Sermon

Faith like a pilot light

Scripture Text:

2 Timothy 1:1-14, Luke 17:5-10

Sermon:

There was a Lutheran pastor who lived during the Second World War in Nazi Germany, and he eventually died in a concentration camp because he was part of an assassination attempt against Adolf Hitler.  (Not your typical Lutheran pastor.)  You may have heard of him, his name was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and while he was studying to be a pastor he asked a friend what he wanted most in life.  And the friend said,

“I’d like to be a saint!”  (Very modest, friend, of course.) And then the friend asked him the same question back, and Bonhoeffer said,

“I’d like to learn to have faith.”

I’ve always been struck by that story. What does it mean to have faith anyway?   The writer of the letter to the Hebrews says, … faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen (Heb. 11:1). It’s hard to feel confident in things we can only hope for, or to believe in things we haven’t seen.  The word faith can even get tired, because we use it so often.

We heard a tough reading about faith in the gospel from Luke today. The disciples have been listening to Jesus teach some very difficult parables and lessons about forgiveness and the love of money.  And you can hear the stress in their voices when they say to Jesus,  “Increase our faith!”  Please, help us figure out how we’re going to do all this!

Luke’s got high expectations for his readers.  He doesn’t read like a greeting card or an inspirational poster.  He tells us that, instead of being compassionate or understanding, Jesus snaps back at this request and says to them: 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. But what is he really saying?  Faith the size of a mustard seed… that’s not very big.  What if he’s telling the disciples that their faith doesn’t need to be increased?  That they already have all the faith they need?

Then Jesus goes on to compare the disciples to God’s slaves. Now, this isn’t easy to listen to for us, and it wasn’t for them either.  How could Jesus say we’re like worthless slaves?  Is that really supposed to inspire us to follow him?

Jesus wanted to get the attention of the disciples.   He was frustrated with them.  They’d been with him for months and years, and they still didn’t understand what faith was?  I don’t know how to unpack the slave metaphor, really, because we just don’t have anything like that in our society anymore.  But at the end of the story, the moral is, “we have done only what we ought to have done!’”

And gee, that’s not exactly something you’d go home and embroider on a pillow or frame and hang by your front door:  “We have done only what we ought to have done.”  How could that be “good news”?

What if the good news is that we don’t need any more faith?  That we can’t have any more faith? That we’ve already been given what we have, even if it’s the size of a mustard seed.  That all the faith we’ll ever need is already inside of us.  We don’t have to make it bigger or find more of it.  Maybe we just need to decide to use it.

I’m going to turn to our friend St. Paul for some help. In his second letter to Timothy, Paul is writing his old friend a letter. It’s sort of a goodbye letter – Paul has been Timothy’s teacher, they traveled together, and now Paul is leaving his last wisdom and thoughts for Timothy. He mentions Timothy’s mother and grandmother… it’s quite heartwarming, especially in comparison to Jesus in the Luke reading! Paul tells Timothy that God has called them through grace, not because of any great thing that they’ve done.  Faith isn’t something they’ve gathered up enough of to get a gold star of approval or a Faith Merit Badge. It’s not like a bank account that you can fill up and than draw on. It’s not something to brag about, or to think that one person might have more than another.

Paul talks about faith as like a little fire inside of Timothy – something that can be “rekindled.” You can feed kindling to a fire, but a tiny spark is just as live and capable of burning with light and heat as a candle flame or a bonfire.  A tiny spark of faith is all we need.   A tiny spark of a sense of God’s goodness.

I think of gas stoves and the tiny blue light that’s always burning inside them.  You can light all four burners and the broiler with just that tiny blue light. Faith is like a tiny blue pilot light burning inside each one of us. That, as Paul says, can rekindle power and love and self-discipline in us. You can’t increase a pilot light. And if you blow out a pilot light, all it takes is a little spark to get it burning again.  You can’t improve a pilot light. It just burns there and when you need it to get bigger it does, as easy as that: Whoosh!

And faith is a good treasure that has been entrusted to us, Paul says. That sounds more like a bank account.  But a bank account, again, is usually something we earn.  This treasure is something that has been entrusted to us – given to us – to watch over.  Through God’s grace and through the people in our lives who have shared their faith us, we’ve been given the treasure of faith.  The thing about this treasure, like the pilot light, is that it’s not just something that we hold onto, it’s something that activates our relationship with God.

I wonder if another way to explain faith is to say that it’s the desire inside each one of us that moves us toward God.  And so, when we follow that desire, when we live it out in our daily lives, and we live into a fully trusting relationship with God,  we respond to God’s will without having to think about it or worry about it.  We simply desire to do the bidding of our God.[1]

We can’t increase our faith; we can only use it.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer didn’t say that he wanted to have more faith, but that he wanted to learn how to use it.

So, don’t worry about having enough faith.  You have all the faith you need.  And you only need a very small amount.  Trust that the pilot light of faith burning in you is enough to help you build a trusting relationship with God, is enough to help you face whatever you need to face in your life, is enough to help you know and do God’s bidding for you.

Amen.

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[1] David Lose, “Faith.” http://www.workingpreacher.org/dear_wp.aspx?article_id=409

Uploaded on October 3, 2010 in by RevHeidi

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