What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, October 31, 2010

Reformation Day
Jeremiah 31:31-34 + Psalm 46 + Romans 3:19-28 + John 8:31-36

Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” They answered him, “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone. What do you mean by saying, ‘You will be made free’?” Jesus answered them, “Very truly, I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not have a permanent place in the household; the son has a place there forever. So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.

Freedom. When we hear the word freedom what is it we usually think of? For most of us, it would be safe to assume that freedom means freedom “from” something. Freedom from our parents; freedom from being told what to do; freedom from regulation; freedom from taxation; freedom from an addiction. As Americans we cannot help but understand freedom as political freedom: freedom of speech, freedom to practice our religion, and freedom of the press. In this sense, freedom, we’ve been taught, is our right, and goes with the Enlightenment philosophy that believes these freedoms are endowed to all and make us fully independent beings, free to buy what we want, to spend our time as we want, and to vote as we want. Freedom, it turns out, shapes much of our life as citizens in the public arena of our lives.

So when Christ says to the Jews who believe in him, “If you continue in my word…you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free”, (John 8:31-32) what kind of freedom do we hear Jesus talking about? Do we perhaps believe we have experienced that kind of freedom apart from Christ? Unpacking the context of what Jesus says reveals, however, that he’s not talking about the kind of free expression we may value so highly in our culture.

Jesus is in the heat of a debate with the Jews who believe in him over his claim to be God’s very Son. A festival has just taken place in the midst of Jerusalem called the Festival of Booths, a time that celebrated God’s guidance of the Israelites from slavery into the wilderness exile and into the promised land. This in a way was a festival that celebrated freedom; and into this mix, Jesus begins proclaiming that he himself is now the one who mediates the kind of freeing presence that was experienced on that passage from Egypt to Israel. When he says “If you continue in my word”…that word “continue” means he also says: “If you dwell in…if you abide in…if you set up a tabernacle…in me…you will also abide in the sheltering presence of God.” Jesus himself says that he…is…where the freedom of God dwells. If we dwell there…we will dwell in freedom too, Christ promises.

That sounds like a lovely place to be! Don’t we all want to be there? And it is indeed a freeing place, to rest in Christ whose promises liberate us from so much: freedom from sin, freedom from keeping score with God, freedom from the powers that hold us captive. In some way, shape, or form, we are here this morning because we want to rest in that place called Christ…who is our mediator with the freeing God…we long for a freeing place we can trust in…we long for a Christ who comes to free we who recognize we’re captive and cannot free our own selves.

But this freedom Christ wishes to dwell in with us…does not only free us from that which binds us up. The freedom of Christ who sets up shop right in our very hearts to dwell in freedom…also comes to free us for something. And that is the promise of Christ’s proclamation for us this day…a promise not just to be a refuge in the relaxing of what constrains us, but also to be a Messiah who releases us for the kind of life we have been created for, the kind of life that we cannot be free or apart from …which is a life of relationship…relationship with God, and relationship with others. Life-giving relationships are at the heart of the freedom God gives to us in Christ. We have been freed from self-reliance to a relationship of mutual dependence upon Christ…and it’s into such a wide web of relationships God places us in…today…now…to abide and dwell as ones whom Christ has freed for love. Martin Luther famously wrote in his booklet, “The Freedom of a Christian” that God gifts us in Christ to be “the most free lord of all, and subject to none; [and at the same time]…the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to every one.” While relationships are not necessarily always easy places to be…Christ sends us to them today because they are the source of what gives life, and what gifts us with the sheltering mercy of God who is Christ for us.

I wonder, does Jesus set us free for today? What does Christ declare alive in us that had been dead, that gives us renewed life to share in relationship with others? The grace that comes with Christian freedom does not transport us to some other-worldly place, to some utopia that can never exist. Christian freedom binds us to this world that God loves so much. Christian freedom does not serve us as a wish-dream that pulls wool over our eyes…but rather it serves to open us to see anew that Christ makes a place for us in the world that is real, living and breathing with his new life. Christian freedom is God’s gift to us because God chooses to become incarnate, and dwell with us in wherever we may find ourselves in our lives—and life lived in that freedom can happen anywhere.

