TEXT: Luke 17: 5-6
5The apostles said to the
Lord, “Increase our faith!” 6The Lord replied, “If you had faith the
size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and
planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.
Jesus’ first
followers begged him to give them more faith. “Increase our faith!” they
demanded, as if they’d time traveled to our century and ordered Fast Faith like
Fast Food at a Spiritual Drive-Through-- after which God’s static-y voice
replied, “Would you like fries with that?” Unfortunately, faith isn’t so easy
to order. Fortunately, as Jesus explained, our faith doesn’t have to be
biggie-sized. Even a little bit of faith—the size of a mustard seed—can
accomplish seemingly impossible things. Just a little faith can be enough to
uproot a mulberry tree and plant it in the sea—which you have to admit is one
of the Bible’s strangest metaphors.
Just a
little faith in God’s loving purposes can unite diverse people across the
world’s cultures and times, for which we give thanks on this World Communion Sunday.
Just a
little faith can plant new faith communities.
The metaphor
of planting a tiny seed of faith is especially appealing to church planters
like me and perhaps to you as part of a new faith community. In many ways Open
Table is a just sprouting seedling. Tending this vulnerable seedling requires
patience and faithfulness. And in the case of a mulberry tree or a
congregation, its full potential won’t be reached for many, many, many years.
Sure, some
of us know of churches that spring up almost overnight with hundreds or
thousands of members. Wistfully, we might envy the sheer numbers these churches
boast, so we pray, “Increase our numbers.”
Worriedly, we might imagine that the key to a sudden influx of new members is a
change to our worship service or one additional program or more and more
activities or a slightly tweaked advertising strategy. These musings can be
constructive if each of us is asking “What can I do?” rather than “What should
others in the church be doing?" . . . and if we all stay focused on following in
the ways of Jesus . . . and if we’re not flailing about to please hypothetical
visitors in some misplaced belief that spirituality is a commodity we produce
to fit consumer expectations. Up to a point, we need to accommodate the
preferences of potential church members, anticipating, for instance, the best
time and place for us to gather for worship and prioritizing the needs of those
who are not yet with us over our own. But our faith community is not forming to
serve up the spiritual equivalent of Happy Meals—even if that’s what sells.
While I
would love for us to grow our numbers rapidly, I’m afraid the standard formula
for doing so may not work for us. One blogger has recommended “prepack[aging]
the Gospel” with this “quick and easy formula”: Take “1 dynamic preacher, 3
good musicians, a well selected location, and lots of marketing dollars” and in
“two years’ time” you’ll have a church (http://jeremiahgibbs.com/2013/09/17/chipotles-scarecrow-and-theology-what-the-church-can-learn-about-witness-from-a-burrito/#more-204).
I’d love to
have lots of money to devote to lots of marketing (though I suspect that even
in the 21st century our love for God and one another and especially
for those on the margins should be our best way to be known in our community).
I’d love to
have the perfect location for Open Table (though the perfect location for a
progressive church to grow numerically would not be ANYWHERE in conservative
Mobile, AL).
I’d love to
have 3 or more fabulous musicians, and God knows I’d love for us to have a
dynamic preacher!
But the
standard formula doesn’t quite fit us because the gospel we are offering is not
one we can prepackage and churn out for mass consumption. In fact, our Good
News involves a rethinking of the Good News as you’ve heard it previously. As
your pastor, I’ve got nothing for you, nothing at all—no glitz, no charm, no
charisma, no brilliance—nothing but a Gospel that is, for me, truly Good News. That’s
all I’ve got.
Open Table
offers a Gospel that is demanding. And the demands of the Gospel don’t sit well
with consumers who think they can place an order and have God delivered to them
when and where and how they wish. The good news we preach and teach and try to
live is about loving even our enemies, giving up control, forgiving, losing our
lives in order to find them, dying to the old ego-driven self, living in
grateful connectedness to all creation, recognizing our own belovedness while
at the same time knowing that life is not all about me or you. The good news we
teach and preach and try to live has nothing to do with believing certain
doctrine in order to go to heaven but has everything to do with falling
trustfully into the arms of Love and working selflessly to usher in God’s ways
of peace and justice right here and now. The Gospel as we understand it is not
about bolstering the faith you walked in with but challenging you to hear God’s
voice unsettle your convictions. The Gospel is not about providing pat answers
but about living the questions. But how many people in this city or in this
world do you think will really think that’s “good news”? How in the world could
Madison Avenue sell this?
