a mustard seed.
Well, the American mustard seed apparently is not like the Middle Eastern mustard seed. Our mustard seeds don’t produce shrubs or trees; they produce plants with clusters of seeds and yellow flowers that stand about three feet tall. They are grown as a crop, from which various varieties of mustard are made, including grey poupon, which is consumed only by people who are seated in the back seats of Rolls Royces. Otherwise we use spicy brown or French’s yellow or Dijon. Poppy seeds are much smaller than the mustard seeds of yore, so Jesus surely was incorrect when he said that they are the smallest of seeds, even of the Middle Eastern species.
I happen to know a snippet about mustard plants, because when I was in 6th grade, a farmer just outside Ellicottville, New York hired my brother and me and a few other boys in our Scout troop to clear his field of wild mustard. We were going to earn some money for the troop, while doing a good deed at the same time. He had about five acres of mustard. After we had worked for a couple of hours, we had managed to pull up a patch about 40’X40’. Even though we were supposed to Be Prepared, we weren’t prepared to keep doing such a thankless job all day or probably longer. It would have been much more effective if we had pulled out the mustard after a three-inch rain, or maybe during the rain. As it was, in the hot sun the mustard strongly resisted being pulled out. So we thanked the farmer for the potential opportunity to earn money for the troop and gladly bailed out without payment.
If a little faith goes a long way, does a lot of faith go a longer way? In the kingdom of God, is everyone required to pass a faith test to prove whether they have the proper kind of faith or a sufficient level of faith, or are great gradations allowed?
It seems to me that there are different varieties of faith, because there are different varieties of people. For example, if something good happens to certain folks, they automatically attribute it to God. If something bad happens, they think it is because God is punishing them. Their faith leads them to that conclusion. To other folks, however, good things or bad things just happen, and to them God is not the ultimate cause of such occurrences. Many people believe the Bible is inerrant and infallible, and many others do not hold that belief. Those who have faith in biblical inerrancy tend to believe that those of us who don’t believe in it have no faith at all. Nevertheless, I hope and trust God is not that doctrinaire. If He is, probably everyone in this room is doomed.
Curiously, faith matters a great deal to Christians and Muslims, at least for salvation, but not at all to Jews. Jews who feel connected to God do so because they are Jews, not because they have faith. To believing Jews, God is the first and most important of the “givens” of life. To Jews who are not believers, however (of whom there a few million), God plays little part in their thinking, but they still consider themselves Jews. Perhaps to all Jews, either you have faith or you don’t, but one way or the other, you’re still a Jew.
To Christians and Muslims though, faith is a necessity for anyone to become acceptable in the sight of God. Eternal life shall not be given to those without faith, and probably faith of a particular sort. According to these particular Christians and Muslims, You can’t believe just anything; you must believe the right things. And the various sects of Christianity and Islam all have their own list of what the right things are.
One of the reasons why Jews may reject Jesus as the Messiah is that Jesus seemed to insist that faith was a prerequisite for a proper relationship with God. Jesus seemed to indicate that one must first believe in God, and then one must affirm certain beliefs or doctrines about God. If we are unable to affirm these particular creedal notions, then we cannot be followers of Jesus. Or so say many of the followers of Jesus, and, according to many of those folks, so said Jesus himself.
By reading the Gospels it becomes evident that for Jesus, faith was the linchpin of our relationship with God. But what kind of faith? And how much? Those questions led to major disputes among Christians historically, and they lead to major disputes today.
Let us consider some examples of faith. If Christians become ill, should they have faith that God will cure them? Many do have such faith, but should all have it? If we were to ask, “Can God heal illness?” many if not most Christians would say that He can. But will He? No doubt fewer would insist that He will. That doesn’t mean they don’t have faith; it just means they do not insist their faith requires that of God. They simply don’t think like that.
Our middle hymn was “Whate’er my God ordains is right.” The German tune title is Wass Gott Thut Ist Wohlgetan, which means, roughly, “Whatever God does is well and correctly done.” Does that mean whatever happens happens because God wills it to happen? Surely not. For example, crimes occur, but certainly not because God causes anyone to commit them.
Kidnapping is one of the most terrible and feared of crimes. Countless millions of people of all religions or none have been praying for the release of the Nigerian girls taken captive by the members of Boko Haram. Does the faith of those who pray dictate that by His very nature God is somehow obligated to free these girls?
