A Little to a Lot

John 6:1-15; Luke 12:13-21

A Little to a Lot

A little can be a lot. I find what Jesus did here with this feeding to be quite wonderful.  There’s this great multitude of people out in the middle of nowhere looking for Jesus because of all the healing he was doing throughout Galilee.  The day is coming to an end.  The people need to eat.  So, in a scene reminiscent of the Israelites wondering in the desert Wilderness after God brought them forth from slavery in Egypt, Jesus fed them in a way that would leave no doubt that in Jesus the Lord God of Israel was among them.

The crowd was actually bigger than 5,000.  That was just counting the men.  Many scholars will say add at least one woman and one child per man and estimate that the crowd was over 15,000.  That’s almost the whole city of Owen Sound.  Jesus feed them with five barley loaves and two fish.

I think that possibly the real miracle here was that he got some kid to share his food.  I’ve got two kids and I know how they are with sharing.  It’s a hard lesson for them.  When we go to McDonald’s they both will want fries.  I’d like to save a little money and let them share a small fry because they never eat them all.  But, they each have to have their own and getting them to share food is more of a fight than the two dollars are worth.  This nameless boy shared his food.  And, those loaves and fish were probably his family’s dinner that he was responsible for.  He probably would have gotten in trouble for having given it to Jesus and his disciples had Jesus not feed everybody with it. 

We adults have a problem with sharing as well particularly in our culture with its economy that’s driven by the institutionalized coveting we call private ownership.  We each have to have our own – our own land, houses, cars, stuff.  If everybody has their own, who needs to share. 

Moreover, we like building bigger barns and keeping it all to ourselves.  Whether we want to admit it or not, we are like the rich fool.  Jesus was quick to point out that the rich fool didn’t earn his wealth.  It was the land, the fruitfulness of the land that produced his wealth.  He had little to do with it.  Yet, the fool built himself bigger barns to keep the abundance of the land that he should have shared with everyone who helped to work the fields.  And, then he has the audacity to speak to his soul as if he is God.  In the Bible the soul is the totality of our embodied being that is supposed to be in relationship to God.  This rich fool as if he is a god to himself builds his big barn to hoard the abundance of the land that he has no right to and says to his soul, “Relax.  Eat, drink, and be merry.”  God got him.  That night he died.  God called his life, his soul to account.  What good was his earthly hoarding? 

God himself called the man a fool.  In Greek, the word is aphron, which is the type of fool who is foolish for not living up to his potential.  The potential here is the Kingdom of God value of sharing one’s abundance with those who for whatever reason have need.  This rich fool spent his life in pursuit of comfort and achieved it through wrongful hoarding.  He could have in fairness distributed the excess that the land produced to those who actually worked the land for him and been rich according to Heaven, but he didn’t.  He built a bigger barn and hoarded it and God was not impressed.  To be intentionally redundant, God called him a fool.

In the world today we call this foolishness saving for retirement.  I could rant on about that, but that’s not a funny rant when you are a senior who is on a fixed income that really is not enough.  You give to your church and other causes and the giving comes at a cost.  It’s a sacrifice.  All the while there are those who have amassed substantial to massive fortunes of the “abundance” of the blood, sweat, and tears of the hard work of others.  Yet, they give little to nothing and what they do give really costs them nothing.  There is foolishness in our economic system just look at the bizarre world of the American election.  This foolishness keeps us from living up to our potential of being a truly fair and just society where there is no poverty.  We’ve a whole culture of individuals fixated on the foolish pursuit of someday being able to like God by being able to say to our own souls, “Relax.  Eat, drink, and be merry.”

In King Jesus’ kingdom a little boy’s little bit feeds a lot.  In the kingdom of the world everybody’s pursuit of a lot requires that there be a percentage of people not having even a little.  There is something wrong here.

You may remember the Ethiopian famine back in the 1980’s.  There was a drought and people started to starve.  The harsh truth was that there was enough food being produced in Ethiopia to feed the people, but the people who were growing the food could get more for it by selling it on the world market than dealing locally with it and so people starved because of localized drought.  So it is in the world today.  There is enough food at present to go around.  The reason there are people starving today is greed.

