ANIMALS SHOW US HOW TO INCREASE OUR FAITH
SAINT FRANCIS DAY CELEBRATION
Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
October 06, 2019 – 10:30 AM
Saint Cecilia Catholic Community, Palm Springs, CA
Rev. David Justin Lynch
Habakkuk 1:2-3;2:2-4 | Psalm 95:1-2;6-9
2 Timothy 1:6-8;13-14 | Luke 17-5-10
+ In the name of the Father, and of
the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
We live in an absolutely crazy
world. People are fighting wars in Yemen, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Others
are engaging in street violence, like that happening in Hong Kong. Here in the
United States, we witness vandalism to places of worship, mass shootings, urban
social unrest, corruption in government, severe inequality of wealth and
income, abuse of power, invidious discrimination based on immutable
characteristics, and one person assaulting another driven by hatred of their
ethnicity and/or religion. All of that not only tries our patience but tries
our faith in both God and our fellow humans. Based on fear of harm, the
response of many is to ignore the voice of God and become hard-hearted in a
quest for mere survival. We cry to God for help, but God does not do what we
expect. God does truly test our faith quite often.
What we are seeing today is nothing
new in human history. The prophet Habakkuk lived in the Seventh Century Before
Christ. He’s what scholars call a “pre-exilic prophet.” Then, as now, times
were not good. Here’s the scenario: the
Northern Kingdom of Israel had fallen, and the Babylonian army was on the march
towards Jerusalem in the Southern Kingdom called Judah. The brutal Babylonians
were about to ransack and destroy Jerusalem and deport its people to Babylon
for a long exile.
In our first reading today, the prophet sees violence all
around him and asks why God does not take action. It’s the same thing we feel
when we hear of street violence and mass shootings that leads us to ask, “Where
is God when we need God?” The prophet openly questions God’s wisdom to not get
involved. God tells the prophet that things will get better and to persevere. If
you read the rest of the Book of the Prophet Habakkuk, (very short, only three
chapters), you will see how the prophet contrasts the pride and arrogance of
the Babylonians with the humility of the Israelites. The prophet tells the
Israelites that if they act justly, they will have the faith to survive what
the Babylonians are about to visit upon them, that is, the loss of their land.
As I have preached many times,
faith is NOT, I repeat NOT, whether or not you assent to the existence of
supernatural things, that which is beyond concrete, tangible human experience
perceived with one or more of our five senses.
Faith is NOT the power of positive
thinking or positive reinforcement. It is not found within the will of
the human mind.
Faith is NOT pulling oneself up by
their own bootstraps.
Faith is NOT an acceptance of the
mere existence of God. Rather, faith assumes God’s existence and asks for our
trust in God.
In the Old Testament, Abraham was
considered a great example of faith because he trusted the divine promises which
he personally saw only partially fulfilled. Because of Abraham’s trust of the
unseen, God identified Himself as "the God of Abraham" and Abraham
became known as "God’s friend forever." Hundreds of years later, the
Israelites demonstrated their faith in God when they trusted Moses as God’s
emissary in leading them through the Red Sea while leaving the Egyptians behind
them to drown. It took Moses quite a while to convince them to leave Egypt and
trust God acting through Moses to give them a life better than they experienced
as slaves to the Egyptians. Simply put, an increase in faith was necessary to
motivate the Israelites to leave on their Exodus journey.
Fast forward to today for an
example from our world. We put our faith in people every day. Have you ever had
surgery? You have exhibited confidence in the surgeon by allowing her to work
on your body. You trusted the doctor to improve your physical condition. Similarly,
when a person gets on a train, they exercise faith in the engineer, trusting
that the engineer was trained to do her job. You are trusting that this person
can get you to your destination! Think of the trust that you invest in other
people daily. When you think of it that way, why do we have such a hard time
trusting God? Probably because God is
far away from you, not part of your everyday world.
What God is asking of you is to
place your trust and complete reliance on God, just as you do the doctor or the
train engineer, only the stakes are much bigger.
Faith asks us to assume that,
despite all the bad things going on around us, God will, in the end, make all
things right.
