Ordinary daily practices for the long haul

Sermon by Jamie Howison on Lamentations 3:19-26 and Luke 17:5-

Before I reflect on this reading from the Gospel according to Luke—a reading that makes Jesus sound like a rather uncompromising and somewhat grumpy sort of character—I do need to say just a few things about our reading from Lamentations. Often called the Lamentations of Jeremiah, this book is a five chapter, all but unrelenting lament for the brokenness of Jerusalem in the days following its defeat and destruction by the Babylonians. It is at points something of a horror show, as Jeremiah describes almost unutterable loss and degradation in that city, yet right in the middle it breaks and offers these extraordinary words:

The thought of my affliction and my homelessness
is wormwood and gall!
My soul continually thinks of it
and is bowed down within me.
But this I call to mind,
and therefore I have hope:
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.

There is an insistence in Lamentations that the whole truth of loss and brokenness be told, and that it be held before God in a kind of prayer, and then there is this moment in the middle in which “the steadfast love of the Lord” is proclaimed, and proclaimed against all odds. It is a kind of lesson for all of us when things go badly wrong, and when we have to face our own part in the creation of a bit of a personal disaster. Don’t back away from the hard truth, Jeremiah says. Say it all; shout it to the very throne of heaven. There is no shame in utter lament, he’s telling us… and in the very midst of it all, dare to affirm that God’s love is steadfast, God’s mercies are ever present even if we can’t see them right now, God faithfulness is great. Dare to say such things, even in the darkest hours of a hard, hard night, whether or not you can entirely believe them. Trust Jeremiah’s words here—poor, cranky, beleaguered, and fitfully faithful Jeremiah. Because under our God, sometimes nothing more than a full voiced lament and a stubborn faith will do.

Now, on to the Gospel. “[W]hen you have done all that you were ordered to do,” Jesus tells the disciples, “say, ‘We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!’” Nothing like a bit of battering ourselves on the head to make for good followers of Jesus… or is that actually what’s at stake?

Let me contrast this for a moment with another story from earlier in Luke’s gospel; one that we dealt with just a while back. Whereas today’s Gospel readings says, that a master would never—never—welcome the hard-working slave to take a place at the table, but rather would make him serve the master a meal before being able to feed himself, the story from the 12th chapter of Luke he says, “Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them.” You hear the contrast, of course. In the earlier little parable, the master is so delighted by the work of the slaves that he sits them down and serves them a meal, while in this later parable the master is portrayed as more or less scoffing at such a violation of the customs of a master/servant dynamic.

In short, Jesus seems to be working both sides of the street here as he tries to hammer truth into the hard heads of the disciples. And maybe he is working both sides of the street, because his point is not to give to them a book of master/slave etiquette, but rather to spin their heads around so that they get faced in the right direction. In the case of this parable this evening, you need to back up a few verses and read part of what the lectionary skipped us past to get a sense of what he’s doing. Once you have at least a taste of the context, this harder teaching tonight begins to make a good deal more sense.

So, in the verses prior to where the disciples say, “Increase our faith!”, Jesus has been pressing them on matters of sin and forgiveness. He begins by saying, “If another disciple sins, you must rebuke the offender, and if there is repentance, you must forgive.” This is a kind of protocol for life in an actual community, in that it means that if I do something that offends or is otherwise destructively “off the mark”—and “off the mark” is the literal meaning of the Greek work hamartia, which we translate into English as “sin”—then it is incumbent on you to tune me up. In a community you can’t just let things simmer on a low boil or—and this is worse—go talk to some third person about how offended you were by something I’ve said or done. No. Jesus would tell you to come and talk to me and let me know that what I’ve done or said is hurtful or offensive of whatever. That’s the kind of oil that will keep the gears of a community from seizing up.

And then he continues, “And if the same person sins against you seven times a day, and turns back to you seven times and says, “I repent”, you must forgive,” which ramps up his teaching to a whole other level, right? All you can control is your decision to forgive… again and again and again. I might repent, apologize, promise to do better, but then do exactly the same offensive thing again that same day. I might even have been completely sincere in my apology, but I just keep stumbling. Seven times in a day, Jesus says, which puts it on the same sort of extraordinary playing field as his famous response to Peter that he must forgive seventy time seven times, which essentially means endlessly.

Well the poor old disciples are hearing this call to both be prepared to be honest about their own failings—their own missing of the mark—and to keep forgiving and forgiving and forgiving, and it all just leaves their heads spinning, which is where our Gospel for today picks up: “The apostles said to the Lord, ‘Increase our faith!’”

Increase our faith, they say, because the sort of economy of honesty and forgiveness that you’re setting before us is way more than we can handle. Increase our faith so that we have a fighting chance of being the sort of disciples you’re wanting us to be. Increase our faith because we simply can’t do this on our own.

And now he says, “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,” which might be heard as a call to them to build up their faith, but that’s not the only way to read the text. This is how N.T. Wright reads things:

Perhaps not surprisingly, the disciples realize that all this will require more faith than they think they have. Jesus is quick to respond. It’s not great faith you need; it is faith in a great God.

And then comes this challenging little parable with the hard-working slave who has to wait until the master has eaten and drunk before he can quench his thirst and fill his empty stomach. And then once the master has eaten—once you have done all you were ordered to do—the only thing you have left to say is, “We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!” Or, in the somewhat more nuanced translation Bishop Wright offers, “We’re just ordinary slaves. All we’ve done is what we had to do.”

Yet keep firmly in view that Jesus is not setting out protocols for master/slave relationships here, but rather is pressing his followers toward being real Kingdom people. I’d even go so far as to say that ultimately Jesus’ life and message is one that has no room left for such an institution as slavery, yet he’s never shy of using unusual characters and scenarios to press his followers forward.

And here I believe that the biblical scholar Greg Carey is absolutely on the right track when he offers the following:

Some seek a mystical experience, a faith that works like a drug and helps us get through life’s ordinary challenges. Some aspire to faith as an antidote to struggle. With enough faith, the televangelists tell us, we can conquer doubt, illness, even economic hardship.

You know those versions of faith, I’m sure; versions that have us always as victorious overcomers, who only stumble when our faith gives way to doubt. But frankly, that’s not the way the world necessarily works nor is it the way that God works. You know, I’m sure, of people who have prayed faithfully and earnestly for a healing or some other miraculous response, but seem to come up empty. Goodness, even St Paul had to face that moment when his relentless prayer for relief from his “thorn in the flesh” was answered only by this: “God said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.”

And so Greg Carey continues in his reflections on this passage,

In this light, mustard seed faith and modest discipleship may be just what we need. By God’s grace, discipleship requires not unshakable confidence or spectacular accomplishments. Luke’s Jesus indeed makes extraordinary demands of his disciples, yet sometimes discipleship requires ordinary and daily practices of fidelity and service.

“Sometimes discipleship requires ordinary and daily practices of fidelity and service,” and isn’t that just so? I’d even go so far as to say that often discipleship requires ordinary and daily practices of faithfulness and service, or what Eugene Peterson famously called “a long obedience in the same direction.”

I believe that this is precisely what Jesus wanted to knock into the thick skulls of his disciples, and what they would ultimately “get” when they stood in the light of his resurrection and under the power of the Holy Spirit and began to actually become his people, his church. On their way to that place, he sometimes just had to rattle their cages, which is where this tough little parable comes in. And sometimes our cages need to be rattled in much the same way, which is why we can’t skip by the uncomfortable bits of the gospels, but rather keep reading our way through the whole of this odd yet ultimately liberating set of stories, again and again and again.