Well, enough of those global economics, what about us?  Fall is here.  The harvest is in.  Hopefully the crops are sold and the bills are paid.  God has been good to us.  We are thankful.  What do we do now?  Build bigger barns?  I doubt that.  I suspect there are probably more than a few farmers in the area wondering if they should go ahead and sell.  Economics for the family farmer are largely not fair.  The big farm operations that deal at the global rather than the local level with their “lot” of what the land produces seem to hover like vultures over the “little” of the family farmer. 

Coming back to Jesus and his feeding of the multitudes, I see the family farmer being a lot like the little boy with five loaves and two fish.  So I’m perplexed and I ponder.  How does the little of the family farmer become the “lot” that feeds the multitudes when multinational farming corporations that deal globally are circling?

Well, I could go all hippie on you and talk about how the family farmer has the potential to keep things local.  If we listen to the economics guru’s who have  a mind to the future of the human species and the planet we live on rather than the bottom line, they tell us that local based economies are the most healthy, fair, just, and sustainable way for us to go forward as a species.  Considering Ethiopia in the 1980’s, they are likely right.  But, it requires a local economy being willing to buy local and that is not an easy and affordable switch for most people to make.  

It is amazing how something as simple and basic to life as food can be so complicated.  But, maybe we Christians shouldn’t give in so easily to the way things are in the world of “Big Corporate Food.”  When we go to the grocery store we have a choice when it comes to produce and usually to meat to buy Ontario.  We just have to read the label.  If it’s not local, then it’s “Big Food” who is making the profit and not an Ontario farmer.  There’s Kingdom of God value in buying honest, local food rather than cheap, mass produced food.  Let us remember and support and be thankful for our local farmers.  What seems to be “a little” in the world of “Big Food” when kept local is a lot.  Amen.

Temple Disposition

Luke 18:9-14

The other night at a potluck in one of our Cooperative sister churches we were discussing the perceptions people have of church.  One woman shared a story of a conversation she overheard between a mother and her child.  That particular church lets a daycare meet there one morning a week in their basement.  This woman happened to be coming in when the parents were picking up their children and as one mother was leaving with her child, the child pointed up the stairs to the sanctuary and said, “What’s up there, Mommy?  Let’s go see.”  The mother immediately responded, “No. You have to pay money to go up there.”

Talk about a misconception!  But it’s a misconception come by honestly.  How many times have we heard, “Churches only want your money?”  Regardless of what we teach about stewardship and giving, because churches pass a collection plate around during worship, it isn’t a stretch to see why some might think that you have to pay to come into the presence of God.

Another common misconception that used to be quite popular is the idea that you have to wear your Sunday best to come into the presence of God.  Whether it’s a suit and tie or a ladies hat, somehow this expectation gave the impression that you needed to clean yourself up, be presentable and a model of good citizenship, in order to come to church.

These misconceptions that you have to pay to come to church or get yourself cleaned up in order to go to church are based on a conditional understanding of God’s love.  Somehow, people have gotten the idea that the church teaches that you must do something before God will accept you: clean up your act, do good works, have faith, be morally upright, make a personal decision to accept Jesus as your Lord and Saviour.  When we look through the history (long past and recent) it isn’t difficult to see how the church has taught and perpetuated these misconceptions.  Through one side of our mouths we say the love and grace of God is free and unconditional (Jesus died for all), but through the other side of our mouths, or perhaps in the disapproving look down our noses, those who are ‘not like us’ somehow don’t qualify as part of the ‘all’ included in the ‘free and unconditional’.

The Pharisee in Jesus’ story has a similar misconception of God’s love and grace.  He believed himself to be righteous: he followed the law, he gave to the poor, he worshiped in the temple, he read and studied his bible. He did everything he was supposed to do and he did it properly and in good order.  We need to understand that this man was a good man.  And we have a lot in common with him.  He was faithful to his wife, he wore his Sunday best to church.  He was an honest businessman and didn’t take advantage of anyone. He didn’t bully others.  He was sincere and honest in his devotion to God and it showed in the way he lived his life.  According to his belief and his conduct, he had absolutely every right to be there in the temple – in the actual presence of God.

