William Yagel
Grace Radford
October 2, 2022
Proper 22, Year C
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.
Amen.
-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
How do you think Jesus said it?
“If you had faith the size of a mustard seed”
“If you had faith the size of a mustard seed”
I mean, sure, he was speaking in Hebrew, but you get the idea.
When I was a kid I think I always heard the last version, emphasizing the size, or the quantity of faith. I always just assumed that Jesus responded directly to the plea of the disciples to “Increase our faith”. It functioned as a ledger in my mind where we were all to trying to get more faith, or at least to act like it. Greater faith meant more ability. Basically, anything is possible with more faith. It can sound a bit like a Genie in a bottle. With right amount of faith you can do anything, like moving trees or mountains!
Of course, one of the challenges of this reading, and the reason that I no longer hear this passage in the same way, is because when things don’t go our way, it can be heard as a reflection of one’s lack of faith. It begins to sound like: “If I was more faithful I would have gotten that job. If my faith was a little stronger my prayers would have been enough to help my dying parent. If I was a better person, God would have rewarded me with a bigger house, car, or bank account.” It can begin to sound like faith leads t prosperity. This is an dangerous way to hear the words of our Gospel this morning.
The ultimate problem with this understanding of our passage from Luke is that it makes God very small. Believing that faith allows us to control God’s creation places us on a pedestal adjacent to God. Or worse, we can start to imagine that God is here to do our bidding, and the more we strive to achieve the more dedicated God is to us. It affords us an unhealthy belief that if we are good enough or faithful enough, we can somehow be in control.
While attending Seminary, I participated in a small group conversation each Thursday morning called “Colloquy”. This was a group that engaged in theological conversations. More specifically, we talked about how we saw God breaking into our lives through stories shared by group members. One person shared an event that happened in their life, and we reflected on the theological themes and questions that emerged from those stories.
On one Thursday morning the story elicited the topic of control. Specifically, we were considering what role control can play in the priesthood. How unhealthy it is to think we must dictate the outcome of a situation, and how easy it is to feel that a situation must go a certain way or it will hurt the church. It was a rich and thoughtful conversation, and it revealed, as you might imagine, how ubiquitous this notion of control is throughout our culture.
Through the entire conversation the man with whom I was ordained a Deacon, Samson (I did ask if I could use his name), was silent. Samson didn’t really speak a lot, and I loved listening to his reflections because he was always measured and thoughtful, but he was never totally silent. Over time I came to listen for his wisdom and his insight, so I noticed his behavior, and I reached out later that day to make sure nothing was wrong.
Maybe you already know, but for those who don’t I should mention-
Samson grew up in Sudan. In what is now South Sudan, but he made his way to the United States decades ago, leaving prior to the country formally splitting into Sudan and South Sudan. Anyway, he lived there in his youth, so his accent reveals that his first language is not English, but that said, he is now a fluent English speaker.
When I caught Samson later that day and asked about his silence, he was quick to smile and assure me that all was well. He explained that he had gotten caught up in reflecting on this word, control. Being fluent in English and having lived in the US for years, he knew exactly what we meant, but he was thinking of his home and his native tongue. You see, they have words for what an army, government, or the police might do to “control” a people. He could describe the guiding by a parent of a child to “control” them. But this word, this concept, this understanding of control that we were discussing, he said:
“I can’t translate it into my native language. This thing, not just the word, but this concept of control in this way, it doesn’t exist in my home country.”---
I mentioned this incident to a friend of mine, and he thought a minute and said: “Nah, can’t be, they must have another word. How could they not, maybe he didn’t understand?” I want you to hear that the concept of control is so engrained in us that my friend wanted to argue that Samson didn’t know his own culture. He wanted to, in a way, to control the dialogue! Control, like it or not, is part of our DNA.
Thinking back on this conversation, I have often reflected on the possibility that we would not even assume we could control our lives. That we would not even possess the language to give voice to the notion that we could manipulate the system to our gain. I suppose in many ways I have wondered and about and wished for that ignorance. Because it is only in giving up the notion of control that we find faith.
You see, I don’t believe that doubt is the opposite of faith, rather, I agree with theologian Paul Tillich who says that doubt is an element of faith. I believe it is this insidious notion of control that works against faith. The “dogged self-reliance” that we celebrate as a nation must be unbound from our spiritual existence, maybe from our culture all together. Why do we expect to be completely prepared and secure in our lives. Why do we think we create our own destiny? These notions, especially when compared to the people of South Sudan, expose a profound challenge in our way of approaching the world. A challenge that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin captured when he said “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
This is the paradox and the good news that we live in. We are called to be active agents in our own salvation, we are to seek to change our behavior to become closer to God. Yet, the whole time we are to recognize that this work is completely out of our control. That this is not work we could ever begin to do without God’s mercy. Because the more we do it ourselves, the farther we get from the goal of faith in God’s love. The harder we work as physical beings to have a spiritual reality, the more distant that reality becomes. We are called to recognize ourselves as spiritual beings, and to give ourselves over to that faith. It only in giving ourselves over to that spiritual reality that we can begin to do that work.
I suppose when theologian NT Wright reads this passage he hears it as:
“If you had faith the size of a mustard seed”
Because Wright offers that it is not the amount of faith that should be emphasized, but rather the presence of faith in a Great God that is transformative. We might consider faith more like a portal that a possession to be quantified. When we think of it in this way, the size is far less important. We start a pinhole in the fabric of our lives that allows God’s radiance in. It is not then the quantity of the light that is let in, but the quality of that light.
Amen