Faith of the Mustard Seed
Luke 17:5-10
Ken Howard+

“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.”

Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel passage have always left me a bit puzzled. If Jesus meant them as a literal teaching about what the prayers of a person with even the most minute faith can achieve, then his instruction seems to have accomplished little. I mean, even only a few people in each generation attained the level of faith of the minuscule mustard seed, surely the sea would be a floating forest of mulberry trees by now. But as far as we know, there is not even one out there. Yes, I know, Jesus managed to shrivel a fig tree, but as far as we know, he never got one to plant itself in any major body of water. But today, in light of the recent tragedies and seeming triumphs of evil, Jesus’ words almost seem to taunt us.

But Jesus was not one to taunt. Nor was he one for giving useless advice. So he must have been trying to get at something else. But what?

When we think of Jesus, many images come to mind: Rabbi, Teacher, Good Shepherd, Worker of Miracles, Son of God, Messiah. All serious images, these. But there is one thing about him that we often overlook. And that is his sense of humor. You gotta admit: Jesus must have had a pretty twisted sense of humor to pick those twelve bone-heads as his Apostles. And God, too, to choose to work through human beings.

Look again. But this time imagine Jesus responding with a silly grin. “Increase our faith!” the Apostles say. And this is how Jesus responds. He paints for them a mental picture of them praying that a mulberry tree be uprooted and planted in the sea. And no sooner do the words leave their mouths than the mulberry tree blasts off like a space shuttle arcing across the Holy Land toward the Mediterranean, and touching down softly atop the waves like an old space capsule, waiting to be recovered by the awaiting fleet of ships.

Come on. Admit it. It’s funny. Why? Because it is so unexpected. Trees don’t take off like rockets. And who in their right mind would pray for such a thing anyway?

And maybe that was the real point of what Jesus was trying to teach. When it comes to thinking about faith, the twelve people Jesus chose as his Apostle were pretty much like us. Like us they tended to think of faith as the ability to believe something. Like us they tended to think that stronger faith means fewer doubts, and perfect faith means no doubt.

Jesus’ little one-line parable quickly disabused them of that notion. It said that if faith was about belief making things happen, then with even the smallest amount of that kind of faith their prayers could easily overcome the laws of physics, not to mention the principles of horticulture.

It taught them what faith wasn’t. But it also pointed them in a different direction to discover what faith was. With a single sentence, Jesus had enabled the twelve to imagine something they had never and would never imagine on their own. And that was the real point. Faith was not about a quantity of something like belief. But rather, faith is a gift of Godly imagination.

Faith is about imagining with God. Faith is about peering through the fog of the world as it really is and imagining how it could be with Christ more clearly seen. The gift of faith – and it is a gift and not something we can will or strengthen – is the gift of seeing the world transformed – of seeing that small part of the world within the range of your vision as it might be if it were to be joined to the kingdom of God. And about trusting that vision enough to begin to act “as though” – as though it were real, as though it existed, as though we believed.

Now, this may seem a small thing in the face of the great evil we have seen lately – small and ineffective. What does violence understand but violence? How can something as ephemeral as faith stand against deadly reality of evil? How can a wisp stand up against a whirlwind?

But it can . . . it has . . .

Do you remember the evil empire? At one time the former Soviet Union held not only its own people, but also the people of its neighboring countries in an iron grip behind an iron curtain. And threatened to expand its grasp across the faith of the earth, as well. Perhaps the most concrete symbol of that empire was the wall of concrete and barbed wire that ran through the city of Berlin. For those of us who grew up with that wall, it was a momentous occasion when it came down. We can remember where we were and what we were doing that night.

Ironically, it was not an act of violence that started the wall crumbling, but an act of faith and prayer. The first crack in the wall was made by a group of striking workers hundreds of miles away at a shipyard in Gdansk, Poland. Surrounded by the overwhelming force and confronted with a demand that they give up their strike or face armed attack, they held an all night vigil of prayer. In the morning they did what they told, but with a twist. In a God-inspired act of imagination, they walked out of the shipyard acting as though they won their strike – more than that: acting as though they had won their freedom. And that infection of faith and freedom spread, until it brought down not only the wall, but the empire.

Our faith, our prayers, can help us against the evil we face as well. It may well be– at this time – that as a country we are faced with the choice of the lesser of two evils. Kill or be killed. Resort to the lesser evil of war or face the greater evil of terrorism. Some of us – out of principle – may fight and die in this war. Some of us – out of principle – may not be free to fight – and some of those may give their lives in this war, too.

But in the end, war cannot defeat evil, because evil lives in the human heart. Only a changed heart can overcome evil. And only love changes hearts. God’s love. And silly though it may seem, God uses the very human heart that is the carrier of the infection of evil, to be the carrier of an even stronger infection: the infection of God’s love. I’m talking about us – our hearts. We spread this infection when we love our enemies. We spread this infection when we pray for those who persecute us. We spread this when, even when we are forced to fight, we mourn every life lost, even the lives of those who would rejoice at our demise

It is not logical to love our enemies. It does not come naturally to pray for those persecute us. It makes no sense to mourn the deaths of those who hate us. Not in this world. Be we are citizens of another world, a world in which they do. A world where the lamb lies down with the lion. That world is God’s realm: a world we call the Kingdom of God. Our faith can give us the eyes to see it. And our prayers can enable us to act as though we already lived there.