Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

Reading: Lamentations 1:1-6; Psalm 137; II Timothy 1:1-14; Luke 17:5-10

St. Paul from a Roman prison wrote to a young Timothy:

God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power, and of love, and of self-discipline.

We gather today and every Sunday to be renewed, to have the Spirit that lives within us be recharged. God’s grace reinforces, rekindles the gift of God that is within…

First, God’s grace dwelling within us, ensures that when others bow down to the principalities and powers of this world, we are empowered, we are strengthened, to stand up straight and tall. God’s grace dwelling within us ensures that we endure secure, while others may bend and break.

Second, God’s grace dwelling within us ensures that we love while others may seek vengeance or revenge. God’s grace dwelling within us ensures that we love all God’s people, not just some, not just those who look like us, or talk like us, or worship like us, or dress like us, or think like us.

Third, God’s grace dwelling within us ensures “self-control”. St. Paul used a very complicated Greek word here that is not easily translated, sophronismas. It has been rendered as:

“the sanity of saintliness”,

“the control of oneself in the face of panic or of passion”,

and

“self-mastery which will keep us alike from being swept away and from running away”.

In the midst of all the words being thrown about in the public arenas, we need to be people centered on God; people who have God’s grace at our very core, and at the very same time be focused on serving as Jesus served. We need to be people with God’s grace in our heart, and people with God’s grace in our thoughts, and people with God’s grace in our throats, and people with God’s grace in our deeds. We need to be people who can walk confidently into the valleys of the shadow of death, and people who can gently touch the demoniacs to return them to purposeful living, and people who can restore sight to the blind, and people who reach out to the lepers.

The first century disciples of Jesus saw the hurting world all around them, and they cried out to Jesus, “Increase our faith”.

Their cry is sometimes our cry, too. Jesus, “increase our faith”.

How did Jesus respond to those first disciples?

If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree [which has deep roots], Be uprooted and planted in the sea, and it would obey you.

Jesus responds to us with the same love. 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.

Of course, he was speaking Middle Eastern hyperbole. Of course, he knew that their faith was far greater than a mustard seed.

And of course, he knows our faith is far greater than a mustard seed, too. He knows that as St. Paul wrote to Timothy