SERVANTS ENTRANCE

A Sermon for The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
October 7, 2007
by Pastor Laura Gentry

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!’”(NRSV)

Grace and Peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Rabbi Harold Kushner tells a wonderful story about a bright young man, who was a sophomore Stanford pre-med student. To reward him for having done so well in school, his parents gave him a trip to the Far East for the summer vacation before the start of his junior year. While there, he met a guru who said to him, “Don't you see how you are poisoning your soul with this success oriented way of life? Your idea of happiness is to stay up all night studying for an exam so you can get a better grade than your best friend. Your idea of a good marriage is not to find the woman who will make you whole, but to win the girl that everyone else wants. That's not how people are supposed to live. Give it up; come join us in an atmosphere where we all share and love each other.” The young man worked so hard to get into Stanford, but had become so competitive and had lost his integrity in the process. He was ripe for this sort of approach. He called his parents from Tokyo and told them he would not be coming home. He was dropping out of school to live in a monastery, called an ashram.

Six months later, his parents got a letter from him: “Dear Mom and Dad, I know you weren't happy with the decision I made last summer, but I want to tell you how happy it has made me. For the first time in my life, I am at peace. Here there is no competing, no hustling, no trying to get ahead of anyone else. Here we are all equal, and we all share. This way of life is so much in harmony with the inner essence of my soul that in only six months I've become the number two disciple in the entire ashram, and I think I can be number one by June!”

They say that all good humor must have one crucial element: Truth. Indeed, this story rings true. The young man's intentions were noble but he was not able to follow through. Before long he was competing in the monastery to be the star pupil!

This is the same mistake Jesus’ disciples make in today’s Gospel lesson. They say to him, “Increase our Faith!” as if they think a person can have more or less faith. Why didn’t they think they had enough faith? A few verses early, Jesus sent them out with power over demons and diseases. They preached with boldness. They went around without any supplies of their own. They had the faith to trust God for all their necessities. They had the faith to heal the sick and cast out demons. They had the faith to proclaim the coming Kingdom of God. Yet, now, like the young man in the ashram, they think they need more faith.

And yet their plea demonstrates that they recognize that faith is not just a matter of their own strength. They cannot increase their own faith without God’s help. We Lutherans affirm what Saint Paul wrote, that we are saved by grace through faith and that it is not our own doing (Eph 2:8). But even the faith through which we receive God’s gift of grace is a gift. I think that our growth in faith is usually a movement from faith to faith (rather than from unbelief to faith). While the faith you have today is similar to the faith given at baptism, it is also different—as God’s word has watered it, it has grown firm and steadfast.

Still, faith is not a commodity, like wealth, that a person can accumulate. So Jesus sets out to explain more about faith to his disciples. He says, “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.” Scholars interpret the tense used in the original Greek here to mean that they already have the faith of a mustard seed—it is not an “if only you had the faith of a mustard seed,” but more of an affirmation that they presently do have the kind of faith that can move mulberry trees! All they need to do is believe and act on their existing faith and they can do as they’ve been called: to rebuke, repent and forgive within the community, and it will happen. In essence, Jesus seems to be saying that God doesn’t need to give them any more faith—all they must do is make use of the faith that they already have. A mustard seed is all it takes

But I haven’t moved any mulberry trees or mountains lately, have you? Does that mean that we don’t even the faith that’s as tiny as a mustard seed? No, but what this passage makes us recognize, then, is that we need to lean on our faith more, to trust it more. The gift of faith is already ours, the question is, will we use it? I remember a little prayer I read years ago, related to this text. It goes something like: “O God, I don't pray for enough faith to move mountains. I can get enough dynamite and bulldozers to do that. What I need and ask for is enough faith to move me.” Perhaps simply trusting God is more miraculous than supernatural acts like flying trees and moving mountains. “What I need and ask for is enough faith to move me.”

Then Jesus goes on to tell his disciples what they ought to do with this gift of mustard seed faith: there is much work to be done. And regardless of how much the disciples do, they cannot do more than what is expected of them. That’s a tall order, but then again, they’ve been given the miracle of faith. So Jesus tells a parable about a slave. It is interesting that this parable presents an opposite picture of the master and slaves given early in Luke (12:37) when the master returns home to find the slaves waiting for him so he has them sit down to eat and he serves them. In today’s parable, he says that the master would not say to the slave “Come here at once and take your place at the table,” but would instead have the slave get to work—for that is his job.

Jesus asks the disciples if they, as masters, would thank a slave for doing his job. The word “thank” here, can also be translated as “credit,” implying that the slave cannot earn special credits for doing only what was required of him. Do we expect to earn credits with God or gain God's favor simply by doing what God has asked us to do? The point is that we cannot. We cannot win God’s favor by doing good things any more than a slave could earn the master’s favor by obeying his orders.

You see, if the apostles get the increased faith they want so that they can do what is expected of them: stand up to temptations and not be the cause of temptations, rebuke and forgive those who have sinned against them, and repent of their own sins—they still haven’t done anything extraordinary, only what is expected of them. Therefore, they should not expect any special favors from God for being such a great Christian.

Have you ever given a nice gift to someone and then not received a thank you note? Perhaps you mailed the gift and without a thank you note, you don’t even know if the person received it or not. It can be very upsetting. In our culture, we kind of expect thank yous. But we cannot treat God the same way. Do we somehow think God owes us a thank you because we go to church and perhaps we even read the bible on our own time and pray and try to behave like a Christian most of the time? Do we think we’ve done something above and beyond the call of duty that deserves special recognition? Well, this parable puts a damper on that kind of thinking.

What this story reminds us, is that doesn’t God owe us anything for living good, Christian, lives. God’s favor and blessing are matters of grace—they are gifts and cannot be earned. God loves us because he chooses to love us, not because we are lovable. Therefore, when we assume that we can deal with God on the basis of what God owes us, we have made a basic mistake. If that’s the case, we have rejected grace as the basis of our relationship to God and based that relationship on our own worth and merit. We must be humble enough to remember that we are saved by grace, not by works.

Nevertheless, there is a lot of work to be done. I remember that in the church where I was youth director in Montana, there were signs over the exits that said in big, bold letters, “Servant’s Entrance.” People would comment from time to time about the signs, asking, “These are the exits, so why does it say ‘servant’s entrance’?” The pastor would explain, “Because when you leave the house of worship, you are entering the world where you are called to be servants.” Passing through those servant’s entrance doors often helped me put things into perspective as I left worship. We are not here to get puffed up and think about how wonderful and religious we are and how much God owes us for that. We are here to have our faith increased, so that we can be more equipped to do the duties to which we have been called, for example: coming to worship regularly, sharing our time and talents with this congregation and with our community, sacrificing our own pleasures for the sake of those in need, proclaiming the gospel of God’s love in all that we do, seeking to follow in Christ’s footsteps. Now these duties may sound like a lot, but truly, it is the least we can do considering how much God has freely given us.

You may be saying that you are not equipped to do such difficult things for God. That’s just what the disciples were saying when they asked Jesus to increase their faith. Author Madeleine L’Engle put it beautifully when she wrote, “I don't have to have some special qualification to do what I have to do. All I have to do is have the courage to go on and do it.” God has already given you the faith to do these amazing things, that’s all the qualification you need. You just have to have the courage to walk through the servant’s entrance when you leave here today, and take up your duty of service. God will do the rest. You’ll be amazed.

Now may the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep our hearts and our minds in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.


© 2007 Laura E. Gentry