THE KIRK OF KILDAIRE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

CARY, NC

www.kirkofkildaire.org

A sermon preached by Cathy Church Norman

Small Faith, Big Love

Mark 12:28-31
Luke 17:5-6

October 7, 2007

Mark 12:28-31

28One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that Jesus answered them well, he asked him, "Which commandment is the first of all?" 29Jesus answered, "The first is, 'Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; 30you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.' 31The second is this, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these."

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.

The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Last week I went with some folks from our church to a conference at Willow Creek Community Church just outside of Chicago. It was huge! We were in a big auditorium (I think it seats about 7000) with a big stage and a big band. There were big screens on either side of the stage and big screens behind the band that projected big scenes of oceans and stars and deserts. It was even on a big campus with over 150 acres. The sound was big and loud, and it was beautiful. Thousands of people praising God together, some hands lifted, all voices raised.

Though the setting of the conference was big, the ideas were small, simple. It was a conference about small groups.

The first speaker I heard was a middle-aged bald professor named Scot McKnight who spit when he talked and made things real simple. He told us he had decided to live by something he called the Jesus Creed (and he's written a book with the same name). McKnight says living by this creed has changed his life. And he says if we focus on the Jesus Creed, if we say it and pray it every day for one month it can change our lives, too. His whole idea of the Jesus creed comes from the Mark passage we read earlier when the expert in the law comes up and asks Jesus for the greatest commandment.

Well, Jesus was a good Jew and like faithful Jews of his day (and of our day), a passage from Deuteronomy known as the shema was tattooed on his heart. He and his fellow Jews would have recited the shema upon waking and retiring. [We heard it read in Hebrew a few minutes ago]-" Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; 30you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength."

It was no surprise Jesus would have given this passage as the greatest commandment. They recited it since they were kids. The surprise came when Jesus added to it. He went all the way back to the book of Leviticus, Leviticus 19:18, to add a dusty old verse that nobody ever quoted-"You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

McKnight says with this addition, Jesus changed history. He turned everything around. He amended this fundamental Jewish creed and laid the foundation for his life and ministry and for our lives too. So, the Jesus Creed is:

"'Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; 30you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.' 31The second is this, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these."

Jesus' idea of loving God and loving our neighbors is at the center of everything he did and it's at the center of everything Jesus calls us to be as the church and as believers. McKnight challenges us to say it when we wake up and when we go to bed, and through out the day at several points. If we center ourselves and our lives on this creed not as a command but as a confession, it will remind us whatever we do, our day is shaped by loving God and loving others.

What a simple idea: love God and love others. It's a simple concept but not always easy to practice.

In our Luke passage, the disciples ask, really demand Jesus to give them more faith. Jesus doesn't tell them they need a truckload of faith to follow him (or probably more like a boatload back then). He tells them all they need is faith the size of a mustard seed. It they had that they could grow a mulberry tree in the sea. And who can do that? Trees don't grow in the sea. Matthew's Gospel says if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you can move mountains. Nothing will be impossible. [1]

A little bit of faith goes a long way. The disciples were worried about having the right amount of faith poured into their hearts and minds. They thought if they had lots of faith, they wouldn't stumble. This big faith would strengthen them to do what they were supposed to do. But instead, later on in Luke 17, Jesus tells them to get about the business of doing God's work. There's a lot of loving that needs to be done. If they focus on that, God will take care of the faith part. Instead of asking Jesus for more faith, perhaps they should have been praying for more love. Perhaps we could pray for more love, too.

McKnight talks about mustard seed faith in The Jesus Creed. Even though a mustard seed is small it grows to be a large bush when it's planted. And the kingdom of Jesus grows like this too. McKnight writes, "it spreads like seeds, one at a time, from person to person. Don't get me wrong, sometimes Jesus speaks to large crowds and gets large responses. . . . But mostly Jesus just meets people-breezy mornings with his disciples, sultry afternoon walks with his followers, cool evenings around the table with all sorts. Nothing about Jesus breathes the need for the gymnasium in Tiberias, or the Sanhedrin's audience in Jerusalem, or a daily platform in the courts of the temple. Nor does he need Rome's theater in Sepphoris. The paradox of a mustard-seed kingdom means that all Jesus needs is a person and an opportunity. . . . His is not a ministry of the big and beautiful, but of a little mustard seed passing from person to person, pocket to pocket, heart to heart." (p. 137-38)

The next person I heard speak at the conference was a crazy-haired Australian man born in South Africa but who now lived in L.A. His name was Alan Hirsch and he was brilliant in his simplicity. Hirsch spends most of his time studying why the church is on the rise in some parts of the world but on the decline in our part to the world. He believes that a mustard seed faith is all we need, and says, "the smallness of what we're about is the genius of it." Hirsch thinks the church has lost its way over time and whenever we get lost we need to go back to Jesus to find our way.

He says we need a church that looks more like Jesus and not the domesticated Jesus we've created. . . a church that reclaims the Jesus of the Gospels, the guy who hung out with ordinary people-fishermen and carpenters-and with people of bad reputation-tax collectors and prostitutes. Jesus loved people who seemed unlovable. He spent time with his neighbors and expanded the definition of who a neighbor was. His love pushed boundaries. It was boundless. And it was messy, too.

