This morning we are given a passage from the Gospel of Luke that starts with the apostles’ plea to increase their faith. Did any of you hear that just now and wonder why apostles, of all people, were asking for more faith? Geez. If they don’t have faith as big as a mustard seed, no wonder so many of us have a hard time locating our faith! How would we even know if we had it if it’s smaller than a mustard seed?

Do you wonder what led the apostles to ask for a raise? Well I’ll tell you. They were asking for more faith because Jesus had just given them some really impossible instructions about how to deal with frequent, continuous sinning against them. Here’s how the story goes in the verses before what I just read: Jesus had just told the story about Lazarus resting in the bosom of Abraham and the rich man begging for a drop of water. We can imagine that that story left the comparatively poor followers of Jesus feeling pretty smug.

Then Jesus said to them, "Look, occasions for stumbling are bound to come, but woe to anyone by whom they come! It would be better for you if a millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea than for you to cause one of these little ones to stumble. So be on your guard that you don’t go putting stumbling blocks up in front of people! If another disciple sins, you must rebuke the offender, and if there is repentance, you must forgive. And if the same person sins against you seven times a day, and turns back to you seven times and says, 'I repent,' you must forgive."

They must have been thinking to themselves that they did not have what it took to do that. And I don’t blame them – I have a hard time forgiving the same person twice in one week, never mind seven times in one day. I actually don’t even have what it takes to rebuke an offender seven times a day. (At least not out loud.) Increase our faith, they say. We definitely don’t have enough faith. We need more faith.

And what Jesus said next is easy to hear as kind of sarcastic or critical – but I don’t think that’s the intention here. I think it’s a compassionate response – gentle and a little mischievous. What he says is, you know the size of a tiny little mustard seed? That’s all you would need to do amazing and seemingly impossible things. Jesus knew that they all had at least that much faith – they were following him weren’t they? They were showing up to hear him tell stories.  I think Jesus was saying, don’t worry about how much faith you have, you’re doing just fine. Faith, according to Luke, is all about ingenuity and resourcefulness, about determination, about tenderness, integrity, courage, persistence in the face of injustice. Jesus prays at the end of Luke’s account that Simon’s faith will not fail and that when he has repented, he will strengthen others. The need for repentance is assumed. Faith is about mercy and compassion and working for a just society. It’s not about believing and it’s certainly not about coming to church. (Now don’t get me wrong, I do love it when you come to church, but as it now says right on our front door, believing is not a condition for beloving or belonging here.)

So if one doesn’t need faith in order to be forgiving, what does one need? A change of heart. But that can be so hard can’t it?

I took a training course this past week that was about changing hearts. Specifically, it was about forgiveness and resolving grief and resentment. The teacher, Rob Voyle is an Episcopal priest with a doctorate in psychology who has developed the most amazing protocols for helping people in a very short amount of time to permanently resolve the most intractable resentments. 1 I’m really looking forward to finding ways to offer this approach for anyone here who’s interested. I’ve already been practicing on myself and on family and friends. It’s too early to declare permanence, but so far, it really works!

Voyle postulates that people who don’t forgive either don’t know how, or they are unmotivated to forgive. The lack of motivation is because usually some part of us objects to forgiving. Righteous resentment often is what gets in the way of forgiveness. But resentment is really not good for us. Nelson Mandela once described resentment as being like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill the people who did us wrong. We know that someone should have behaved differently and we continue to demand (in the present) that the past should be different. Resentment is about continuing to hope for a better past.

Forgiveness is about changing how we relate to the past offense – whether it was this morning or 40 or more years ago. Forgiveness doesn’t deny that something bad and wrong happened. Forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting or giving up on our values or saying that the infraction doesn’t matter. And here’s a radical idea: even though Jesus says “if there is repentance, you must forgive,” that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t forgive if there is not repentance! Forgiveness is also not necessarily reconciliation. Forgiveness also doesn’t mean being unsafe or unjust. It doesn’t require or even encourage having any contact with the person who offended or injured. It just means that we stop drinking the poison. And it is poison. It makes us feel sick and when we feel sick we are usually not very resourceful. When we feel sick we usually do not have our best access to tenderness, integrity, courage, or persistence in the face of injustice.

So forgiveness is resourceful and healing. Forgiveness is restorative. It doesn’t change the past, but it does change our perspective on the past. If we can get really clear about what we would have preferred to have happened, what we have learned from the past, and what we want to claim as values and lessons for the future, then forgiveness can create hope: a vision of the future that we would find enjoyable and resourceful and life-giving for ourselves and our communities.  Theologian Lewis Smedes once said, “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.”

If you do have faith, even if it’s smaller than mustard seed, you already have what you need to accomplish what seems impossible, according to Jesus.  The funny thing about mustard seeds is that in Jesus’ time, planting them was illegal – but it didn’t really need to be illegal, because no-one in their right mind would plant one. Mustard is a weed that grows like wild -- like kudzu in the South, or like bamboo. It takes hold and you just cannot get rid of it. So I think that whenever Jesus uses a mustard seed as an example, he’s making his listeners laugh. He’s not giving an example of something tiny and precious. He’s laughing about the spice of life and saying that a little tiny bit is going to wreak havoc so watch out!

 And Jesus is saying, use whatever little bit of faith you already have and stop fretting about not having enough. Wild and great things can be accomplished with a tiny amount of faith, according to the rabbi from Nazareth. And it’s our responsibility to use faith to accomplish great things. Imagine how many impossible things can happen when we combine the power of the miniscule amounts of faith represented in this sanctuary. We certainly don’t even need everyone to have a tiny seed of faith. In fact, more might be downright dangerous! We already have more power than we probably know how to harness.

The Gospel challenge is never that there is not enough. The Gospel challenge is about what to do with all of the abundance. The Gospel challenge is about using the power of the tiny bits of faith that have been planted to bring about healing and emancipation, to participate in feeding and freeing people who are hungry or oppressed, and to bring an end to violence wherever it occurs. It is, Jesus says, simply what we must do, not with some reward in mind, but because we can.