Proper 22C; Luke 17:5-10; St. Paul’s Smithfield, NC
10/6/2019
Jim Melnyk: “It’s Not How Much”
How much faith is enough faith? Not much, according to
Jesus. Not much. “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed,” Jesus tells
his disciples, “it is enough!” Now a mustard seed isn’t exactly the smallest
seed in the world, but it’s pretty small – only about 1-2 millimeters in diameter.
The mustard plant, that can be as troublesome to farmers as weeds, isn’t the
largest plant in the world – it’s more like a bush that can grow up to ten to
twenty feet high. One would do well not to underestimate what a seed as tiny as
a mustard seed can produce.
The Apostles say to Jesus, “Increase our faith,” as if
they don’t already have enough faith to follow, or as if faith is a commodity
that can be added to or taken away from by Jesus. In the end you have to
already have faith in order to consider asking for more – and Jesus tells his
followers that what they have in hand is all that is ever really needed.
Basically he tells them, “You can shake the world with the little amount of
faith you see peeking out from behind the curtain of your soul.”
Have you ever thought about what just a little bit of
faith can do? I first learned about William Kamkwamba from Masitala, Malawi
years ago through our son Jake who was teaching Earth Science at Greene Early
College High School in Snow Hill, NC at the time. Jake was using Kamkwamba’s
story, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind,
to help teach his science students. It’s an amazing story.
It was the year 2002 and a fourteen-year-old youth,
kicked out of school because his parents couldn’t afford eighty dollars in
school fees, was about to change the life of his struggling village. Malawi was
locked in the jaws of a terrible draught. “Consequently,” according to reports,
“thousands of people [had already] died. [William’s] family and others were
surviving on one meal a day. The red soil in his Masitala hometown was parched,
so that his farmer father could not work or produce any income. But amid all
the shortages, one thing was still abundant: wind.”[1]
Though exiled from school William spent his days in the
library. He read about how windmills could be used to harness the wind and
create energy. The teenager thought to himself, “If they can make electricity
out of wind, I can try too.”[2]
Armed with a book, and undeterred by fellow villagers who thought he was either
crazy or bewitched, William scoured local scrapyards for items “including bicycle
parts, plastic pipes, tractor fans, and car batteries. To construct the tower,
he collected wood from blue-gum trees. ‘Everyone laughed at me when I told them
I was building a windmill. They thought I was crazy,’ [the boy] said.”[3]
But God didn’t give William a spirit of cowardice that caused him to give up,
but rather a spirit of power, and love, and discipline. And William persevered![4]
Kamkwamba tells us in his story that the day he was ready
to try out his windmill everyone in the village gathered around in its shadow –
including those who had mocked him for months. He tells us “still they
whispered, even laughed. It was time.”[5]
William climbed his tower, released a bent piece of wire that had held the
windmill’s blades in place, and then watched as the spinning blades picked up
speed. Then to the amazement of everyone in the village except for William, a
tiny light attached to the wires from the windmill began to glow weakly at
first, and then “surged into a magnificent glow.”[6]
In the years immediately following Kamkwamba built four
more windmills – one of them thirty-seven feet tall. There was enough electricity
generated to pump water in his hometown, and people from his village and the
surrounding area would come to charge their cellphones.
William
was only fourteen when he was kicked out of school. But he managed to change
the face of his hometown.
The
apostles say to Jesus, “increase our faith,” and perhaps we’re meant to ask,
“How much faith is enough faith?” William Kamkwamba’s story might answer, “It
doesn’t take much if we open ourselves to its power.” In the end it’s not about
having enough faith – or about getting more. Late theologian Walter Wink says
we shouldn’t be thinking about faith as a quantitative thing. Rather it’s about how open we are to the
faith we already have. It only takes a bit of faith. Faith, Wink tells us, is
qualitative. “Even the slightest amount can be overwhelmingly effective,
because it is not faith in our own faith, but simply faith in God, faith that
God is God, that God is able to act in the world.”[7]
Truth is, the Apostles already have enough faith. They
just need reminding. They are part of the seventy followers of Jesus who had
been sent out to preach the Good News and heal the sick. Luke tells us the
seventy had “returned with joy, saying, ‘Lord, in your name even the demons
submit to us!’”[8]
Who in the world would need an extra shot of faith after an experience like
that? Perhaps they needed a boost because even then Jesus had already set his
face toward Jerusalem and the cross – and that, my friends, is a mighty
daunting and harsh reality.
Like the Apostles in today’s readings, we always have
faith. But sometimes we lock it away
– like we might lock a vintage car in the garage, trying to keep it pristine
and safe. The trouble is, we don’t often take it out of the proverbial garage
for a spin around the block. We don’t want to risk our faith being challenged
by life’s road hazards – obstacles that might cause it damage – or cause us to
doubt.
Or,
as Walter Wink surmises, we actually might be placing our faith in the wrong
things. “We [end up believing or trusting] in money, or power, or seduction. [Or
we simply] trust that things will turn out bad. And our [misplaced] faith becomes…self-fulfilling.”[9]
But, Wink tells us, [if] “we have even an inkling of trust in God and the
brazenness to exercise it, that, says Jesus, will be enough to change the very
face of reality.”[10]
A
windmill made from scrapyard supplies isn’t much to look at. In fact to most of
us living in a world of factory-finished, architect-designed, wonders, it might
even look like junk – like a joke – like someone’s science project gone awry. But
William Kamkwamba could see beyond the brokenness of all the individual parts
and how they could fit together to do something glorious. And that
conglomeration of castoff junk ended up bringing water and light to a village
living on the edge of oblivion.
Likewise, a mustard seed isn’t much to look at.
And, according to many, a mustard shrub isn’t too amazing either. As some would
define it, as “an ordinary, common bush ubiquitous as a weed in Palestine.”[11]
We may not believe it at times, but Jesus tells us we have the faith to “see
beyond [the seed’s] unimpressive exterior,” to see in that seed a harbinger of
the coming kingdom of God. And see within ourselves the seeds that are the very
kingdom coming alive and changing the world.
[1]
Synthesis Commentary, 10/6/2019
[2]
ibid
[3]
ibid
[4] 2 Timothy
1:7
[5]
William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
[6]
ibid
[7]
Walter Wink quoted in Sojourners Online, Preaching
the Word, 10/6/2019
[8]
Luke 10:17
[9]
Wink, Sojourners Online, Preaching the
Word, 10/6/2019
[10]
ibid
[11]
Synthesis Commentary, 10/6/2019
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