Luke 17:5-10
The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!” The Lord replied, “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.
“Who among you would say to your slave who has just come in from plowing or tending sheep in the field, `Come here at once and take your place at the table’? Would you not rather say to him, `Prepare supper for me, put on your apron and serve me while I eat and drink; later you may eat and drink’? Do you thank the slave for doing what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, `We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!'”
A man named Johnny was walking along a steep cliff one day when he accidentally got too close to the edge and fell. On the way down he grabbed a branch, which temporarily stopped his fall. He looked down and to his horror saw that the canyon fell straight down for more than a thousand feet. He couldn’t hang onto the branch forever, and there was no way for him to climb up the steep wall of the cliff.
It would seem that Johnny was lacking a key ingredient with his new found relationship with God: faith. As Christians we speak of faith all the time. When things are going wrong folks always say, “just have a little faith.” It has got to be in the top ten sermon topics for priest. You can’t even read the bible without running into discussions on it. The words of Paul, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” In other words, everyone who has faith in Jesus will be saved.
In our Gospel, Jesus speaks of faith, “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.”
So if everyone is talking about it, then what is it? What is faith?
Paul says, “faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for. By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.” That’s nice. Everybody understand faith now? Maybe we should break it down a bit more.
Faith is believing in what we cannot see, but it comes in two different varieties, C. S. Lewis broke it down for us as “head faith” and “heart faith” and it is best broken down in an example: Head faith, Lewis says, is when he goes in for a surgery. He can trust the anesthesiologist because he understands through the intellect the workings of the body they’ll put the mask over his face, start pumping in the gas that will put him to sleep, and after he is asleep – and only then – will the surgeon begin the operation and the cutting. Because he is deeply asleep he knows that he will experience no pain. The intellect is sound, right up to the point when they lay him on the table and actually put the mask on him. It is then that his emotions, his “heart faith,” takes over. Fear kicks in and his heart says, “Oh my goodness what if this doesn’t work?” “What if I’m not asleep when they start slicing into me?” “What if I can feel everything, but can’t tell them?” The head was good, but the heart took over and left him a nervous wreck.
The same is true in our Christian walk. When all is well with us our faith is strong, but when we find ourselves hanging off a cliff with a thousand foot drop below and only an invisible voice in our heads saying, “Trust me,” then our emotions ramp up and our heart begins to doubt. We begin to doubt. “Is God really out there,” we whisper to ourselves.
There is a dramatic difference between the head and the heart when it comes to believing in what we cannot see. Deciding which one will rule our souls – head or heart – will also make a dramatic difference in our Christian walk. We came across this passage last week in our Wednesday night study of the Ragamuffin Gospel: “If a random sample of one thousand American Christians were taken today, the majority would define faith as belief in the existence of God. In earlier times it did not take faith to believe that God existed – almost everybody took that for granted. Rather, faith had to do with one’s relationship with God – whether one trusted in God. The difference between faith as ‘belief in something that may or may not exist’ and faith as ‘trusting in God’ is enormous. The first is a matter of the head, the second a matter of the heart. The first can leave us unchanged, the second intrinsically brings change.”
If head faith is greater than heart faith, then how do we go from one to the other? How do we go from remaining the same, to being transformed in Christ? It is a matter of rephrasing that simple question. Instead of asking, “Do you believe in God?” ask, “Do you trust in God?”
“HELP! HELP! IS ANYONE ELSE UP THERE?” No, there’s not. Trust in Him. The Psalmist says to the Lord: “The Lord is trustworthy in all he promises and faithful in all he does.” And what does the Lord promise? Do this for me… Turn to page 779 of your Book of Common Prayer. What does the Lord promise? Let’s say together Psalm 121:
I lift up my eyes to the hills; *
from where is my help to come?
My help comes from the LORD, *
the maker of heaven and earth.
He will not let your foot be moved *
and he who watches over you will not fall asleep.
Behold, he who keeps watch over Israel *
shall neither slumber nor sleep;
The LORD himself watches over you; *
the LORD is your shade at your right hand,
So that the sun shall not strike you by day, *
nor the moon by night.
The LORD shall preserve you from all evil; *
it is he who shall keep you safe.
The LORD shall watch over your going out and
your coming in, *
from this time forth for evermore.
Have faith in your head. Stop simply believing and start trusting, for the Lord himself watches over you.
Candle in a Cave 