Measuring up?

 How big does faith have to be?  Jesus told his disciples that they didn’t need a big amount of faith.  Size didn’t matter to him, and neither does it matter to God.  Which, I’m sorry, is a hard pill to swallow some days. 

I wish I could throw bushes around with my faith, but that would not make me a Christian.  It might make me a hurricane, hopefully much smaller than Fiona, but certainly a blowhard and a destroyer of forests.  If I want to know I have faith enough to do what God is calling me to, how do I measure up my faith and know I have enough?

I may be looking around at other people and saying – “oh, look at what they are doing, they must have a lot of faith.  I can’t do that because I don’t have enough faith.”  It’s a perfect excuse to get out of doing anything that I might be nervous about. 

Maybe that is what the disciples were doing.  They were realizing how difficult it would be to live out these new ideas Jesus was teaching them.  Ideas that were scary, outrageous, challenging and culture changing.  Ideas that pushed against what ‘everybody knows’ or what common sense told them.  Ideas that challenged the belief that insignificant people like them could have a profound difference on the world they lived in.  It challenged the belief that might is right, or he who has the most toys wins, that the person with the most money must have the best life.  That it’s a dog-eat-dog world, kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, and might is right because only the strong will survive.

And those same fears and tensions that the disciples faced are the same fears and tensions we face.  Jeremiah too, struggled with fears and tensions from being a person of faith.  He was uncertain what was going to happen to him, or even that he had the ability to be a prophet to the people.  Certainly, his words of challenge and lament were not appreciated by his peers.  They got so angry at Jeremiah’s sermons that they threw him in the stocks to publicly humiliate him and to stop him preaching any more.  He continued to preach anyway.  He preached that the king’s actions were full of arrogance. He preached that the country’s leaders had lost touch with ordinary citizens.  He preached that the decisions being made by the politicians were trying to make them look more important and powerful than they really were.  And he preached that all these people and their choices would lead to disaster.  Their attempt to measure themselves in terms of wealth, power, and strength instead of measuring themselves by their faith would doom them.

So rather than support freedom of speech, they threw him in jail.  Not unlike the protesters in Russia who are being arrested and sent to jail or worse, Jeremiah’s arrest was designed to intimidate him and stop the unrest.  But it didn’t stop him, and it didn’t stop the Babylonian Army that circled the city. 

Jeremiah had the faith of more than a grain of mustard, then, when he bought a piece of land where the army was camped, not knowing if he would survive or if his family would once again grow crops on their land some day.  But he did it anyway, in a grand public gesture of faith and protest and hope.  In the face of war, in jail for being a dissident, on the brink of having the city invaded by foreign soldiers, he gave hope to everyone who witnessed to this ridiculous real estate deal.

We see similar acts of public faith.  Women in Iran burning their hijabs and cutting off their hair.  Russian men fleeing their homeland in droves.  Ukrainian refugees coming to Canada.  Other Ukrainian farmers and students, women and men doing their bit to protect their homeland.  Astronauts planning a return to the Moon.  Jesus dying on a cross, executed by the state.  We are not called to such outrageous, dramatic acts of faith.  Jesus said we didn’t need to do a huge song and dance to get our message across, to promote our faith, to counter the culture we see around us that hurts so many in the competition for success.  Instead, we can have the faith of a grain of mustard seed.  We may not be familiar with mustard seeds, but we all know sunflower seeds.  We know how they are not very big, but they are delicious when seasoned and cooked.  We know that it would take a lot of sunflower seeds to fill our stomachs, so they are too small to use as our only source of food.  But what a plant can grow from them!  They grow very easily in our climate – I have heard countless stories of people finding sunflowers growing under their bird feeders. 

Faith can be the size of a sunflower seed.  It is not something that needs to be big and strong, weighty and massive in order to grow something marvelous.  It can be as simple as deciding to ask questions at a forum on a proposed shelter for the Homeless in Athabasca or knitting a hat and mitts for the RCMP to give out to people in need.  It can be as small as helping write a grant that helps us sponsor the Blanket Exercise for the One Book One Community program.  It can be as simple as cooking hot dogs at a Pride picnic or being supportive of our new youth group and leaders.  It can be as quiet as cleaning the Lion’s Park up repeatedly after vandals. It can be as simple as coming forward to eat a small piece of bread and drink a small cup of juice in memory of Jesus.  Whatever the size of our acts of faith, Jesus says they are enough.  May we find the courage to live them in our daily lives.