A Sound Mind

Luke 17:5-10, 2 Timothy 1:6-14
The Rev. Sara Fischer

Loving God, pour upon us the abundance of your mercy.

When you have done all that you were ordered to do, say “We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!”

This is a bit harsh, don’t you think? The whole gospel is a bit harsh—first the disciples are told that they don’t have a lot of faith, then they are told not to expect any thanks for their service to God. I expect the analogy of a slave and a master doesn’t quite work for most of us in this instance. I think it’s safe to say that employer/employee relations have come a long way since the first century.

Jesus’ hard words in today’s gospel come after a series of hard teachings about sin and forgiveness. The apostles’ responsesuggests that they do not feel up to the task that Jesus has set before them. Increase our faith!—they cry. His rebuke is to remind the disciples, in fairly stern way, that with God, all things are possible. We have enough faith, because any amount of faith is enough. Faith is a binary thing; either we have it, or we don’t. We can’t have too much or too little. If we have faith, we can continue the ministry of Jesus and build the kingdom. As disciples, this is our job.

Jesus wants his disciples to say “we are worthless slaves.” In this, Jesus challenges us to re-examine the source of our self-worth. Other translations of “worthless” say “without profit,” “unprofitable.” Left to our own devices, we are ultimately useless. The words implied here are “without God.” Without God, we are worthless. We cannot be profitable in a meaningful sense without God. All of our worth, our value, all of our profitability comes from God.

And we do not earn God’s approval any more than we earn faith. Both are a given. We already have both.

There is a story about Dorothy Day, who was a journalist, a social activist, and a devout Catholic her whole life. She died in 1980. Through much of her life, she was considered by many to be a living saint. She founded a newspaper, "The Catholic Worker," she built feeding programs, houses of hospitality for transients, Christian communal farms, and so on. She dedicated her life to helping the very poor live with a sense of dignity and community. Dorothy hated to hear someone say of her: “She is a saint.” She would get upset, and say: “don't say that. Don't make it too easy for yourself. Don't escape this way.…I am not different from you. … I am like you. You could easily do what I do. You don't need any more than you have. So get to work!” she would say.

The disciples in today’s gospel who beg Jesus: “Increase our faith!” do not need more faith. They just need to trust in the little that they have. That is a difficult lesson to learn, for many of us have only a mustard seed worth of faith to work with. Consequently, we think that we should leave the real work of spiritual growth, prayer, Bible study, and outreach to those we think of as being ‘more faithful’. I bet many of you can relate to that. But not so, says Jesus. We can “turn a profit” for God even with our weak, wavering faith.

God has already given us a gift, the gift of faith. Someone once said about this gift that you can't fill up the glass after it is full. The gifts are already given. The gift of faith from God is already in us. We cannot earn more faith any more than we can earn God’s grace.

In today’s reading from the second letter to Timothy, St. Paul writes:

For God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.

I was sharing this passage with a friend and she said I love that verse! I grew up with that verse, it was my favorite verse in scripture. I took another look. Here it is in the King James version, the version my friend grew up with: For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.

We need this spiritual gift of a sound mind to live out our faith and to direct our service to God’s kingdom. Here in this faith community we have many examples of living saints, using gifts of faith to carry on the ministry of Jesus. During this month of October you will be hearing from some of them on Sunday mornings. This morning I have asked someone who I think you will all agree embodies a sound mind, to talk to you about using all of our gifts to carry out God’s work in this place.