So, if he was such a good guy, why did Jesus say that it was the tax collector who went away justified (rightly related to God and others)?  That hardly seems fair, doesn’t it?  If this man wasn’t justified, then how could anyone else be?

The bottom line is that the Pharisee misunderstood the source of his righteousness.  He thought it was about him: what he believed and how he embodied his faith in the world.  Jesus is telling us through this story, that neither what we believe nor what we do makes us acceptable to God.   What justifies is God’s grace, and God’s work of removing sin from his presence.

Let me explain that further.  The Jews rightly believed they were God’s chosen people.  The very fact that God chose them, brought them into existence through Abraham, made an everlasting covenant with them, rescued them from slavery in Egypt, and gave them the law is the evidence that they were already righteous – already accepted by God, already in right relationship with him because God chose them.  The problem wasn’t that they weren’t righteous, because they were. The problem was that they were also sinful. And they couldn’t bring that sin into the presence of God. I realize that’s a hard concept to get our heads around – righteous and simultaneously sinful, but it is the reality of God’s people.

Which brings us to the tax collector in Jesus’ story.  How on earth does a guy like this inherently corrupt tax collector win out over the devoted obedience of the Pharisee?  We might quickly conclude that it was because he was humble, he recognized that he was sinful and in the presence of a holy God. And we might quickly conclude that the moral of the story rests in the benefits of humility before God.  But Jesus never makes it that easy for us.

Your Greek lesson for the day: I think all of our translations say that the tax collector pleaded with God, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”  Many of the characters in the gospels call out and plead for Jesus to have mercy on them:  the ten lepers, the rich man in Hades, Bartimaeus the blind beggar, the man possessed by many demons.  It is a common cry on the lips of the poor, the outcast, the marginalized, the sick, and the diseased.  It is a plea for God’s favour and his benevolence.  But, in the Greek the word for mercy isn’t what this tax collector uses. The word that Jesus has the tax collector use here is the word that implies atonement, pardon for sin, and forgiveness.  It’s the word that is used for the mercy seat in the temple – the actual place where God sits. It’s the word that is used in Hebrews when we are told that Jesus became like us in order to be a merciful and faithful Great High Priest making atonement for the sins of the people (Heb. 2:17).  It is a word that is only associated with God and the work of atonement done by the high priest on behalf of the people. 

Now, I don’t want to give you a whole sermon on the atonement, because that would take a very long time – though we have just passed Yom Kippur…  But I will say this.  Atonement is the fancy theological word that we use to talk about the way God covers over our sin, bears it away, washes it clean, removes it from his presence and unites us to himself.  In the days of the sacrificial system, with which both Pharisee and Tax Collector would have been familiar, the high priest would go through an elaborate ritual of sacrificing a bull and a goat, and taking the blood – which represented the life of the animal passed through death – and sprinkling it around the temple and finally on the lid of the Ark of the Covenant, God’s throne on Earth.  This sprinkling of life that had passed through death cleansed the temple of iniquity, the stain od sin, and finally united God and his people.  There was a second goat, to which the priest would whisper the sins of the people and then the goat would bear them away off into the desert, thus removing them from the people and the presence of God.  This was a ritual that was practiced every year so that the righteous people of God could have their sin removed from them, and so truly know the presence and power of God in their lives.  Jesus death on the cross and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the church on Pentecost fulfilled the atonement (at-one-ment) foreshadowed by these sacrifices.

The tax collector wasn’t asking Jesus to show him favour. He wasn’t asking Jesus to heal him.  He made no promises of repentance, and he gave no indication that he was going to turn his life around.  What he did was plead for Jesus to be atonement for him – to bear his sin away, to remove it from his sight.  He was asking God to be the life that passes through death and Jesus would become just that.  When it comes to anything we think we must do to make ourselves right with God, Jesus has done it all.

