Sermon prepared for
By Gregory S. Kaurin, Co-pastor
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Text: Luke 17:5-6
Super-Size
Us!
One of my primary
jobs as a pastor is to interpret and apply the scriptures, to preach and
teach. And I am called to do it in a way
that changes the direction of people’s lives, whether that happens in a single
message or over a period of time, to provide God’s assurance and comfort to
those who are wounded, to provide God’s direction to some who feel lost, and to
challenge and motivate any of us who have become stagnate, complacent or
self-focused.
I would love it
if I could do all this as well as Jesus did.
He told us to follow him, to be more like him. And I want that… or, at least the good parts of Jesus’ministry. I
want to comfort and heal with a word or touch.
I want to convince, assure, forgive and motivate people. I’d like to take a stand without fear of the
consequences.
In short, I want
to be: PASTORMAN! I want to move
mountains with my faith, to say just the right words, to rise above even the
likes of Billy Graham and the rest, to preach the message that ends all wars, that
solves the
Okay, maybe I
don’t need all that. But it would be
nice to have a portion… Jesus said that
we could move mountains with even the tiniest seed of faith. And here’s the scariest thing about this
passage. Jesus said that if I had even a
tiny bit of faith, I could move a mountain.
I can’t even cause a little steam burp like last Friday’s little
eruption on Mt. St. Helens, much less move her like she moved in 1980! What does that seem to say about my
faith?
I remember being,
I think I was ten years old, trying to pray my grandpa alive, up out of
coffin. With all my ten-year-old heart,
trying to believe enough, hope enough, have faith enough. Nothing. Not a twitch.
And I’m not sure that my faith is any stronger now than it was
then. More educated,
different maybe, but not stronger.
In fact, at ten years old, I was still holding out hope for UFO’s, magic
and Big Foot.
How did Jesus do
it? People asked all around him. And Jesus pointed to God. By God’s will and power alone,
…and faith. People were healed
and changed by faith. “Your faith has
made you well,” Jesus would say, or “the faith of your friends,” or sometimes
Jesus own faith, the faith of God channeled through him, was all it took, and
people were healed, fed and nourished or changed.
The disciples saw
what Jesus did, they heard his incredible words, and saw the work ahead of
them. They heard Jesus say that it is
all said and done “by faith.” No wonder
they cried out, “Then, Jesus, increase our faith!” Like everything else around us, we get fooled
into believing that bigger is better. Wider
is better. Faster is better. More is better. “Super-size us.”
Supersize our faith, Lord!
I’ve asked for
something like that. Maybe not with
those exact words, but I have asked God to be more than I am.
The key is to get
at faith… what it really means. I don’t
believe you can capture faith in a single word, but when we try, we usually go
for the wrong word. When people are asked
to define faith in a word, the first one they go for is “belief.” There is an element of belief in faith, but I
honestly don’t think that is what God or Jesus meant when he said, “Believe in
me.” I think he meant something bigger
and more freeing than that.
Belief is what
Peter Pan used to save Tinkerbell. In that play, if he could just get enough
children to clap and believe hard enough, then Tinkerbell
would come back from death. So, imagine
all the children clapping and believing in fairies as hard as they can. It’s exciting, wonderful, and truthful but only on an abstract and imaginative
level.
And that is the
way that a whole lot of Christianity lives and operates—and I will dare to call
it immature Christianity. Hoping and
praying for the show, and preying on others who want religion to be more like
magic.
I’ve tried
that. I’ve tried believing harder than
most other kids; I have tried to fly on a wing and a prayer, I have tried to
heal and bring dead people to life by believing hard enough. And literally speaking, I have had very
little success. If that is what Jesus
meant in today’s gospel lesson, then I am a weak-faithed
pastor, and you all should toss me out on my ear!
I think faith is
more closely related to the word “trust.”
To have faith in God means that I trust God. Even when Jesus says in the Bible, “Believe
in me,” he meant exactly what we do. If
your momma asks you to believe her or to believe in her, she is asking you to
trust her.