I've been reading this book called The Irresistible Revolution by a guy in his early 30's named Shane Claiborne. It's been messing with my faith in a good way and challenging what it means to serve. If you'd like to shake up your faith and think about loving in a whole new way, I suggest you read it, too. [The Irresistible Revolution]

When Claiborne was in college, he decided he wanted to learn how to love and serve, and couldn't think of a better example of how to do that than Mother Teresa in Calcutta. So, he wrote her a letter asking if he could come for the summer. When he didn't hear back from her, he made some phone calls, and ultimately got her phone number and called to ask if he could come for the summer. She said yes, and when he asked where he would eat and sleep, she said, "God takes care of the lilies and the sparrows, and God will take care of you. Just come."

Claiborne says in his time with Mother Teresa he learned to do great things with deliberation. Mother Teresa used to say, "We can do no great things, just small things with great love. It is not how much you do, but how much love you put into doing it."

Claiborne lived in a leper colony, where he says the "Bible came to life, changed from black and white to color." He had always been troubled by verse John 14:12, where Jesus tells the disciples, "Very truly I tell you, all who have faith in me will do works I have been doing and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father." Claiborne couldn't understand how we could do more than Christ himself. Claiborne says even though he touched lepers, at the end of the day, they still went home lepers. But then he says, "I began to discover 'the greater things'. . . . I started to see that [the] miracles were an expression not so much of Jesus' mighty power. . . what had lasting significance were not the miracles themselves but Jesus' love. . . . It wasn't that Jesus healed a leper but that he touched a leper, because no one touched lepers. And the incredible thing about that love is that it now lives inside us." (p. 78, 84-85)

At the end of his summer, Claiborne was ready to come home. Mother Teresa always used to say, "Calcuttas are everywhere if only we have eyes to see. Find your Calcutta." He knew his Calcutta, the place where he was supposed to share God's love, was in the United States, especially in urban Philadelphia.

I wonder where the Calcuttas are for each of us. Could Cary be a Calcutta?

In his book Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller has a chapter called "Love: How to Really Love Other People." Miller writes about a time he and a friend lived in the woods of Oregon for a month with what he calls "hippies." He says "they smoked a lot of pot. . . and drank a lot of beer. . . and man did they love each other, perhaps too much." Most of them had been formally educated at places like NYU with master's degrees. They knew about American and British writers, African, Cuban and South American writers. Miller says, "They were books themselves, all of them were books, and what was so wonderful is that to them, I was a book too. We would sit around and talk about different literature and each other, and I couldn't tell the difference between the books they were talking about and their lives, they were just cool. I liked them very much because they were interested in me. When I was with the hippies I did not feel judged, I felt loved. To them I was an endless well of stories and perspectives. . . It felt so wonderful to be in their presence, like I was special."

Do we, do you make people feel like this? Loved and accepted.

Miller goes on to say, "So much about what I know about getting along with people I learned from the hippies. They were magical in community. People were drawn to them. They asked me what I loved, what I hated, how I felt about this and that, what sort of music made me angry, what sort of music made me sad. They asked me what I daydreamed about, what I wrote about, where my favorite places in the world were. They asked me about high school and college and my travels around America. They loved me like a good novel, like an art film, and this is how I felt when I was with them, like a person John Irving would write. I did not feel fat or stupid or sloppily dressed. I did not feel like I did not know the Bible well enough, and I was never conscious what my hands were doing or whether or not I sounded immature when I talked. I had always been so conscious of those things, but living with those hippies I forgot about myself. And when I lost this self-consciousness I gained so much more. I gained an interest in people outside my own skin." (p. 207-9)

Miller says he never felt love like this before in the church, love so real and true. He couldn't be himself around his Christian friends the way he could around his hippie friends who he says were far from believing that Christ was the Son of God.

What does that say about Christians and about the Church? Can we learn lessons in love from the hippies?

Jesus says we need to get about the business of loving God and loving our neighbors. We need to love like Jesus did. And what did Jesus do? He threw parties and opened doors wide open. He told a story about a person who stopped to help someone who was nothing like him. He ate with sinners, prostitutes, and tax collectors. He touched lepers, walked with the poor, and listened to people's stories like they were the best stories that had ever been told.

Jesus invested his time in a group of average Joe's and then used them to scatter seeds of the kingdom one pocket at a time. He taught this small group of friends to have faith the size of a mustard seed and to really love God and really love people, and that God would change the world through them. And God did.
Jesus showed us how much he loved us by the way he lived and by the way he died, and he invites us to share in this mustard seed kingdom of love, looking for people-one person at time-and opportunities to love. People who may be like us but also people who may seem at first nothing like us. He invites us to pass the mustard seed from pocket to pocket, heart to heart with ordinary acts of love and kindness.

At the table we see most clearly how much Jesus loved God and loved people. Jesus was obedient through his fears, even as he prayed the night before his death, "if it is possible, take this cup from me, yet not what I want but what you want." [2] We see at the table that Jesus loved his neighbors until it hurt, and man did it hurt, it got him killed. And Jesus is still loving and serving now. He invites us to love, too. This table is an invitation to be part of Jesus' body, to do great things, to be part of God's family. Here we find an invitation to be fed and renewed so that we will have the energy to love and change the world one life at time.
Amen.

[1] Matthew 17:20
[2] Matthew 26:39