When we pray for an increase in
faith, as the disciples of Jesus did in today’s Gospel, we pray for increased
trust and reliance on God. Jesus gives the example of the mulberry tree. Jesus
tells us that if we have sufficient faith, we can do anything. For Jesus, a
little faith goes a long way in getting big things done. Jesus tells us that
faint the size of a mustard seed will be sufficient to uproot a mulberry tree
and plant it in the sea. A mustard seed is extremely small, no more than about
one millimeter in size. A mulberry tree, however, is quite large. It grows
three to four meters high in the first six years of its life, and, when fully
grown, tops out at about twenty-five meters. What Jesus is telling us is that
he amount of our faith is less important than its potency and quality.
We all know people who are simple
and humble but with an incredibly strong faith that moves mountains. For example, Rosa Parks, a Black housemaid,
moved mountains in impelling the success of the civil rights movement when,
when, after a hard day of cleaning, refused to move to the back of the bus when
requested to do so by a White person in accordance with prevailing custom. Simple, humble people, like the incarnate
Jesus, accomplish more than bombastic, power-hungry type-A personalities.
The disciples in today’s Gospel ask
Jesus, “Increase our faith.” What prompted them to ask that? In the portion of
the seventeenth chapter of the Lukan Gospel that immediately precedes today’s
Gospel reading, Jesus spoke about sin. Jesus said sin was inevitable and that the
result of sin was not good. But Jesus also said, “If your brother sins, rebuke
him, and if he repents, forgive him.” And then Jesus tells them if someone
wrongs you seven times in one day, and says, “I’m sorry” each time, you should
forgive that person.
We have all had the experience of
someone who continually displeases us and apologizes, but keeps on doing
it. At home, Deacon Sharon continually
tells me to clean up after myself. Each time, I apologize for not doing it, but
I am still a messy person. Each time, however, she forgives me. And I ask her
repeatedly to store her clothes in closets rather than all over the bedroom,
but I forgive her for not doing it. The
fact we continually forgive each other has enabled us to be together over
twenty-six years. For Christians,
forgiveness is quite practical: it keeps relationships together.
What forgiveness requires is humility.
Apologies, saying I’m sorry, requires humility, requires the setting aside of
one’s pride to say, “I made a mistake.” But forgiveness also requires humility
on the part of the forgiver, to set aside an urge to retaliate and justify
oneself and to instead accept the human imperfections of those who wrong us.
Humility is the most powerful and
efficacious route to increase our faith. Jesus explains that to us in the two
sayings that follow the prayer of the disciples for an increase in faith.
First, Jesus talks about a hardworking servant who has just plowed a field and
has come to the master’s home. The master has two choices. The master’s choice
was to be humble or selfish. The master
can consider the humanity of the servant, that the servant is tired after a
hard day’s work ploughing a field, and invite the servant to sit down and eat,
or the master can require the servant to do further work to serve dinner to the
master and that the servant should put his own needs on hold until the master’s
hunger had been satiated. Jesus recognizes that most masters in this situation
would choose the second alternative.
What Jesus wants, however, is for the master to be humble by showing
gratitude to the servant.
In the part of the seventeenth
chapter that follows today’s Gospel, we have the story of the ten lepers where
only one of them showed Jesus gratitude for having been cleansed. Humility and gratitude are related. To show
gratitude requires humility, and conversely, humility flows from gratitude. Each
feeds the other.
Jesus also recognizes the value of
humility in the second story about servants in today’s Gospel. Those servants
who do the bare minimum to keep their jobs are called “unprofitable.” Such
self-satisfied servants are not willing to humble themselves to say, “I can do
better.” If we truly want to increase our faith in God, we have to honestly
take stock of who and what we are to see if we can do better than we are doing.
That requires humility, the jettisoning of a puffed-up ego that starts with the
assumption of “I am better than anyone else and I don’t need to prove myself.”
Humility gives us the openness to
God is necessary to increase our faith in God. Faith is by its very nature
a subjection of the mind and will to God as the sovereign truth, a subjection
to God’s divine authority as the illuminator and teacher of the soul. The
person who is too involved with her or his own ego has no room for God. Such a
person lives with the delusion of self-sufficiency in knowledge and skill,
which leads to the further delusion of “I don’t need God. I know everything. I
can do it all myself.” Such a person lives without perceiving a need for God
and no need to trust in God or be loyal to God. That kind of person relegates
God to the dustbin of total irrelevance. God calls us to pray for people like
that and to be examples in their presence to show them what trusting God looks
like.