This is what the Pharisee missed – his sin.  He was right about his righteousness, but he overlooked his sin. And that misconception, or failure, or oversight, or whatever you want to call it, caused him to set up barriers and lines between people with respect to their relationship with God – lines and barriers that God himself was about to destroy for good through Jesus’ death and resurrection and then the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost.

Winding down, if we to place ourselves into this parable what would be our prayer in the temple? As the parable stands, Jesus offers us two choices:  standing off looking down our noses at those who are different and thanking God we aren’t like them, or desperately pleading for God’s mercy.  But in these post-resurrection, and post-sending-of-the Spirit days, there is a third option.  Friends, the church, the people of God, has been equipped and empowered by the Holy Spirit to be a dwelling place for God on earth.  We are now the temple of God! So, what is our prayer if we are the temple?  It is the prayer of the one who sees the utter brokenness of the tax collector and who reaches out to him with the mercy of Jesus, praying, “Lord make us instruments of your peace, your grace and loving kindness”.  Our disposition is one of humility and compassion, not standing apart or far off but standing together as the temple of Christ, shaped and empowered by his spirit to reach out with compassion and mercy to the broken.

I’ll end this with a joke I heard the other day.  “How many Christians does it take to change a light bulb?”  “None, Jesus already changed the light bulb, we just need to turn it on.” 

**To give credit where credit is due, this was a collaborative effort between my wife Dana and me.** 

Praying...It's What We Do

Luke 18:1-8

It is a startling fact about people like us that if we are diagnosed with a life threatening condition that will end our lives in the next few years and a change in habits would remedy the situation, 80% percent of us will do nothing.  Old habits are hard to break and new habits are hard to develop.  Even when it is a matter of life and death we don’t like to change our habits.  Well, without sounding like a snake-oil salesman I would like to tell you about a change in habit that’s not likely to make you live longer, reduce your stress, or overnight deliver you contentment, but it will help you to be faithful, to endure. 

Faithfulness, Jesus asked his disciples that rhetorical question, “When the Son of Man comes will he find faithfulness on the earth?”  That question comes at the end of a parable in which he was teaching them about their need to pray continually so that they do not lose hope in God and fall away.  Jesus knew that being his faithful disciple in this world that crucifies its hope was going to get tough for them.  It was going to be quite difficult to live faithfully according to the hope of his coming by showing unconditional, forgiving love and steadfast commitment to Christian fellowship.  He likened this task to the hopeless impossibility of a falsely accused widow seeking vindication for her tarnished honour by going to a crooked judge who just likes to see people put to shame.

Praying continually is necessary to having faith and being faithful.  Apart from praying continually Jesus’ disciples would fall into what we translate rather weakly as discouragement or a loss of heart. I’m going to get your Greek lesson out of the way quickly this morning.  The word Jesus uses quite literally means “in evil doing.”  The word is enkakeo (Those who like playing with Spanish homonyms think en caca.) and there are two senses in the way it gets used.  It can be either “to treat badly or evilly” or “to wrongly cease doing something” meaning to quit on people or to leave fellowship.  So, without this habit of continual prayer Jesus’ disciples will fall into the evil of a discouraged heart that leads them away from Christian fellowship or even to turn on it and treat it badly.

For time’s sake, instead of tracing this parable out in depth I’ll just go straight to the point and say that there is a correlation between Jesus’ disciples learning to pray continuously and the continuance of Christian community on earth.  Without this discipline, the habit of continual prayer among the disciples of Jesus, the church perishes.  It is in prayer that the personal faith, hope, and love that are the seeds of Christian community take root and sprout.  In prayer by the working of the Holy Spirit God changes us, transforms us to be in the nature of his children, Christ-like as Jesus is his Son.  As children trust their parents for everything, so prayer makes us look to our Father in heaven and trust him for everything.

