Crazy Faith

Proper 22C; Luke 17:5-10; St. Paul’s Smithfield, NC 10/2/2016

Jim Melnyk: “Crazy Faith”

Faith is a wild, crazy, and dangerous thing!  Being a people of faith does not necessarily make life easy or comfortable for the people of God.  It never has – and it never will.  We’ve all heard the old saying, “Be careful what you wish for – what you ask for – what you pray for – because you just might get it.”  The disciples say to Jesus, “Increase our faith,” and centuries later we know the results of that demand.  We know that we are here today, in part, because of their demand – and we know just what that request cost the disciples as they lived out their lives as followers of Christ.  Faith is not for the complacent or the comfortable – something people of faith have realized throughout time.

“Increase our faith,” the disciples tell Jesus.  Yet these followers must have some fair measure of faith just to follow Jesus this far – or to even have the guts to make such a request.  Jesus, their friend, is a teacher; preacher; and prophet, and he seems to be on a collision course with both religious leaders and Rome – and well, it has already taken a great deal of faith for them to get this far.  They have faith enough, Jesus tells them – enough to bring about the miraculous – and that faith is a God-given gift.  “It’s not the amount of faith that’s important,” Jesus seems to say.  “Rather, it’s how that faith is perceived by us – and how it is understood and acted upon – that makes the difference.”  It’s our willingness to acknowledge and act upon the faith God gives us that’s important.

So perhaps “increased” faith is nothing more than an increased perception of the faith already within us – and one has to wonder if the disciples really know what they are getting into by making their request. 

The difference between being of “little faith” – that is, being unaware of the faith within us, and being a person of “increased faith” – that is, becoming fully aware of God’s gift to us, is as deep and wide as the Grand Canyon.  It’s the difference between Abram and Sarai playing shuffleboard in a retirement home on the Tigris River, or heading off without maps or a GPS for a land promised to them by God.  It’s the difference between Noah ending up treading water for a long, long, time, or risking the mockery of building an ark miles from the nearest water.  The difference between being a person of “little faith” and being a person of “increased faith” is the difference between Jesus finishing out his life as a country preacher in Galilee and “setting his face toward Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51).

Someone once said that the difference between being a person of “little faith” and a person of “increased faith” is the “difference between cold grits and hot lava.  It’s the difference between being on the rolls of a parish and being the Body of Christ” – carrying out ministry in the world around us – that being a person of “increased faith” is to be a person “possessed by God” (citation lost).  And we’ve got to be a bit crazy to want that for our lives!

In his book, Crazy Christians, Presiding Bishop Michael Curry spends the first chapter talking about the things Jesus dared to preach – the dream of God Jesus dared to proclaim in the midst of a nightmare that is the world.  “What the world calls wretched,’ he writes, “Jesus calls blessed.  ‘Blessed are the poor and the poor in spirit.  Blessed are the merciful, the compassionate.  Blessed are those who hunger and thirst that God’s righteous justice might prevail.  Blessed are you who work for peace… (Matthew 5:3-11). Love your enemies and pray for those that persecute you (Matthew 5:44)’. 

Jesus was crazy,” Bishop Curry concludes, and the bishop even reminds us that at one point in Mark’s Gospel Mary comes to try to take her son home, because people are saying Jesus “has gone out of his mind” (Mark 3:21).

But Curry does more than call Jesus crazy.  “What the Church needs,” Curry writes, “what this world needs, are some crazy Christians who are as crazy as the Lord.  Crazy enough,” he continues, “crazy enough to love like Jesus, to give like Jesus, to forgive like Jesus, to do justice, love mercy, [and] walk humbly with God – like Jesus.  Crazy enough to dare to change the world from the nightmare it often is into something closer to the dream that God dreams for it.”  Because as Brother Geoffrey Tristan also reminds us, “Our calling is nothing less than to become the body of Christ” (Brother, Give Us a Word, 9/27/2016).   Oh, Lord!  Increase our faith!

Being a people of increased faith is a wild, crazy, and dangerous thing. But, as St. Paul reminds us – we have not received a spirit of cowardice or timidity – rather, we have received a spirit of power and love.  On the other hand, remaining a person of little faith is safe – then we feel like we are in control.  We don’t have to worry about God using us, as people of little faith, to turn the world upside right or right-side out.  If we don’t push too hard nobody will push us back.  After all, can you recall anyone, over the past couple of millennia, ever getting stoned to death like Stephen; ever getting crucified and fed to wild dogs like Andrew; ever being burned at the stake like Joan of Arc or Thomas Cranmer, who wrote our first Prayer Book, for being people of little faith?  Even today we can read news stories of people being beaten or gunned down simply because of their faith – and not just Christians alone, but Jewish and Muslim sisters and brothers as well.  “Only people of increased faith have enough Light to make the world want to extinguish it.  Low-wattage faith, [like mine so often is,] has always been tolerated by the world” (citation lost).

           

So our challenge, it seems, is to find the courage to be people of increased faith in a world that doesn’t want such faith to exist.  We are challenged to be risk-taking people in a wild and dangerous world.  Or as Bishop Curry puts it, “Christians who are crazy enough to think [we] can change the world,” because the crazy Christians are the ones who will.  “Sane, sanitized Christianity is killing us.  Comfortable, demure Christianity may have worked once upon a time,” writes Curry, “but it won’t carry the gospel anymore.” 

We need Christians brave enough to stand up to a renewed racism in our nation and the world.  We need Christians willing to stand up against the reality of poverty, where children in our nation – the richest nation in the world – where children go to bed hungry at night.  We need Christians who are crazy enough to stand up against xenophobia – recalling the Biblical imperative to welcome the stranger because our ancestors in faith were once strangers sojourning in Egypt.  We need Christians who are crazy enough to stand against violence of any kind, remembering the words of our Lord and Savior who proclaimed the Good News of God’s love.

But we are not called to such a challenge alone.  We are a people of faith, not individuals of faith.  We are not one or two people, here or there, who pad the parish rolls – we are the Body of Christ, made one through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and the gift of God’s Holy Spirit alive and yearning to be set free within us.  We are also a people of promise – a promise where in and through our baptisms we covenant with God to be God’s people.  What’s more, God has covenanted with us as well.  As we come together in prayer, we are strengthened in our faith.  We hear the scriptures read and become a part of their story, and our faith is strengthened.  Jesus meets us at the table as we receive his body and blood, and the saving presence of God is made real in our lives as we are nourished in this holy sacrament.  The bread and the wine we receive are the outward – the tangible – elements of Christ’s real presence taken within us – part of the great mystery of faith.

Faith is a wild, crazy, and dangerous thing!  Being a people of faith does not necessarily make life easy or comfortable for the people of God.  It never has – and it never will.  We’ve all heard the old saying, “Be careful what you wish for – what you ask for – what you pray for – because you just might get it.”  Perhaps if we are willing to dare, we can become a body of crazy Christians together – “Christians who,” as Bishop Curry tells us, “are crazy enough to catch a glimpse of the crazy, transforming, transfiguring, life-changing vision of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”