Faith Enough to Serve

There are several ways to read the Gospels. You can read them as strictly historical narratives – as eyewitness accounts of the doings and sayings of Jesus. This tends to be the approach favored by Christians who call themselves "fundamentalists."

Approaching the Gospels this way calls for considerable mental dexterity. You have to defend the word-for-word accuracy of each Gospel while at the same time accounting for the fact that the Gospels don’t always agree with one another.

What should we think when Matthew reports a saying of Jesus in one context and Luke in a completely different context? Did one of them get it wrong? Is one Evangelist reporting accurately and the other playing fast and loose with the facts? Is one inspired and the other having a bad day? It’s possible to spend so much energy defending the historical veracity of each Gospel writer that we fail to listen to what each one has to say.

There’s a better way to read the Gospels. This way sees each Gospel as a rich mixture of both memory and testimony, written to bear witness to Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen Lord, the head of the church. Read this way, the Gospels speak from faith to faith. The Jesus who appears in all of the Gospels is the Jesus in whom the church has placed its faith.

Thus, when Jesus addresses his disciples in any Gospel passage, we can be pretty sure that the Gospel writer is aiming those words of Jesus directly at the church. Even those sayings addressed to Jesus’ disciples before Easer takes place in the gospel narrative can be heard as sayings of the risen Christ to the church.

This way of approaching the Gospels opens up all sorts of rich possibilities that are not available to us if we insist on reading them in the same way that we read the New York Times or the Tallahassee Democrat.

Today’s Gospel lesson is a wonderful example of what I mean.

Read as a newspaper report, this passage presents Jesus as a drill sergeant barking orders at his disciples, telling them to suck it up, obey commands, and stop their bellyaching. Jesus comes over as my high school football coach, Coach Evans, yelling at us players, "Suck it up, men. It’s the fourth quarter. Get out there and give me 110%."

But if you read this passage as the risen Lord addressing his church, the same words take on an entirely different feel.

In the verses preceding our appointed text, Jesus has been teaching his followers how to live in community with one another. You’ve got to hold one another accountable, he tells them, but you also must forgive. If one of you gets out of line, you must rebuke the offender and if he or she repents, forgive that person and move on. And don’t keep count! "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" (Luke 17:4).

Do you know anyone like that? Someone who constantly gets under your skin? Someone you wouldn’t put up with for another instant it weren’t for the fact that that person is your brother or sister in Christ?

It doesn’t take much imagination to picture the scene in Luke’s church that prompts him to aim that particular saying at his fellow church members. I know exactly who Jesus is talking about. So do you. (Don’t say the name. We’re in church.)

"If we’re going to behave that way," the church says back to Luke, "If we’re going to keep on forgiving these truly obnoxious people Jesus calls us to live with, we’re going to need more faith. Got any sayings of Jesus on that subject?"

"Funny you should ask," says Luke. "I’ve got just the one."

"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"  (17:5).

Now, Luke, you will remember, is writing in Greek. Greek has basically two kinds of "if" clauses. One is for conditions contrary to fact, as in "If I were President, I’d appoint So-and-So to the Supreme Court." The other is for conditions according to fact, as in, "If Jesus is our Lord, we should listen to him."

This saying of Jesus is of the second variety. We could translate, "If you had even a tiny bit of faith (and you do), you could tell this mulberry tree, "Go jump in Lake Jackson, and it would obey you."

So Jesus is not scolding his disciples for having too little faith. He’s inviting them to live out the full possibilities of the faith they have. You don’t need more faith. Faith isn’t quantitative. You don’t measure it out in grams and ounces. Faith is a gift of God. The faith you disciples already have can work miracles because faith puts you in touch with the power of God.

Words like "impossible" and "unattainable" lose their meaning. Why, chunking a mulberry tree into the sea is nothing compared to the difficulty of living together in Christian community, of forgiving one another as God has forgiven us. Mulberry levitation – that’s a piece of cake compared to living with (don’t say it). That’s takes more faith than any of us has.

"No, it doesn’t, says Jesus. "It just takes the faith you already have, the faith God has already given you."

There’s no way of knowing the original context of this next saying of Jesus, but Luke wants us to hear it connected to the saying about faith and mulberry trees. Jesus invokes a relationship familiar to his hearers in the first century, but very unfamiliar to us – the relationship of maser to slave.

I doubt that any of the twelve original disciples owned slaves, but certainly other early Christians did.

If you have slaves of your own, Jesus says, you know what it’s like. The masters says "Jump" and the slave says "How high?" Your slave comes in after a long day of tending your sheep, and you don’t say, "Come on in, slave. Sit down here at the table and I’ll get you something to eat." No! You say, "What are you waiting for? Peel the spuds. Shuck the corn. Stoke the fire. Get your master’s supper on the table."

The master doesn’t award the slave with vacation trips to the Bahamas. He doesn’t had out perfect attendance pins for showing up for work each day. That’s not the way it works. As for you, you aren’t the master. You are the slaves.

A message like that is hard for you and me to hear. It reminds us of the bad old days when people kept slaves and slaves had no choice but to obey their masters.

Many of us spend our lives trying to free people from various forms of bondage precisely because we believe that Christ came to set people free. We should not read this saying as an endorsement of slavery as it was practiced in Jesus’ day any more than we should turn a blind eye to the forms slavery takes today.

Work all day, come home, fix the supper, wash the dishes, make the children’s lunches for the next day, get up early and do it all over again – therein lies a kind of bondage many women know very well. Some are married to husbands who should be lending a hand. Some are single moms. Nobody, least of all Jesus, is saying that’s the way women should live.

Remember how Jesus welcomed Mary into the circle of male disciples? Remember how Paul referred to the runaway salve Onesimus as his own child? The gospel has a way of breaking down the dividing walls that keep us locked off from one another. It cuts the mighty down to size and lifts up the nobodies.

Knowing all that, however, we still need to be reminded that we are God’s servants, and we do not serve God for the sake of reward.

Last week we celebrated the 20^th anniversary of the founding of the Shelter of Leon County. It’s hard to believe that twenty years have past since we used rooms in the First Presbyterian Preschool to welcome homeless neighbors on cold nights. Since that first winter, the Shelter has served over 31,000 people.

In a vivid illustration of this second saying of Jesus, the good folks of the Shelter had prepared boxes and boxes of certificates of appreciation to give to the folks who have been serving homeless people these twenty years. Each certificate was, signed, framed and laid out for easy access.

Guess what? At the end of the festivities, there were still boxes and boxes of certificates unclaimed.

You see, people don’t do that kind of work in order to receive a certificate to hang on the wall or a trophy to gather dust on the shelf. They do it because that’s their calling, their form of service. You could even say that serving homeless people is a kind of slavery, freely chosen.

Servants like that will accept an award if you drag them up to the podium with a team of wild horses, but it’s not their first choice. Their first choice is to serve because service is their first love.

We don’t need more faith, beloved. What we need is to act on the faith God has already given us – freely, joyfully, lovingly. Not because it’s our way of getting rewarded, but because it’s our way of loving the God who first loved us.