So, what is continual prayer?  Well, what goes on in our heads anyway? All of us worry.  We worry instictinctually.  Apart from worry, we usually just let our minds go on in their own little worlds of imaginary conversations around emotions we can’t quite name.  Sometimes we get ideas.  A few of us can actually sit and think and sort things out.  Mostly, we just let our minds get preoccupied with whatever.  Continual prayer is taking control of our thought world with prayer.  Let me give you some examples of continual prayer. 

First, there is finding a specific prayer to pray over and over in those times when we’re just letting our minds graze the green pastures of nattering thoughts.  I like the Lord’s Prayer for this.  “Our Father, who art in heaven hallowed be thy name.  Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven…” and so on.  I pray that prayer and think about what it means quite a lot especially “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.”  If I wake up in the middle of the night, I wait and listen if anyone in particular comes to mind then after that I just keep saying the Lord’s Prayer over and over in my head until I fall asleep.   When I’m out for a run or cooking dinner or working in the yard I pray the Lord’s Prayer over and over.  In fact, if I were laid up in the hospital or lying on my deathbed, praying the Lord’s Prayer over and over would likely be where my mind would be.

We can also make our Prayer Covenant prayer a means of continual prayer. “Lord, grant Bob and me the grace to commit our lives to the lordship of Jesus Christ without reservation and further grant Bob and me the grace to know your strength and guidance today.”  Pray that over and over throughout the day.

A more mission-oriented way of doing continual prayer would be to walk around our neighbourhoods praying for everyone.  Figure out when people are most active and get out there so you can actually see them and hear them.  There’s also actually talking to our neighbours and find out what’s going on in their lives and keep it in mind and pray about it.  If they are worried about something, bear that worry with them through prayer.  If they are okay with it, pray with them.  When we’re out and about we can take notice of the people around us and pray inwardly, “Lord, have mercy on him.”  If we see a young family walking a baby carriage up the street, if you’ve had kids you know what they’re going through, pray for them.

 We can make our homes prayer centers.  Anybody that comes into our homes does not leave without us having first prayed for them.  This is especially so for our children and grandchildren.  If you start a ministry like that, be prepared for in time people will start coming to you.

Some of you might be thinking “that’s what ministers are supposed to do.”  No, it’s what we do.  We pray.  That’s faith.  That’s heaven coming to earth  When people in churches take up this habit, this ministry of continual prayer, churches change because God begins to change the people in them.  If we are to take Jesus seriously in this passage, it is when we, his followers, depart from praying continually that churches become social clubs, or go into survival mode and die. 

So, if Jesus were to return today and come to this church would he find faith?  Would he find us praying?  Let us not forget that our God is not an unjust judge.  Our God deals in resurrection.  Let us not be part of that 80% who do nothing and fall into the evil of disheartenment that destroys Christian fellowship.  Amen.

A Life beyond Happiness

John 6:24-35

Every so often in early March just before the UN’s declared World Happiness Day the much awaited for World Happiness Report is released. The authors of the study send a survey out to 3,000 people in 150 nations. With this study of just a handful of people from each nation in the world they try to determine overall “Subjective Well-Being” in each nation…happiness. The 2016 report ranked Canada the 6th happiest country behind Finland, Norway, Iceland, Switzerland, and Denmark which was happiest. The United States was 13th.

I remember one year in the wake of one of the studies the CBC ran a phone-in show on happiness. They asked Canadians how they would define happiness. What was clear in it all was that Canadians say that happiness just comes about. If you seek it, you’ll be miserable. Happiness involves being part of a healthy community, service to others, self-acceptance, and also thankfulness. Oddly, even the atheist said you had to be thankful. Interestingly, most of the callers included faith in God as crucial to happiness. Some even defined happiness as blessedness. In the end it seems that happiness is a sense of contentment, or satisfaction, or being fulfilled….aaah, life is good.

Well, I mention all this natter about happiness because happiness, or satisfaction, or fulfillment plays a major role in why this crowd of people came seeking Jesus here in our passage from John’s Gospel. The day before they had been seeking Jesus because they wanted to see him do miracles and what happened was that at the end of the day when they were all hungry Jesus fed this crowd of likely 15,000 on two fish and five loaves of bread and they were satisfied. Down south we call it fat, dumb, and happy. The people were so impressed that they wanted to make him king. If Jesus could make their bellies happy, how much more could he do for their common life as a people?