And for me, that
idea has changed everything. I might ask
God to move a mountain, or to do the impossible. If it happens, then I know it needed to
happen, but if it doesn’t happen the way I want it to, if faith is mostly about
trust, then I have placed it all in God’s hands, and I am saying that I trust
him to carry things out, to do impossible things in his own way, his own time,
and for results greater than I can imagine right now. If you can trust God, even a little bit, you will
begin to see life in a whole new way.
Trust allows you
see a miracle in something that other people might call a coincidence. If you trust Jesus Christ to be there
wherever he says he will be present, you will start to see him and hear him in
ways that other people cannot.
Trusting God
means that I know that God heard my 10-year-old prayers, and that my grandpa is
in fact alive in God’s kingdom and more healthy today
than he ever was while he was here on earth.
To trust God, is
not easier than belief, but it is more freeing, and more open to the
gospel. Trust allows us to truly pray like
Jesus did, to ask God for we want, but at the same time to ask him for his will
to be done. Trust allows us to begin
realizing that the things that happen to us, or don’t happen to us, are not the
end of the world, but at the same time, trust allows us to believe that God
uses us, that we are a part of something a whole lot bigger than ourselves.
When we trust
God, it reorganizes our priorities, it allows each of us to lead others, to be
parents and Sunday school teachers, and even to make mistakes, and still trust
that God will—not only forgive us—but that he will use our mistakes for his
greater purpose.
Trust in God
allows me and my needs to be smaller: I don’t have to be Pastorman,
and you don’t have to be Superchristian. I don’t have to have all of my needs met in
order to worship and give thanks to God.
You and I are simply called to share with others what we get from our
faith, how and when Christ has touched our lives. To listen to others, as
Jesus did. Love them and forgive
them, all because we trust God to do what is most loving, most gracious, and
most right. Behind all the commandments
of scripture is trust. Abraham trusted
God, obeyed him, not to gain anything, but simply because he trusted him. And God called it righteousness.
And trusting God
allows us to take risks, as people and as a congregation, and if we dare, as a
whole church. We really can let go and
stop worrying so much about ourselves.
When we trust God at his word through Christ, then our home, our room in
heaven is secure. Our focus needs to be
on working together, doing what it takes to pass on the core message, the core 2000-year-old
traditions, however we can, to those who will be alive and worshipping 5 years
from now, or twenty, fifty or thousand, using instruments, songs and languages
we’ve never heard of yet. Trust means
that we will not let, we cannot let this message of faith and hope die with us.
Fundamentally,
though, trust can only be a response.
Our trust is based on what we truly believe about God, and what we saw
in Jesus Christ. This is the God who was
willing to die to save us. No other God
or power would do that. To trust God
means that we know that he will always be faithful, even if we are not, that he
will forgive, that in spite of all that happens around us in this life, God’s
Word and Will finishes last. And that
God will be eternally loving, merciful and just.
Let me end with
one small challenge. I think if you do
this even in one small way as you leave today, then it can lead to even bigger
changes. Take a moment, the next 22
seconds and I want you to think of one thing, just one thing, one problem, one
person that is weighing on you, bugging you, pestering you.
As you take
communion this morning, add an extra prayer, for yourself or that person, or
that situation, and trust God to help you with it, through it, to endure it, to
accept it or maybe even change it. But
let go, and trust God with the results.
We are not making
magic here; I will not promise you that it will all go away or change. Your situation might stay the same, but I
believe that it can change you, how you feel about it, or how you deal with it. Things might even seem harder for a while, and
it may force a period of conflict. It
might give you more courage, more peace, more voice. Trust God, that, in the end, you will be
okay. Try it, let go, and see what
happens.
We don’t need to Supersize our orders.
We only need to ask God to change our order… from our demands of him, to our trust in him… for what he has already done,
and for what he will always do. We are
in God’s hands… the best hands. He gives
us bread and wine. He gives us
Christ. He gives us salvation.
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