The Rev. Deacon Bette Kauffman's sermon from October 2, 2022

You Have All You Need

The Rev. Deacon Bette Kauffman

2 October 2022, Christ Church, St. Joseph

Season of Creation Week 4 (Year C, Pentecost 17)

Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4; 2 Timothy 1:1-14; Luke 17:5-10

In today’s Gospel lesson, the disciples ask Jesus to increase their faith. It’s like they think faith is some kind of magic potion, or some kind of credit account—and if they could just get their hands on more of it—drink more of the potion, build up more credit in the account—they’d “have more faith.”

I’m not sure what they thought “having more faith” would look like. Maybe they are thinking that if they could somehow accumulate more faith they would no longer have questions about who Jesus was, and what he was here on earth to do.

Maybe if they could accumulate more faith they could answer the difficult questions of their religious traditions. Like, is this man the Messiah, or are we to wait for another/

Maybe if they had more faith, they could quit wondering about the strange and radical teachings and, frankly, demands of this man and just accept them and live by them. Maybe they would understand why he insisted on eating with notorious crooks and women of ill-repute.

Maybe more faith would enable them to forgive and forgive again and forgive some more, as Jesus said they must. Maybe with more faith they would be able to understand and accept the disabled, the highly contagious, the dirt poor, and the foreigner, like Jesus did and asked them to do.

Today I think we often associate increasing our faith with talking ourselves into intellectual agreement with something we actually find to be quite preposterous, or that we are persuading ourselves—as one author put it—to believe 6 impossible things before breakfast.

That’s not faith; that’s self-deception. And probably not very successful self-deception. I think some perfectly good Christians suffer a bit of embarrassment and discomfort every time they say the creeds.

I had an interesting discussion with my women’s bible study group in Monroe about “resurrection of the body.” Turns out most of us don’t really expect our bodies to be resurrected at all. We believe a lot more easily in having an eternal soul that flies off and leaves the body behind.

But I don’t think what we believe, what we intellectually agree to, has anything to do with faith. Faith is not about some process we go through to accumulate all the “right beliefs and doctrines.”

Here’s a wonderful statement about faith from the lectionary blog of a woman by the name of Sarah Dylan Breuer. She says, “Faith is relationship -- a relationship of trust, of allegiance. When Jesus talks about ‘faith,’ he's not talking about what you do in your head; he's talking about what you do with your hands and your feet, your wallet and your privilege, your power and your time. Faith in Jesus is not shown by saying or thinking things about him, but by following him.”

I can’t say it better than that. And following Jesus is a day to day, moment to moment thing. It’s doing what he calls us to do and not expecting great accolades and high praise for doing what we ought to do.

Faith is less in the grand gestures, less in reciting the creed in a loud voice, less in making a big showy gift to the church, than in the moment to moment being true to Jesus and his call to us to love the unlovable, to forgive even the boneheads who will never change, to reconcile with those we would rather duke it out with.

Sometimes when life’s pains and sorrows hit us hardest, faith is just putting one foot in front of the other, getting through the next hour, the next day. Trusting God even when there’s no evidence that God gives a hoot.

I’m going to have a bit of coffee with you right after the service, and then I’m heading straight back to Monroe. I sometimes like to wander through the Tensas Refuge on my way home from St. Joseph, but not today. We have a funeral at Grace this afternoon.

A young man, early 40s, died of an overdose. His parents are long-time members. He served as our sexton for a number of years. He had been through rehab many years ago and was sober for 16 years. Then he and his wife, whom he had met in rehab, came into some money when her father died. The temptation was too much. They spent it on heroin.

They got arrested, were sent back into rehab and after about a month, he got out. He had dinner with his parents and his own children; a lovely evening together, by all accounts. Then he went to his own house and promptly overdosed. His wife, still in rehab, called his parents and said, ‘Something’s wrong. He’s not answering the phone.” They went; he was dead.

When I spoke with his mother on the phone a few days ago, she said, “We’re getting through a half day at a time.” That’s faith. It’s putting one foot in front of the other. It’s keeping your eyes on Jesus in the midst of agony. It’s not escaping the agony with glib declarations of what you believe. It is plodding through the agony, and the mundane, but especially the agony, keeping your eyes on Jesus.

I used to think the saying, “What would Jesus do?” was pretty hokey, a cliché, for sure. But more and more I think it is exactly the right question to ask. What would Jesus do?

By and large, we know what Jesus would do. We know Jesus would choose love, reconciliation, inclusion of all.

Sometimes the church likes to portray Jesus as obsessed with wrong and with people’s sin, as judgmental, as morally smug. That would be us, friends. We’re the ones obsessed with people’s sin; we’re judgmental and morally smug.

God understands that we are wounded, irascible, quarrelsome beings who inevitably fall far short of the standards God sets for us. That’s why God became one of us and lived among us and continues to dwell in our hearts. We are not in this alone.

Nurture that mustard seed of God in your heart. It’s everything you need. 

In the name of God, father, son and Holy Spirit, AMEN.