Faith, Trinity 18

Faith

“Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief.” Mk 9. 24
Trinity 18 (Harvest): Habbakuk 1.1-4; 2.1-4; Ps 37.1-9; 2 Tim 1.1-14

So the man comes home from church one evening having just heard a stirring sermon on ‘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.’

There is a large sycamore tree right outside his window that obscures a beautiful view of the sea. Before he goes to bed he looks at the tree and says: ‘Lord, I really have faith that you can remove this tree and throw it in the sea.’ He pulls the curtains and goes to bed.

First thing in the morning he leaps up and pulls back the curtains. He looks at the sycamore tree and says: ‘I knew it would still be there!’

At first sight this saying of Jesus might seem to suggest that if we only had a tiny amount of real, genuine faith, then we could move mountains or replant trees in the sea.

This is obviously the sort of thing that the disciples have in mind when they ask him to increase their faith.

You can almost imagine Peter saying to the Lord after this statement about tree replanting, ‘Really Lord!?’

And the Lord saying unto Peter: ‘Don’t be so daft!’ – or words to that effect.

Jesus is pulling their leg. He’s teasing them. He’s using humour and hyperbole again to show them how they’ve got it all wrong.

We still often talk about faith as if you can have it in varying amounts. ‘He has tremendous faith’ can either mean he’s very devout, or, rather naïve, or even, particularly stupid.

Like the schoolboy definition of faith: faith is believing something you know isn’t true.

It is not the quantity of faith that is important. It is the nature of the faith, and what you have faith ‘in’, that is paramount.

By the ‘nature of faith’, I mean that it must be a belief that affects your actions? I believe that wasting energy is bad for the environment, so instead of driving to the shops, I walk.

But belief that affects actions is not enough. Young children who believe in Santa Claus can behave in significantly different ways for at least a few days before Christmas. But there is no Santa Claus.

More tragically, suicide bombers sincerely believe they will go straight to heaven. It is a defiant act of faith.

No, it is not just the nature, or sincerity, or depth of our faith that is critical. It is also what we have faith ‘in’ that is crucial.

My uncle had great faith in number 7 running in the 2.30 at Doncaster; and in many other horses throughout his long life. It was nearly always misplaced faith.

I must have told you about the strict Baptist minister visiting Newmarket. Out of curiosity he goes to the races, and knowing that nobody knows him there, decides to have a flutter. He goes to the paddock first and is intrigued to see a Catholic priest praying in Latin over a horse. He is even more surprised when it wins. The priest prays over two or three more horses and they all win.

So finally he lays half the church funds on the horse the priest next prays over. The horse starts well but then keels over before the first fence and dies. The minister is distraught and rushes to ask the priest what happened. “Ah that’s the trouble with you Baptists,” the priest replies, “you don’t know the difference between a blessing and the last rites.”

So before faith leads to actions, we need to be assured that the content of our faith is sound and will not lead to foolish actions.

This is why Christian theology, which down through the centuries has tried to wrestle with what the Bible teaches us, is so important. In Anselm’s phrase, it is faith seeking understanding. Othodoxy leads to orthopraxis. Right belief leads to right actions.

Many of the struggles of the Anglican communion at the moment are centred on this very thing.

As we use Richard Hooker’s three-legged stool of Scripture, Tradition & Reason, we come up with different answers to the question: how should I act in response to my faith?

We have a guide in conscience, and in the peace of Christ, which is supposed to rule in our hearts and minds. But Scripture warns us that the human conscience can be seared, and that selfish desire can lull our heart into a false sense of peace.

This is why Christianity is essentially a communal faith. We need each other to save us from ourselves, as we try to act out our faith.

So the lives of the saints, and of our brothers and sisters around us and around the world, help to form the content of our faith and encourage us to act on that faith, to ‘taste and see that the Lord is good.’

Occasionally there will be some incident in our life or in the lives of those close to us, which acts as a fillip to our faith. It gives us a sense that God really is there and that our relationship with him is not just wishful thinking. It is never ‘proof’, but it is an encouragement to go on believing.

When I was young, I ran a youth club on a barge on the river Adur in Shoreham. A number of the teenagers became Christians and exhibited that naivety of faith which can often be such an inspiration to us old cynics who’ve seen it all and are more prone to put things down to co-incidence than prayer!

We outgrew the one barge and needed another one. They prayed and we found another barge, floated it and claimed it. We needed timber, pitch pine to be specific. They prayed and the old Palace Pier in Brighton was being scrapped and they gave us all the timber we needed.

And most strangely, we needed coach screws – huge screws for fixing the timbers together. Their faith was all stoked up and they prayed for coach screws. As we went on a Sunday afternoon walk up the riverbank, through the south downs valley, incredibly, we found coach screws in the grass along a hundred yard stretch, far more than we needed.