On this Reformation Sunday, the “truth that sets us free” is Christ, the Word incarnate, who comes to free us, to purify us and to save us from ourselves. This day started in 1667 in Germany as a celebration of the Lutheran Church in an effort to combat an intense Roman Catholic campaign against the Protestant faith. But as we prayed in our prayer for the day today, we are part of a church in need of continual freeing from itself, in need of renewal, and continued re-formation. It’s not a day to “toot our own horn”, so to speak…but a day for Christ to renew his church, and for him to be re-formed as the head of our lives. Re-formation day belongs to the Christ and Christ alone, who frees us in every age to proclaim the truth that in him there dwells the freedom of both God’s grace and of life-giving relationship with God and others.

Martin Luther struggled greatly to know this Christ-given freedom in his life. He could not let go of the weight of believing in a God who angrily demanded his continual sacrifice to be perfect. No matter how hard he tried, he could not secure his own fate with God. But the freedom that finally opened him up; the freedom that sparked a whole movement in the church; the freedom that overcame his doubts came through Christ who has secured our fate, and who seals our lives with his abiding presence. Today we celebrate the freedom of a living relationship with Christ that does not enslave us to control have to our future, or the future of the church, but a living relationship with Christ that frees us to live free for one another, and the world God loves. Christ again promises us that through him, “if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.” Amen.

What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, October 17th, 2010

Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 29C)
Genesis 32:22-31 • Psalm 121 • 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5 • Luke 18:1-8

The same night he got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had. Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, "Let me go, for the day is breaking." But Jacob said, "I will not let you go, unless you bless me." So he said to him, "What is your name?" And he said, "Jacob." Then the man said, "You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed." Then Jacob asked him, "Please tell me your name." But he said, "Why is it that you ask my name?" And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, "For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved." The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip.

Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. He said, "In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, 'Grant me justice against my opponent.' For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, 'Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.'" And the Lord said, "Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?"

I don’t remember when it happened, but several months ago, a member of our church was talking with me about a previous time when as a young adult he had given up on church. The way he talked about it, it was as if he had given up on God, too. God was nowhere to be found, and why did it make sense to go through the motions at church when the people there were just as messed up as anyone else? But through this faith community, he discovered that God had never been distant… Even though this person had not been completely faithful, God’s faithfulness had never waned one bit. And as he talked, he clearly saw his faith not as an aspect of his life that required his performance or observance, but something that guided and worked through his imperfections. His life now gives witness to God’s faith in him, despite his struggles, rather than his struggles giving witness his own or to the church’s weakness.

Jacob was anything from perfect, for sure! Maybe God chose his family as one of the founding families of Israel so God could show just how much redemption God could bring to us! As someone whose very name means “trickster”, “over-reacher”, “supplanter”, Jacob’s life showed little regard for the sacred responsibility of being a descendant of God’s chosen family of Abraham. From the very time he came out of his womb, he was grabbing at his twin brother’s heel trying to come out of the womb first. As a young man he stole his brother’s right to their father’s blessing—a tremendously sacred honor only given to a firstborn son. He stole it by coming to his blind, aging dad, pretending to be his older brother Esau. And that’s just the beginning…but we get the picture about Jacob.

By the time we reach him in today’s lesson in Genesis, he is trying to secure his own blessing for himself again. Now he’s trying to do things in order to appease God, to keep God away from meddling in his own affairs—to secure his own blessing so he doesn’t need God anymore. So when he finds out his brother Esau is coming to him, his brother who he has stolen so much from, his brother who would be rightly furious with him, Jacob sends him a hoard of gifts: “two hundred female goats, twenty male goats, two hundred ewes, twenty rams, thirty camels and their colts, forty cows and ten bulls, twenty female donkeys and ten male donkeys.” (Gen. 32:14-16) Do you catch just how much work he’s doing to try and make up for his mistakes? Everyone else goes ahead of him to meet Esau, but Jacob spends the night alone, and that’s where we pick up the story with today’s lesson.

And that’s also where God picks up Jacob, and wrestles with him. We don’t necessarily find out that it’s God until later, when Jacob names the place where they wrestle “Peniel”, meaning the “face of God”. But throughout that night, as he knows that his furious brother awaits him, as he waits in the darkness, as alone as he has ever felt in his life—even with all the children and livestock and land he’s accumulated for himself since he left his brother—God finds him to struggle with him. For all Jacob did and had done, God was supposed to have left him alone. But God likes to work through the misfits, mustard seeds and the masqueraders, does God not? God likes to show up at the least expected of times to reveal to us that God’s been more faithful than we had ever thought, does God not? God likes to pick us up and literally shake us sometimes to wake us up to how our lives have been missing the mark, to how God redeems us, does God not?

