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| Piety Choi, A Mustard Seed, 2015 |
A talk given during the Contemporary Worship service at Holy Sepulchre London on Sunday 2nd October 2022 (Year C, Proper 22) and Tuesday 4th October 2022 based on 2 Timothy 1.1-14 and Luke 17.5-10. My script is below. An shorter version of this sermon was preached at Choral Evensong on Wednesday 5th October 2022.
Welcome
Hello, my name is
Phillip Dawson and it is a great pleasure to welcome you to Holy Sepulchre
London and our lunchtime worship. We hope this time together will be relaxed
and informal - a space to gather together, to pray, to sing. It’s wonderful
that you are here with us either in person or online - you are always
welcome.
Please feel to sit,
to stand, to come and go as you wish during the course of the next hour or
so. We’ll begin with a time of sung worship, led today by the fantastic
Luke Hamlin. Then we’ll hear some words from scripture and a short reflection.
After a time of prayer we’ll continue in song.
In our gospel
reading today we hear about the seed of faith. A seed within each of us - which
we might need to discover and rediscover. A tiny seed that has the power to
make an impact that is so big, so awesome, it can be hard for us to comprehend.
So, as we begin our
time of worship, let us pray;
Opening Prayer
As we gather here
in our smallness,
we call upon your
name Lord, giving thanks to you for the great gift of faith; a gift which is
vast beyond all measure;
may the Spirit to
lead us to rediscover the seed of faith you have planted in each of us;
help us to cast our
minds to Calvary - and learn how to embody that seed of faith as you, Lord,
embodied it.
We are sorry for
the times we big ourselves up; filling our lives with pride, with worry, with
anxiety;
Fill our lives
again Lord, with your truth that has set us free.
That we are no
longer slaves to fear.
That, by your
amazing grace, you have given us everything we need to grow in your
image.
In Christ alone my
hope is found.
Amen
Worship Songs
Bible Readings
Let us hear the word of the Lord in the Holy Scriptures. Beginning with a short passage from Chapter One of the Second Letter to Timothy beginning at verse five, which if you would like to follow along is on page 1195 of the pew bibles.
2 Timothy 1.5-10
I am reminded of your sincere faith, which first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice and, I am persuaded, now lives in you also. For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands. For the Spirit God gave us does not make us timid, but gives us power, love and self-discipline. So do not be ashamed of the testimony about our Lord or of me his prisoner. Rather, join with me in suffering for the gospel, by the power of God. He has saved us and called us to a holy life—not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace. This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time, but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus, who has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.
And a reading from the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 17 beginning at verse five - on page 1050 of the pew bibles.
Luke 17.5-10
The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!”
He replied, “If you
have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be
uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it will obey you.
“Suppose one of you has a servant plowing or looking after the sheep. Will he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, ‘Come along now and sit down to eat’? Won’t he rather say, ‘Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink’? Will he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.’”
Sermon – The Lord doth
magnify my soul
A few months ago I visited the Holy Land for the first time with a small group of people training for ministry at various colleges around the world.
It was an amazing experience, which I thoroughly recommend if ever you get the opportunity.
One of the things that surprised me most was the size of everything.
The old walled city of Jerusalem can be crossed on foot in about a quarter of an hour. The mighty River Jordan is a shallow, muddy and narrow stream. The Sea of Galilee is more like a small lake. The holes in the ground said to have supported the cross of Jesus - and the two men crucified alongside him - are very close together. The cave tomb - the Holy Sepulchre - has been carved away and replaced by what is called an ‘edicule’ - a small house with a tiny door guarded by a monk, which you have to bend double to enter. Inside there is space for three or four people to line up and touch the stone bench where the body of Jesus is said to have lain. People with short legs could kneel beside it - I had to stand. The bench itself is thin and narrow. You only get a small amount of time inside the edicule before the monk standing guard tells you in no uncertain terms to move on!
What surprised me at the time was that everything was much smaller than I had imagined - although no less awesome!
But perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised at all. After all, this is a Gospel of small things. Small things with a huge impact. A birth in a manger. The story of a man living in a small area of occupied land on the fringe of a sprawling multi-cultural empire. Of the calling of a band of twelve then seventy - which, according to one passage in the Book of Acts had grown to just one hundred and twenty by the time of Jesus’ death. Not exactly a mega church.
The harvest is
great but the labourers few. This is a Gospel of small things. Of fig trees,
lost coins, mustard seeds. The extra-ordinary inhabiting the ordinary.
In the passage we heard from the Second Letter to Timothy, Timothy is described as someone with “sincere faith” which first lived in his grandmother, Lois and his mother Eunice.