In the wake of that meal, the next day, when our reading picks up, these people came to Jesus seeking happiness. When they found Jesus, he immediately pointed this out saying, “You are not seeking me because you saw signs, but because you ate the bread and were satisfied.” In other words, “You are not looking for me because I fed you all with two fish and five loaves. Rather, I made you happy.” They were not seeking Jesus because they understood that these signs revealed him to be the Messiah, indeed the Son of God. They were seeking him because for a brief moment they were happy and they wanted more.

So Jesus continued to teach them. “Don’t labour for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures into eternal life that the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal.” Jesus hits home here not only with this crowd but also with us. I cannot think of a statement that would be more counter-cultural to our way of life, than what Jesus has just said here. He tells us not to spend our lives on pursuing what we think will make us happy for it is all perishable.

Western culture thrives on the individual pursuit of happiness. The preamble to the Constitution of the U.S. as a historical document sums up in one statement what has been the striving of Western culture since the 1,400’s. It says every human being has an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Many have died and continue to die for these basic values. They are the impetus behind every Western government, our economy, our health care system. The Christian religion has even been co-opted into being about the pursuit and protection of life, liberty, and happiness.

Yet, Jesus says that there is something greater that we should labour after – food that endures unto eternal life. Eternal life does not mean going to heaven when we die as we are accustomed to think. Jesus defines it at John 17:3 where he says precisely this: “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” Eternal life is knowing God through Jesus and there is no true happiness apart from that.

Jesus says that eternal life is found by believing in him. There is only one work we should labour at and that is to believe in him, that is to work at being faithful in him. The preposition “in” is important. The Greek preposition there is used primarily to describe location or place; i.e., in the store. It’s like saying we are playing baseball in the park. To believe “in” Jesus literally means being located in Jesus situated in the new humanity God has brought about in him and sharing in his relationship of Son-ship with the Father in the Holy Spirit. It is by being located in him by being united to him in the Holy Spirit that we believe, that we work at being faithful.

To believe in Jesus means to personally know him and through him know God the Father and his faithfulness and steadfast love for us his children. The Holy Spirit brings this about as a free gift. From this personal knowledge arises trust. Faith as trust is something that we learn and grow in as God day to day, month to month, year to year proves his steadfast love and faithfulness to us.

Finally, faith as personal knowledge and trust in God must become faithfulness. To have faith in Jesus is to live life on his terms. Faithfulness is a community effort to love as he has loved us. Just as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are a communion of mutual love so must we be. We come into relationship with Jesus in a community of believers whom the Holy Spirit has bound together in the love of Christ, a community that worships and prays to the Father together, a community that commits itself to live according to the scriptures, a community that thrives on repentance and accountability in accordance to Scripture. To be truly human is to have faithfulness in Jesus Christ which is living according to his commandment to love with our brothers and sisters in Christ.

Today we gather around the Lord’s Table to share his meal. To eat the Bread of life and drink the cup of the New Covenant sealed in his blood. This act of sharing this meal, of sharing him who gave his life for us to have life is the best image of what it is to believe in Jesus, to work together at being faithful in him him. It is in him that we are faithful. Bound together in the Hoy Spirit sharing him who gave his life for us, we are “in him” being faithful. Let us come to the table. May we eat and be happy. Amen.

A Mustard Seed Faith

Luke 17:1-10

I suspect that just about all of us have found ourselves staring at difficult days ahead and prayed something like “Lord, I believe.  Help my unbelief.”  We’ve needed to trust that things really are in the good and loving hands of a faithful God.  The diagnosis came.  There’s been an accident.  There’s been a death.  It’s 2008 and I just watched my retirement savings go to half what they were a month ago because of greedy bankers.  This year I really am going to have to sell the family farm because I just can’t do it anymore.  Times come when it becomes brutally clear that our lives are not our own, not in our control and as people of faith we need some assurance.

