Sermon: Faith of A Seed (Oct 6, 2013) - Evaluation, Feedback

Sermon: Luke 17:5-10 

Title: Faith of A Seed

In today’s Gospel we hear the cry of the Apostles to Jesus, “Increase our faith!”

What I hear from this request is their anxiety; they are saying “We are afraid that our faith isn’t big enough to help us through all of the challenges ahead. Sometimes, we are skeptical. We lose confidence. We don’t find enough resources within ourselves.’

I hear this anxiety in our current society: the demand of a culture that prods us to be ceaselessly productive, and to prove it. Self-reliance and the pursuit of self-improvement is rooted in our culture. We should always be praising our quality of life, stay positive, and be productive. The shadow of all this positivity is that we put aside or bury an important question to ask - about the time when we can be productive no more – our time of death and dying. Although Jesus’ teaching in today’s Gospel doesn’t necessarily address death or dying, there is a connection. “So, you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say ‘we have done only what we ought to have done.’”

Last week, thanks to the extra time that I was granted in order to focus on my learning goals as an intern, I enjoyed some great learning opportunities, including a workshop on grief and loss, presented by the Cowichan Valley Hospice Society. The lessons I most appreciate from this workshop are twofold; how we address our losses and how we integrate our losses and grief into our life journey. At the workshop I met people who had experienced many losses in their lifetime, loss after loss. Our loss-line, or, as the workshop leader phrased it, our “loss bank” also includes losses that may not be immediately obvious but have affected our life significantly. Divorce, moving, aging, loss of health, loss of dreams, loss of culture, loss of mother tongue, not being able to raise children, loss of belonging, someone to talk to. Often, these losses and sorrows in our lives are not always paid the attention they deserve. It would be a tremendous journey for us if we could set aside a time to sit and draw the loss-lines in our own lives, all of which have created our particular world-view, our questions, our theology, our life-philosophy, our relationships with one another and with God.

Think about a spiral journey, from the center outward. We are seeing them – our losses – there at the center in our memories, in our body. We are not disloyal to them. But still seeing them, we unlock ourselves, slowly opening ourselves and allowing more spaces for us to gradually walk out through the spiral.

Stephen Jenkens, the leader of a palliative care counselling team at a hospital in Toronto, believes that grief is a skill, not just a feeling. Grief is skill of the heart, in the same way as love is a skill of the heart that can be taught and learnt and shared.  I will express his point in more Christian terms; Grief is an act of faith, in the same way that loving is an act of faith. Both are faith of the heart, because grieving, like loving, is an appreciation of what we value most in our life, what we so respect: life, and the relationships that give shape and meaning to our lives.

This journey of loving, losing, grieving and integrating all of these feelings is also pertinent to our journey as a congregation. As a church, we love, lose, grieve and integrate these three things in faith. We continue to hope we can be enlarging, vibrant, meaningful, spirit-filled, by growing together. We witness our Sunday School and the children bursting into the joy of learning and growing with our support and care. We celebrate for the unceasing opportunities of welcoming newcomers, new members into our midst. But we feel awkward about commemorating and paying attention to the losses we experience as a church family - our dear friends and members, our health, our energy, and even the future of our beautiful sanctuary. We need to be wise.

At this point I want to note that the numerical facts such as whether our membership is increasing or decreasing, the sturdiness of our finances, do not indicate our well-being in spirit. It is a hard subject, but we need to ask and think about death and dying. I mean, our death and dying. That ability to face our issues, our anxieties as a church are crucial when we ask the question of how to be fully present as a Christian community that becomes light and salt and spirit in the wider community. Now, I am not suggesting that we are dying. I am suggesting that dying is an act of living. Or more than that, dying is an essential part of living and regeneration - Christ’s resurrection is divine proof of that fundamental truth.

We wouldn’t be healthy if our body didn’t allow its individual cells to die when necessary. Dying is integral part of the mechanism of a living organism. Much the same as loving and living, dying should be learnt and integrated into our conversation, our everyday consciousness. Dying is an act of faith in the same way as living is. Our culture, however, does not give death and dying a real place, except for the individual deathbed or quiet memorial service. The art of losing, the art of grieving, the art of dying… We don’t commemorate these things, we don’t  integrate them into our culture, we don’t teach that they are part of our lives, that we will encounter these feelings some day. That is a great loss.

Stephen Jenkens has spent time with many children who are dying, and says he has found this: Inside the inherent grief of a child dying is the dying child’s great curiosity: “Where am I going? Who will I be? Will you still be my parents?”

In a journey as a congregation, sometimes we need to set aside a time to look into our own collective anxiety – where are we going? Who will we be? Will God still bless us?

When our collective anxiety is properly attended to and cared for with collective wisdom, we will feel strengthened. We will not allow negative emotions, anxiety, fear to direct us and prod us to go go go … to get things done, to achieve, as if by doing, remaining in motion, we can prove our value to ourselves. We need to learn and develop needed skills of self-care. While seeing our anxiety and fear, we need to learn to give ourselves a space for hope, to unlock ourselves from anxiety, and to be confident that we can be flexible. We will be centered. We will be grounded in spirit.  

What Jesus says to us in today’s Gospel is that we only need a seed’s-worth of faith. A seed cannot direct its path in life. it does what it must: it gives its whole being to the ground. It trusts the ground. It does not always succeed in sprouting, growing, blooming, bearing fruit. Its fortunes are bound with the condition of the soil, the weather, the timing. But it seems that somehow a seed knows that its success is bound with trust. I really like the term “faith of a seed” which was inspired by Shirley this week. All a seed has is faith; it allows itself to be planted, split, transformed into something unknown to the seed itself.

Today, the JNAC (Joint Needs Assessment) committee will ask us some questions to assess our needs as a congregation. Take time to ponder these questions: where are we going? Who will we be? Will God still bless us? When our anxiety is attended to, talked over, shared, addressed, and acknowledged, I hope we can be confident in letting what we are now die as well as in embracing the new life to come. New possibilities of being and becoming as a renewed church will push up to the surface. Time flows on, sprouted seeds grow into new and magnificent shapes. God is in time. So are we. Our journey as a congregation is the journey of a seed, the journey of the faith of a seed.

Evaluation/Feedback

"Our worship service today was powerful, encouraging. You are using the metaphor, "ground of being" throughout worship with meaning and truth." 

"The sermon was strange, powerful to me. The whole service was very meaningful."
" I read and was greatly moved by your sermon on Oct. 6. You have so much depth of understanding for someone so young. I think you are very empathetic and intuitive. These are valuable assets for a minister."