Increase our faith Jesus! Make life easier for us! Don’t make it such a leap for us to believe, to act, to live in the hope you have given us. Increase our faith! Make it easier for us to pray, to focus on you, to give our lives in your service. Surely following you wasn’t meant to be such an effort of the will. We understand about it being difficult, but surely you could at least give us some more motivation; a greater sense of purpose; a clearer drive to get involved and keep going.
So you disciples think it’s all about being highly motivated and generally keyed up—like a rock concert or a political pep rally—everyone raring to go with no doubts or second thoughts—when actually it’s really more like cooking. It’s a very ordinary, everyday thing. You don’t expect to be thrown parties just for doing your everyday jobs, do you? You have to put the effort into it, to get the benefit out of it. But just like in cooking, you don’t need much spice to rev up a dish. You know if you put a little bit of pepper, just a little bit of mustard, in a casserole, it will add a whole lot of zing. And even if you only have the faith of a mustard seed, you will be faithful servants.
The faith of a mustard seed—now that’s a familiar phrase and we’ve been told often enough that that means that you just need a tiny thing to produce a huge tree; but mustard seeds are pretty ordinary and they’re certainly not the smallest seed, nor are they the tallest tree. Mustard seeds and mustard bushes are fairly ordinary in the world of the Middle East, more like prolific weeds than the cedars of Lebanon which were so easily logged out. Mustard is a very ordinary plant; but when you put it into a cooking pot, even just one seed, the stew is livened up. And overdoing it can ruin everything.
Faith wouldn’t be faith if it came without a second thought. Asking the questions and living with them gives a strength that a naïve gung-ho approach can’t touch.
It’s not in great achievements that the people of God show their faithfulness, but in the ordinary, everyday sharing, caring, persisting and enduring that God’s enduring mercy is embraced, demonstrated and discovered by others.
The covenant relationship of marriage is such a good metaphor for the covenant in which we find ourselves with God. We want it to be all champagne and roses, but really it’s more about tea and toast—it’s about the ordinary, everyday stuff of continuing to learn to listen to and work with one another.
God’s faithfulness to us, as extraordinary as it is, is all about God being with us in the everyday, the ordinary. And God’s call to us to faithfulness is the same—a call to listening to and working with God in the everyday ordinariness of our lives, whether we feel like it or not, whether we are motivated or not, whether we feel the buzz or not. Faith wouldn’t be faith if it came easy.
And yet it’s a miracle that God believes that we can believe; that God expects that we will be faithful servants, being and acting for God, just as our employers and our families expect us to be the people that we are to them—parent, child, grandparent, uncle or aunt, niece or nephew, sister or brother—and to do the work that we are employed to do. And if that’s all we do, surely we have done something as miraculous as saying to a mulberry tree, “Move and be planted in the sea.”
Faith, just takes a modicum of ordinary, everyday living, to demonstrate its truth, its effectiveness, its reality.
Increase our faith! Surely we have already enough to achieve what it is that God asks of us; because after all, all that we need has already been achieved by God. Faith, like an ordinary mustard seed, spreads like wildfire, like weeds and extends God’s realm to the ends of the earth.
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