SERMON 4 October 2004 

Increase Our Faith

There are certain places in the Gospel of Luke where the story of events, people and happenings is interrupted and Luke throws in a bundle of sayings of Jesus. They don’t seem particularly related to what has gone before or to what comes after. They just sit there. The reading from the Gospel this morning is one of these. It is about not causing others to stumble; the need to forgive; the importance of faith; and the nature of servanthood, and so on.

The thing that jumped out to me in this passage was the blunt request, almost demand, of the disciples to Jesus. ‘The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!”’ (v 5). Bang! Like that. Increase our faith! Now in the world of religious life, that could be regarded as a motherhood and apple pie statement. Akin, in the wider world, to: ‘I want to be a better person.’ Or: ‘I think I’ll lose weight next week.’ A vague aspiration that no one, especially the one saying it, really expects to make any difference. 

But if it isn’t that; if it isn’t pious clap trap; what does the request of Jesus, ‘increase our faith’, mean.? What did it mean to his followers back then? What might it mean for us, if we repeat it? 

There is a song in the rock musical Godspell which is in the form of a prayer. It runs something like this: 

O dear Lord,

Three things I pray:

To see thee more clearly

Love thee more dearly

Follow thee more nearly

Day by day.

That’s not bad, I think, as a first attempt to understand what ‘increase our faith’ might mean. Faith has an intellectual component. It means to understand who Christ is; to see Christ clearly. So to increase faith means to see Christ more clearly. But faith is not just a head thing, getting our beliefs right. It is also a heart thing, personal commitment, trusting of ourselves to God. So an increase in faith would mean to love God more dearly. And finally, faith is not just head and heart, it is also action, a doing which corresponds to the seeing and the loving. It is discipleship. So an increase in faith means to follow Christ more nearly. 

To see thee more clearly; love thee more dearly; follow thee more nearly. That would be increase in faith. 

But Jesus does not sing this song to the disciples. He tells them a story. Remember they ask him to increase their faith. First, he replies with the bit about the mulberry tree being dumped in the sea by a smidgin of faith. But that is just a vivid way of saying that faith, even a bit of faith, is extremely important in God’s scheme of things. And it gets things done. But the real response comes in the story. Here it is:  

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 you were ordered to do, say, ‘We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!’ (Luke 17.7-10) 

Put like that I think I’d rather have the Godspell song! This doesn’t look promising. Indeed in our day and age it sounds positively awful. It’s way, way politically incorrect. It seems to accept if not to applaud exploitation of the weak by the strong. And if God is intended to be likened to the landowner, God appears in the colours of a tyrant who works his servants day and night and not a word of thanks. What is going on here? 

Remember the disciples asked to have their faith increased. So this story is not a first lesson in human dealings with God. This is not ‘Discipleship 101’. This is graduate school being addressed here. Of course, Jesus has said to them prior to this: ‘God loves you; you matter to God; every hair of your head is numbered; not a sparrow falls without the awareness of your heavenly father; know that you are of more value than sparrows’. They know that bit of the faith already. It is the first step. But they have asked for the next step. 

‘Alright,’ says Jesus, ‘if you want to go deeper you need to begin to see yourself and the world, more as God sees them’. We human beings have a persistent tendency to see ourselves as pretty much the centre of things. We can even begin to act as if the world, as if others, as if God, owes us something. Owes us service. Owes us honour. Owes us wealth. But before God, the God of all Being, before the God who is really God, that’s silly. In fact, it’s just wrong. 

Think of our place in the wide world of creation, God’s cosmos. We humans have strutted the cosmic stage, or at least this earthly part of it, especially in the last couple of hundred years, as if we owned it. And as if it owed us. As if, like the landowner in Jesus story, we could say to the water, the air, the fields, ‘we’ve used you for this and that to increase our wealth during the day, now we are going to use you again and squeeze from you further service by night. Don’t you dare sit and rest. Put on the apron and serve us anew’. 

We are beginning see what that attitude leads to. The exploitation of the earth threatens to come back at us in cosmic proportions: climate change, salination, foul air, and what have you. And we will be not be able to do much about it if we are not careful. We thought we were Lords of creation. But we’re not. Creation belongs to God. It is not ours. ‘Increase of faith’ means to honour the truth that the world is God’s. If we try to play lord and owner we are likely in the end to be reduced to servants and slaves. 

