Luke 17:5-10
October 6, 2013
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Have you ever wished you had more faith when you prayed for a loved one who was sick and the result was the person didn’t get well? Have you ever prayed for an opportunity for a promotion or a new job and wondered about how much faith you have left when none of these opportunities came? Have you wished for more faith after working on redistributing resources and food to the hungry and the poor only to see the line of people who need food gets longer every week?
We don’t see in the Bible many occasions when the disciples ask something of Jesus. But in today’s Scripture, the disciples pled for an increase of faith. By this point in Jesus’ ministry, the disciples have witnessed a number of strange and inexplicable wonders. They have heard much of Jesus’ teaching. Their plea was to have the capacity to believe or to know what to make of the events that have come their way in Jesus.
Jesus has spoken to them in parables, sketching for them the nature of the Kingdom of God. But many of his stories have been confusing and incomprehensible. Jesus has miraculously healed some people, and has silenced the wind and waves of a stormy sea. How can things like that happen?
“Increase our faith!” the disciples blurt forth. We wonder if the disciples have been suppressing this for a long time. Have they been witnessing Jesus’ signs and wonders and have held back on a public admission of their inner doubts? At last they can hold back no longer; at last they admit their cluelessness. Haven’t we been in situations like this as well when life itself just doesn’t make sense anymore?
“Increase our faith!”
Dutiful Service
Luke 17 is one of five places in the gospels where Jesus makes a comment about a mustard seed. Three of those references are essentially the same as three of the gospel writers’ record of Jesus telling how the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed (Mt. 13:31-32; Mk. 4:30-32; Lk. 13:18-19). One of the other references to a mustard seed is when Jesus explains to the disciples why they were unable to cure a demon-possessed boy (Mt.17:20). The final mustard-seed reference is in our text when Jesus responds to the disciples’ request that he increase their faith.
Because of how small mustard seeds are, we tend to hear this repeated metaphor as a comment on the quantity of faith one possesses. Yet it is unlikely that’s the intended meaning in any of these usages, and it’s especially not the case here where Jesus responds to the disciples’ request for more faith. In this setting, where the comment appears right before Jesus’ parable of the dutiful servants, the point seems to be that the disciples’ need is not for more faith, but for redirecting what faith they have toward dutiful service to God.
The parable has to do with a master’s slave or servant who labors long hours in the field and then is expected to fix dinner for his master and only after that before having any food himself.
If Jesus was telling this parable today, he’d probably substitute “your employee” for “your slave or servant,” but the point would be the same: Does your servant deserve thanks for doing what’s expected of him? Does your employee deserve thanks for giving you eight hours of work?
In the parable, the implied answer is clearly “No,” and Jesus then turns the story on the disciples who are seeking more faith, saying, “So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, “We are unworthy servant, we have only done our duty.’”
The “unworthy” or “worthless” implies that no matter how much we do in service to God, we are only doing what is expected and that it’s impossible to do more than what’s expected of us. We can never put God in our debt. In fact, when it comes to serving God, Jesus is, in effect, telling us to forget the old idea of having “stars in our crown”—special recognition or reward in heaven. While it is true that there are a few things, such as enduring persecution and doing works of charity in secret when Jesus does mention divine reward, Jesus is telling us that our discipleship is just expected of us.
Does the servant get special thanks for doing what’s expected of him or her? When you have done everything expected of you, be matter-of-fact and say, “The work is done. What we were told to do, we did.”
While this sounds like a thankless job to be Jesus’ disciples, there are two things we can say about that. First, while the parable tells us not to expect divine thanks for serving God, there are human thanks that come to us nonetheless. It may not happen often, and we’ve all had occasions when those we help appear to be ungrateful. But there are times when someone says “Thank you” in such a heartfelt way that it buoys your spirit. When we see someone lifted from trouble because of our efforts and we experience elation, or when some young person tells us that an offhand remark we made in a Sunday school lesson helped her or him make a positive career choice, we are understandably uplifted and encouraged.
In fact, it’s unlikely that we can be faithful in our Christian duty without receiving at least occasional expressions of appreciation. We need that from each other. But in Jesus’ parable, however, he stresses that we should serve God because it’s the right thing to do, not because we hunger for divine reward.
Second, doing the right thing without being praised or rewarded brings a kind of satisfaction of its own. It’s like when I sweep the sidewalk on Sunday mornings. My reward is that I really like the church and its surroundings to be clean and neat!