If memory serves me correctly (which at my advanced age it may not), the only person I ever knew personally who was kidnapped was the mother of two girls who attended the same church with their parents that our family attended when I was in 1st or 2nd grade. The girls’ father was a doctor in town, and their mother was very active in both the church and community. A man came and kidnapped Mrs. Stackhouse, holding her for ransom. She was held captive for a day or two, as I recall. In the end, the man took Mrs. Stackhouse to a barn to hide out. He forced her to climb up a tall ladder into the hay mow, and followed her closely behind. When she got to the top rung of the ladder, she held on with her hands, but she dropped her weight down onto the head and shoulders of her kidnapper, knocking him down to the concrete barn floor far below, where he broke either his arm, his leg, or his back; I don’t remember which. She quickly climbed down before he could recover the knife or pistol he had been carrying, and ran out to safety.
Did God save that brave lady, or did she save herself? Whate’er our God does is right, but does He do everything? And if so, where in the great scheme of things do we fit, if at all?
Does faith require that God does correctly and well whatever we think He should do? If you were Mrs. Stackhouse, I suspect your faith would be all that you felt could sustain you in your terror, but if you were Dr. Stackhouse or Linda or Diane, your faith might elude you altogether in such circumstances. Is faith either/or, or is it both/and? Either we have it or we don’t, or when we have it, we may have much more of it at certain times than at other times.
In our first Gospel reading we heard the account of Jesus healing the epileptic boy. This story is found in all three of the Synoptic Gospels. The disciples asked Jesus why they were unable to heal the child. Jesus plainly told them, “Because of your little faith.” Then, for the second time, Jesus used a mustard seed as a simile or analogy or metaphor. “If you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move hence to yonder place,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you” (Mt. 17:20-21).
If Jesus was literally talking about moving mountains by faith, obviously it is worthless advice. If he was speaking metaphorically (which surely he was), it is excellent advice. Faith can enable us to do things we thought we could never do. Henry Ford was an irascible, inflexible, rascally racist of an old coot if ever there was one. Nevertheless, he believed that it was possible to produce automobiles on an assembly line rather than by creating them in a small garage somewhere one at a time. Within ten years of his entrepreneurial start-up, he went from no Model Ts on the highway (such as the highway was in the Twenties) to millions of them. You could have any color you wanted, he said, so long as it was black. They were sufficiently inexpensive that a majority of American families could afford a Ford. But then, after many successful years, he stopped making Model Ts altogether and began to make Model As, and the Ford Motor Company nearly went belly-up. Faith, even our own faith in ourselves, is a tricky thing.
Faith is both “Either/Or” and “Both/And.” There is no one, even the most confirmed of atheists, who does not have at least a smidgeon of faith of some sort, and even those with the greatest faith lack faith of the highest sort at every moment of their existence. Faith comes and goes, it ebbs and flows. It is inevitably that way for everyone. We cannot maintain invincible faith either infinitely or eternally. Even in heaven, I presume, people have lapses of faith. Maybe they should know better, but I expect it happens anyway.
At any given period of our lives, we have different levels of faith, and different varieties of faith. Jesus extolled the faith of little children, and with good reason. Most little children don’t question things, although a few do. Little people usually just go with the flow. But bigger people perceive life differently. For some of us, faith is much easier and comes far more naturally than for others of us. It depends on many factors, I suppose, but two of the most important are personality and our particular grey matter. All people and all brains do not all function in exactly the same way. They never have, and they never will. Surely God understands that and is OK with it, since He created us all. If not, it seems like it is His problem, not ours.
Thus the Either/Or and the Both/And of faith is on a continuum. The line goes from A+ Almost Immoveable Faith on the one side to D- Wishy-Washy Faith on the other side. Everyone is on that continuum, but not everyone is permanently in one place. Because of circumstances or evolving thinking, A+ people may slide over to C- every now and then, and D- people may slide over to C+ or even B-. Nobody gets an F; God has steadfastly refused to create or allow any Fs on the faith continuum. Besides, some D-minuses think they are D-minuses, when in fact they may be Cs or Bs or As. Conversely, some who think they are A-plusses may actually be C-minuses or D-plusses.
Because faith for everyone is a continuum, not a constant, all faith is Either/Or and Both/And. I trust that God doesn’t judge any of us either on the quality or constancy of our faith, but He is always there to offer us enough faith for whatever obstacles may come our way. Whether our faith is a mustard seed or a mountain, it is ultimately a gift from God. And because it is God who gives it to us, it is bound to be enough, however much of it we have. Thanks be to God.