What is Your Mustard Seed?

Fr. Larry's Homily on the 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time, C

Have you ever had the experience of trying to buy something with useless currency?
I tried, once, to use a twenty-five-year-old British One Pound note only to be told that they aren’t accepted anymore.  Imagine that feeling. One moment you have in your hand what you believe is exactly what you need to get what you want only to be told that you do not. And this is not the friendly and beneficent “your- money- is- no- good- here” kind of statement.  It’s the bold fact that what you trusted has let you down.
 
The disciples had also reached that point in their walk with Jesus, so much so that they finally broke down and blurted out: “Increase our faith.” A simple demand, a reasonable request made by those who had seen Jesus do some astonishing and spectacular things.  If he can cause great miracles to happen, summoning faith should be a snap. But Jesus gives a peculiar response.
 
He gives them outlandish comparisons about mustard seeds and mulberry trees.  The rhetoric may be outrageous, but the reality is rich.  Forget about the scenery…the mulberry and the ocean; focus on the fundamental affirmation. In fact, Jesus’ answer does not really meet the disciple’s request; he does not say, “OK, here’s some more faith.” He puts the disciples on the spot.
 
For the Jesus we encounter in the gospel of Luke, what is important is not the amount of faith but the kind of faith. If it were no bigger than a mustard seed, it would still be of unbelievable power.
 
The point for Luke is this: with even the tiniest amount of genuine faith, men and women who listen to Jesus’ word and commit themselves to him can do things impossible to naked human nature. Can you recall how the gospel of Mark ends? “These signs will accompany those who believe: BY using my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will lay their hands on the sick, and the sick will recover.
 
What about us? What is this faith as we experience it? Especially as Catholic Christians? What is this commitment in concrete reality?
 
First off, faith is not the same thing as certainty. Many people get the two mixed up. Many ask for faith but what they really want is certainty. They want to be excused of all responsibility on their end. “Give me absolutes so that I can get on with my life and not have to think about it anymore.” While that sounds ideal, there is nothing in our faith that points to such a transactional, detached and irresponsible position. Nothing of that speaks to a living, daily relationship.
 
Honestly some think of the pursuit of faith as if it were like their internet or cable provider.
“I just want to make my payment and then always get what I want when I want it.”  When the service fails…and it usually does, then they say: “Well, you just cannot trust them…” 
“I say my prayers, I go to Mass, I give when I am asked…and then God lets me down…”
Faith in God is never the result of any quid pro quo arrangement.
 
For us there are two aspects to faith. First is the intellectual reality and by that, I mean the so-called Act of Faith.  This is what we have been taught and retain in our memory. These are the fundamental truths of our faith in Jesus Christ: “I believe everything the Catholic Church teaches, because God has revealed it through Christ; I accept it not because the church says so; I accept it because through the Church God has made it possible for me to accept it. 
 
It is on God’s word that I can make the declaration: “There is but one God in three divine persons; The Son of God was born of the Virgin Mary. This wafer that looks like bread and tastes like bread is not bread but the flesh and blood, body, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ.”
This is essential for a genuinely Catholic faith, and why? Because the Son of God took on flesh and blood and died for us to tell us something…about God, about ourselves and about living and dying. It is important for us to take God’s truth on God’s word…but faith is not simply a matter of the intellect.
 
What the disciples were asking for could not be provided by a catechism or a laundry list of doctrines to be accepted without delay. Nor was Jesus about to tell them what doctrines they had to believe to enter the kingdom.
 
What Peter, Matthew, and John wanted was an increase of trust. Faith in its fullness is a surrender of my whole person. My intellect will not save me…nor will it save anyone.
To believe means that I yield everything, including my whole self, to God. Here it is that I risk all.
Against all odds, against all fears, against all objections and in a sense against all reason.
I utter a total yes to God whose will in my regard I often find difficult to understand.
 
A total yes in darkness.
 
Here belief involves total trust. It’s Abraham leaving country and his kin…” not knowing where he was to go”, not knowing what would happen to him along the way, knowing only that God was calling him …at the age of 75, to leave what he loved and to settled where God alone knew.
That’s why we call Abraham “our father in faith.”
 
It is poor old Job sitting on a dung heap crying out in the middle of his torments. “Though God slay me, yet will I trust in him.” 
 
It is Mother Teresa explaining her success to an inquiring reporter: “I am like a little pencil in God’s hand.  The pencil has only to be allowed to be used.”
 