Now this night of Jacob and God wrestling is but a small, brief literal moment depicting the metaphorical wrestling that God has been doing on Jacob not just over one night, but throughout Jacob’s life. God has been wrestling with Jacob just as much and even more so than Jacob has been struggling to distance himself from God. The God of Jacob is a God of struggle. Anyone who has been the parent of a child whose behavior they have struggled with can say an “Amen” to God’s frustration with Jacob! The God of Jacob has not created the world and let it run its course without bothering to intervene. The God of Jacob was not changeless and absent, or a God who does not grieve Jacob’s deceptive life, or who just waited with crossed arms for him to shape up. God struggled, God agonized, God wrestled with how to intervene in Jacob’s life. God felt Jacob’s fear that night, as he dreaded seeing his estranged brother again. And so God wrestles with him—literally has an all night World Wrestling Federation “Smackdown”, struggling to help Jacob see himself for who he is, struggling with all the forces of pride and greed and self-deceit at work in him. The God who struggles with Jacob, and who struggles with us, wrestles into us God’s forgiveness and spirit of reconciliation. As much as we may struggle with God, God struggles even more with Jacob and with us…in order to reveal the face of God’s mercy…in order to reveal God’s persistent justice, which we see in today’s Gospel lesson…in order to reveal a God who does not give up on us, no matter what.

At the end of his night of struggling, Jacob gets a new name, Israel, which means both “God struggles” and “the one who struggles with God.” A fitting name following the kind of night that God and Jacob have had. Jacob walks away with a limp because of a wounded hip, a reminder of his life’s frailty. But he also receives a blessing that he had not conned, or purchased, or fanagled, but this blessing was given to him by God. And after that kind of night, what would happen in Jacob’s encounter with Esau? Tears. Honest confession. Reconciliation. Hugs. Reuniting. Jacob discovers in the face of Esau the reconciliation that he had found in his divine wrestling partner…he’s so moved by the sight of his brother that he tells him, “for truly to see your face is like seeing the face of God since you have received me with such favor.” (33:10) Jacob met that same face in the face that dared to struggle with him, to show him for who he is but to still bless him nonetheless. It’s that same face that we meet in the face of Christ—the Christ whom God dares to send with us to wrestle with our rejecting of him, the Christ who wrestles new life into us by rising from the dead—it’s as if meeting the risen, forgiving Christ becomes real when we see and receive that forgiveness in the face of our fellow sinners and fellow enemies—just as it did for Jacob, who “saw God” in his brother’s face…just as we can see what a forgiving God looks like in each other’s faces.

So, when we talk about the kind of God we believe in to our neighbors, our co-workers, and our family and friends, we do not have to speak of a God who keeps track of our faults, or who is “somewhere out there.” We can speak of a God of who struggles with us, as much as we struggle in our daily lives. We can speak of a God who dares to put up with us! We can speak of a God who dares to forgive us, even though our track record—like Jacob—speaks more often of missing the mark than of making it.

Jacob’s wrestling in the darkness is not altogether unsimilar to the darkness faced by some thirty-three men who finally “saw the light” this week. For people like Mario Sepulveda, even the darkness of a trapped mine could not keep him from giving this testimony upon his being the second Chilean miner rescued this week: “I was with God and I was with the devil; they fought me but God won. God took me by my best hand, the hand of God, and I held on…I never thought for one minute that god wouldn’t get me out of here.” God puts these same words on our lips today, because we have been lifted out of the depths…we can speak such words because God goes to the depths to wrestle with us, to show us God’s own face of forgiveness, a face where God works out God’s blessing of the world through us. Amen.

What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, October 10th, 2010

Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15c • Psalm 111 • 2 Timothy 2:8-15 • Luke 17:11-19

On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him. Keeping their distance they called out, saying, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!" When he saw them, he said to them, "Go and show yourselves to the priests." And as they went, they were made clean. Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. He prostrated himself at Jesus' feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. Then Jesus asked, "Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?" Then he said to him, "Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well."

