“Mustard seed faith”

Pentecost 7 - 27^th July 2014

Revd Andrew Bain 

Readings:

Romans 8: 26-39 - who shall separate us from the love of God?

Matthew 13: 31-33, 44-52 – the mustard seed, the tiniest of all seeds…

These readings we’re having from Romans are just bringing us Paul’s wisdom, one life-giving insight after another, so much that you almost want him to slow down so you can take it all in.

This week: The Spirit prays for us in sighs too deep for words; all things work together for good to those who love God; who shall separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus? It’s like sitting through the Messiah – the whole Gospel’s here.

But you could be forgiven for challenging Paul and saying: Ok these are fine poetic words, but what have they got to do with my struggles? I find prayer really difficult, sometimes it’s boring, sometimes I feel like I’m getting nowhere and God’s gone off on holiday somewhere.

The writer CS. Lewis knew that experience, in spite of having written some of the most powerful books on Christian faith of his generation – he knew that experience when his wife, Joy, died. Romance had come late into his life, and they were married as Joy lay in her hospital bed, dying of cancer. How cruel to have her snatched away when they’d only just found each other. In a little volume called “A Grief Observed” Lewis writes of just how prayer felt in those early days of loss: “But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.”

Most of us know something like that experience at some time in our lives. God seems far away and our troubles and our sadnesses just seem to overwhelm us. So what would Paul know about that? Well, quite a lot in fact. When Paul wants to show his qualifications as an apostle it’s his sufferings he lists as his validation, his authority for saying anything about anything: “Five times forty lashes at the hands of the Jews, three times beaten with rods, once I was stoned. Three times I have been shipwrecked (you really didn’t want to go on your holidays with St Paul), a night and a day adrift at sea, in danger from rivers, in danger from robbers, hungry and thirsty, in cold and exposure”. And quite apart from that, he tells the Corinthians, I had to put up with you lot! Paul has been about as roughed up by life as you could get, and yet still he prays.

And now he writes to the Christians in Rome, knowing that he daren’t make light of what they’re going through. In the very heart of darkness the infant Church is daily in fear of its life. Like the Christians in Mosul last week faced with three terrible choices: convert to Islam, pay protection money, or leave (or a fourth choice – die), the Christians of Rome had choices and dilemmas every bit as tough. Do you make sacrifices to the Emperor and acknowledge him as a God, or face the consequences of persecution, imprisonment and even the arena, and die as entertainment for the mob?

So in no way are Paul’s words just pretty poetry. Paul’s under no illusions that every day and in every way we’re all getting better and better or that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. We fight against principalities and powers, BUT, and this is the fulcrum, the turning point of the whole of human history and every human situation: The Cross of shame, the Roman Cross of shame, is now the Cross of Glory, Christ’s royal throne from which he reigns – so Caesar watch out, and all the powers of darkness, watch out; and all the darkness in me and in you as well because Jesus is risen.

So when Paul is weak, when he’s imprisoned for his faith, he knows that it’s the Spirit of the Risen Jesus, living in his friends whose names we know – it’s the Spirit of Jesus in his friends that strengthens his own faith, carries him when his own faith and his own praying might seem like mission impossible. How can you pray when life is so hard? I think you’re carried by Jesus in your friends and in their praying for you.  Because prayer isn’t so much what we do, but what God does in us, and in our brothers and sisters. It’s that tiny mustard seed of faith of people who pray, people whose hearts are moved towards us, bringing us the moments of resurrection that we need.

           

The writer and priest, Donald Nicholl, records the story of a man who was lying desperately ill in hospital. He writes: “He was almost out of his mind with terror and confusion induced by the drugs administered to him. Nothing of his true self seemed to remain except a tiny particle the size of a grain of mustard seed. Outside that particle all was chaos and darkness. Suddenly he heard a voice from the nearby corridor: “I’m that bloody lonely I could cry”. It was the voice of an old miner who was in hospital for the first time in his life and had been left in a wheelchair in the corridor.

The old miner had cried out because he was overwhelmed by the impersonality of it all. Hearing the terror in the old man’s voice the desperately ill man in the neighbouring ward, from the pit of his own terror, said to himself: “I’ll go out and sit by him if it’s the last thing I do.” And so he did. And from that moment his own terror began to lift. A process of healing had begun in him, so that soon he was more whole than ever before in his life. In the voice of the old man he had heard the voice of God calling him to wholeness and holiness. You can begin anytime, anywhere, even if you are only a tiny grain of mustard seed lying in a pit of terror”.

This is the tiny mustard seed of faith inside all of us because in all these things, we are, together, “more than conquerors, through him who loved us”.