Increase our Faith!

This week I have been thinking about faith. Like the disciples, our prayer is often “increase our faith!”

But these same disciples had left their workplace and home to follow Jesus, how much faith do they want! The picture we have of the disciples from the gospels shows us they didn’t always understand what Jesus was talking about, they were often confused by his actions, but they still followed.

“Faith is not believing that certain claims or statements about God are true. Genuine faith presumes a relationship with God. It implies a radical trust in God, faithfulness in one’s relationship with God, and a way of seeing the world as life-giving and nourishing rather than as hostile and threatening. “ [i]

Faith allows us to join Habakkuk in saying: For crying out loud, LORD! – What is going on in the world, or why is my life such a mess.

Faith is waiting for God, listening for God.

Faith is trusting that what God says will come true, even if not in my lifetime.

Without faith in God, we wouldn’t be so open and honest with God about how we feel,
about how we feel about injustice in the world,
about we feel about the pain in our lives
about how we feel about evil.

Faith isn’t a magic wand that we wave and everything is suddenly OK.

Faith is trusting that God is present when things are going against us, when we are in pain, when we are confused.

Sometimes we think about the so called giants of faith, the people who seem to have been given a double dose of faith.  Faith “is simply and humbly doing what needs to be done, big or small, great or mundane, just because it needs doing.” [ii] Faith is simply the willingness to do what needs to be done, to respond to the call of the Spirit in our lives. It isn’t a commodity to be hoarded, it isn’t a scarce resource.[iii]

The rest of the Luke reading is a story about a slave and master, this is an image that might not resonate with us.

But if I said, you go to work for 8 hours a day, you come home and do some housework, look after children etc. That is life. You don’t get a medal for doing your job. Same deal with being a disciple, offering hope and love and grace, living in faith, that is what a disciple of Jesus Christ does, so what do you expect, a Parade! 

I wonder what it really means when we pray Lord, increase our faith.

What is it we are looking for?
- a bigger God?
- courage?
- recognition?
- a way out?

Biblical Scholar Tom Wright comments that this is not so much about having a big enough faith in God, but faith in a big enough God.[iv]

There is a wonderful story, “Mister God this is Anna”. One story Anna tells her friend is why she won’t go to Sunday school anymore. She has sensed that the Sunday School teacher tries to make God small, because Sunday School teacher is scared of God.

Are there ways in which we try and make God smaller, easier to understand?

In the letter to Timothy we read:  “God’s Spirit doesn’t make cowards out of us. The Spirit gives us power, love, and self-control.”

Maybe rather than praying for more faith, we need to recognise the faith we have, and live out that faith.

That doesn’t mean doing something major and heroic.
It means being honest with God and ourselves.

In response to the request for more faith, Jesus tells the disciples that faith the size of a mustard seed – which is small - is enough to uproot a tree and plant it in the sea. This isn’t literal, I mean why would you uproot a tree and plant it in the sea except to show off, and faith isn’t about showing off.

I think Jesus is saying that we have enough faith, enough faith to live as the people of God.

Faith is an action, it isn’t being able to recite the Ten Commandments or knowing the Apostles Creed of by heart.

Faith is not measured in the quantity that we hold for ourselves, faith is not something that we can store away for a rainy day. Faith, enough faith, is when we act.

Faith is living out the love, the forgiveness and the mercy that God shows us. Faith is trusting that God is God. And that will show up in a myriad of ways in our lives.

I encourage you to think about when you acted in faith this week.

- have you listened when someone needed to talk?
- have you volunteered at a local charity
- have you written a thank you note to someone who has done a kindness
- have you cooked dinner
- have you prayed for a neighbour who is having a hard time.
- have you spoken a word of encouragement to someone who needed it

None of these is any big deal, and yet it is just these kinds of acts that occupy so much of our lives. They are acts of faith.[v]

And faith means sharing in bread and juice and allowing that something happens when we eat this bread and drink from this cup. Not something magical, but something significant.
Somehow we grow close to God, somehow we connect on a different level with God and each other and Christians around the world.

---

[i] Br. David Vryhof Society of Saint John the Evangelist email 1/10/2106

[ii] In The Meantime , David Lose

[iii] In The Meantime , David Lose

[iv] Spill the Beans

[v] In The Meantime , David Lose