Have you ever had that experience of losing something that you literally had been seeing in front of you maybe just five minutes ago? It can happen all the time with things like keys, or the remote control, or a pair of glasses. The experience usually goes something like this: “Gee, I swore I put those glasses here…it’s where I saw them last…where did they go?” Often the best reply to give someone—in addition to, “It’s sitting on your head”, or “It’s right there in front of you”—is “Where did you last see it?”

The lepers in today’s story from Luke are looking for something much deeper, much more vital and much more essential than a pair of sunglasses or car keys. In fact they had not seen this thing for so long, they might not even know when it is they would have last saw this if they were asked.

Lepers in Jesus’ day didn’t necessarily have what we now call Hansen’s disease, but had skin conditions that were ugly, nasty and frankly, gross. Levitical codes kept anyone from getting close to them. When someone approached them they had to yell out “Unclean! Unclean!” for fear that someone would become ritually impure if they even got too close to one of these “untouchables.” The law also kept lepers out of the Temple. They were to be kept out of God’s sight.

What is it these outcasts had lost, and were looking for? What is it they have not found anywhere? They’re wanting someone, anyone, to see them. Truly see them. Someone to see them not as sick, not as altogether worthless, not as altogether undignified—because no one else is able to look much more than a brief moment, which is enough to know they want to look away.

So when this group of lepers sees Jesus coming into town, this man who has a reputation of healer, of bringing the dead to life, they call out to him, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” And unlike other healings of Jesus—where he touches these ritually impure people or invites them to dine at table with him—the only action it takes for him to heal them…is to simply…look at them. What makes Jesus’ looking at them so different than an insulting stare, or a judging look, or curiously analyzing them like a freak-show…is that Jesus sees their sores, their rag clothing, their dirty bodies…but he also sees them as whole people, as dignified people…as children of God…. That’s how Jesus sees us…and that’s how these lepers saw themselves after Jesus saw them—because Jesus’ very eyes were what healed them that day. Eyes, after all, were just what the Good Samaritan needed to heal the beat up man on the side of the road—whom no one else would see. It was also God’s eyes dared to look upon a lowly servant—a young, vulnerable teenage girl named Mary—to bear the very flesh of God’s love for the world. It was the eyes of Jesus that saw the wee little man Zaccheus up in a tree, and that offered him forgiveness and new life.

You may be thinking to yourself, but Pastor Jon, isn’t this passage about the one leper who thanked Jesus? Isn’t this a story supposed to be about our gratitude? Isn’t that what most of the verses in this story are about? It is about our gratitude. But the gospel, however, never starts with us. The tenth leper, the one who returned to give thanks to Jesus, never would have had anything to be thankful for… if it weren’t for Jesus’ eyes. The gospel always begins with God’s merciful love, bringing life from death, going from God to the world, through people like these lepers, and through people like us. And even though it is the tiniest of fragments of this story, it is Jesus taking the time to bring his healing sight to the unseen, to the invisible and the ones blinded from everyone else, which unlocks God’s good news of transforming healing in Christ.

The seeing business is the kind of business that Jesus is in. When he looks at us, he does not look at us with a stern, judging way; he does not look upon us with an evil eye. Jesus sees that we are all lepers—we are all inept, broken, fragile and sinful people. But in seeing our frailty and our pain, and isolation…the eyes of Jesus look upon us with compassion. Rather than doing what everyone else wants to do—which is to look away from what’s painful, look away from death, look away from ugliness—Jesus cuts through those barriers with eyes that have the power to knock down any wall of separation…eyes that drill the love of God straight into our hearts. Jesus can see beyond what others’ can’t see or don’t want to see, to bring the visible face of God to the world.

Luke is very precise in pointing out that the 10^th leper recognizes Jesus healed him not by touch, or smell. This Samaritan “saw that he was healed,” Luke says. (17:15) It’s not just his skin that has been changed. This man’s soul, this man’s very life…has been made new by Jesus. And he can’t see things the same again. When we have been seen for who we are, truthfully—inept, broken and afraid—and yet looked upon graciously by Jesus, we can’t help but have our own sight changed. It’s a kind of sight that does not just rejoice at this gift Jesus gives to us…it’s a sight that recognizes that there is a Giver behind that gift…and it’s God! When Jesus has looked upon us with his sight that restores and gives us new life, suddenly we can see Jesus bringing life through his sight…not just through us…but to the whole world. We recognize the healing wholeness of Christ’s eyes when the marginalized are brought into the light; we recognize the healing wholeness of Christ’s eyes when we look to the future and see an open horizon rather than uncertainty; we see the healing whole ness of Christ’s eyes when we look to ourselves and see a beloved child instead of a failure; we see the healing wholeness of Christ’s eyes when we look to God, and see a loving parent.

