Overcoming the Big with the Little

Luke 17:5-10 (Proper 22, Year C)

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The Mustard Seed Necklace

There was a nice little gift store in my boyhood church. It sold all sorts of cute religious trinkets — carved olive wood crosses straight from the Holy Land, little boxes of the Bible’s precious promises, and those glow-in-the-dark crosses we now know were laced with radium. And, of course, there were the mustard seed necklaces: simple gold chains holding a glass pendant with a single tiny seed embedded inside.

Those were hot sellers.

And we can understand why. Of all the images Jesus uses to describe the kingdom of God, the mustard seed is the most popular. He talks about it on five separate occasions in the Gospels. “The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed which is the smallest seed you plant in the ground. Yet, when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants.” “If you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move.”

Over and over, Jesus reaches for the tiny mustard seed to illustrate the power of faith and the kingdom.

But in Luke 17, he uses it in a way we often overlook.

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Watch Yourselves

First, Jesus warns about the peril of sin. We tend to overcomplicate sin in the church. Sin is simply what happens when you walk outside the way of God — putting yourself first, seeking salvation only for yourself, neglecting the poor and the forgotten, showing up for the ride but not the sacrifice.

And sin kills. It kills the soul, the body, the mind, families, churches, nations, the world.

So Jesus says, “Watch yourselves.” Sin has a way of creeping up on you without your even knowing it, until one day you find yourself a long way from God and the life he intends for you.

How are you doing with the way of God? I struggle with it every day, because the way of the world — the way of Marty — is a lot easier than the way of the Lord. But the way of the Lord is the only way to life.

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The Forgiveness Test

Then Jesus gives us a scenario we all recognize. Someone sins against you, says he’s sorry, and tries to make it right. How do you react?

For some of us, one offense is one too many, and we banish the culprit for good. I once worked with a church staff member who kept a list like that — the kind of list that begins with the same letter as my last name. Yeah, that list. Once you were on it, you never got off. Maybe you have a Singley list of your own.

But others of us can forgive a first offense. Then Jesus ups the ante: what if the person does the very same thing again? Am I the only one who’d be pretty ticked off at that? But being a Christian — and having just come home from a genuinely inspiring sermon on forgiveness — maybe some of us would find the strength to forgive a second time.

I’m not sure I’d be in that group. How about you?

Jesus keeps raising the number — a third time, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, a seventh — meaning as many times as the person comes back and says, “I repent.”

“Forgive him,” Jesus says.

Anybody still in the game?

The disciples gasped. They choked. Just like us — they had faith, but not that much faith. So they said, “Increase our faith!”

And Jesus answers, “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.”

What we need for the greatest, most impossible miracles isn’t more faith. So what is it?

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Just Doing Your Duty

Jesus answers with a story his listeners would recognize. A servant comes in from the field, tired and hungry. Custom of the day: he isn’t invited to sit and eat. He prepares his master’s meal and serves him first — and the master doesn’t even thank him, because the servant only did what was expected of him.

“So then you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.'”

Duty. Hold onto that word.

Mother Teresa once told of a dying woman she found abandoned in a garbage dump. The woman, in her agony, raged against the son who’d put her there. Mother Teresa told her she had to forgive him. The woman was furious. But Mother Teresa said, in effect, “Of course you must forgive him. He is your son. You are his mother. It is the duty of a mother to forgive her children.”

Just before she died, the woman offered God her forgiveness for her son. In doing so, she set herself free to die in peace, set her son free from guilt, and took part in God’s own work of redeeming the world through Christ.

It was her duty.

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Mustard Seed Duty

We don’t talk much about duty in the church today. But faithfully carrying out the small, God-given duties in front of us is the heart of what it means to live as a Christian. And what we forget is that these duties are usually small and simple — like grains of mustard seed. Yet these little seeds of duty have the power to change the world.

St. Augustine put it this way: “To be faithful in little things is a big thing.”

Nowhere in the Bible are we called to solve poverty — but we are called to care for the poor among us. Nowhere are we called to establish peace on earth — but we are called to be peacemakers ourselves. Nowhere are we called to save the world — but everywhere we are called to forgive, love, welcome, and support one another in Christ’s name.

We are called not to big tasks, but to small duties. We are called to a mustard-seed-sized faith — countless little responsibilities that, added together, become real-life miracles.

That’s the lesson: the greatest miracles come not from a faith big enough to overcome the impossible, but from a mustard seed of faith that simply says, “Do your duty.”

Faith is trusting God enough to do your duty — as a husband or wife, a parent or child, a neighbor, a citizen, a member of a church. Faith is following Jesus, who came into the world and went to the cross — not because he wanted to, but because it was his Father’s will, and he did his duty.

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Coming to the Table

As we come to the Communion table today, I hope you can see how the miracle of salvation came to be. The bread and the wine are symbols of the One who truly did his duty. They are such little things.

They are mustard seeds planted in the earth.

And from those tiny seeds, trees have been uprooted, mountains have been moved, the impossible has become possible, and salvation has come to the world.