Fierce

Luke 18:1-8; 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5

How fierce are you?

How fierce are you willing to be, in prayer; in your faith?

That’s what Jesus is asking us today, telling this story about a woman who keeps on insisting on justice when all common sense and experience says she’s not going to get it. It’d take a miracle for her to win against the forces of indifference and self-sufficiency personified in the “unjust judge” in the story, and she keeps expecting and demanding that miracle anyway.

This story is framed to emphasize the importance of persistence. But the idea of nagging until you get something has always put me off, until I found out that our translation of this story is actually underselling that point quite a bit.

In other English translations, the judge in Jesus’ story says to himself, “well, even though I don’t care about God or anybody else, I’m going to give this woman what she wants so that she doesn’t attack me! …so that she doesn’t beat me black and blue!”

The original Greek is something like “hit me under the eye”, a phrase for knocking out a boxing opponent.

This widow isn’t simply persistent. She’s fierce.

She’s not patient and persistent in a mild way. Her nagging isn’t whining. Her drive for justice is active, bold, risky, powerful -- punchy.

Will we be like her? Jesus wants to know.

He asks his disciples, asks us: Will the coming of God into our daily reality, then and now, find mild, indifferent, or complaining belief?

Or will the coming of God find faith: active, fierce expectation of miracles and justice, of God acting among us; high expectations of generous, holy right-living in our world, our neighbors, and ourselves.

How fierce are we going to be in our faith?

Jesus wants to know.

How fierce are you willing to be in prayer, in the constant practice of opening up yourself, opening up our lives, to God in miraculous expectation, profound trust, and active confidence?

That’s actually the same question we’ve been encouraged to ask ourselves all this month as the preparation for Consecration Sunday draws our attention to the way we give. To the way we commit our money to the work of God, through the church responsible for being the Body of Christ here and now.

“What percentage of my income is God calling me to give?” say the handouts of giving levels that have been in your bulletin the last two weeks.

This question is – in a concrete and measured way – the same as the question Jesus is asking today: How fierce are you, how bold and persistent and ferocious are you willing to be in your faith, in your prayer?

The number that represents fierce commitment is different for every household, but for all of us, giving our money in faith is, in fact, a form of prayer.

(Giving our money in transactions, obligation, or reluctance isn’t usually prayer – while I value an uninterrupted relationship with PSE&G, there’s nothing holy and nothing especially relational about moving money from my bank account to theirs every month.)

But giving our money to the work of God – turning over a concrete measure of our spending power to the spiritual nurture of our neighbors, children, strangers, the world – that IS a form of prayer.

Because prayer is more than our words. Prayer is all the actions that open our hearts and senses to the presence of God in the world. Prayer is the actions and attitudes that open our ears and hearts to the will of God, the habits and choices that open our eyes and hearts to the love of God, poured out on us and on others.

Jesus wants us to be consistently fierce in all those forms of prayer.

Jesus also knows it isn’t always easy. That these fierce forms of prayer are often hard, regularly uncomfortable, and even frightening.

About ten years ago, I first made the commitment of giving ten percent of my income to God in my pledge to the church - because I’d found that gradually increasing my giving as a percentage of income had consistently focused my attention on, increased my ability to see what God was up to, changing lives and hearts in the church and in the world around me. But ten percent – the traditional “tithe” – felt quite risky when I was moving to a new job, preparing to buy a home in a new city, uncertain about the cost of living.

Writing my pledge card at that level has gotten easier with practice and experience, like many forms of prayer, but still when I sit down every week with the bills that are due and the money I’ve spent on my comforts and my responsibilities, some weeks it’s really hard to write that check to Trinity instead of putting it off or reducing it.
I get anxious about whether I’m in control of my spending. I sometimes fear this much giving may risk my ability to maintain the safety of my home, or independence in retirement, or my commitments to the future of my family. I wonder if I’m limiting the good I can do elsewhere.

Sometimes, I write and deliver that check cranky with anxiety.
Other times, I remember what my friends and the witness of scripture tell me: that it’s ultimately God’s job to do the protecting and providing; to guide us to those places where we do the most good in the world; that God welcomes our dependence on God even when it frightens me.  Those weeks, writing that check is an act of active trust and hope. And a bit of a relief, that I’m not responsible for safety, future, and life all alone.