The ultimate result of, “I know
everything and can do it all myself” is atheism. The atheist attitude is, “I am
totally self-sufficient. Whether or not God exists is irrelevant to me. I can
do it all.” That is exactly where the world as a whole is headed, particularly
in the technologically advanced countries. Much of Western Europe is agnostic
or atheist. Those areas of the United States where the tech industry dominates
the economy, like metropolitan Seattle, Washington and Silicon Valley,
California, are among the lowest as to the role played in people’s lives by
religion and spirituality of any kind. The very low church attendance in those
areas is a symptom of a much larger problem. The pride of self-sufficiency in
those areas has usurped any need one may have to turn oneself over to God.
But as smart as those unchurched
techies think they are, there is another way to live. It may not lead to
material riches, but it can lead to God.
To increase our faith in God requires that we replace our pride and
sense of entitlement with humility and the gratitude that comes from it. St. Francis of Assisi gives us an example of
how to increase our faith through humility. Nothing stopped him from pursuing
God’s glory. After squandering his youth away in having excessive fun, he
converted to Christianity, renounced his inheritance, and offered himself
totally to God. His embrace of Christ-like poverty was a radical notion at the
time, when the Christian church was tremendously rich, much like the people
heading it both then and now. That concerned Francis and many others, who felt
that the long-held apostolic ideals had eroded. No longer relying on personal
wealth for survival, Francis put his total trust, that is, his total faith, in
God, and God was always there for him throughout the trials and adventures of
his life. The faith of Francis increased because he let go of worldly things
and surrendered to God.
Not only do saints intercede for
us, but they also set examples for us. Francis showed us how he increased his faith
through prayer. Later in this service, at the preparation of the gifts, we will
sing the Canticle of the Sun, wherein Francis praised God in creation. If there
is anything that makes us stand in awe of God, it is creation itself.
We increase our faith in God when
we pray the Prayers of the People following the Creed and the special prayers
at the end of Mass. The fact of our prayer demonstrates our faith in God, that
we are trusting God to bring us a beneficial outcome.
We often hear preachers tell us
that the way to increase our faith in God is to get to know God by reading the
Bible. Saint Francis, however, illustrates to us that the fundamentalist
protestant sola-scriptura doctrine is totally impotent. Just like when we fall
in love with someone, whenever Saint Francis would gaze at the sun, the moon or
the smallest of animals, he would burst into song, drawing all other creatures
into praising God.
Saint Francis invites us to see
nature as a magnificent book in which God speaks to us and grants us a glimpse
of his infinite beauty and goodness. To quote the Book of Wisdom, “Through the
greatness and the beauty of creatures one comes to know by analogy their maker.”
Francis is often associated with nature,
and in particular, animals, such as the ones we will bless today. Those animals
who are part of our families offer us a unique way to increase our faith in God.
They demonstrate unconditional love for us. As the First Epistle of John tells
us, God is love, and love is from God. In more than one place in the Psalms,
God is described as “is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger,
abounding in love.” That definition of
God is what I see in God’s manifestation among us, not only in Jesus but in
all the rest of creation.
Our view of God, however, is not
universally shared. Our conservative sisters and brothers often preach a stern,
judgmental God who will send souls of dead people to heaven or hell depending
on how they conducted their lives. Animals, however, have no idea what a
judgmental God is. Animals do not think of their afterlife as the go about
being themselves. Wild animals simply go about the business of being what they
are, being born, surviving, reproducing, and dying, without value judgments
about themselves or other creatures. They don’t think of themselves or other
animals as good or bad. While it is true that animals are not human, they
nonetheless receive God’s grace, receiving and responding to God’s love, each
in their own way. God cares for their needs without them asking.
Animals are the ultimate
demonstration of what faith in God looks like. They don’t pray to God to ask
God to do something for them. Whatever God thinks animals should have, they get
it. So it should be with us. To increase
our faith, we must trust in God to do whatever God thinks is right for us.
We communicate to God our wants and
needs in human language, but ultimately, God will do whatever God thinks is
right for us. Our faith in God requires we trust God to do that. To show that level of trust in God requires
our total humility in our relationship to God. It requires total faith in God.
We accept God by experiencing God. The more we accept God, the greater our
faith in God becomes. Faith is the first
light, the heralding light, the foundation placed in us of what in its final
perfection will achieve the ultimate goal of our existence when we become one
with God. AMEN.
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