God had not rained them down like manna from heaven. That would have been a bit irresponsible of the Almighty. They had been thrown there a decade before, by the railwaymen taking up the old Horsham line which was axed in the Beeching cuts, that many of you will remember. Whether co-incidence or not, certainly it was an encouragement to faith.

But what if acting on our faith does not lead to greater blessing, but seems to add to the difficulties of our life. Or what if, however much we believe and pray, the horrors and messiness of life do not go away?

If today’s readings have any common thread, it is, how do you keep faith, when all around you wickedness and chaos seem to go unchecked, and the task ahead of you as a disciple of Jesus Christ seems impossible and unrealistic?

So Habakkuk complains to the Lord: “Why do you tolerate wrong? …The law is paralyzed and justice never prevails!” (1.3f) The Psalm (37) takes up a similar theme.

In the reading from Luke, the disciples begin to grasp the enormity of the Gospel project and ask simply: “Lord increase our faith.” (Lk 17.5)

At the end of Habakkuk’s short prophecy, he sums up the Christian position:

“Though the fig tree does not blossom, and no fruit is on the vines; though the produce of the olive fails and the fields yield no food; though the flock is cut off from the fold and there is no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will exult in the God of my salvation.” (Hab 3.17f)

It was refreshing to hear on the radio this harvest Sunday morning, a farmer whose crops had been decimated by floods, expressing just this same thought.

Acting in faith is a statement that we do believe that God is good; that right will triumph over evil; that saving the world is a project worth giving our life to.

In Stanford’s anthem (at the offertory - see below) based on Habakkuk’s prophecy, you will hear how he turns the gloom into an assertion of faith as we come to the Altar of God.

For every time we come to this Table and taste the food of heaven, we are offering a Eucharist, a thanksgiving for God’s sustaining harvest in our lives.

And we bring our mustard seed of faith, seeking to understand what God is doing in our lives and in our world.

It is not always easy to believe and to shape our actions to our belief, but whenever we come in penitence and faith to the bread and the wine, we can say with honesty:

“Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief.” Mk 9. 24

Offertory Anthem

"For lo I raise up"

Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924)

For lo I raise up that bitter and hasty nation,
Which march thro' the breadth of the earth,
To possess the dwelling places that are not theirs.
They are terrible and dreadful,
Their judgment and their dignity proceed from themselves.
Their horses also are swifter than leopards,
And are more fierce than the evening wolves.
And their horsemen spread themselves,
Yea, their horsemen come from far.
They fly as an eagle that hasteth to devour,
They come all of them for violence;
Their faces are set as the east-wind,
And they gather captives as the sand.
Yea, he scoffeth at kings,
And princes are a derision unto him.
For he heapeth up dust and taketh it.
Then shall he sweep by as a wind that shall pass over,
And be guilty,
Even he, whose might is his God.
Art not Thou from everlasting,
O Lord, my God, mine Holy One?
We shall not die.
O Lord, thou hast ordained him for judgment,
And thou, O Rock hast established him for correction.
I will stand upon my watch and set me upon the tower,
And look forth to see what he will say to me,
And what I shall answer concerning my complaint.
And the Lord answered me and said:
The vision is yet for the appointed time,
And it hasteth toward the end, and shall not lie,
Tho' it tarry, wait for it, because it will surely come.
For the earth shall be filled
with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord,
As the waters cover the sea.
But the Lord is in his holy temple:
Let all the earth keep silence before Him.

Habakkuk 1.6-12; 2.1, 3. 14, 20

Thanks - Harvest

Thanks – Harvest

“Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Eph 5.19, 20

Some people are chronically grateful; which can be infuriating for the rest of us. It sometimes makes you want to scream. Ogden Nash points it up beautifully in the last few lines of his poem about a moaning wife with an ever-grateful husband: “The Outcome of Mr MacLeod’s Gratitude”.

So she tired of her husband’s cheery note
And she stuffed a tea tray down his throat.
He remarked from the floor where they found him reclining
“I’m just a MacLeod with a silver lining.”

Harvest Thanksgiving is a day in the Church calendar when we try to regain a proper sense of gratitude to God. Fortunately, we live in a part of the world where we are no longer dependent on good harvests, rain in due season and all the other vicissitudes of nature, ‘cruel in tooth and claw’.

But this gives us an even greater, and in some ways harder responsibility to acknowledge our ultimate dependence upon God for life and breath and, in the words of our text, everything. And from this right sense of gratitude flows praise to God and compassion for others – another traditional theme of harvest-tide.

