"Increase Our Faith" October 3, 2010

Lamentations 3: 1-42
Luke 17:1-10
This morning we open our eyes to see, that the world is impacted by all we do, and we, by the world. Congregations in Asia, Africa, Alaska, Australia, Central America, Canada, Connecticut to California, Nova Scotia to New Orleans, ALL this day gather as One Church; East Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant and Reformed, Pentecostal, Conservative and New Age, as one Table; One Communion with our parents and grandparents, and great grandchildren yet to be, a living Communion of Saints.

We long to hear a message that resounds “Well done Good and Faithful Servants, Come into the Joy of your Master, For you have been faithful over a little and I will set you over much. Well done!”
We look forward to times of retirement, after the kids graduate, once they are married, when we can live happily ever after.
Instead we are reminded that Almighty God is God, and we are servants. Life is hard. We slave all day long, in school, at Work, then cooking and cleaning, caring for others, we follow the rules and put away for the future, and when done, no one is going to serve us, there are no merits for having lived life.
However there is grace, by which we come to believe there is more to life than going through motions.

There needs to come a point in each of our lives in which we measure whether we have been an aid or a hindrance to others. When we question more than what we know, and what we believe:
“Do I, by my attitude, my faith, my character and conduct, make it easier for others who know me, to believe in God, or am I a stumbling block in the way of their redemption?”

From our earliest moments, we are conditioned to compete. As newborns, tested,
How highly did we score on our Apgar test, Activity, Pulse, Grimace, Appearance and Respiration? How early did we learn to smile, to roll over, to stand, to speak? Did we catch the ball? Did we score the Goal? What was our GPA? What records did we set? What Accomplishments did we make? How did we, by our presence in life change the world? Have we won?

Along the way in life, we discern that what matters is not our accomplishments! Not only if we won.
Not how many cars, how large a salary, how beautiful our home (these are only what we are taxed on!) but what matters is that our lives are limited by our ability to forgive.

More than any generation before us, all things are possible to us. It is possible that we could climb Mt. Everest, visit the Space Station, Travel the World, win Nobel prizes, write books, invent new means of communication and social networking; but if in the end, we wronged someone along the way in order to do so, life is lesser. The Ends do NOT justify the Means. It is not up to us to show one another the error of their ways, forcing them to change. All that matters is that when one repents, we forgive.

On mornings like the Bombing of Pearl Harbor, or the destruction of the Twin Towers, weeks where we must follow through on hard decisions, laying off people we worry about, giving diagnoses we know are horrible, we desperately want to cry out in lament: “WHY GOD?” When there is a car accident and our child is taken from us, when our businesses are eroded to bankruptcy, when Cancers are discovered, when we have followed all the rules and done all that was expected, and life is not happily ever after, instead the economy has not improved, our children are unemployed, like the voice of Lamentation, we want to blame God. After all, we did not choose our birth. We did not choose this circumstance, we did not want to live in darkness.

At times it seems God is testing us, tempting and entrapping. If God is ALL KNOWING, ALL POWERFUL, If God is God, then Why? It seems that either God is a sadistic beast waiting to pounce upon us and rip us apart, or a puppet master who has orchestrated this stage of life with choices of good and bad to see what we will do.
But the point of the voice in Lamentation is that neither of these logical conclusions works.
Faith as small as a mustard seed can change the world. Believing in forgiveness, trusting God does make a difference.

One truth is that circumstances can rip us apart and devastate us; and there is Good and Bad in life. Another truth, is that God is All Powerful, and God's love is ever lasting.
Oddly, God loves us so much, God will not violate our free will, God will not take away our suffering. Humanity is free to choose all manner of things, and in this life we have many choices. At times our circumstances, do have results. At other times the circumstances of life are just awful.
But God is God, not a superhero who rescues us from ourselves, nor changes circumstance so we can ride off into the sunset. God who called life into being, who ordered the stars and planets, loves us so much as to be vulnerable to our creating out of creation. And God occasionally enters into life “to redeem,” to turn life on its head and make us wonder at what is possible.

Faith is Not a matter of how much. We do harm to one another, beating up victims by believing if they had just believed more, or as we do... NO, each one of us, every human creature is a gift of God. How hard it is for us to give up control? We have a natural predisposition of being self-centered. We make choices in life, our parents made us the center of their worlds, we imagine all things through our mind's eye. Out of love and devotion, we choose to live our lives around another's needs, first a partner, then our children's, but still as extensions of our self-centeredness. Faith is the realization that we are only neighbors in this life. As we each live life, occasionally, sometimes as many as seven times in a single day, we offend one another; when we do, in faith we are to forgive. We do our part in life, like every other creature, we teach, we feed, we care for others. What we are called to do in faith is three things
1.To love God
2.To forgive our neighbors, our brothers and sisters, and even selves, so as to begin again
3.To live our lives in ways that make it easier for others to choose what is right