Yes, the Samaritan does go to back to Jesus so that he can thank him. But even more than thanking him, I wonder if what he really wanted was to see him—to see and look into the eyes of the one whose eyes had cut through and broken his life wide open. Is that not what we do when we come to worship? We come to see the one who has gifted us so graciously, who has challenged us and sustained us to become more than we ever could have become on our own—to see Jesus in bread and wine, water and Word, in the care given and shared by this community of faith. When Jesus looks at us, we are given a clear vision to see the eyes of Jesus bringing healing to the world. Out in this world God is making visible the love of Christ through eyes like ours—eyes that can constantly look for who is missing, who is invisible, who is in need of the healing eyes of Christ.

With my years of experience working with the homeless, one lesson I have learned from talking to them is about how to respond when asked for money or change. So often they told me, “You know, when you walk by, at least just take a moment to stop and look at me. Acknolwedge I’m here. Acknowledge I’m a human being. Even if all you do is say ‘No, I can’t help you’, when I get looked at in the eye, I at least feel like ‘somebody.’” What would it be like for us to pay attention this coming week to where our gaze tends to wander...at work, on the street, in the classroom. What would it be like to see if we notice our eyes glancing waywards from a person or place that no one else may be noticing. If we take a closer look there, we will see Jesus there, giving sight that gives restored healing…sight we have the power to give…sight Jesus gives first to all of us by looking upon all of us with compassion. This sight of Jesus gives us faith to be made well. Amen.

What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, October 3, 2010

Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4 • Psalm 37:1-9 • 2 Timothy 1:1-14 • Luke 17:5-10

The apostles said to the Lord, "Increase our faith!" The Lord replied, "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." Who among you would say to your slave who has just come in from plowing or tending sheep in the field, 'Come here at once and take your place at the table'? Would you not rather say to him, 'Prepare supper for me, put on your apron and serve me while I eat and drink; later you may eat and drink'? Do you thank the slave for doing what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, 'We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!'"

Got faith? If there were a bumper sticker summary of God’s Word for us today, that could be it: “Got faith?” The theme coming through several of our lessons speaks directly to our life of faith, and the dangers and promises that lie within a life of faith.

For the prophet Habakkuk, when he looked around him, he didn’t see anything at all that prompted faith in him—the pre-exile ruin of the Israelites was at hand, and the Babylonians were making a mess of everything. “How long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen?” he cries to the Lord. (1:2) God’s response comes in the form of a promise—a promise shown in a vision of a different, future time…a time when God will save God’s people…a time that cannot be grasped by any evidence or proof, but only by faith in God’s provision of what God says God will provide. God proclaims to H abakkuk, “the righteous live by their faith” in what God has promised. (2:4)

In Luke’s Gospel, the disciples have just been commanded by Jesus not to be a stumbling block to the weak and to forgive anyone who sins against them seven times and asks for forgiveness seven times. And the disciples respond immediately, “Increase our faith!” (17:5) It’s as if the disciples have been traveling on this journey, following Jesus, learning from him, extending his ministry of proclaiming and healing, and this last command is the straw that has broken them, wondering if they can carry on any more: “Lord, just give us more faith so we can follow you. What you’re asking of us is so challenging…we’re not going to be able to take this much longer!” Jesus’ responds to their exasperation with strange images of mustard seeds and mulberry trees, and a brief parable about a slave.

And it’s here where one of the dimensions of faith comes alive for us today. The disciples themselves show that it is not as though they have no faith—in Greek they’re actually saying something more like, “Add faith to us!” The disciples have faith, it’s just not big enough for them. Jesus tells them faith does not have a size or quantity. Faith the size of a mustard seed—the tiniest of seeds!—is enough. Mustard seed faith can do the impossible—even plant trees in oceans, Jesus says! It’s as if Jesus says that mustard seed faith cannot come from us; it begins with God for it to be faith. So when we may be in the disciples’ shoes of being overwhelmed, and wondering if we have faith any longer—we do not look to ourselves to find faith again. In the hearing of God’s promises, we discover faith—faith in seemingly impossible promises but promises nonetheless God gives us: to love us freely as a gift, and promises to empower us for service to our neighbor and all Creation.

