Luke 17:5-10

"You gotta have faith." Well, that's what George Michael said. Who here doesn't want their faith increased? I mean I hope that is why you came to church: to know God better; to grow spiritually.

Having more faith would be great. I know that my faith has seen me through so many trials. And that is just since I woke up this morning. Faith has seen me through the deaths of both my parents, serious illness of family members and countless other scares and dilemmas.

Now I have made mistakes. But maybe if I had more faith I would not make those mistakes. I could trust God to see me through those things and I would know the right way to go. But you gotta have faith.

In our scripture lesson Jesus had just warned the disciples about stumbling or causing others to stumble. So the disciples want their faith increased. They want to be able to avoid stumbling. They want to avoid causing others to stumble. They want to be able to weather the storms of life. They want to be the ones who build their house on a rock and not on shifting sand.

So they ask Jesus to increase their faith. If you gotta have faith, then more faith must be better. So Jesus says, "If you have faith the size of a mustard seed�" A mustard seed? That is tiny! That ain't much faith, but OK Jesus. what can you do with a speck of faith? Not much I am sure.

"... you can command this tree to be uprooted and cast into the sea and it will obey you." Wait a minute. That would take a lot of faith. Matthew records this a little different. On that occasion Matthew records Jesus saying you can move a mountain with mustard seed sized speck of faith. Then he says, "Nothing will be impossible to you."

What is it about faith? Is it like super concentrated holy power or something? How come just a speck of it can move a mountain. Yet most people who have faith have problems moving a mole hill?

Maybe we need to take a closer look at faith and mustard seeds. What is faith? Hebrews says that faith is the assurance of thing hoped for the conviction of things not seen. Faith is about trusting or believing in something or someone else. It is more than mere belief. You can believe that a bridge is strong enough to hold you and not collapse. It takes faith in that bridge to actually walk across it.

So it is not the size of the faith but the size of the thing you have faith in. Dare I say if you had even an atom of faith you could move mountains. That is if the thing you have faith in is bigger than the mountain in question. So if your faith is in God, and God is definitely bigger than any mountain, the mountain had no chance of not being moved.

But Jesus didn't stop there. He charged right into another parable about a servant. The servant does what they are told and at the end of the day they are still a servant. The servant cannot demand to be served because of their service. They still keep serving.

So what if you have a mustard seed speck of faith. No, let's say you have two whole mustard seed specks of faith! And you command mountains at will to be moved from here to there! Well, we should all just honor the ground you walk on and God Himself should come down and say what a good job you have done.

No, because if you really have faith enough to move mountains, you know that it is not you or your faith that did the moving. God did all the heavy lifting. You just trusted. If you want to increase your faith, than "trust and obey, for there's no other way to be happy in Jesus than to trust and obey." Hey, somebody ought to write that down and put it to music.

So, yes, seek to increase your faith. I hope you have enough grains of faith to make a whole vat of mustard! But remember that if your faith is not in God you won't be able to cut the mustard, much less move even a mole hill.

2 Timothy 1:1-14

Thank you, I now have photographic evidence that you were in church today and engaged is radical behavior! I will be delivering these pictures to the proper authorities and will soon after be obtaining indictments for your arrest and incarceration. You should expect a visit from the police soon. And then you will pay, and pay dearly, for your subversive activities! (Pointing to the altar.)

You may find all this amusing. I mean going to church is not a crime - is it? In America we have freedom of religion. We have a right to gather and practice our religion freely. And communion is hardly a radical or subversive activity.

But in the history of Christianity that has not always been the way it was. There were many times when either practicing Christianity or practicing the wrong sort of Christianity could get you killed. That is why early Christians in Rome literally went underground in the catacombs. In many places in the world that is still the case. In some places attending an unlicensed church can land you in jail. In other places you could have your hands cut off or be killed for being a believer in Jesus.