It is perhaps a symptom of living surrounded by plenty that we rarely say grace before meals these days. It is not only right to give thanks to God, to ask for his blessing, but also, in the words of our Bishop, ‘to enlarge our sympathies and make us mindful of the needs of others.”

Even George Herbert, writing in the 17th Century, in an age vastly more uncomfortable than our own, realises that complacency is setting in. So in his poem 'Gratefulnesse' from The Temple, written in his fortieth and final year:

Thou that hast given so much to me,
Give one thing more--a grateful heart:
Not thankful when it pleaseth me,
As if thy blessings had spare days,
But such a heart whose Pulse may be
Thy Praise.

Why do we find it so difficult to live with that proper Christian attitude of thanks, praise and compassion?

Let’s speculate for a moment on today’s well-known Gospel story: the ten lepers.

You are part of a band of complete outcasts from society, facing an unpleasant death within a short time. Then one day you meet a healer called Jesus. You all shout; you can’t get near, it wouldn’t be allowed. You are told to go and show the Priest you’re better; how ridiculous, how embarrassing – but it’s worth a try, and as you traipse off, expecting nothing, you begin to notice signs of genuine healing. It’s a miracle!

So why did only one come back to say thank-you? What happened to the other nine? A lack of gratitude usually signifies a problem in attitude. So let’s do some guesswork, based on our own observation of humankind.

The first person was the nervous fearful sort; he was scared, completely confused and terrified, not knowing what was going on – he hid.

The second person was offended. She wanted to do something difficult for her healing. God helps them that that help themselves. The simplicity of the miracle offended her.

The third person realised, after the fact, that he did not want to be healed. He’d forgotten how to live, who he was without his leprosy. He’d allowed it to define him. Jesus took away his identity and he wasn’t grateful.

The fourth person, well, here is an easier one to identify with. She forgot. That’s it, nothing more, in all the excitement and joy she just forgot.

The fifth leper was unable to say thank you anymore to anyone. For years he had been shunned by family and friends and forced to beg. By living in constant need, he lost the ability to be grateful, for anything.

The sixth person, had contracted her Leprosy eleven years ago, when her children were toddlers. She had to leave her precious family. So when she was healed, she ran, like a bullet from a gun – she had to see them, she had to know how they were.

The seventh, well the seventh did not believe there was anything to be thankful for. It was entirely a coincidence. There had to be some logical explanation. Perhaps the water in that place. It was nothing to do with Jesus, why say thank you?

The eighth person was quite the opposite. She knew it was Jesus, she’d heard all about him and now she had experienced his healing touch. She couldn’t wait to tell as many people as possible that this really was the Messiah.

The ninth – what of the ninth? I don’t know. There could be so many reasons. Some are a mystery, beyond our imagination. He didn’t, he couldn’t, he wouldn’t, he forgot, he meant to but got distracted…

There are lots of reasons for not living a life of gratitude to God and others. But as we focus on the tenth leper, we begin to see that it is the transforming love of Jesus which is at the heart of our gratitude; the pulse of our praise.

The tenth was a Samaritan, despised by the Jews. His religion was a version of Judaism but ‘not pure’. So he had been an outcast from Israel long before he contracted leprosy.

Of course we are used to thinking of the Good Samaritan, but Jesus only told that parable to highlight the contradiction to his Jewish hearers – the good Samaritan. We can think of parallel attitudes as we listen to some of the rhetoric in the Middle East today.

Among lepers, among the ten, other outcasts, the Samaritan had found a community of Jews to belong to. He had been rejected, and then in his illness found acceptance.

In sending him back home, his healing robbed him of his community.

So why did he say thank you?

Perhaps this Samaritan recognized something deeper in Christ than the immediate benefit of being free from leprosy. He had been healed with Jews; he had not been excluded from that.

In the middle of the confusion of what to do with himself after his healing, he had realised one thing. Jesus had not rejected him: Jesus, a Jew, a healthy Jew.

Perhaps he was beginning to see the heart of the Gospel which still we find so hard to grasp, sometimes even in the church. The healing love of God in Christ reaches out to all; the sick and the well, the Jews and the non-Jews; the people we like and the people we don’t like… We are all valuable to God. The same sun shines on the just and the unjust. Earthquakes and hurricanes strike where they will.

So however others respond, our response should be one of thankfulness, in all the changing scenes of life. From this springs all else. As Cicero said: “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.”

As we come to this Eucharist, this giving of thanks over broken bread and outpoured wine, the liturgy encourages us to ‘…feed on him in your hearts by faith, with thanksgiving.’

Carry this with you into each moment of your week and of your lives.

Thou that hast given so much to me,
Give one thing more - a grateful heart:

“Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Eph 5.19, 20