Well, that’s not quite what’s going on here with the disciples and their outright command to Jesus to increase their faith.  What’s happened is that Jesus had led them to the realization that being his disciples and leading his people was not going to be easy.  Faith and being faithful is difficult matter.

In Luke’s Gospel in the few chapters prior to this moment, Jesus has been doing an innuendoed compare and contrast between the demands of true faithfulness in his Kingdom and the false faithfulness demanded by the Pharisees.  To give you a brief recap, within the hearing of the most powerful vein of the religious authorities of the Jewish people, the Pharisees, Jesus has told his disciples that they cannot be slaves to both God and money.  The Pharisees were “money-lovers” and they ridiculed Jesus for saying this.  They were religious authorities who loved the wealth, power, and prestige that they had garnered over God’s people by being the brokers of the people’s relationship to God, the brokers of a “populist religion” (Good morals, good values, good citizens, good nation upholding religion). 

Jesus "called" disciples, people who would be students of his life, proclaiming "The Kingdom of God is at hand.  Live accordingly and be faithful to this God-given Good News."  The Pharisees, on the other hand,  were quite aggressive about making converts to their way of being a faithful Jew.  They proclaimed a powerful message also, a gospel of fear that made converts.  “The Messiah’s coming to establish the Kingdom of God and if you want to be a part of his Kingdom and not have happen to you what he’s going to do to the Romans, the tax collectors, and the sinners, then you had better follow us.  Obey our interpretation of the Law of Moses to the jot and tittle like we do.  Give handsomely to us because we are the experts.  Without our judgements and expertise you are lost sheep doomed to damnation.” 

Ask any TV preacher or any big-church or mega-church preacher, there’s money in “populist religion”, which is religious beliefs that strike a chord with the cultural roots of a people and becomes popular.  It is quite lucrative to tell fearful, anxious people how to get and keep an almighty God on their good side.  It’s also easy to be seduced by the power and prestige that comes along with being a broker of “populist religion”.  The problem is that it causes leaders to mislead people into a religion based in magic and superstition rather than faithfulness.

This is the topic around which we find Jesus in conversation with his disciples in todays’ reading.  Jesus tells his disciples that people will stumble, but woe to those who cause people to stumble as the Pharisees were doing.  The way in Jesus’ Kingdom would not be that of the strict Law observance the Pharisees were demanding.  But rather, in Jesus’ Kingdom it is holding one another accountable to God’s demands of justice, fairness, and above all, unconditional love.  Theirs would be the way of forgiving, which is bearing with and walking with one another in our sins, rather than judging and abandoning one another because of sins. 

In “populist religion” it is very easy to scapegoat and crucify those who challenge your power over people.  But in Jesus’ Kingdom, we have to accept people as persons, as “little ones”, as children of God and in humility serve them (not rule over them) by exercising accountability that leads to repentance and being forgiving, even to those who sin against us personally.  Dress codes and food rules are easy.  Judging and ostracising are easy.  But, Jesus’ way is difficult and necessitates faith, a slow-growing relationship with Jesus through the Holy Spirit in the sphere of reality that the writers of the New Testament called "in him" or "with him" or "in Christ".  

Jesus’ demands we serve others like slaves by bearing with one another in mutual and unconditional love; that we keep one another accountable to a cross-formed way of life, to sacrificial generosity, unbounded compassion, and striving to be wealthy in the ways of the Kingdom of Heaven rather than wealthy on money.  The Lord of all creation demands we be forgiving…and need I say it again…forgiving.  These demands are difficult.  It’s in realization of the enormity of Jesus’ difficult demands of faithfulness rooted in his kind of love that the disciples’ outright order Jesus, “Increase our faith.”

