How to increase your faith

Luke 17:5-10

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.

7“Who among you would say to your slave who has just come in from plowing or tending sheep in the field, ‘Come here at once and take your place at the table’? 8Would you not rather say to him, ‘Prepare supper for me, put on your apron and serve me while I eat and drink; later you may eat and drink’? 9Do you thank the slave for doing what was commanded? 10So you also, 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!’ ”

In the summer of 2000, at the age of 20, having just finished my second year at university, I worked as a counselor Christian summer camp for boys.  And while there, I decided to try to write a song, since that seemed like the sort of thing a serious Christian might do.  Never-mind that my guitar skills were basic and I had no experience as a lyricist.  For reasons that I do not exactly recall, this little passage from the Gospel (it might’ve been Matthew, not Luke) served as the inspiration, as it were.  It turned out that the song was not especially inspired, and I never even completed it.  But the small part I did “compose” said something like, “faith like a mustard seed - what does that say about me?”  

I was trying to wrestle with, on the one hand, Jesus’ statement that if you had faith the size of a mustard seed - just the tiniest bit of faith - that you could command a tree to uproot itself and fly into the see (or in Matthew - even more impressive - you could move mountains) and, on the other hand, the reality that I had never managed to move any trees or anything else with my faith.  And so this called into question, in my young mind, whether I actually had any faith at all.  Like the disciples who asked that their faith might increase, I wanted the kind of faith that Jesus spoke about, the kind that could powerfully manifest itself, that could change the world.  

This leads quickly to an obvious question: how do I get this kind of faith?  The obvious answer, I thought, was to ask for it much like the disciples did.  But it might not surprise you to learn that, having asked, I was not immediately endowed with the ability to relocate trees.   And that seemed to lead to one of two conclusions: either God wasn’t interested in me having faith - which seemed quite unlikely - or there was something about me which prevented this kind of faith, something I hadn’t done but needed to do, something I need to let go of, etc.  

That’s my peculiar little story, but it found me arriving at a place that, I think, many modern people in church have found themselves, where we encounter the apparent disparity between what it means to have faith and our actual experience.  We are told that we need to believe certain things, and that if we do believe that certain things would follow, but then those things don’t seem to be happening.  And this, if acknowledged, can bring us to a point of crisis: either I don’t really have faith, or the promises are false.  So you either give up altogether, or you commit to the struggle of trying to increase your faith.  

At this stage it’s easy to skip over a very important question: What is faith?  When I was 20 I’m pretty sure I thought that having faith meant being certain that the doctrines of the faith were true, that having faith meant you didn’t have doubts, so the way to increase your faith was to eliminate doubts so that you could arrive at certainty.  But this puts you in an impossible position, for the doubts always creep in, then you feel like you’re not making progress, like maybe you’ll never believe, like maybe you’re not cut out for this.  And again, the way to cope is either to give up, or to deny your own doubts.  The world is full of people who have left the church and Christians who pretend as if they’ve got everything figured out, who cannot admit to others or even to themselves that they’re plagued by doubt.  

But there’s a better way to think about faith.  For all kinds of reasons, people like us have been conditioned to think about faith as a primarily mental act, you have faith - or not - in your head, and the struggle between faith and doubt is primarily psychological.   But the Greek word that we render “faith” in English translations does not carry the same assumptions.  (One good thing about living in Luxembourg is you can assume all people understand that translation is not a simple one-to-one correspondence - especially when you’re spanning a distance of two millennia.)  Instead the word we render faith carries connotations like trust, loyalty, allegiance, or faithfulness.  It was more or less impossible for those people to imagine that having “faith” could be in your head without also being manifest outwardly; the presence (or absence) of faith is revealed in the shape of one’s life.   Christianity is less a belief system, more a way of life.

It’s a curious thing that, after Jesus’ declaration about faith, he then immediately starts talking about slaves and their proper place.   It might seem that these two things just happen to be beside one another, but I think they’re related, even directly so.  It’s quite telling that Jesus moves the discussion from faith onto themes of duty, obedience, submission - the sort of things that are expected of a servant/slave.  We are, of course, accustomed to thinking about the relationship between faith and obedience, but we typically think of faith leading to obedience, that upon coming to belief that we then act.  

But Jesus seems to be saying here that this causal relationship is reversed, that obedience comes first.  The disciples have listened to what Jesus has taught and have observed his actions, and they feel, in the heads, hearts, guts, the distance between what he’s saying and doing and what they want to say and do, what they can even imagine themselves doing.  “Increase our faith!”, they cry out.   If the disciples request for faith is just about changing their mentality, or attitude, making them certain where they doubt then Jesus’ response doesn’t make much sense.  But if by asking for faith they really asking for something more like faithfulness, then his meaning comes more into view.  He’s saying that there is no shortcut to faithfulness; the only way to have faithfulness is to be faithful.  Faith is something that you do.  So they are to be like servants/slaves who obey, who submit themselves to the direction of the master.  They cannot take a seat at the table before prior to completing their duty; they must persist in faithfulness.    

This past Tuesday we discussed the nexus words like faith, belief, and trust.  These three are closely related but carry slightly different connotations.  The word trust, more than faith or belief, suggests (at least to my ears) a basis in our lived experience.  We trust those things which have shown themselves to be trustworthy.  Trust is generally earned, not given, and our trust grows every time someone delivers on their promise.   Although we might speak of “blind trust”, the reality it’s probably not blind - it’s based on something, however intuitive/subconscious - and there’s nothing especially commendable in trusting that which has not proven itself trustworthy.   We do not believe in God, have faith in God, trust God, totally blindly -  it is rooted in our actual lived experience - but most of us, like the disciples, feel the meagerness of our belief/faith/trust; that it doesn’t amount to a mustard seed.  

Rather than struggling within ourselves to overcome doubts, silence voices in our heads, somehow change our perspective, alter our psychology - rather than making our religion about a personal, private quest to achieve the right state of mind - rather than assuming that faith (if it ever arrives) precedes faithfulness, Jesus is telling us, just as he told the disciples, that if we want our faith to increase then we don’t sit on the sidelines waiting - even praying - for that to happen.  The way to come to faith is to attempt, however tentatively, actual faithfulness. 

If we have faith the size of a mustard seed, Jesus promises, then we will have a power that manifest itself in the world.  One way of understanding this promise is to imagine that, if we actually stepped out in that little modicum of faith, that we would discover that, lo and behold, what Jesus promised is true.  And then of course, we might very well be inspired to greater faithfulness, and thus greater faith, and so, a kind of confirmation loop.  If we just a had little faith, Jesus seems to be saying, then we would almost necessarily arrive at great faith.  

Returning to that lyric I attempted, rather than questioning my faith, I might ask to what extent I’ve actually been faithful?  Have I told myself, “If only I…. then I….” when, in fact, I could just do the thing I’m wishing I could do.   If we indeed claim Christ as Lord, then it might be helpful at times to remember that he is the master, and we the servant/slave, so we might even treat obedience as non-negotiable, as something we do whether we want to or not.  Imagine that.