It is the mom and dad accompanying to the cemetery their second child who has died in tragic circumstances to be buried next to the first… not reciting the Creed, only repeating over and over again; “Sacred Heart of Jesus, I place my trust in you…”
 
Or how about Jesus? I suspect a fair number of people do not realize that Jesus lived a life of faith. We tend to see him so absorbed in his Father, so protected by his Father, that faith played little or no part in his life. Not so! A famous German theologian Karl Rahner brought this home to me in his writing about belief in Christ:
“ According to Scripture we may safely say that Jesus in his life was the believer…he is the one who hopes absolutely…loves absolutely.  Jesus surrendered himself in his death unconditionally to the absolute mystery he called his father, into whose hands he committed his existence, when in the nigh of his death and forsakenness he was deprived of everything that is otherwise regarded as the content of a human existence…everything fell away from him, even the security of the closeness of God’s love, and in this trackless dark there prevailed silently only the mystery that…has no name and to which he calmly surrendered himself as to eternal love and not to the hell of futility.
 
The point is this:  For all that he was the Son of God, for all that he had a unique relationship with his Father, this man too died not with experience of resurrection, not with any unassailable proof that he would rise from the dead; he died with faith in his Father,
with hope of life forever. That’s why the last words from the cross are so striking…and faith-filled: “ Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” Remember what his enemies said as they taunted him on Calvary? “He trusts in God; let God deliver him how, if he wants to” …He trusts in God.
 
The disciple’s request for an increase of faith is our request as well. The answer Jesus gives them and us concerns no what can be done for us but what we ourselves can do.  It begins by surrendering anxious lives for the peace that is ours if we decide that there is, instead of ourselves, someone else in charge of everything. It means taking our desire for certainty and placing it where it belongs, in the knowledge that God wants wonderful things for us when we give up trying to buy them with currency for which he has no use. If currency is still the image that works best, then the only currency Jesus takes is us.
 
The boldest move a poker player can make is to say “ I am all in.” Recognizing that God always has the upper hand, maybe our best move is to lay all our cards on the table.
 
May we pray?
Father we often confuse faith with certainty.  It comes from our desire to be the gods of our own little worlds.  Remove what keeps us from surrendering ourselves completely to you that we may with total trust in your plan for our lives, live fully in sure knowledge of your love.
We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen
 

“Faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard
comes from the preaching of Christ”

- Romans 10

 

 

Organic Gift

by Parker Palmer

 
Years ago, I heard Dorothy Day speak. Founder of the Catholic Worker movement, her long-term commitment to living among the poor on New York's Lower East Side - had made her one of my heroes. So it came as a great shock when in the middle of her talk, I heard her start to ruminate about the "ungrateful poor."

I did not understand how such a dismissive phrase could come from the lips of a saint - until it hit me with the force of a Zen koan. Dorothy Day was saying, "Do not give to the poor expecting to get their gratitude so that you can feel good about yourself. If you do, your giving will be thin and short-lived, and that is not what the poor need; it will only impoverish them further. Give only if you have something you must give; give only if you are someone for whom giving is its own reward."

When I give something I do not possess, I give a false and dangerous gift, a gift that looks like love but is, in reality, loveless - a gift given more from my need to prove myself than from the other's need to be cared for. That kind of giving is not only loveless and faithless, based on the arrogant and mistaken notion that God has no way of channeling love to the other except through me. Yes, we are created in and for community, to be there, in love, for one another. But community cuts both ways: when we reach the limits of our own capacity to love, community means trusting that someone else will be available to the person in need.

One sign that I am violating my own nature in the name of nobility is a condition called burnout. Though usually regarded as the result of trying to give too much, burnout in my experience results from trying to give what I do not possess - the ultimate in giving too little! Burnout is a state of emptiness, to be sure, but it does not result from giving all I have; it merely reveals the nothingness from which I was trying to give in the first place. 

May Sarton, in her poem "Now I Become Myself," uses images from the natural world to describe a different kind of giving, grounded in a different way of being, a way that results not in burnout but in fecundity and abundance:

As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root...

When the gift I give to the other is integral to my own nature, when it comes from a place of organic reality within me, it will renew itself - and me - even as I give it away. Only when I give something that does not grow within me do I deplete myself and harm the other as well, for only harm can come from a gift that is forced, inorganic, unreal.
About the Author: Excerpted from Parker Palmer's book "Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation"