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.