Has your faith or lack thereof every
made you feel guilty? Does shame play a
role in how we participate, how we engage, how we interact in church? When I was in high school, there was a
mainstream Christian band called Jars of
Clay with a hit song called “Like a Child.” The chorus had that famous
line, “They say that I can move the mountains, send them crashing into the sea.”
All, with faith like a child. Move
mountains. It is a powerful image that
calls us to a deeper faith, but does an unexplored or glossed over reading of
our Biblical text, really do that?
If we stop and think, the lessons we
have learned over life, the messages we have heard in church, create a
challenging dialogue for each of us. Our
life is a myriad of experiences, events, and overall series of emotional
periods. This is why we might say, ‘I am
going through a really tough time right now,’ or ‘that period in my life was
really dark.’ Or, ‘this year has been a
really good year and I just feel so blessed!’
When life is not entirely as easy as we
think it could be, we can so often have the tendency to feel like our faith is
supposed to dictate where we are supposed to be. If I just had more faith, maybe I wouldn’t be
so sad. If I just had more faith, maybe
grief wouldn’t be so overwhelming. If I
just had more faith, I could be more content knowing where I am today. When we examine faith from this perspective,
doubt and shame both begin to permeate our central belief system. The lesson of having the faith of a mustard
seed almost always undergirds our reasoning.
And for good reason, as we hear the plea of the apostles, to have their
faith increased.
However, we cannot just turn to the
story of the mustard seed to understand what Jesus means when he says, “If you
had faith the size of a mustard seed.”
We have heard this Sunday, the follow up about the worthless slave or
servant, an emotionally charged statement that comes from Jesus. And just before this passage, the disciples
are struggling with causing each other to stumble. The disciples are rebuking
the offenders and then Jesus says you must forgive those who repent, even if
that person sins against you seven times a day.
Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. And the apostles respond, Increase our Faith!
I want to change directions for just a
bit and share with you the beginning of George Saunder’s commencement speech
from Syracuse University this year which just appeared in an editorial in the
New York Times.
Now, one useful thing you can do with an old person, in
addition to borrowing money from them, or asking them to do one of their
old-time “dances,” so you can watch, while laughing, is ask: “Looking back,
what do you regret?” And they’ll tell you. Sometimes, as you know,
they’ll tell you even if you haven’t asked. Sometimes, even when you’ve
specifically requested they not tell
you, they’ll tell you.
So: What do I regret? Being poor from time to
time? Not really. Working terrible jobs, like “knuckle-puller in a
slaughterhouse?” (And don’t even ASK what that entails.) No.
I don’t regret that. Skinny-dipping in a river in Sumatra, a little
buzzed, and looking up and seeing like 300 monkeys sitting on a pipeline,
pooping down into the river, the river in which I was swimming, with my mouth
open, naked? And getting deathly ill afterwards, and staying sick for the
next seven months? Not so much. Do I regret the occasional
humiliation? Like once, playing hockey in front of a big crowd, including
this girl I really liked, I somehow managed, while falling and emitting this
weird whooping noise, to score on my own goalie, while also sending my stick flying
into the crowd, nearly hitting that girl? No. I don’t even regret
that.
But here’s something I do regret:
In seventh grade, this new kid joined our class. In
the interest of confidentiality, her Convocation Speech name will be
“ELLEN.” ELLEN was small, shy. She wore these blue cat’s-eye
glasses that, at the time, only old ladies wore. When nervous, which was
pretty much always, she had a habit of taking a strand of hair into her mouth
and chewing on it.
So she came to our school and our neighborhood, and was
mostly ignored, occasionally teased (“Your hair taste good?” – that sort of
thing). I could see this hurt her. I still remember the way she’d
look after such an insult: eyes cast down, a little gut-kicked, as if, having
just been reminded of her place in things, she was trying, as much as possible,
to disappear. After awhile she’d drift away, hair-strand still in her
mouth. At home, I imagined, after school, her mother would say, you know:
“How was your day, sweetie?” and she’d say, “Oh, fine.” And her mother
would say, “Making any friends?” and she’d go, “Sure, lots.”
Sometimes I’d see her hanging around alone in her front
yard, as if afraid to leave it.
And then – they moved. That was it. No
tragedy, no big final hazing.
One day she was there, next day she wasn’t.
End of story.
Now, why do I regret that? Why, forty-two years
later, am I still thinking about it? Relative to most of the other kids,
I was actually pretty nice to her. I never said an unkind
word to her. In fact, I sometimes even (mildly) defended her.
Saunders continues to go into his advice
for the graduates, how we understand ourselves as humans intellectually and the
need for kindness and how kindness is essentially what we need to be working
for in life, and he says, that “as you get older, your self will diminish and
you will grow in love. You will
gradually be replaced by love.”
I was struck by his story for a number
of reasons. First, what a wonderful
message for college students who are so worried about jobs and careers –
kindness. But there is another part of
me that sees the human person in all of life, oscillating between Ellen and
George. Our human experience, our stories in life
invite us to see ourselves as both Ellen and George. We have been the one who has stood their
silently ashamed of not offering a response, and we have stood their listening
to others, angered and harboring resentment.
There is so much guilt and hurt that
makes up each of our collective stories.
Maybe we weren't the young child who chewed on her hair and stared
awkwardly at our neighbors, but regardless we carry the burden of things done
and things undone with each of us. We
hold resentment at others who have hurt us.
Days, weeks, years later, we stand both as Ellen and as George, wishing
we had acted differently or others had been more generous. If
you have been around people long enough, you have probably both been offended
and offended others. This is a part of
being human.
And even in Christian community, human
interactions have a way of unsettling our being, causing turmoil. Even in churches, Christian communities,
feelings are hurt. Just look at the
apostles in our lesson today. They have
a deep desire for their faith to be increased.
Their faith is linked to forgiveness.
They needed help with forgiveness, even if their fellow apostles are
offending them seven times a day. They
need help forgiving their fellow disciples in Christ, the people they are intimately
connected with in relationship. And in
forgiveness there is always a duality.
There exists the need to forgive others and the need to forgive
ourselves. Faith is the driving factor
for the way we care for each other.
As I look at the train wreck of our
national government, the excessive bickering between parties and the parties’
leaders, the failure to lead and instead to shut down and blame the other, I
have to wonder if Luke would have something to say to each member of our
Congress. Faithfulness as seen in light
of the ability to forgive one another would have the power to move
mountains. It would have the power to
pick up this mulberry tree and plant it in the sea. Forgiveness (which requires the ultimate
faith) has that kind of transformative power to change the course of
Washington.
Maybe Jesus’ response that we only need
the faith of mustard seed, is invitation to realize how close and how tangible
forgiveness can be. Something as small
as a letting go or a refusal to harbor feelings of animosity, or lay blame on
the other can be utterly transformative, utterly life changing. In a small action lies unimaginable
results. In a small action, forgiveness has
the power to do what seems impossible, inconceivable and to defy not only the
law of physics, but human understanding in the way that we behave and
function.
And maybe we need to
have that kind of faith. Our world is so
polarized and we long for an appropriate response. Just like the apostles, we demand for God to
increase our faith. Could the answer as
small as a mustard seed? Could the
answer be letting ourselves off the hook for all the things undone? Could the answer be in our response to
ourselves and our response to our fellow friends and family, our neighbors, and
those whom we stand in opposition with? Could the answer be rooted in our
ability to drop the need to be right, the need to be appeased, or the need to
see a limited view of justice? Could the
answer be in the size of a mustard seed?
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