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.

Spilled Coffee

So I’m coming out of Paddymelon’s with a big coffee mug full to the brim.  Someone jogs my elbow and what spills out all over the sidewalk? Coffee? 

Well, those who know me really well will say anything but coffee unless I’m bringing a cup of joe to my husband Tim.  Tea possibly, chai latte or London fog, white hot chocolate, just about anything but not coffee.  Why?  Because what I put in my coffee mug is what will come spilling out. 

So too, what will come spilling out of my mouth may be any number of things.  Since I’m a Canadian, an apology.  “Sorry,” I will say, even if the person jostling my arm was the instigator of the spill.

If I’m at home and it’s been a long day, and Tim backs into me when I don’t expect it, there may be something far different than “sorry” spilling from my lips.  And if the coffee mug drops, splashing boiling beverage all over me then shatters to a million pieces, especially if it’s a favorite mug from a beloved aunt who has long since left this earth, well, even I don’t want to hear the words spilling out of my lips.  And if it’s been a really bad week, with a funeral that shouldn’t have happened to someone too young or too close, well, there just might be tears involved on top of it all, and a real honest to goodness grief burst!

What comes pouring out can be quite situational, and quite human.  Being human is a messy business, with emotions that hit us when we least expect it, sometimes right between the eyes, sometimes right in the stomach.  We find anger flaring up, resentment, frustration, jealousy, envy.

We pray, God, fill us good guys with good things, we’re on the right side, reward us please, and punish the evil doers.  Dry up their bank accounts, impound their trucks, put their kids in the foster care system, confiscate their weapons, and lock them up where they can’t threaten us anymore.  That too is human.  But thoughts like these can fill us up with evil emotions.

Scripture says “Be still before God and wait patiently.  Do not fret because some prosper in evil schemes.”  Easy to say, hard to do, especially when our nightly news is full of disturbing images of police in body armor, collections of guns being discovered horded by protestors, of politicians scolding each other, of racist flags, of children being taught to blockade legitimate traffic between two countries.  Be still before God, wait patiently.  Even harder, let go of anger, and recognize the damage fretting can do to the human soul.  Trust in God instead of imperfect, messy humanity.  One of the reasons I believe so many people were entrenched in Ottawa is because they put all their trust in themselves and no one else.  If the election brought in a government that they don’t like, they don’t trust the rest of Canadian voters.  If the medical community brought in restrictions that they don’t want, they sneer at the very people trying to keep them alive.  If the scientists make discoveries they don’t understand, they call them names and view them as part of a mass conspiracy.  If the media tries to communicate what the voters, the medical researchers and the scientists are discovering and they find it confusing, they turn to other sources that stoke their anger.  They only believe in themselves and the hope that they will get their own way.

They do not have hope in ideals, in principles, in due process or in the Golden Rule.  Do to others as you would have them do to you is not where they are at.  I suspect that they would not respond pleasantly if someone moved into their homes and started blaring air horns 24/7 for weeks on end.

Luke’s passage has Jesus recognizing that not everyone will be able to hear his words.  “I say to you that hear me”, or in other versions, “you that are still listening”, means that he too knew the messiness of what Jeremiah called the deceitful human heart.  Jesus knew that what he was teaching was so hard that folks were tuning out.  He had just told them about the beatitudes, the Blessed are those who the world think are cursed, and that was a conversation stopper for most of them.  Then he threw a real zinger at them.  "Love your enemies, and do good to those who hate you."  Well, that is so against what human nature wants to do, that it would tune out a lot of his listeners.  No way would good Jewish people want to hear that they were to be loving to the Roman soldiers that oppressed them, the tax collectors that robbed them, the schemers and power brokers that bullied them.  But that is exactly what Jesus was trying to teach them.  And with his ‘Turn the other cheek’, he was laying the groundwork for nonviolent resistance.  As one internet pundit wrote, "Let me be very clear.  This was not a call to grit our teeth and be nice to bullies, to stay in abusive relationships or to be quiet in the face of injustice."  This was a call to make sure everyone could see the bullying for what it was, and by standing up to them to offer the other cheek, or giving them your shirt as well as your coat, was to show to everyone around that they were doing this shameful behavior but you still kept your dignity intact.  But how does that play out in real life, Jesus?

A good example is the Greensboro sit in back in February of  1960, where young black college students prepared themselves to go to a Woolworth’s lunch counter and sit there until they were served lunch.  They knew it wouldn’t be easy.  They practiced so that no matter what violence was thrown at them, they would stay calm and not retaliate.  They would not punch back, they would not fight, they would not bring in guns or weapons or horns or hot tubs or flags, they would just sit until they were offered a menu.  Four young college students sat waiting for food that did not come.  The next day they were back, and the news spread to other colleges in the Southern US.  At one point there were 300 students at that lunch counter, and it became one of the cornerstones of the Civil Rights Movement.  Segregation ended although the racism never did.  But that Woolworths counter now houses the International Civil Rights Center and Museum, which includes the lunch counter where the Greensboro Four sat.

Coffee was served to anyone who wanted it, and tea and probably some iced teas and sodas.  And eventually the love that they had for their cause and for justice and equal rights for all spilled out on everyone around them.

What are you putting in your coffee mug?  What are you putting in your heart and mind?  Are you able to hear Jesus teach you to love your enemies and do good to those who hate you?  It’s not easy, of course, but I trust that this is what God is calling us to do.  Not to love the angry actions of the people who are hurting others by their noisy protests, but to look at them for the stunted shrubs in a dry desert, for the hopeless people that they are who don’t know how to trust in anyone but themselves.  Who put anger in their coffee cups and don’t drink anything other than that.  And to fill up our own coffee cups with stillness before God so that when the difficult times come and we are jostled by life, what will spill out will be peace and hope and compassion for all who struggle through these difficult times.