And over years of practice, it’s becoming often a joy to fall from my anxiety into my trust in God’s care and power as I write a check, or take another risk that stirs my doubt and fear.

Every time you or I feel the stretch, the uncertainty, when we write out our estimate of giving cards, or put cash in a pledge envelope, or click the button for our weekly or monthly gift in the online banking app, it’s an exercise in trusting God.

Taking that risk in commitment strengthens the trust muscles of our souls, even if we don’t know and feel it at the time, just as learning the rules of grammar, or all the vocabulary of color, is an exercise in being a good story teller even when the stories seem far away.

And when we know it’s an exercise in trust, when we consciously and deliberately practice trusting God in the giving of our gifts and commitments, that strengthens our trust in God the way taking an improv or toastmaster class directly strengthens our story telling.

That’s the same way that learning the stories and themes of the Bible is practice in seeing what God is up to in the world here and now; even though some days reading the Bible is a slog and others it’s vividly stirring your soul.  The same way that repeating the words of the prayer book trains our voices to open the needs and hopes of our hearts to God, even if our minds are elsewhere; and taking the risk of praying out loud for someone in our own words – such a vulnerable feeling for many of us! – can open new parts of our souls to God’s love.

Jesus wants to know if we will do these things consistently, repeatedly, in the face of discomfort and doubt and fear, because the small habits of prayer – prayer with our actions, choices, dollars, voices – train our spirits for the great needs, for the fierce, focused, and bold expectation of miracles; train our hearts to perceive, receive, and share God’s love.

I suspect that on some of the days she set out to confront that indifferent judge, the widow in Jesus’ story felt every painful fiber of her dependence on a miracle, every anxious doubt and need.

And on other days, she probably just showed up to repeat her demand for justice because that’s what she always did on Tuesdays at 10 am.

But each of those actions added up to a fierce, bold dependence on God, a deep, powerful trust that she might not fully have felt until it was at last rewarded, and an ferocious expectation of miracles that made it possible for her to receive both justice and joy.

Jesus is inviting you and me to that same fierce, persistent commitment of prayer.
Fierce, faithful, consistent prayer in our actions and attitudes – with dollars and voices and hours and relationships – that opens our lives and souls and hearts to the even fiercer, stronger, vibrant love of God that pours miracles over us, and longs always for us to see them, expect them, and receive them with joy.

Increasing Faith

2 Timothy 1:1-14; Luke 17:5-10

Do you remember who gave you your faith?

Some of us, like Timothy long ago, have mothers and grandmothers whose faith and faithfulness was a rock for us, an example to learn from.
Some of us remember other family members, friends, neighbors, even co-workers who invited you into faith, by word or example. For some a cherished mentor kindled something inside you that connects you to God; for others, it was a whole community…

Close your eyes for a moment, and remember: who gave you your faith?

Now, how many of you, in that moment, thought of Jesus as the one who gave you your faith?  Thought of God – as Creator, or Christ, or Spirit?

Because that is where our faith actually comes from.

\While the apostles asking for an increase of faith in today’s gospel story were turning to the friend from whom their own faith had caught fire in the first place, when they ask Jesus to increase our faith what they are really doing is asking God.

Whether they know it consciously or not, they’re acknowledging that we don’t create our faith out of our own efforts. We don’t learn faith the way we learn history or the alphabet or the rules of golf. We can’t earn faith by the number of hours of church volunteer work we do.

Because faith, at the very core, is a gift given to us by God, is the seed of our relationship with God. A gift strengthened in community and in practice, and recognized by its effect on our lives. And the good news is that God gives that gift to every one of us.

It’s just that sometimes it feels like not enough.

And sometimes you wonder if you got any at all.

The apostles – those of his followers whom Jesus had sent out to tell others what they were learning from him – apparently doubted that they had enough faith for the challenge Jesus had just given them: of forgiving those who hurt them, even over and over and over and over.