This notion of looking to God as the source and beginning of our faith is illustrated with a beautiful story that is told by a pastor who is talking to a youth group. He asks them, “Do you believe in God?” And they immediately shake their heads, “no”, as if they were describing whether it is raining outside or not. And this pastor was so mad and ticked off. It was as if everything he stood for had been shot down in a brief moment—and several thousand years of passing on the faith was about to stop with the suburban teens who were sitting in front of him. And then he went on, and later he happened to throw out another question: “Have you ever felt God close to you?” And they all immediately raised their hands. Whew! he thought. The youth went on to talk about being close to God while they had been in church services; they had felt God close to them when they noticed a different feel in the air at a loved one’s funeral, something that was bigger than themselves that was holding them throughout that time. It wasn’t that they did not have faith; it was finding a language for how to express it. A God who is near in the midst of pain is indeed the God who God reveals to us on the cross of Christ…it’s a faith that begins in God…God who in coming near to us in Christ grounds our lives in the faithfulness of God.

Jesus’ response to the disciples’ cry for additional faith to follow him reveals another of the dangers of faith: it can become a crutch rather than something that truly comes alive when we take a risk. Faith does have power to allow God to work in us as recipients of God’s sustaining Spirit. In Jesus’ day, masters would never address or give their servants any extra praise for doing what was plainly expected of them. Jesus tells the disciples that they are not worthy of special praise for taking the acts of faith that following Christ involves. Often times, we Lutherans can fall into this trap of believing we need to get our theology and our articulation of our belief correct in our heads before we will put our faith into action. Faith can start with the head, but it also starts with the heart—and forgiving someone, taking time to listen to a person in need, daring to speak out for justice, or any other act of faith can inform and shape our faith in a profound way that would not be possible without taking that risk. Sometimes, faith comes by acting ourselves into a new way of believing—rather than endlessly trying to convince ourselves of something that is altogether right for us to do but which we never actually step out and risk doing. Jesus warns us today that faith gives us peace from God, but not security; faith brings us a connection to God who is larger than our lives, but does not give us a free pass from life’s most ordinary challenges; faith can accompany us anywhere we go, but will not automatically erase our doubts, our illnesses, or our economic hardships. Jesus-faith is a bold faith, both present to us but also awaiting to be discovered in even the most simple but profound acts of mustard seed faith—a discovery that can start when we put one foot in front of the other.

The risks of faith awaiting discovery become possible because faith, by it’s very nature, trusts in what is not seen, as Habakkuk testifies. God’s response to Habakkuk’s lament of the destruction of Israel comes not with an immediately visible change of the situation, it comes with a vision—and that’s a profoundly important dimension of faith: trust gives way not to sight, but vision. God promises Habakkuk that the eyes of faith see will see a vision of God’s mercy, as God says, “there is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay.” (2:3) In this way a faith-driven life differs from a success-driven life, or a bottom-line driven life. Faith in God cannot always see what God is up to in our lives; but faith trusts that just because we don’t see God, God still is up to bringing us from death to new life. Faith can trust that lives oriented towards God don’t usually go from point A to point B to point C in a straight line. Lives of faith take a meandering way, a way that rests in the hands of God, a way that has many unexpected bumps and turns, a way where confusion at what we see around us does not keep God from giving us a vision for our future. A life of faith, rather than resting entirely on our shoulders, rests on God’s promised faithfulness to us.

Faith brings us together and forms us as God’s people. How will we as the church testify to the treasure of faith that’s discovered and shared in this community? We can…by living out faith as our way of life. It’s a life that begins in God, who works in us, to direct our whole lives—not just Sundays, but also Mondays through Saturdays—into lives covered with God’s gift of new life in Christ. That risking, mustard seed faith that grants us a vision beyond what we see shapes our lives into ones that become channels—channels who pour out the gifts of God’s grace to the world.

When Martin Luther was asked what he would do if he learned he had one day left to live, he is famously known for saying he would plant a tree. Such mustard seed faith is more than enough faith for God to grant us to trust God’s promises; such mustard seed faith is enough to risk bringing a gift of healing to the world in the face of death; such mustard seed faith is enough to envision a God at work in more ways than we can imagine.

Got faith? For a mustard seed being all the faith that’s sufficient for us to give life to the world, let all God’s people say, Amen.