October 5 2025 Sermon
Life doesn’t go as planned. We find ourselves making mistakes, bad decisions, we sometimes get lazy, don’t have the willpower to take up difficult challenges or stave off temptations.
More often than not forces beyond ourselves disrupt our life plan. A friend walking the path of self-destruction doesn’t heed advice putting a strain on the friendship and a parting of ways. A child or grandchild makes choices we cannot understand which lead to heartbreak. Global economic factors far beyond any individuals control run roughshod over our plans, our lives. Life doesn’t go as planned, we don’t get what we expect or think that we deserve.
Jesus’ first disciples knew this as well. In the passage immediately preceding today’s gospel reading Jesus tells his followers that they must forgive one another even 7 times a day if the offender repents. Life didn’t always go as the disciples wanted, planned, or expected. And Jesus tells them that they must forgive one another, even if the other has disrupted their plan, prevented them from getting what they wanted.
How do the disciples react to this challenging command to forgive? Luke tells us that the disciples ask for more faith. Were they expecting that more faith would enable them to better control the world around them? To heal what ailed them and loved ones. To exert greater influence over the evils of the world to make it a better place where life goes according to plan? Would more faith help them forgive those who wrong them, to more gracefully turn the other cheek? What outcome would more faith provide.
Jesus tells them if you have faith the size of a mustard seed you could cast a mullberry tree into the sea through the word of your command. Surely the disciples, having followed Jesus for several years already had this much faith, faith the size of a mustard seed. Maybe the disciples didn’t grasp what faith is and how it functions.
Abruptly Luke’s account moves to Jesus telling the disciples a parable about a slave and the slaves master. In a master-slave relation, the master is served by the slave not the other way around. It would be ludicrous for the slave to expect that the master would serve them dinner after they put in a hard day’s work in the field. With our 21st century sensibilities we cringe at this scene, but the disciples likely would have thought – oh, the slave doesn’t just get what he wants, he has a job to do.
Jesus had a job to do. He came into the world to bring reconciliation into the world, to save sinners, to inaugurate the kingdom of God on earth, to call disciples to continue his servant ministry, to bring to his followers the gift of faith.
Faith is gift which enables us to do God’s will. Faith is the means by which we can serve God and others. Faith moves us beyond our self-centred hopes and expectations and enables us to attach ourselves to God’s plan – a plan that is nothing less than the salvation of the whole world.
So what of our lives, our dashed plans and unrealized expectations. The God who rightly fits the masters role has taken the role of servant, to heal our wounds, to guard and protect us and those we love, to forgive our sins and feed us with the bread of life. God has already done the impossible, has assured us of eternal life and offers us the opportunity to have a foretaste of that life even now.
The senior Paul, even while imprisioned sends this message to the young Timothy in today’s epistle. The apostle Paul encouraging Timothy to rely on his faith – not the immediate circumstances of his life or the outcomes of his efforts. That mustard seed of faith already gifted to Timothy through his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice, confirmed in him through the laying on of Paul’s hands, that faith, rightly offered back to God in his desire to follow Jesus and join in God’s reconciling mission is the solid foundation for Timothy’s life in Christ. So too for us, let us gratefully receive the mustard seed of faith given us, and offer it back to God in our worship and lives of service. +