SERMON FOR THE Twentieth SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
WDo This !W
“Jesus said to his
disciples, ‘Occasions for stumbling are bound to come, but woe to anyone by
whom they come! It would be better for you were a millstone hung about your
neck and you were thrown into the sea than for you to cause one of these little
ones to stumble. Devote yourselves! If your brother sins, you must rebuke the
offender, and if there is repentance, you must forgive. And if the same person
sins against you seven times a day, and turns back to you seven times and says,
‘I repent,’ you must forgive.’
“The apostles said to
the Lord, ‘Increase our faith!’ The Lord replied, ‘If you had faith the size of
a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted
in the sea,’ and it would obey you.
“Who among you would
say to your slave who has just come in from plowing or tending sheep in the
field, ‘Come here at once and take your place at the table’? Would you not
rather say to him, ‘Prepare supper for me, put on your apron and serve me while
I eat and drink; later you may eat and drink’? Do you thank the slave for doing
what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that
you were ordered to do, say, ‘We are worthless slaves; we have done only what
we ought to have done!’” (Luke 17:1-10).
Dearly
Beloved, Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Amen.
hat
do we have here? Mulberry trees and mustard seeds—and in the midst of it all,
the cry of the disciples: “Increase our faith!” It certainly sounds pious enough. In fact, it seems
to be so swollen on piety that it just might burst itself into a million pieces.
And, perhaps surprisingly, our Lord has no interest in keeping this holy
hot-air balloon afloat. Instead, He aims to shoot it right out of the sky. “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed,”
says Christ to the disciples, “you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be
uprooted and planted in the sea’, and it would obey you.”
“If
you had faith the size of a mustard seed…” In the Greek, this is a
counter-factual. Jesus is saying, “If
you had faith as small as a mustard seed—WHICH YOU DO NOT—then you could preach
a word to this mulberry tree, and, in so doing, uproot it and plant it in the
sea.” Here the winged cry of the disciples is hurled down to earth in a furious
and fiery nose-dive. To demand an increase of faith assumes that you have at
least a little bit of faith already.
But how can you increase what you have nothing
of? Oddly enough, Christ reveals the disciples to be faithless in their very cry for “more.”
At the same time, however, we can
see that the disciples were in some limited way aware of their lack. After all,
to cry out for “more faith” is tantamount to confessing of not having “enough
faith.” The disciples knew they needed “more” than they currently possessed. But
why? What provoked this sense of absence?
What led them to suspect this scarcity?
What aroused this recognition of want?
The preceding verses—verses 1-4—provide the answer:
“Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Occasions
for stumbling are bound to come, but woe to anyone by whom they come! It would
be better for you were a millstone hung about your neck and you were thrown
into the sea than for you to cause one of these little ones to stumble. Devote
yourselves! If your brother sins, you must rebuke the offender, and if there is
repentance, you must forgive. And if the same person sins against you seven
times a day, and turns back to you seven times and says, ‘I repent,’ you must
forgive.’”
How truly bizarre it is: If you ask the church whether she can stamp out
world hunger by the year 2020, without even a moment’s hesitation she’ll say,
“Yes! My faith can move mountains!” But if you ask her in the next breath whether
she can forgive sin seven times a day, then suddenly the color flushes from her
face and she becomes sick with worry: “Increase my faith, Lord!”
What is so hard about forgiving sins anyway? Nothing, actually. And maybe that’s just the problem. Maybe
the problem is that it’s too easy.
Forgiveness, we think, doesn’t “go anywhere.” It doesn’t hold out any promise beyond itself. It is a circular movement
we just repeat over and over again—seven times a day—even seventy times seven!
The Old Being shudders at the very thought of it. “You mean to tell me,” the
old sinful self whimpers, “that the Christian life is just this ceaseless
repetition of going back and forth, to and fro, around and around: repentance
and forgiveness, repentance and forgiveness. Isn’t there something more to
be done than just that?!” Forgiveness
never seems to be quite enough.
Our Lord Jesus Christ has just
finished giving the disciples the keys to the Kingdom: a key that binds (the Law)
and a key that looses or sets free (the Gospel). And yet the disciples just sit
there, staring at the keys like dumb cows staring at a new barn door—mouths
agape and drooling, totally oblivious to the precious office being given to
them. My goodness, just imagine if we actually implemented Christ’s instruction
that it would be better for a millstone to adorn the neck of every pastor,
deacon, bishop and pope and they be drowned in the depths of the sea than that
even the smallest one should be allowed to stumble? There wouldn’t be a single
millstone left above sea level, I’m afraid—besides there being far too many
necks left unadorned!