Timothy lived in such a place and time. When the book of 2nd Timothy was written the Apostle Paul was in prison in Rome. Christians were experiencing persecution from two sides. Many Jews took exception to their claim that Jesus was the Messiah. They were also offended by the way they fraternized with Gentiles and even allowed them to be part of their faith without submitting to the laws of Moses. On the other side Greeks and Romans found their insistence on the existence of one true God a threat to the civil peace. Ironically the early Christians were called "atheists" because they didn't believe in the gods. They were also accused of cannibalism because they ate the flesh and drank the blood of their leader.

Paul the apostle had been like a Father in the faith to Timothy. So from his jail cell he wrote to Timothy the young pastor about how to carry on without his guidance. Of all the things he could have said, he told him to not be ashamed of the Gospel. Timothy had heard the good news first from his Mother and his Grandmother. And now he was a minister of the Gospel.

In fact Paul tells Timothy to join him in suffering for the Gospel. Paul knows he may never see Timothy again. He may die in prison or be executed. He also knows that as a student of Paul Timothy may suffer the same consequences. If he stays true to the Gospel he will be persecuted. And most of all to rely on the power of God!

Paul goes on to use himself as an example. He says "I am not ashamed." But why is he not ashamed? Because he knows the one in whom he believes. And he is sure that God can preserve his soul until eternal life.

So what does all that have to do with us? No one here is in danger of prison or death because of the Gospel. We have no reason to be ashamed of the Gospel. We have the legal right written into our country's basic laws to worship as we choose. Then why do so many Christian today seem to be ashamed of the Gospel. Why do so many not openly share the message of salvation.

Simply, the Gospel is still subversive and radical. We proclaim and believe in something that is utterly different from the world around us. We believe that the God of the universe became a human being. We believe that humans are ultimately unable to take care of themselves and that we need to trust utterly in something that cannot be seen. We believe that the last shall be first and the first shall be last and the greatest of them all is the one who is servant. We believe that something as simple as eating bread and drinking juice can bring us closer to God.

We need to admit and embrace the fact that these are radical ideas. We live in a world that only believes what it can see. We work and play and go to school in a society that believes that people have to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. We live in a culture which says that happiness comes from the accumulation of things or in getting what you want. We live in a philosophical environment that proclaims that this is a dog eat dog world and the biggest meanest dog eats last and best.

No wonder Christians seem ashamed of the Gospel. That a man who died with common thieves is our leader. That is scandalous. That he was a king with no earthly kingdom. Sound like a cop out to me. But we know that the one in whom we believe is able to keep us until that day when he returns - or do we?

Today is World Communion Sunday. Christians all over the world are celebrating Holy Communion on this day. Some are doing it illegally. Some risk persecution or death if the fact that they were in church became known. They believe and are not ashamed of the Gospel.

But they shame us. With all the freedoms we have and all the opportunities we have to proclaim the Gospel that we fail to take. When the conversation around the coffee pot turns to religion, what do we have to say? When friends are sitting around before class talking of their problems, do we offer Christ? When discussions in the supermarket get started, do we proclaim the Gospel?

Perhaps it is not that we are ashamed of the Gospel. Rather we lack an appreciation of why Paul and others are not ashamed even in the face of persecutions. The Gospel is the power of Salvation and abundant life. And that is what people need today. The Good News saw Paul and the early church through their trials, imagine what it can do for people today.

Sometimes it is hard to know how to share the Gospel. But we have the opportunity like no other group at any other time. People will discount you and smirk at you. But when the opportunity presents it self - Do NOT be ashamed of the Gospel. Just remember Paul and Timothy and all those countless Christians throughout the ages and around the world who have suffered persecution because of the Gospel. And know that He who upheld them is able to hold you up!

Psalm 137

Have you ever felt all alone in your troubles? As if nobody knew the trouble that you saw? Did you ever feel like you were in a foreign land where people didn't understand you? No matter how much you wanted them to understand you could not find the voice to express your troubles?

