So how is faith different than magical thinking? Are prayers different than hocus pocus or
getting your tea leaves read. Pray that the airplane ride will go smoothly,
that your sports team will win, the list is endless. And while we are to turn every
concern over to God, that’s not what Jesus was thinking when he challenged his
disciples.
It's not the amount of faith we have. It’s not the amount of logical, rational
thought we bring to our relationship with God.
Even the saints of old had their doubts, their dark nights of the
soul. It’s not the power of our emotions
either. When people measure their faith
solely by the strength of their feelings, that can be where faith gets mixed up
with certainty. Think of how some people
have gotten emotionally committed to a cause to the point that they believe all
kinds of dangerous things.
Jesse Zink wrote in our study book Faithful, Creative,
Hopeful that faith is quote: “A kind of groundedness in our tradition. Faithful
means that we need to be able to draw from the wealth of resources provided by
our Christian Forebears… we need to be grounded in Christian practices of
prayer, service, and worship.” (page xv, 2024). Sounds like Paul’s letter to Timothy,
reminding him of his mother’s and grandmother’s faith.
Jesus saw faith as something that helped us to trust
God. And just like his metaphor, that
when we have a boss, we don’t expect to order the boss around, we serve the
boss by doing the job that’s expected of us, so too, faith gets us doing one of
the core components of the Christian life.
Service. Service to God because
we choose to trust God. Not lip service,
not logical brain gymnastics or emotional responses, but a gift that helps us
to act in alliance to what God is calling us to. Faith is one of the gifts of the spirit, like
love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, gentleness and self-control.
A story that recently hit the news was the anniversary of a
gift of faith that led to action which seemed insignificant at the time. 41 years ago, some young people working in a
grocery store in Ireland, making minimum wage, were told by their union to
boycott selling products from South Africa.
There were 11 of them, some as young as 17, some were 21. One girl, Mary, checked the produce aisle and
discovered that the store was selling grapefruit from South Africa. She was at the cash register when a customer
tried to buy two grapefruits. She
refused. The store manager told her to
leave. She and her 10 friends left the
store and started a picket line. The
Union paid them £21 a week, and that was not enough to pay the rent. They didn’t know what apartheid was, they
didn’t know anyone of African descent, but they trusted they were being asked
to do this for a good reason. For a year
they picketed but it didn’t have any effect.
Then a man came and joined them, the first person of color any of them
had ever seen. His name was Nimrod
Sejake and he had been imprisoned in South Africa then went into exile until he
ended up in Ireland. He joined the
picket line and helped encourage the young people. Then Archbishop Desmond Tutu was traveling to
receive the Nobel Peace Prize but detoured to meet the young activists. More and more people stopped buying grapefruits
and other products. They were invited to
visit Tutu in South Africa, but the government deported them; that caused a
backlash so big that the Irish Government banned all goods from South
Africa! That meant that after three
years, the strike was finally over. Then
Nelson Mandala was freed, Apartheid ended and the 11 strikers were invited to
meet Mandela. How did Mandela find out
about them? Turns out Sejake had shared
a jail cell with him! Mandela told the
young people that their faithful commitment to show up day after day had
encouraged him to have faith while he was in jail. Their refusal to sell grapefruits because of
their faithful commitment made a corrupt and undemocratic government fall.
We are not living in a country where half of the adult
population can’t vote because of their skin color. We’re not needing to boycott our workplaces
because of grapefruits. But we are
living in a country that eradicated measles 27 years ago. And we’re living in a province where a baby
died this week because its mom was not vaccinated, and six other babies also in
Alberta got measles before they were born.
We’re living in a province where people think that vaccines cause
autism. We are living in the only
province to expect people to pay for their covid booster shots, and we are
living in and working with people that are putting their faith in conspiracy
theories, homophobia and racism.
What does faith the size of a mustard seed look like
today? Or maybe faith the size of a
grapefruit? Maybe it’s as simple as
rolling up your sleeve for a vaccination or telling young people your measles
story. Maybe it’s boycotting goods from
Israel and calling for a cease fire in Gaza.
Maybe it’s praying for a neighbor struggling with addiction or family
violence or bullying. Wherever God calls
us to serve our neighbors, through prayer or action, that’s faith. And it doesn’t take much for our faith to
change the world. May we work for peace
and justice that all may one day know God’s abiding love for each and everyone
of us. Amen
