Sermon delivered on Trinity 19C, Sunday, October 2, 2016, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Westerville, OH.

If you prefer to listen to the audio podcast of today’s sermon, usually somewhat different from the text below, click here.

Lectionary texts: Lamentations 1.1-6; Psalm 137.1-9; 2 Timothy 1.1-14; Luke 17.5-10.

The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!” Let us pray.

And now may the words of my mouth, and the meditations of all our hearts, be acceptable in your sight, O Lord our strength and our redeemer. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I am thankful for those who have come before me in my family. I’m especially thankful for those who have spent their lives following Christ, and set down before me and others an example of what it means to trust, to have faith, in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I don’t want to turn this into a glory fest for the faithful in my family, but when I read this passage I can’t but think about people like my grandma Sadie. All her life she has kept responding to the call of our Lord to follow and to serve. She keeps following and serving. Through sending loved ones of to wars, through economic depression and loss of Grandpa Marshall’s employment, through sicknesses that should have claimed her life, through the deaths of three of her six children, she has kept faithful to her Lord and served him. She has been put through the ringer in her life, always living meagerly. Her whole story is filled with more sadness and disappointment than most, and yet she still clings to the Lord.

“Faith is the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not seen,” says the writer of Hebrews. Through all the horrible mess of stuff that life might bring we can think forward, remembering the promises of Jesus Christ for our unending life in and with him. When life is lonely, and we feel alone, and God seems so distant from us, we can remember the words of the Lord Jesus when he promises us that he will send to us a comforter, literally “one who will come alongside,” to always be with us as we continue our journey toward eternity with him. We see evidences of this in the body of Christ; we do not see the end of the trail with our eyes yet, but we know it is there. We trust in Jesus Christ, for why wouldn’t we? Has he ever done anything to make us not trust him? No. Rather, he shows his glory in his Church through the preaching of the Word, the surest promises anyone can ever hear. He displays his love for us in the administration of the sacraments; through the ordinary means of water in baptism we have been clothed with Jesus Christ, marked and sealed by the Holy Spirit for Christ himself. We are his. At the table we feast on the most precious body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, the holy food of new and unending life in him, in our hearts by faith and with thanksgiving. We see the service of our brothers and sisters in their ministries in the community. We have visible things, tangible things to remind of us of God’s goodness and love toward us.

At this point in the narrative of Luke’s Gospel Jesus has shown them God’s kingdom breaking into the course of human history. The course of all history is being corrected right before their very eyes! The promises of God that he would be their God, and that they would be his people, and that he would be present with them forever is rising up in full force. And yet they cry out to him, “Increase our faith!”

Well, shoot. They’ve been with Jesus himself and walked through everything with him so far in these past couple of years that we encounter in the narrative of Luke. They’ve even seen works and heard teaching that we don’t even have a written record of. And here, as they’re headed toward Jerusalem, the apostles are begging him to increase their faith after hearing him tell them that woe be to the person who causes another to stumble. It would be better that they had a millstone tied about their neck and they be cast into the midst of the sea. They’re terrified; they need assurance. So Jesus asks them, “if you have a servant who is working for you,  do you say to him, ‘Come on in and take your place at the table?’ No, you would likely instruct the servant to put on his apron and continue serving. He is doing what he is already being rewarded to do, so nothing more needs added to him.”

Jesus is saying to them, look, you’re the servant; keep on serving! Keep doing what you’ve seen me do; you’ve been called to do these things and be leaders in the kingdom of God, and it is in doing them that you will continue to realize the faith you have. Get your hands dirty. You have been, are being, and will be strengthened in faith; but you’ll never know it unless you keep on serving in faith. The Apostle Paul has written, “For in the Gospel the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, ‘the righteous will live by faith.” And in another place, “For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we might be the righteousness of God.” Instead of worrying about the size of their faith, perhaps these Jesus-followers should just get on with living it out in obedience to Jesus’ commands. After all, we might add as Luke has written in the previous chapter, one who is faithful in very little is also faithful in much.

Through Christ, from the faith that is given to us through the preached and visible Gospel and by the power of the Holy Spirit, we might continue in faith to serve him faithfully. We, who have been made the righteousness of God, are only that as we continue to follow, continue to serve, doing that which we have been called to do in Jesus Christ. For the proof of the pudding is in the eating, so lets eat that pudding and know its flavor. Its flavor is from the fruit of the faith that has been given us in Jesus Christ. A faith, even when it seems so little, is enough to command bushes to uproot themselves and jump in the sea, or mountains to remove themselves. God has given to us this faith. And so we shall live by faith, because we most assuredly have enough of it.

In Jesus Christ we lack nothing. My grandma, who has had to live her life with very little, and apiece at a time losing what little she has had, has never lacked anything in Jesus Christ. She has never required more than what the Lord has already given her: namely, himself. She will tell you if you ask her that yes, she has had her spiritual struggles throughout her almost 90 years of life, a life that according to her physicians is coming to a close soon. But let me remind you of this: the spiritually dead person has no spiritual struggles. She is very much alive in Christ, and all these 90 years she has continued to display the fruit of faith in her prayers, her service, her witness, and her worship of God. We too have been made alive in Christ and we lack nothing, including and especially faith. Let us keep on serving our Lord, trusting in his promises to us, having a lively faith that acts as its own assurance to us when things get rough and we just don’t know if we are able to press forward in our mission.

So let us continue to follow our Lord, trusting in his promises to us, doing the work he has given us to do, feeding on him through Word and Sacrament to give us renewed strength daily on this journey, as Paul says, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus, guarding the good treasure entrusted to us, with the help of the Holy Spirit living in us.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.