Several years ago, when I was still in seminary, I was having dinner with some friends at their house. Over the course of the evening, the topic shifted to religion, and being the official theological student at the gathering, I became the dart board for some theological darts.
Two of my friends had become disenchanted with religion, and I secretly suspected that they wanted to find a measure of vindication for their own doubts and skepticism. A death in the family had precipitated a crisis of faith for one of my friends, which resulted in the person giving up on church and, presumably to some extent, on God.
How do you harmonize the presence of grievous sickness with God’s love? How can God be who we say God is and still allow suffering to exist? These were some of the questions lobbed my way, and they were good ones. But my friends’ rational and logical minds couldn’t tolerate any ambiguity in answers.
They were, in turn, surprised at my response to their queries. I had done enough clinical pastoral education to know that the least helpful response is to demean the very real anguish of others by attempting to justify or rationalize it. In the end, it can make those who are suffering feel like worthless people of little faith, and it often makes God seem cold and brutish, none of which is true.
So, I decided to respond with an honest answer. Yes, I could have quoted from the Book of Job or waxed eloquently about God’s love expressed through the bestowal of free will. But I opted for a simple and truthful answer. I don’t know, is what I said.
It's true. As much as I could find theological explanations for the existence of evil and suffering, when sitting at the bedside of someone with an incurable disease, those explanations will do little good. The godly response, I hope, is simply to respect their pain by staying with them and remaining silent.
To my surprise, and with a bit of proud vindication on my part, my friends stopped throwing darts at me in the form of theological questions to challenge God’s existence. I think they were humbled by the fact that I admitted my own limitations. I also admitted that I couldn’t adequately explain the mysteries of God. And this was different from their own quest to prove God’s non-existence or validate their own skepticism.
My friends’ vehement theological questions were tantamount to demanding something of me, as a representative of God in their eyes. Make us understand! Or perhaps, in reverse, prove our belief that God does not exist!
My friends’ demand of me was like the apostles’ demand of Jesus: increase our faith! This request for our Lord to add something to their existing faith, or lack thereof, is bossy at best and deceptive at worst. Based on Jesus’s response, it doesn’t seem that the apostles even have faith the size of a mustard seed, so it may very well be that the apostles were defensively covering for what they knew to be lacking on their part.
Unfortunately, the lectionary doesn’t give us the first four verses of chapter seventeen in Luke’s Gospel. In these verses, we see the reason for the apostles’ impertinent demand of Jesus. Jesus has laid out the rigorous expectations of discipleship. Beware, he says, of being the cause for someone else’s stumbling in the faith. It would be better for a millstone to be hung around your neck and for you to be thrown into the sea than to be someone else’s spiritual obstacle. And while you’re at it, you must forgive another person who sins against you seven times a day and asks for repentance as many times.
The apostles are clearly intimidated by these stipulations of discipleship, and so they make their own demand of Jesus: increase our faith! The problem with their request is that faith isn’t a commodity to be doled out. One doesn’t recharge one’s faith battery when it weakens, and God is not the charger. The apostles really don’t seem to understand the nature of faith at all.
It’s easy to mirror the apostles’ response when we feel the weight of discipleship. As we become more aware of our human frailty, and as we feel less equipped for the task of following Jesus, we might be sorely tempted to make demands of God. Increase our faith! The intention is good: we want to follow God. But the response isn’t so good: we want God to do all the work. God has now become the dispenser of favors. We are now in the position of trying to control God. When there’s something we lack, we ask God to give it to us.
The litany of demands we can make is long. If we only had more money, we could do the ministry we are called to do. If we only had more members, more people would want to join our church. If we didn’t have so many other obligations, we could give more time to God. If we weren’t so tired all the time, we could be nicer and more magnanimous to others. If only the Church could give us clearer doctrine, we’d be able to follow Jesus more closely. These are all explicit or implicit demands for God to give us something we don’t think we have. But are all these just excuses for eschewing the responsibilities of being faithful?
The easiest response when things get tough is to give up on God. It’s easier to write God off than it is to admit that we don’t know how to explain some things about God. It’s easier to cling to our anger with God when we’re going through a difficult time than it is to release the anger by searching for where God is in all of it. It’s more comforting to find a religion that will give us all the answers we want rather than assuming personal responsibility for navigating ethical quandaries with grace. It’s easier to blame God for our misfortunes than to trust that even if we can’t see it, God will heal us and help us, somehow, in some way, and especially when we can’t explain it.
But there’s one more problem with treating God as a giant problem solver. Yes, it leads us to manipulate God, and yes, it leads us to manipulate other people to make things easier for us. But it also ignores perhaps the most important thing of all. To demand that God increase our faith assumes that we don’t have enough of what we need to be faithful disciples.
To cry out for God to increase our faith rests on the assumption that there is a dearth of resources, whatever they may be, as we walk the way with Jesus. This was the erroneous assumption of the apostles. Intimidated by the rigorous demands of following Jesus, they incorrectly assumed that he was asking something of them that they couldn’t achieve without needing something more. Jesus, work your magic. Wave your magic wand and give us more faith.
But the truth is that in the kingdom of God, we always have precisely what we need to do what God is asking us to do. The church that cries out to God for more resources to enable ministry can’t see that they might be focusing on the wrong ministry. In God’s kingdom, ministry is shaped and built around the gifts and resources also present. Vision forms from the planted seeds of these gifts from God. The person struggling after a crisis who simply asks for more faith might have unrealistic expectations of herself. Perhaps her faith is witnessed not in overcoming grief but in trusting God in the midst of personal anguish.
Having faith means, above all, truly believing and trusting that God has given us everything we need to complete the work to which he is calling us. Rather than looking around and seeing a scarcity of necessary resources, could we look around and see that something as small as a mustard seed is crucial to life-changing ministry and service? Having faith does not mean we have all the answers. It means that we are willing to be responsible for what God has already bestowed upon us. It means not taking the easy way out.
If I could go back in time to that dinner with friends years ago, I would have added something to my response to their theological questions. I would have told my friends that instead of expecting a foolproof theorem for theological quandaries, they had everything they needed to follow Jesus. God could hold their initial anger and questions, which might be an impetus to deeper relationship with him. Perhaps their questions could be turned into the gift of helping others struggling with doubt. Maybe they weren’t as faithless as they wanted to seem. Because no matter how many questions we may have, no matter how bleak the picture may look, and no matter what we seem to lack, one thing is sure: God has always given us enough.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
October 2, 2022