That was the plight of at least one slave that originated this song. But it was also the plight of many others who sang it and passed it on. The enslaved Africans in America were foreigners in a strange land. Forbidden to speak their native language and to practice their native ways. More than their bodies were in chains. Their hearts were enslaved. Without the expressions of their culture they found it hard to give expression to their grief.

But they found a voice. They found a way to express and share their pain; to let it out. The spirituals that grew out of these slave communities are the living legacy of the voice that they found. They express the pain and torment that these children of God went through. But these slaves found more than a cultural expression. They found an answer in the evangelical Christianity they embraced. Through Christ they found that there was a balm in Gilead. They heard of Jesus being mistreated and crucified and said, "I've been there!" They could say "I was there when they stripped him and beat him" because they had been stripped and beaten. They could say "I was there when they nailed him to the tree," because they had seen their brothers and sisters hung from trees. But not only did Jesus know their pain that nobody else knew but Jesus also healed.

Psalm 137 begins, "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our lyres." This psalm was obviously written during that time in Israel's history when the Babylonians carried them off into captivity. They were slaves in a foreign land. While they may not have been treated as badly as the Africans enslaved in the Americas, they were still prisoners. They were separated from the temple, the only place they had ever worshipped God. They were exiled from the promised land where God dwelt, so they wept.

So they hung up their lyres. Separated from Zion their home they could only weep. Separated from temple worship, the only mode of religious expression they knew, they were silent. They, like the African slaves were divorced from their culture and were feeling the pain of captivity.

To add insult to injury their captors ordered them to sing songs. "Pick up your lyre Hebrew. Why don't you sing us one of those songs of Zion." But how could they sing the Lord's song in a foreign land. How could they sing of the greatness of God with no temple. The promised land and the temple in Zion were wonderful things to them. How could they possible sing of their greatness to the very people who had destroyed the temple and conquered their land.

This is where the psalm takes a disturbing twist. Verse 8 says, "O daughter of Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who repay you with what you have done to us!" That verse can be explained away as a simple call for justice but verse 9 is not so easy to explain. "Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!" What!? "Dash children against a rock." Didn't you feel uncomfortable when you read that earlier in the worship service?

Verse 9 is nothing but blind hatred. What other than hatred could bless those who kill innocent children? It's not the children's fault for the crimes of their parents! Why kill them? Yet that is what this psalm calls for. I don't doubt that the Hebrews sang songs like this while in captivity, but what is it doing in our Bible? What in the name of heaven and earth was God thinking when God led the Hebrews to include this psalm of hatred in their book of holy songs.

John Wesley said that there are some psalms that are not fit for Christian lips. I believe this is one of them. Jesus said, "love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." Yet this psalm blesses those who kill the enemies' children. It would be so easy if we could just take this psalm out of our Bibles, but God put it there for a reason.

So why is this psalm of hatred in the Bible? I believe it is there to show us how not to react to trouble. Not everything in the Bible is there as an example to follow. The Bible it full of murder and bigotry and adultery. The Bible is full of stories of those evil things because that is real life. The Bible contains all those evils, interpreted in the light of God, to help us learn who not to act.

I believe this psalm is one of those examples of how not to act. This is real life as ugly as it is. The Babylonians had destroyed their home and way of life. So many of God's chosen nation exploded with hatred. They would have gladly dashed the Babylonian's children upon a stone.

But the Bible also tells us of a way other than this way of hatred. It is the way of love that leads to eternal life. Our prime example of it is Jesus Christ who, even though innocent, was persecuted and killed unjustly as a criminal. When his captors and tormenters mocked him, he did not explode with vile hatred. Do you remember his words upon the cross, "Father forgive them for they do not know what they are doing." Instead of telling his followers to kill the Romans he prayed for their salvation.