Not only is
the Gospel we live demanding, but the community we create around this Gospel is
diverse. We come from many different walks of life and church backgrounds. Our
politics and personal histories and abilities vary. We are unabashedly “out” as
an open and affirming church, but we’re not “the gay church” and our
progressive label means, to us, something broader than being open and affirming
or social justice-oriented. Our diversity and a desire for even greater
diversity is certainly no short cut for growing a church.
It’s not
only the demanding Gospel we live and the diverse community we create that
complicates our growth—it’s also the deeper spirituality for which we strive.
We try to honor silence and simplicity so that God can talk to us more than we
talk to God—but silence frightens many in our noisy culture. We offer surprise and elicit
participation—which might be uncomfortable.
Music and art and poetry and the love we bear for one another can touch us deeply in worship,
but we are wary of emotionally manipulative worship practices. There are no
quick and easy lessons for spiritual maturity. Because sometimes that growth is
not up to you. Sometimes it’s a matter of waiting patiently . . . as the
darkness teaches . . . and time heals . . .. and your roots go down deeper even
as your spirit reaches upward toward the Light. Spiritual maturation is
hard.
Especially
because life is not on hold while your pastor is rearranging your theological
map. Death may rob you of a loved one just as you’re rethinking eschatology. Or
you may lose your job or your health at the same time you’re losing your
ability to read the Bible literally but before you’ve acquired a confidence in
reading it any other way. Many in our faith community have faced great
challenges before they’ve had time to reconstruct their spiritual resources.
But today’s
passage from Luke assures that with faith, even just a little faith, you can be
transplanted from familiar soil into a salty sea and grow even there. Even on the salty seacoast of Mobile, Alabama.
With just a little faith.
It may be
tempting for us to sell our community a gospel that most people want to
buy. But our mission is about following
in Jesus’s way—not about selling a product.
The Slow
Church movement has been developing over the last few years in resistance to
just such a consumerist view of church. It was inspired by the Slow Food
movement of recent years that critiques “industrialized [fast] food cultures
and agricultures” and the way a fast food culture has affected not only our
physical health but also has altered our economic systems as well as cultural
values and family systems. Slow food advocates “insist that the ways we eat
actually matter for the kinds of people we become."They believe food should be
"good, clean, and fair." But living the
slow food alternative is “messy and difficult.”
Like the
Slow Food movement, the Slow Church movement questions the speed and efficiency
and bigness of Fast Church and calls for a “vision of the holistic,
interconnected, and abundant life together to which God has called us in Christ
Jesus” (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slowchurch/what-is-slow-church/). Slow Church is slow, hard work. But “we need
this slow and steady witness to the Gospel not only because of its aims to save
people from poverty, oppression and violence”—but “because we, too, need to be
saved” and the planting, tending,
harvesting, chopping, simmering, serving, tasting is all “part of our
spiritual formation” (http://jeremiahgibbs.com/2013/09/17/chipotles-scarecrow-and-theology-what-the-church-can-learn-about-witness-from-a-burrito/#more-204).
The stuff we might think of as the
“business” of church can become, with thoughtfulness, our spiritual curriculum.
If you began
this journey with Open Table thinking we’d be doing church as usual and that we’d
be drawing in hundreds of worshipers by now, it may be time to adjust
expectations.
We are
offering to a conservative culture a progressive theology and healthy spirituality and not just a
progressive social/political outlook.
We are
planting a church at a time when church membership is in a steady decline
across all denominations.
We are part
of a fast food/consumerist mentality that teaches us we
can be
nourished in fast, convenient ways.
This may be
a time to adjust both our expectations toward a longer timeline—and raise our
level of commitment to engage in the hard, slow work of church planting.
The Church
Universal began as a mustard seed. It has
sometimes grown like a weed. It has
sometimes grown like an invasive weed that takes control. But the church has often been the mulberry
tree that offers shade and fruitful bounty in the unlikeliest of places. May our seeds of faith grow into a mulberry tree.
PRAYER
FOR THE CHURCH
God who loves the whole world, we recognize what a tiny part we
might play in your grand scheme. We thank you that you love us into loving others. We would like to take on the demanding,
slow, often invisible task of living and loving faithfully, of letting you grow
us up into more mature individuals and a more mature faith community. Amen
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