Homily - 23rd Sunday - Year C - The Gift of Faith - Luke 17:5-10

Faith is a wonderful gift, even the disciples realize what power it has when they ask Jesus to increase their faith.  Did they want more faith so that they could have more power for themselves, or did they realize that we receive faith so that we can serve others?  We are given the gift of faith - we don’t need to increase it, only to use it.  As Jesus says, “If our faith was the size of a mustard seed, we could do miracles!”

Faith isn’t just true in spiritual things either, there are many wise men of the world out there who call faith by different names, Norman Vincent Peale called it the “Power of Positive Thinking”, Henry Ford said, “It doesn’t matter if you believe you can do it or you believe you can’t do it, you are right!  Our faith makes all things possible if we turn it loose.

But for more than just miracles, we need to use the free gift of faith that God gives us to get us through the hard times or to be willing to serve others when we want attention for ourselves.  Who really cares about being able to show off our faith by pushing trees around?  I’m sure some of you could wish that your faith could push the right little white lottery balls with your numbers on them up those tubes one after the other at the right time so that the millions would be yours, but we don’t use faith for selfish reasons.  Faith is needed most when the world turns on us and is most important when tragedy has struck.

We need to remember that God loves us and we need to have faith that God has our best interests at heart!  God says this to the prophet Habakkuk in the first reading, when Habakkuk complains about how tough things are.  God promises that he has a plan and sometimes we must wait for the result and that takes faith. 

When things have gone bad and it seems we have no more control over our lives - we’ve lost a loved one - we’ve suffered a financial disaster or our health has failed, then our faith is tested because we may feel that God has abandoned us, and just when we want to say, “What is the use in believing?” we need to remember to activate that little mustard seed and go back to God and simply say, “I believe!”  This is what we are called to do as his people.  Not to understand, not to know what comes next, just to believe.  As his people we need to remember that we never really had control in the first place, God is always in charge.

And so Jesus, after encouraging his disciples to have faith, tells them the story that ends, “We are worthless slaves, we have only done what we ought to have done!”

Ouch!

That doesn’t seem fair at all!  Jesus reminds his disciples in fairly forceful language of exactly what is required of us as servants of God.  He has given us the gift of faith but he has told us that we are to use it to be servants, and not even to expect thanks because that is what we were made to do and because our reward will be so much greater than anything we could have ever done would deserve.

We are much more used to thinking in terms of our rights!  What we have coming to us by just being born.

Ours is a culture based on our rights and privileges and we have forgotten about those duties and obligations God charged us with and we have forgotten the fact that the two go hand in hand.  After all, these rights we crave are gifts from God, not from ourselves.

We trumpet our rights and complain bitterly when they are threatened.

We want the right to complain about the government, even when we haven’t voted in 10 years.  We want the right to free medical care but we don’t want to pay our fair share of taxes.  We want the right to live free here in our own country but we want to prevent others from coming here to live free! 

We want the right to abort unwanted children but we don’t want to practice self-control in our lives before they are conceived.

We want the right to have God explain to us personally why certain things have happened and then to have the right to tell Him what He should do and if he or his ministers here on earth don’t seem prepared to listen to us, then we go elsewhere in search of a faith that won’t challenge us too much.

But it is always a challenge to have true faith.  Is this idea that we should serve and obey without thought of thanks so challenging?  Don’t we as parents, expect our children to do the chores we set them, to share when they don’t want to, to behave in ways that seem silly to them and simply believe that we are teaching them these things for their own good?  Do we say thank you when they do the basic things they have been asked to do?  Does a teacher say, “Thank you” to a student for doing their homework?  So why should we expect God to thank us for just doing what he asks, especially when we are already so deep in his debt?

Faith is what helps us accept that we are not on top, even when our pride wants to rebel and tells us that we are in control.  Faith is what allows us to live in joy, in peace, even while we live in hardship, because we know that it will all work out in God’s plans if we just believe.

Faith becomes knowledge through the power of the Holy Spirit when we really believe, because he will give us the gift of knowing what we believe is true and that is what it makes it even easier to believe even more!

Faith starts here when in a few minutes we will all pray to God and we tell him that we believe that the bread and wine on the altar have become his Son’s real Body and Blood despite all the physical evidence that tells us that this is not true.  When we approach the minister of the Eucharist who says, “The Body of Christ”. When we say “Amen!” we are saying, “We believe!”  We will be strengthened by this heavenly food and our faith will increase through the presence of God’s Son in our hearts.

Can we each resolve this week to be less concerned with what is coming to us, and instead to watch how we can serve others, even those who we feel may not deserve it, simply because God has asked us to serve, without reservation and without judgement and we believe in him.  Can we each let go of something we feel we have a right to and let someone else have it instead just to prove that our faith frees us from the need to demand what we mistakenly think is ours.  This is faith in action, this is faith working in the service of others.

God has given us this marvellous free gift of faith and all the power to do good that comes with it.  He has planted that “mustard seed” in each one of us.  Now, it is up to us to use it.

- Deacon Steve