Sermon 2 Timothy 1-5-10
I was speaking with a Minister last week. We were talking about the challenges of finishing school and trying to balance the work with other commitments. She told me a story about how challenging it was to nurture the little faith she had while still in school. She had just given a sermon and the teacher was providing some feedback to her. He said to her, “if you were a little taller, you would offer a better presence to the class”. Whatever else, he might have offered in the way of constructive feedback was totally undermined by this small-minded comment. Instead of giving her a little encouragement, he humiliated her. She was indeed a physically little person- 5 feet tall, that’s 60 inches or 152.4 centimetres. She heard the message that she was too little to preach the Gospel. It was like a sudden punch to the stomach. She was devastated by this “helpful comment”; her height was not something she could change. She struggled with self-confidence for sometime after this. It was the type of experience that tempts one to ask the question, “Am I capable enough?
In the Gospel, the apostles are asking themselves the same question.
So they say to Jesus, “Lord, Increase our faith!” They are worried that they have too little. They are worried that they have too little faith to live the Gospel in a world that is going to resist the message. They are worried that they have too little faith to encourage their community to live the Gospel in a world that is ignoring them or telling them they are too poor, too uneducated, too powerless, to little of a presence in the land for anyone to care about their predicament. In every world it seems the little person is unseen, and the little voice unheard by those who insist on measuring priorities with only yardsticks of self-concern. The apostles doubt they have enough faith. They see Jesus as the one with all the faith. He is the one who can give them more.
Jesus listens to their plea like a wise teacher and then without much bravado, tells them a little story about a mustard seed. And like a good teacher, he makes them think about the right question to ask. And the question he ask them to consider is: How much faith do you think it takes? Is 1 percent enough, is 50 percent, is 99 percent of faith going to be enough for the situation. The apostles think faith can be measured quantitatively; there is a ruler one can use or invent to measure it. They think that if they can measure it in inches or centimetres or in the number of healing miracles performed successfully, or dollars they collect for the church, then they would also have a way to increase it.
Jesus says, consider your faith from a different angle. Consider what it means to live with the little faith you have. It is not a question about how much is enough, it’s a question about how little is necessary to start to build a life with God. You see, Jesus is trying to teach his disciples what my minister friend did not learn from her teacher but had to discover on her own: the littleness of faith is a blessing of grace from God. So, never mind what the world is telling you, and as Paul says to Timothy in the epistle reading, persevere in the faith with courage, God is working in it, in ways no one else can see.
On the inner Hebrides Islands, off the southwest tip of Mull in some of the remotest country in Scotland is Iona. It is just a “little coma of land”, as one writer describes the littleness of the place. It is also the ancient center of Celtic Christianity in Scotland established as a Monastery and religious community in 563 AD, over 700 years ago by a small group of 12 Benedictine monks. They had a dream to form a faith community that worships God, creator, Jesus and Holy Spirit and make this faith the center of their lives. For many reasons, it was abandoned in the middle of the 16th century. The monks left and the stone walls of the monastery were all that physically remained. But the spirit of God remained buried deep and silent in the fallow ground of the place waiting to be nurtured by a little faith.
A little faith met Spirit almost 400 years later. In 1935, during the Great Depression, George MacLeod, a minister of the Church of Scotland working in Glasgow, had a parish in Govan, one of the poorest districts. Thousands of families were suffering, and it seemed the social order of the day did not care. They were too little, it seemed to matter much. He had a vision to use the little faith that was left in his parish by rebuilding Iona.
In 1938, MacLeod arrived at Iona with a band of 12 craftsmen without jobs. They built a small wooden shed in which to live and began rebuilding the monastery. Materials were hard to obtain: The war was on and the government commandeered all timber. But a ship coming from Canada struck a storm and jettisoned its cargo of lumber in the North Sea. The timber floated 80 miles, finally landed on Mull, opposite Iona - and all the right length! It roofs the Iona library today.
As this little band worked, something happened, almost imperceptibly at first, they began to believe, and they began to pray together. Eventually, from the small beginning, out of the poverty and littleness of their faith, they formed a way of life for living and worshipping at Iona that has inspired the faith of hundreds of thousands of people around the world.
It is now almost 60 years since the first tiny group arrived at Iona. Thousands visit the abbey each year. Yet, the Iona Community remains humble, tiny as a mustard seed, you might say. It continues to grow out of its littleness, through the reading of Scripture, community prayer and worship, and common work in the Spirit.
I think maybe Jesus was telling the apostles when he told the parable about the mustard seed, that God’s love is at work in our littleness. A little faith is a blessing. Act in the littleness of faith and we won’t be immobilized in the largeness of our doubt.
Even the slightest amount of faith, whatever slight means, can be enough, because it is not faith in our own faith, but faith in God that matters. Jesus says don’t try to quantify your faith, you will discourage yourself. God not only wants, but loves our littleness so persist in this spirit. Our little faith blossoms in God’s spirit. The grace of God is working in the smallness of our faith. God grows in our littleness. Amen.