Readings – 2 Timothy 1: 1–14; Luke 17: 5–10
“We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!”
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
I don’t know about you, but I could have done without a Gospel reading like that. We are told to be like the poor slaves toiling in the fields all day, then as soon as they come home ordered to prepare their master’s dinner before they get the chance to eat and drink themselves. It’s not exactly the most encouraging text in the current circumstances.
Christ Church Worton, 2 October 2022.
I am tired after the last two and a half years of Corona-Christianity, of the endless chopping and changing of regulations and routines, of the closures and the re-openings, of putting huge effort into learning new skills that became obsolescent a few months later. It was blooming hard work, made more exhausting by being constantly told that the pandemic had forced the Church to confront that it has no money and that we need to get used to a leaner Church more dependent on volunteers. This comes on top of decades of the lay people in the villages, the Poor Bloody Infantry of the Church of England, being amalgamated into ever bigger benefices with ever fewer clergy even as the demand for share goes up. Of course, every clever reorganisation presents itself as the solution to the current problems, but ends up being superseded by the next clever scheme a few years down the line.
There is money in the system, but it’s never for churches or benefices like this; only ever for churches in student towns and big cities promoting a style of worship that is a million miles away from village Anglicanism. Strangely, those churches often seem to promote a sort of theology of success that is also a million miles from the Gospel Jesus is proclaiming this morning, where the reward for hard work is yet more hard work. It is enough to make you lose faith.
Struggling to keep the Faith has, of course, been an issue in the Church since the apostles fled from Jesus on the first Good Friday. It’s nothing new. Our Epistle reading, from Paul’s Second Letter to Timothy, was written about thirty years after Christ’s death and Resurrection, and part of the reason for St Paul writing it seems to have been concern about Timothy’s faith. We can never be sure why Paul was worried about this young third-generation Christian, whose mother and grandmother had been so faithful, and in whose potential Paul clearly has such strong hopes. Worried he was, however, and he expresses his earnest hope that he can lay his hands on Timothy, to “rekindle the gift of God that is within” him.
Luckily, our difficult Gospel passage also has part of the answer. Jesus says that we only need the faith of a mustard seed to carry out tasks that rational thinking would suggest are impossible. Mustard seeds are tiny, only one or two millimetres in diameter. You could fit around 2,000 along the edge of the altar, literally millions of them piled on top of it.
We need just a tiny bit of faith. Don’t beat yourself up because you struggle with your faith, or struggle with God, or struggle with the idea that there is a God. The fact that you are here this morning says you have enough faith – God tends to give us enough of what we need, which isn’t necessarily a lot. Tiny bits of faith in tiny churches in tiny villages can change the world. And if we’re struggling to find that faith within ourselves, we can look to others outside of us to renew it for us, like Paul with Timothy.
And what do we have faith in?
I wonder what your non-religious friends say to you if you mention that you’ve been to a church service. If they’re like mine, they’ll ask if it was uplifting, that they bet you do a lot of good works for the poor, and that they really envy the community that going to church must give you, but they just can’t believe in the whole… you know… God thing.
Is that what we have faith in? In, good works, a loving community, and a natural mood booster? These are all wonderful things, but Paul gives us an alternative view in his letter to Timothy – that Jesus Christ has “abolished death and brought … immortality to light through the Gospel.”
This is something very strange. It is not the uplifted community of good works, nor is it the cult of militant niceness, nor liberation through radical politics, nor protection from Godless decadence through Victorian values. Our faith is that Jesus Christ, by dying on the Cross, destroyed death and opened the way to eternal life for us.
Admit it, this is a very weird belief. Our own familiarity with the core of the Christian faith has blinded us to this weirdness, especially as we live in a country that has been Christian for fourteen hundred years. But as Christianity has retreated so rapidly, so the core of our Faith – that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and that by His Grace, so will we – has once again become obviously weird to our neighbours in a society that is rather in love with its supposedly rational nature. It’s OK for Africans, or Muslims, or Americans from the Deep South to believe this sort of thing – but not educated people from an advanced western European country. Oughtn’t we to be embarrassed about believing these Bronze Age fairy stories in a world of mRNA vaccines and 5G mobile Internet?
In this sense our experience is actually like that of St Paul in his own intellectually sophisticated and technologically advanced society. This morning’s Epistle is shot through with his awareness that some Christians are ashamed of their faith. So here we have Paul, the proud citizen of the Roman Empire reduced to being a jailbird because of his faith that a man executed by the particularly shameful punishment of crucifixion was in fact God incarnate. This was an extremely offensive point of view in respectable Roman society – perhaps that was why the bright and empathetic young man named Timothy struggled with his faith.
So we follow in the footsteps of giants when we live in a society where the Christian Faith is no longer the norm, but something rather odd, and we are in good company when that makes us embarrassed about our faith or struggle with it. But hold on to the faith you have, no matter how little, and look to your Christian brothers and sisters to rekindle it within you – for you God has given you enough faith for you to fulfil His will for you.
Trust in Jesus Christ, and don’t be embarrassed if you struggle with Him sometimes, because I am certainly struggling with the story about the slaves He told in this morning’s Gospel reading.
And now to the Father who made us for Love, to the Son who paid the price of Love, the Holy Spirit who breathes perfect Love, be ascribed all glory and majesty, dominion and power, as is most justly due, world without end. Amen.