They plead with Jesus – or outright demand, it’s hard to tell in a two thousand year old text – that he increase their faith.

We also heard how Timothy – nurtured in faith by his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice, kindled in that faith by the laying on of hands from his own teacher and mentor – seems to be wavering now, daunted by the thought that following Jesus might land you in prison, like Paul, or make your friends embarrassed by you.

Taking responsibility for bearing witness to Christ, for imitating Jesus in the world, can be an overwhelming thing, even for those who start out feeling very close to God, to Jesus.

And if you don’t start there – if you feel new and ill-equipped and uncertain, or you’ve come to church all your life but don’t feel particularly close to Jesus – you might be even more overwhelmed. Might feel like you don’t have any faith at all.

It is okay to feel that way. Even perfectly normal.

Just because God gives us faith doesn’t mean we automatically know how to be faith-full.

It’s just not okay to let that doubt be the last word on the subject.

Because the first word and the last word are that faith is a gift that God gives each and every one of us because God wants a relationship with each and every one of us.

And how much faith we feel we have is often about how much we use it.

Jesus tells his friends that with faith the size of a mustard seed – individually invisible, unfindable faith – they could do both the difficult and the impossible: uproot the most stubborn of trees and get it to grow in salt water.

When you do the difficult, and the impossible, others see that your faith must have been the size of a mountain! The same faith – the same gift of desire to have and grow in relationship with God – that seemed so small you couldn’t find it when you were staring down the difficult and turns out to be big enough for the impossible, for everything, when you’re looking back.

I believe the human experience of growing in faith is usually one where we start out unsure of our own capacity and – by acting as if that tiny faith is enough – discover God’s capacity in and through us.  That’s what Paul tells Timothy to do – to know that God’s capacity, Jesus’ possibility, are enough for him to live in power, love, and commitment even when he feels afraid and unable to act.

And when his disciples tell him they don’t have enough faith for what he wants them to do, Jesus tells a story about working beyond our reasonable capacity and treating that as ordinary and right. He tells us that feeling as though we don’t have enough faith is no excuse for not taking up the work of faith that God has put before us.

Growing in faith usually happens when we are asked or invited to do something we doubt our own resources for, and act anyway, and find that God has provided the resource; find whole new wells of trust and love and power that were just waiting to be used to be discovered.

In fact, growing in faith most usually happens when we are trying to help someone else grow.

In my early twenties I agreed to teach a youth confirmation class mostly because I knew a lot about the church and liked to tell other people about it.

Turns out that’s not actually what confirmation means!

I was rapidly out of my depth fielding the doubts and hopes – the need for faith – of a bunch of 11 to 13 year olds.

I knew I didn’t have enough faith to give them. So I started to pray for them. Now, I had no idea how to pray for anybody at the time. I had prayer smaller than a mustard seed to work with.

But I learned to pray – discovered an absolutely fundamental component of my faith, my own ongoing and still growing relationship with God – because I didn’t feel like I had enough faith to give these youth what they needed. And that not-enough turned out to be all I needed to do the work of prayer that I was given. And my tiny little faith was fed and strengthened and grew in me because I saw God working in their growth.

I’d like to tell you that that was all I needed in my life to believe that the faith God has given me is both real, and enough – just like the faith God has given, keeps giving, you.

But part of God’s gift is that we never actually stop needing to grow in faith – just like the apostles, already close to Jesus, already evangelizing, had to learn how their mustard of faith needed to grow – and God keeps inviting us to more when we’ve already done all we think we can.

So I still wonder if I have enough faith within me for everything we do and need to do here at Trinity as we embrace the gifts and challenges of helping each other to grow in relationship with God.

And we move forward anyway, and over and over I see what God is doing among you; and the faith that God has given you - and me - turns out to be enough, and more than enough.

In fact, the faith that God gives turns out to work for us and in us just like that servant Jesus talks about: who works overtime in the kitchen after a full day in the field and counts more than enough as only what’s necessary.

So when we ourselves step out in faith and do more than we expect we can, receive more than we could earn, it’s that gift of God working overtime in us, filling every smallness in us with God’s abundant love and commitment and power, growing our hearts and souls and transforming the world.