We all suffer from injustice in life to one degree or another. We all feel pain and torment. Some people experience it more than others. In those troubled times we have a choice. One option is the way of hatred. The other is the way of love.

When someone hurts you, which way will you choose? Will you choose to explode with anger against your tormenters? Will you nurse thoughts of dashing their children literally or figuratively upon a stone? Will you allow the spiritual cancer of hate to eat you from the inside out?

Or will you choose the way of love? Those who sang the spirituals in slavery chose the way of love. How could they sing the songs of Zion in captivity? They could sing with the help of God. Like them we can find a balm in Gilead to heal the sin sick soul and its name is Jesus.

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Luke 17:5-10

The Gospel can found on my refrigerator door. Amidst the watercolor and crayon art, the schedules and calendars is a small cartoon. It has yellowed with age. It was cut out of a newspaper some time back and placed where it can be seen daily. It shows a small girl on her knees in prayer. Underneath it says, "The greatest power on earth."

Jesus used a picture to say something similar. First he started with the smallest thing he could think of: a mustard seed. Then he said, "With this much faith you could tell a tree to be uprooted and be thrown in the sea and it would." So just a little faith goes a long way. By the way Matthew and Mark record a similar saying where the item moved by a mustard seed sized faith is a mountain.

No matter which version you take, the message is the same. With just a little faith you can do great things. The power of belief is great. It may seem small but if we truly believe we can move mountains.

It's no wonder that Jesus' disciples came to him and said, "Increase our faith." But the point of Jesus' illustration is that the amount of faith you have doesn't matter. If we were to use the analogy of the atom, size would matter. The power released by one little atom is tremendous. And the more atoms that release their energy, the more power. That is the dynamic behind nuclear power and nuclear weapons.

But with faith size doesn't matter. It seems that Jesus' point is not that faith is highly concentrated. But that any faith at all, even a tiny bit like a mustard seed is enough. Enough for what? Enough to move trees or mountains or even human hearts.

Size doesn't matter because God is the one doing the moving. If it were my faith that moved the mountain, then the bigger the mountain the more faith I would need to move it. But faith is like the key that opens the door to God acting in our lives. If I have a bigger key ring than you do, it doesn't matter, because we can both open the door with that one little key. And once we open the door to God, he can move the mountains and trees and even our hearts.

So, what Jesus is saying to his disciples, who asked for their faith to be increased, is that even if we have the smallest amount of faith we can do great things. Just imagine what we could do if we had faith. We could bring the Gospel to all the lost souls of Columbia. We could stop the advance of drugs in our community and schools. We could feed the hungry and clothe the naked. We could bring peace to people lives and hearts.

And if we did all that wouldn't God be proud of us? No! That is where Jesus' parable of the slave comes in. As if anticipating his disciples' pride at what the have accomplished by faith, Jesus puts them in their place. He says if your slave works in the field and then cooks your dinner, that is nothing special. That is what the slave is supposed to do.

In the same way as servants of Christ if we do all these things it is not anything worthy of special merit. If by faith we lead others to Christ and stop drugs and care for the needy and change lives and move mountains, then we have only done what our master told us to do. You don't reward a slave for merely following orders. And after all the accomplishments were not ours, they were God's. If we move mountains by faith all we really did was open the door to God so that he could move the mountain.

Faith is powerful. Whether it is the faith of a child at prayer or a saint being martyred, it can move mountains. Through faith we can move mountains and change lives. Through faith we can bring light to the darkness. Through faith the lost can be found. Through faith we can transform lives and community and spiritual landscapes.

But true faith doesn't lead to pride. Sure, by faith you can do great and good things but true faith recognizes that God is the actual doer of those things. Faith does not say "look at what I did in bringing the gospel to the lost and light to those in darkness." True faith says, "Look what God has done."

Do you have faith? Even a little? Then you can remove mountains of sin and injustice! And when you have moved a mountain or two and "when you have done all that is commanded you, say, 'We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.'"

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