This glimpse of his family tree - a record of those who gave birth to Timothy, reminds us perhaps that the seed of faith is always in us, like our DNA - and hints at the ordinary circumstances of everyday life in which we might discover – and re-discover it.
Our Vicar, Fr Nick, often tells the story about how he discovered the seed of faith within him outside at an ice cream van. The extra ordinary inhabiting the ordinary indeed! I have never looked at a Mr Whippy in the same way again!
My earliest awareness of the seed of faith within me is also a memory of an
ordinary moment in my childhood.
My father walked out when I was eight years old. My Mum took on cleaning work and sold cosmetics door to door to make ends meet. She worked all hours she could and was always there for us when we came home from school but often, she would need to work in the evening. I have a distinct memory of sitting on top of my bunk bed one evening waiting for her to come home, after putting my brother and sister to bed. In front of me was my treasure box, in which I kept my special things - a card with tiny fragments of gemstones of the world, an old penny coin and - a pocket Bible that had been given to us at school by a group called The Gideons. I opened the treasure box, held the Bible and prayed to God. Nothing complicated. The simple prayers of a child. Asking God to help my Mum, to protect us. To keep us together.
I think that was the moment I realised that no matter how difficult things were or had been, I had faith and trust in God that he would always be with us. No big flashes of light. No pillar of cloud. Looking back, I think that was the moment I first became aware of the seed of faith within me.
Nearly forty years later I still have to go back to that moment – to keep rediscovering that seed – and I still struggle against the temptation to keep filling my life with more things – with more activities – instead of letting that seed inhabit me. It is hard to accept the greatness of the gift of faith we have been given.
Perhaps it’s not
surprising that the disciples ask Jesus for more faith. They’ve seen him feed
the five thousand, heal the sick, hold the attention of huge crowds while
teaching in the synagogue - and had been sent out to do the same.
Comparing themselves to the example of Jesus, these ordinary folk must have
felt that they would never have enough faith to live up to their extraordinary
calling. I’m not embarrassed to stand before you and admit that I can
understand exactly how they feel! Maybe you can too?
“Increase our faith” they cry.
But Jesus explains that faith doesn’t work like that. It’s not about size or quantity. He says: “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it will obey you.”
Pretty bizarre. A tree in the sea. Certainly a symbol of unexpected and radical change - and perhaps one that is meant to put a check on our super-sized expectations. Just as I had expected the scale of the Holy Land to be humongous, perhaps here Jesus is reminding us that a tiny seed of faith has the power to transform the world as we could have never imagined. There is no need for more. The seed is all we need.
Faith isn’t a
commodity that we can acquire - either through appealing to Jesus, or through
earning it by the work we do, or acquiring some special sort of knowledge or
power.
The Second Letter to Timothy reminds us that faith is a gift. A gift from God. A gift we have all received by the Holy Spirit. A gift that existed before the beginning of time - before there was anyone around to receive it. A gift revealed to us in the person of Christ, who is the embodiment of faith, hope and love.
The gift is one we have received “not because of anything we have done but because of [God’s] own purpose and grace.” The letter calls on us to embody this faith “to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you”.
God has given us all we need to fulfil our calling to follow in the footsteps of his Son. We don’t need any more faith. We need to embody it – or perhaps I should say that we need to let it embody us. To live out our faith in our everyday life.
The Mustard Seed is
only one half of today’s gospel reading. The other part is rather harder to
swallow.
We need to put ourselves in the mind of a slave-owner. An extra ordinary idea today - but at the time of Jesus owning a slave was - ordinary.
Jesus asks who among us would invite their slave to sit and eat once they had finished their duties in the field. Surely we would ask the slave to prepare our food before they ate their own?
And just like the slave, when we have done everything we are told to do, we should say : ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.’”
God has given us all we need to live faithfully. It can be hard for us to accept such great a gift. We think we need more. To do more. And that when we do more, we will earn more. But no! What God asks us in return is that we allow that seed of faith to embody us – as our Lord embodied it. Living faithfully in and through our lives, every day. Making space for the extra-ordinary to be revealed through the ordinary.
For our souls and bodies to truly magnify the Lord we need to allow the Lord to
magnify our souls and bodies!
A spiritual writer called Teresa of Avila summed it up this way;
Christ has no body
but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.
Amen.
Links
Image : Piety Choi, A Mustard Seed, 2015
Notes
After I preached this sermon during Choral Evensong on Wednesday 5th October 2022, a catholic priest in the congregation who was visiting from America told me that it reminded him of an essay by G.K.Chesterton "What I found in my pocket" which you can read at this link.
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