Or take the church. We often swan around as if we owned it. As if the church were our creation and existed to look after our particular interests and to serve our special spiritual needs. And it does in a way. I don’t want to deny that, especially at the outset of faith. At the start of the faith journey, we need to know ‘what’s in it for us’. But if we ask for our faith to be increased, then we need to learn that the church is God’s. Its task and mission are way beyond my little interests and my limited understandings. If I try to turn the church into my servant, to plow my fields and set my table, it won’t work. Because I’m reversing the truth. The church is God’s, and if I am privileged to be a part of it, I exist to serve God’s mission in the world, not the other way round.  

So the parable does actually help us to see Christ more clearly. It helps us not to mistake our place in the world and in the church. It helps us see that we are not the centre of things. God is. Deep faith lives that truth.  

But the second thing Jesus’ story says is that to have our faith deepened is to learn that service of God, following the way of Christ, is basically just doing our job, nothing more. The service of God, which is sometimes very demanding—it can seem like working all day in the field and then serving all night at the table—is not something that attracts applause, effusive gratitude, wondrous praise, and the like. The motivation of deep faith—not the beginner’s course—is for the love of God and for nothing else. ‘When you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, … we have done only what we ought to have done.’ 

I know we all need support. We need to be recognized, affirmed, encouraged in what we try to do in life. And Christian faith is not different. Let’s give credit where it is due to each other, and celebrate the gifts and service people bring.  

But if we ask for our faith to be deepened, we are asking for something more. We see this vividly in the life of Jesus. He acted, he spoke, he decided things, fundamentally out of the love for God, and not for the praise of people around him. He did not ask first, ‘what’s in it for me’. He asked, ‘what’s in it for God’.  

Now this is the deep end of the faith pool. If we want to see how deep we have only to remember Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane as he faced the prospect of the cross. ‘Let this cup pass from me.’ That is, ‘For heaven’s sake God, look what’s in this thing for me. Do something!’ But no. ‘Not my will but thine be done.’ That’s the deep end.  

‘Increase our faith’, means to learn to act more from love of God, and less from love of me. To see thee more clearly. To love thee more dearly. 

Finally, the thing that makes this little parable, both offensive, or at least affronting, and yet also astonishing and wonderful, comes to light when we think of the one who told it. I was talking on Friday with my colleague, David Neville, who is the NT lecturer at St Mark’s. I was complaining about how difficult this text was, and did he have anything to say about it that would help me out? David said, ‘well here’s this character who’s has been out there in the field in the heat of the day labouring on the farm. He comes home in the evening pooped, only to be told by the owner: “Prepare supper for me, put on your apron and serve me while I eat and drink…” It is confronting. But what does it remind you of?’ Well, I played the dummy and said, ‘what should it remind me of?’ He said, ‘the Last Supper. Jesus taking a towel, an apron, and serving his friends by washing their feet.’  

And it is like that. At the Last Supper, Jesus is at the end of the day, the day of his life, that is, not just one day in that life. He has borne the heat of all the conflict his mission had unleashed in the world. And he is facing a terrible end. What does he do? He dons the apron and serves at table. Exactly like the story. So Jesus says nothing to us about deepening faith that he isn’t prepared to do himself. In fact this is who he is. If we are really asking about the deep end of the faith pool, this is who God is. 

So this parable is first a piece of theology. It is a revelation of who God is and the way God choses to act in and influence the world. God does not Lord it over us and push us around. Strangely and disturbingly, God comes to us as servant; one who works day and night, in the field and in the house, to achieve the end of God’s kingdom and to bring all creation, us included, into it. 

They said, ‘increase our faith’. Jesus replied by saying ‘this is who I am’. If you want to be my disciple, if you want to be part of God’s action in the world; that is if you want to follow me more nearly, this is where it will lead. Because this is what God is like.  

Remember Paul’s way of putting this? ‘Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.’ (Phil 2.6-8). 

Three things I pray,

To see thee more clearly

Love thee more dearly

Follow thee more nearly

Day by day. 

I can quite happily sing along with that catchy song. 

But when I read Luke, who takes the request seriously, not just as a catchy tune, and says, ‘alright, since you asked, this is the deep end of the faith pool’, I’m not quite so sure I want to pray, ‘Lord, increase my faith’!  

How about you? 

Graeme Garrett