Christ Episcopal Church
October 6, 2013
22 Proper C
When I was a sophomore in college, I took the standard intro to Bible class. The class was fascinating. I had never thought much about the authorship of Biblical texts, so I was unshaken to learn that the first 5 books of the Bible evolved over centuries, and were not written by Moses himself. The idea that stories were passed down orally from generation to generation before they were ever written down made the stories all the more dynamic to me. Of course I knew the story of Moses and the Exodus, but the Babylonian exile was completely new information. We read the Old Testament prophets who predicted gloom and destruction to God’s people, who had strayed far from the path God had set for them. We heard the prophets tell the people that if they did not repent, God would punish them with the loss of the promised land to foreigners. We watched as those threats became real when the Assyrians invaded in 722 BC and destroyed the Northern Kingdom. We heard more prophets warn the southern kingdom that the same would happen to them if they did not repent and mend their ways, and indeed, in 586 BC, the Babylonians invaded, carried the chosen people into exile, and destroyed the Promised Land. Both today’s reading from Lamentation and the psalm come from the time when the people were exiled in Babylon, trying to figure out how to worship God with no temple and no promised land. How could they sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? And while I wondered whether God would actually punish the chosen people so harshly, or if that might just be their understanding of the events, rather than reality, I found that to be largely an intellectual exercise rather than a challenge to my faith.
Until we read Psalm 137, and I was stopped in my tracks. Psalm 137 is appalling. Here, in Scripture, we find not only a psalm of heartbreak as the chosen people of God mourn the loss of the Promised Land, but also a psalm of sheer human vengeance. "O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy the one who pays you back for what you have done to us! Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!" I was horrified by those words, and the fact that these words of vengeance are part of holy scripture troubled me deeply.
Scripture, as I was to learn, does not just contain a record of God’s mighty acts and the faithful response of God’s people to those mighty acts. Scripture is unabashedly honest about recognizing and naming human brokenness and failure while at the same time being clear not to commend that failure. I knew that, on a certain level, having read in Genesis that Cain killed his brother Abel, and that Noah got drunk after the flood, neither of which are commendable but both are stories told in Scripture. What would cause my anger to echo that of Psalm 137? Gross injustice or an act of violence against someone I love? The loss of everything and everyone I hold dear? Utter inertia on the part of those in authority to protect and defend the vulnerable? Psalm 137 has preserved that raw human emotion for all to witness and plenty of other places in Scripture call us to a life that does not act on that anger.
In the gospel lesson this morning, we hear the disciples say to Jesus "Increase our faith!" Immediately prior to this request, Jesus has given the disciples two admonitions. First, Jesus tells them that it would be better to have a millstone hung around their necks and be cast into the sea than to be an obstacle to someone else’s faith. Secondly, he tells them that if another disciple sins, they are to confront the offender and if the offender repents, they are to forgive. These are overwhelming admonitions and the disciples respond to them by saying to Jesus "Increase our faith!" If only they had enough faith, they might be able to live up to Jesus’ high expectations. We know from all these weeks of hearing the words of Jeremiah and from this morning’s psalm that the Hebrew people have a collective memory of what happens to God’s chosen people when they do not live up to God’s expectations for them, and there is a collective memory of a time when such faith seemed impossible. In response to the disciples’ request, Jesus tells the disciples that if his followers had faith the size of a mustard seed, they could uproot a mulberry tree and plant it in the sea.
The truth is, many of us have at some time or another, felt the depth of despair reflected in the words of Psalm 137, and we have also wished we had the faith to do the impossible. When life is overwhelming beyond imagination, whatever the cause, we want the faith to be able to make things whole again. We want to know that it is not our lack of faith that is preventing a solution. On the surface, Jesus’ words are not very helpful here. When we crave a deeper faith, a faith that will allow us to make right the wrongs of the world, we hear Jesus say "If you had even the most minute amount of faith, you could uproot a tree," and we figure our faith must be terribly lacking.
Jesus, however, is not telling the disciples that they do not have enough faith. Jesus is telling the disciples, and us, that we need to understand faith differently. Faith is not about having a quantity sufficient to do spectacular tricks like toss a tree into the sea. Nor is faith about living a life good enough to keep God from getting mad at us. Jesus uses the impossible scenario of tossing a tree into the sea to show the disciples that faith is not about what we can do ourselves. Faith is about opening ourselves to allow God to do spectacular things through us. Jesus was not telling the disciples that their current faith was too small to do great things. Jesus was assuring the disciples that God can do great things through them. Jesus turns the disciples’ understanding of faith upside down and inside out. Faith is not about us. Faith is about God and letting God work through us to accomplish what seems impossible.
Eventually, after 50 years in captivity in Babylon, the Hebrew people will be allowed to return home to the Promised Land. Their time in exile will have increased their faith and they will have a new understanding of the way God works in their lives, apart from any particular piece of land or place of worship. In not too many more chapters of Luke’s gospel, the disciples will witness the horror of the crucifixion and the joy of the resurrection. They will experience God working through them in ways they could never imagine and with a faith they, themselves, could never produce. The message of the scripture is not that we humans will always be faithful, but that God will always be faithful. When times are tough and life is overwhelming, Jesus calls us not to summon up a faith that will allow us to do great things ourselves, but to believe that, in the midst of whatever suffering we find ourselves, God will do great things through us.
Amen.
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