There’s a story of a man and a woman who had some friction during their early years of marriage. His assumption was that she would do all the housework, despite the fact that they both had fulltime jobs outside the home. After several confrontations about this, he finally realized that he’d been unreasonable, and so he decided to help out. The first thing he tackled was the kitchen; he did all the dishes, wiped the counters and swept and mopped the floor. Then he eagerly waited for her to come home, expecting that she would lavish him with praise.
When she did come home, she seemed to notice the work in the kitchen but said nothing. Finally, the man could stand it no longer, and he blurted, “Did you see I cleaned up he kitchen?”
“Yes,” she said.
He waited, but she had nothing more to say. So he said, “Well, don’t you appreciate it?”
“I’m glad you’ve done the work, she said, “but we both live in the house and keeping it clean is just a part of our responsibilities. “I’ve never been thanked for all the housework I’ve done, and I don’t expect to be. Why should either of us be thanked for doing what’s necessary to live decently?”
It took some readjustment of the man’s thinking, but he got the point, enough so that he kept doing a share of the housecleaning. And, even though he never particularly enjoyed the work, he began to take a certain satisfaction in keeping the home reasonably tidy. Likewise, there can be a certain satisfaction in serving God even when no thanks seems to be forthcoming.
The Trustees would like to remind you at this point of the sermon that we have an All-Church Clean-Up Day on Saturday, October 26th!
Our Dutiful Work
Jesus is linking “faith” and “duty” in this Scripture. Those who faithfully do their duty, without much fuss or fanfare, are those who have enough faith to do wonders. What the slaves or servants do in the parable isn’t that wonderful—they simply performed menial tasks for the master. But perhaps that’s the whole point about faith. Those who have faith in Jesus are simply “unworthy servants who have done our duty.”
By answering the disciples’ plead to increase their faith, Jesus is telling them that faith is not some intellectual achievement or something to measure quantitatively but rather a matter of humbly, daily, mundanely attempting to obey Jesus and follow Jesus, doing your bit part for Jesus.
This may be to help at a soup kitchen for the poor or working at the food bank or cooking dinner for your family or doing house chores to share the load. When we do these duties faithfully, we would have enough faith to do wonders.
When we come to church weekly to participate in the routine of worship, it forces us to worship the real God every seven days whether we feel it or not. The church keeps us close to the wellsprings of the faith even when we have been negligent to avail ourselves of those restorative waters.
After today’s Membership Meeting, you’ll be invited again to prayerfully make a pledge to the ministry of this church. You might say, “Increase my faith” so that I may increase my pledge. But doing this simple annual act of giving back to what belongs to God in the first place leads us to have a dutiful faith. In doing the work of faithful ministry, in just keeping at it, we discover that God is making us more faithful, despite our lack of faith.
The parable Jesus told invites us to see ourselves in relation to God as servants—in our work, in our church role, in our leisure, in the unexpected things that come to us and require us to respond. This image of a servant steers us away from the notion of entitlement and reminds us that we don’t earn our way into the kingdom of God but are granted entrance because of God’s graciousness to us.
It’s not the quantity of our faith that matters, but putting what faith we have into service.
Here’s an old sermon illustration about a man seeking entrance to heaven based on his good works.
The man came to the Pearly Gates and asked Saint Peter for admission. “On what basis? Saint Peter asked.
“Well, “ said the man, “I worked most recently in the world of financial management, and I labored hard to make even that realm a place where God’s will was done.”
“Yes,” replied Saint Peter, “but, of course, we expected that.”
“Uh…well, earlier I worked several years at low wages in the mission field. I tackled the cause of poverty and injustice in the Third World. I worked directly with children, families and their communities. I even helped some people escape from human traffickers.”
“We know, but that all needed to be done.”
“But look here…I’ve worked hard to be faithful ever since God called me. I’ve kept my hand on the plow as it were and not looked back.”
“And your point is?” said Saint Peter.
The man, now clearly disconcerted, stammered, “That’s all I’ve got! There’s nothing more but the grace of God!”
“Exactly,” said Saint Peter, opening the gate. “C’mon in.”
We don’t have to be great practitioners of belief; we must only be dutiful servants. We don’t have to have a huge ability to believe; we simply must be those who know that Jesus gives us a job to do and then we get to do it.
For most of us, this is good news indeed.
Let us pray.
Lord Jesus, we confess that there is so much we do not understand about you, so much you did, so much you said, that we can neither understand or explain. Give us the grace in our daily lives to not only understand but rather to be obedient and committed to dutiful work. Help us to be content to work with you rather than to figure you out. Amen.