Sermon — October 2, 2022
The Rev. Greg Johnston
There may come a time in your life when you find yourself living with someone who feels the need to announce, publicly, their completion of every basic household chore. You may already have lived with them. You may be living with them right now.
“Just taking out the trash!” they’ll say to as you lie on the couch. “Long list today!” they say as they unload the groceries, after going to the store for the first time this month. Or, as one New York Times writer put it in her Op-Ed headline, “Honey, I swept the floor!” (Subtitle: “Why do so many husbands feel the need to boast about completing simple household chores? With mine, it’s all about branding.” Which, if you weren’t already in couples counseling… Publishing that sentence in a major newspaper has got to send you straight there.)
The article singled out husbands, but any kind of housemate can be like this, of any age or gender. Don’t get me wrong, it’s wonderful to thank someone you live with for the often-unnoticed tasks that keep a household running. But it’s obnoxious to fish for that gratitude. Doing your half of the chores doesn’t deserve special praise or congratulations. That’s why it’s called “your half of the chores.”
And when Jesus kind of goes off at the disciples in the gospel today, I hear some of that frustration. I wish he’d picked a different way of making the point, without casually taking the institution of slavery for granted, but I hope you understand what he’s saying: Do you thank your servant for serving you? No! he says. Likewise with you: When you do your Christian duty, it is simply your Christian duty. Don’t expect God to thank you for doing it!
The ”slave” thing is strange, for Jesus. But what’s really strange to me is that Jesus says this in response to the seemingly-simple request that he increase their faith. It seems like a total non-sequitur. The disciples pray, as many of us have, for faith, and Jesus lashes out and tells them they’re “worthless.”
So I was wondering what could be behind this kind of response. And I thought about the connection between faith, and trust, and this idea of “doing your half” in a relationship. What is faith, after all, but trusting that someone else is going to hold up their end of the bargain? What is faithfulness but holding up yours? The New York Times columnist interprets her husband’s behavior as “branding.” But I wonder if it’s more about insecurity. One unfortunate husband is cited in the article for arranging separate “viewings” of the freshly-cleaned garage for each member of the family. Maybe that’s because he wants the praise in triplicate. Maybe it’s because he feels so untrusted, he’s so convinced that nobody has any faith that he’ll actually do it, that he feels the need to prove himself over and over again. When the disciples ask Jesus to increase their faith, there’s something a little insulting to that. “Jesus,” they seem to say, “we don’t trust you to follow through on the incredible promises you’re making. Help us trust you more.” And Jesus seems to say, “I’ve done my part. The rest is up to you.”
But if this is what it looks like when God is doing her half of the chores, then I can understand why the disciples pray for faith. It reminds me of one of the most common questions I hear as a pastor: “What is God waiting for?” What’s God waiting for? You don’t need me to list the tragedies, personal and national and global in scale, that could really use a miracles, that desperately need an infusion of God’s grace and mercy and peace. You know them. You’ve lived them. You’ve prayed about them. You may even have lost your faith over them. Two thousand years of war and plague, of sickness and death, and while things are undeniably better today than they once were, Jeremiah’s lamentation for Jerusalem 2500 years ago still rings true. His cry of pain for refugees driven out of their destroyed homes could’ve been spoken this morning about any one of a hundred cities in any one of a dozen countries around the world. So what is God waiting for?
Here’s the thing: We Christians have been losing our patience with God for almost 2000 years now, and still we keep the faith.
You can actually see it in this reading from Paul’s second letter to Timothy. Now, it’s disputed among scholars whether this letter to Timothy is one of Paul’s latest letters, or whether it was actually written well after Paul’s death by a follower adopting his name. But in any case, it’s clear that this is not the period of Paul’s early missionary activity, when he’s traveling around, spreading the good news and forming new churches. Timothy himself is a third-generation Christian: his faith, Paul writes, “lived first in [his] grandmother Lois and [his] mother Eunice.” (1:5)
You get the sense that the excitement of the early days has faded, that the gift of faith needs to be “rekindled,” as Paul says, even in church leaders. Many among the first generation of Christians were convinced that Jesus was coming back soon, literally, in his resurrected body, to set things right. They believed that Paul’s claim that Christ “abolished death and brought life and immortality to life” (1:10) meant that Christ had abolished death, that they themselves would not die. And yet they did.
“Where is God?” they were asking in the 40s, and the 50s, and the 60s AD. “What’s taking him so long?” they asked, as the years since Jesus’ death stretched into decades. Little did they know just how long it could be.
If you understand the Christian faith the way those early believers did, then we are clearly the most oblivious people in the world. If you think that Christ’s destruction of death means that Christians do not die, that Christ’s triumph over the powers of evil means that there is no longer evil, then you’re in denial; you ought to be ashamed of yourself for being so easily fooled.
“But I am not ashamed,” writes Paul. “For I know the one in whom I’ve put my trust, and I am sure he’s able to guard what I’ve entrusted to him until that day.” (2 Tim. 1:12) I can endure suffering now, because God has broken its ultimate power. I trust that on “that day,” that long-awaited promised day, all shall be well. I do not need God to tell me that he’s cleaned the garage, because I trust that on “that day,” that garage will not only be cleaned, but will be transformed into a place of unimaginable wonder.
So “guard the good treasure,” Paul writes, “that has been entrusted to you.” (1:14) Trust in God to win the ultimate victory. Keep the faith, even if your faith is as small as a mustard seed.
And then he adds, in what sounds like it’s just the kind of phrase that preachers throw in to put a prayerful bow on a paragraph or sentence, something that ends up being the most profound theological answer to the entire problem I’ve been describing for about the last ten minutes, and that Christians have been struggling with for about two thousand years. (Are you ready?)
“Guard the good treasure,” he writes, “with the help of the Holy Spirit living in us.”
“Where is God in all of this?” you may ask. “Why is God taking so long? What is God doing in the face of such tragedy? ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken us?’”
And there is Paul’s answer: Where is God? “Living in us.”
This is what makes the dry abstraction of the Trinity come alive. If only God the Father is God, then it’s clear that God has written us off, that God created the world and the world went wrong and God went off on vacation, leaving us to our own devices. If only God the Father and God the Son are God, the picture is a little better: God the Son came into the world in Jesus, and tried to set things right; God suffered, and died, and rose, and God will come again on “that day,” but in between, we’re left alone again. But God’s a Trinity, not a Binity, and so we are not alone. Because while God the Father is up in heaven (wherever that is) and God the Son is seated at his right hand (whatever that means), God the Holy Spirit is right here with us, “living in us.” That’s how God has chosen to respond to our pain in this world. By dwelling within our hearts and minds. By inspiring us to love and courage. By comforting us and strengthening us and working in and through us, as we love, and comfort, and strengthen one another.
God is right here, taking out the trash of our lives, and cleaning our garages, emptying our dishwashers and putting air, God bless her, in our tires. And if these things are happening in your life, but you don’t notice them—if you ever feel hope, or courage, or peace; if you ever offer an act of love, or let someone care for you, but don’t think of that as the work of God—It’s only because God is not like those good-for-nothing husbands. For God, it’s not all about branding.
So, God: Open our eyes to see your hand at work in the world about us. Open our hearts to feel the power of your love within us. “Increase our faith,” we pray, knowing that it is already enough, even if it’s only the size of a mustard seed; give us grace to guard the good treasure you have entrusted to us, with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in us. Amen.