The office Christ gives is an
office that does something. It
uproots and it overthrows, it builds and it plants. The word does it all. And there is nothing
ambiguous about it. “Take, eat, this is my body, given for you…Take, drink,
this is my blood, shed for you for the forgiveness of sins…Do this!” Or how about another? “Go! Baptize all nations in the name of the Father, and of the Son,
and of the Holy Spirit.” The sense of absence, the suspicion of scarcity, the
recognition of want, is nothing other than the experience of the Old Adam and
Eve being put to death. If we are all
just poor beggars at our Master’s table; if
we are all just babies in the font—AND WE ARE; if the Christian life is nothing
but a continual dying and rising again, drowning and emerging anew—AND IT IS—then
the old has passed away and the new has come—AND IT HAS! Here, in this new
kingdom come, the logic of scarcity, of wondering if I have “enough” faith, of
fearing its lack and so trying to secure its increase, utterly fails to understand what faith is. Faith
is not a power in you, but it is the truthfulness of the promise you have received.
Dearly beloved, God did not send me to preach to
you this morning in order to “reinforce your life with a sense of meaning.” He
sent me to take your life away and so
to give you a new one—without end. Nor
did God send me to point you down the wide, well-trodden path of self-discovery,
so that you might—one fine day—stumble upon the answer to your aching question:
“Who am I?” Instead, He sent me to pluck off every last rung from your ladder
to heaven, to tear away every last block from your yellow brick road, and to proclaim, FOR YOU, not an “answer,” but
a PROMISE: “You are His and He is yours—and nothing—neither death, nor
hell, nor anything else—can tear you away from His hand.” And no, God did not send me to plumb the depths of your potential
so as to reveal in you some inner spark or power you never knew you had. Rather,
He sent me to uproot your head from your navel, to place it in the guillotine
of God, and to cut it off with the final stroke of grace—the coup de grace—and, in so doing, to plant
you firmly in the Sea of Living
Water: Jesus Christ your Lord.
God be praised! I have not been sent to preach to you some phony-baloney word, all slick
and smarmy, never ceasing to advertise its ability to “transform” and “penetrate”
human lives, but, when the hour of death strikes, can’t even manage to pierce
the surface of my grandmother’s jello mold—much less the cold, stone heart of a
sinner! It would be better that a millstone be wrapped about my neck and I be
thrown into the depths of the sea than that I should preach to you any other
words than the two God has put in my mouth: the Letter that kills and the Spirit
that gives life; the Hammer that lays the old world to waste and the Hand that raises
up a new world out of the grave.
But I expect that here Old Adam and Eve—in the
midst of their death throes—will want to whisper one last desperate doubt in
your ear; will want to strike one closing chord of uncertainty in your heart:
“What if,” the Old Being hisses seductively, “—what if this preacher, who is so
impious and brash as to claim to be sent by God and to speak on His behalf—what
if he doesn’t have faith the size of
a mustard seed? Then how do you know whether or not he is able to uproot a
mulberry tree and plant it in the sea? You don’t
know. Because you can’t know. You
can’t possibly know because you cannot see
his faith. Sure enough, he talks a big game, claiming to speak for God—any crazy loon can say as much! But the
question you must ask yourself, the question you must prayerfully consider, is
this: ‘Did God really say?’”
Well, if it promotes your hearing of the
gospel, then allow me to put your consciences to rest: I don’t have faith the size of a mustard seed—and so what!? You’re
not a grove of mulberry trees either, but I’ll preach to you anyhow—because the
Word of God will have its way; it
will accomplish that for which it was sent;
ripping you out of the arid soil of your sin, and building you into the oceanic
loam of Christ’s blood and righteousness.
Rest assured: the word of God is not loafing about
in its bathrobe, wringing its hands in boredom, waiting for you or I to attain
some minimal threshold of faith before it can find employment. In fact, the
word works best precisely where there is no faith; yes, even where there is nothing at all.
Do you want an example to emulate? Then emulate this: the body of your
crucified Lord, who though once dead on a cursed tree, was raised to life
through the power of the word, and, in rising, destroyed the bonds of death,
bringing life and immortality to light.
The time for dozing in your sin-shrouded death, then, is over. The time for slumbering in your navel-shaped tomb is done. Morning has broken! Daybreak
has dawned! The Word of the LORD has visited your house today.
So arise, O sleeper! Arise from the dead!
Do you want something to do? Then do this: grab your serving apron and
scratch off the letters that say, “Kiss the Cook—If You Want Desert,” and
replace them with big, bold letters that read: WORTHLESS SLAVE. Then go out
into the world and actually do the task
to which God has called you, exercising the two keys. Bind and loose, rebuke
and forgive, crucify and resurrect, pluck up the old and plant the new.
Do you want something to obey? Then obey this: the word of your Lord, who
commands you: “Be uprooted from the jaws of death! Be torn away from the grips
of hell! I have destroyed them both, for
you. And now I build a new heaven and a new earth, and I plant you within it. You are no longer a
stranger to me—I have called you by name!
You no longer belong to yourself—I have made you my own! Did I really say
it? Yes, I did! I, the LORD your
God, HAVE SPOKEN!”
And if you should ever hear a hissing sound in
your ear—and you will—and if your
boldness should ever falter—and it
will—then turn first to that Old Adam and Eve and tell those frauds to keep
their forked-tongues behind their teeth; and then turn a second time to that
blessed word of promise through which you have received faith and life and
every blessing in Jesus Christ. For how can you increase what has already been
given you beyond all measure? AMENW