Jesus answered them with a very unusual answer: “If you had faith like a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, “Be uprooted and planted in the sea,” and it would obey you.”  Jesus is not telling them that if they could tap into some sort of power called faith, they could do miraculous things or pray it and really believe you already have what you asked for and God will do it for you. This is the sort of nonsense that you hear from the preachers and teachers of “populist religion”.  This passage says nothing like that. It is a very cryptic allegory telling the disciples that they already have the faith that they need to avoid the traps of the “populist religion” of the Pharisees.   Let me run this through for you.

First, here is this mornings’ Greek lesson.  This is a conditional sentence meaning should the conditions of the “if” be true, the “then” is true.  In Greek there are several different kinds of conditional sentences to clue us in on meanings that don’t easily come across in a simple literal translation.   The way Jesus words the “if” part here in Greek clues us in that the “if” part is indeed true which means that his disciples are indeed able to do what he says in the “then” part.   It should read: “if you had faith like a mustard seed (and it is true that you do), it is a fact that you are able to say to this mulberry tree ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea’ and it will indeed obey you.”  Translators leave ambiguity in the sentence for the obvious reasons that mulberry trees don’t do what we command them to because we have some magic power called faith.

Like I said, this statement is an allegory and this means that the mustard seed and the mulberry tree represent something that we need to know to get what Jesus is saying. A mustard seed is very small, about the size of a celery seed.  It grows into a very robust plant that can grow just about anywhere.  You can plant fields of it and grow it like a crop or you can let one plant grow and it will grow to the size of a large ornamental tree.  Either way, one tiny mustard seed in the end yields a bazillion more mustard seeds.  The mustard seed is representative of Jesus and the Kingdom of God.

With respect to the mulberry tree, there is some debate as to whether it is a mulberry tree or a sycamore fig tree that has leaves that look like mulberry leaves.  If it is a true mulberry tree, it is a poor analogy.  If you’ve had a Mulberry tree you know they are messy.  They are quite prolific in the berry department and the berries are quite messy.  In Jesus day they made a black dye out of the juice because it stains so well.  Birds love the berries also and will flock to a mulberry and gorge themselves and poop black poo everywhere.  It’s just a messy tree. 

It is more likely to be the sycamore fig tree that Luke is referring to here.  Fig trees were very important in Jesus day as a food staple.  Jesus often used the fig tree as a metaphor for Israel as the fruitful people of God.  But, the sycamore fig is a different kind of fig.  Its looks are impressive.  It is much larger than the ornamental size fig tree and has a stronger trunk and branches.  They actually grew this tree for its wood rather than its figs because the figs it produces are of less quality.  They referred to its fruit as moria from which we get our word moron which means foolish.  This tree represents the Pharisees and the foolish fruit of their “populist religion”.  It looks like a big sturdy tree but the fruit it produces is inferior.

The meaning of this little metaphor to his disciples is that they have mustard seed faith.  They have Jesus with them in the power of the Holy Spirit and so they are able to keep the demands of the faith.  Yet, they have to be careful and ever mindful of the temptation to the foolish fruit of the “populist religion” and controlling fear mongering that the Pharisees had succumbed to.  If they do as he commands, if they are faithful, if they love and serve as he has loved and served them, if they practise accountability and forgiveness, then the foolishly fruited tree of “populist religion” will indeed be uprooted from among them and planted in the sea.  The disciples do not need their faith increased.  They just need to live according to the faith they have been given and the kingdom will grow.  Jesus, the mustard seed, in the power of the Holy Spirit will grow in them and through them albeit slowly and according to season.

So it is with us this small congregation of disciples of Jesus out here at a crossroads in the middle of nowhere in Grey County, Ontario.  We do not need a magical zap of faith from which some magical gimmick will bring forth miraculous church growth.  We just need to live according to the faith, the mustard seed of himself, that Jesus has given us and by the power of Holy Spirit a crop of people who live cross-formed, love of God filled lives that look like Jesus rather than the moronic fruit of “populist religion”.

And PS, when those times come when it becomes brutally clear that our lives are not our own, not in our control and as people of faith we need some assurance, have no doubt that Jesus, the Giver of the mustard seed, is with you.  He loves you very much and will see you through.  Amen.