Has anyone here ever suffered from contextomy? It’s ok to admit it if you have. It’s certainly nothing to be ashamed of. I mean it’s effected everyone from Jesus to Shakespeare, Marie Antoinette to pretty much any one who has ever run for public office. And we’ve all grappled with the effects of second hand contextomy, whether we know it or not.

But has anyone here ever suffered directly from contextomy? You know, the condition of being quoted out of context in a way that distorts what you actually meant. That’s all contextomy means (for those of you who didn’t know… which included me before I started writing this sermon).

So anyone? Anyone here ever suffer from having your words taken out of context and used against you? Yeah, see. It happens. And now, thanks to Facebook and the Tik Toks, reels, threads, late night comics, and the Youtubes, it happens now more than ever.

We live in a contextumous age, which is a word I just made up, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.  Seriously, it has never been easier to clip, edit, and now, thanks to AI, even generate out of thin air, videos of anyone saying anything, whether they said it or not. And that’s scary.

So thank goodness we don’t have to deal with those kind of shenanigans here in the church, right? I mean God forbid that anyone would ever take the words of famous theologians or Jesus or even scripture itself, out of context. That would be horrible. That would be dangerous. People could get hurt! Can you imagine?

Of course you can, because we do it all the time. Christians have done it throughout history to disastrous effect and we actually do it pretty much every Sunday in traditional churches like this one. Thanks to the lectionary, we read little snippets from the Bible every week completely out of context. We read just enough to learn a little something but never really enough to give us the whole picture.

Which, incidentally, is one of many reasons you might want to spend some time reading this book on your own and why I spend so much time in these little sermons trying to give you a bigger and broader picture of what’s really going on. The Bible is not an easy book to understand, so it is vital that we read it carefully, making every effort to keep its words in context when we do. 

And today’s reading is no exception. I mean if these 5 verses about having faith the size of a mustard seed and seeing ourselves as nothing more than, “worthless slaves,” was all you had to go on – I wouldn’t blame you for wanting to toss your Bible right out the window.  These words have done a lot of damage and a caused a great deal of misunderstanding over the years and it’s easy to see why.

All it takes is faith the size of a mustard seed to subvert the laws of nature?

Are you kidding me?!

Just do what you’re told …like a worthless slave!

Yikes! To misquote Ricky Ricardo, “Lucy, you got some es’plaining to do.” (Which, by the way, is something he never actually said on that show in any context. Seriously, look it up. It’s so weird, right? But then again, so is Jesus.)

⁵The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!” ⁶

And Jesus said:

“If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you. ⁷

Weird, right? Yeah, so let’s dig in.

Does anyone have any idea how big a mustard seed is? This is not a trick question. They’re small. Like really small. Like, just small enough to lodge right between your teeth and be glaringly visible but really hard to pick out. That small.

Well imagine winkling one out from between your incisors and holding it on the tip of your pinky, and hearing Jesus say these words.

Now, think about the size of your imaginary mustard seed and tell me: how do his words make you feel? Honestly…how does it feel to be told that if you had even this much faith, this tiny, miniscule amount of faith, that you could perform a miracle -a fairly useless miracle, let’s be honest- but a miracle nonetheless?

How does that make you feel?    … Sad. Depressed. Angry. Scolded. Inadequate. Not good enough. Lacking. Faithless. Like a bad Christian?

Me too. 

Although, just for the record, by a show of hands, is there anyone here who does feel like you have enough faith to move trees with, like, your mind or something? Cause we’ll wait.

Anyone? No. Me either.

Which means one of two things. We’re either a pathetic bunch of faithless wannabes with zero aptitude for miraculous landscape design…. Or, maybe the word Jesus uses for “faith” here, does not mean what we think it means if we think faith means believing in something really, really hard until all of our wishes come true.

No. That’s the gospel according to Jiminy Cricket, not the gospel according to Jesus Christ, and it’s Jesus Christ who is talking to us this morning.

Friends, the word for “faith” that Jesus uses here in this passage is the Greek word “pistis,” which is better translated as loyalty. When the disciples asked Jesus to increase their faith, they weren’t asking him to help them believe harder in his power or theirs.  They were asking Jesus to increase their faithfulness to him, in the sense of their loyalty, their devotion, their fidelity, their ability to follow him and obey his teachings.

And Jesus responds, essentially, by saying, come on you guys, when it comes to loyalty, faithfulness, fidelity… you can’t increase these things any more than you can measure them. Faithfulness of this sort doesn’t come in sizes. If your sense of fidelity is the size of a mustard seed than you’re as faithful as you need to be because when it comes to being loyal, you either are, or you’re not.

Right?

I mean, think about this with me for a moment. You can’t be just a little bit loyal, can you? Not really. You’re either loyal or you’re not.

You can’t be just a little bit trustworthy. Would you hire a babysitter if someone told you she was trustworthy most of the time? I hope not!

You’re either trustworthy or you’re not.

Jesus’ point here is that when it comes to loyalty, fidelity, & faithfulness, size doesn’t matter.  And for the love of God, please don’t take the fact that I just said that out of context.

This isn’t about working yourself up to a level of faith that’s even this big, because faith doesn’t come in sizes.  You either have it or you don’t.

Likewise and for the record, no one can make a mulberry tree jump into the sea and, not for nothing, but why would you want to?

No, this is all hyperbole. This is Jesus is having some fun with his disciples. The whole mulberry tree thing was never meant to be taken literally any more than those verses about removing the plank from your own eye before you mess with the speck in your brothers.

Jesus is messing with his disciples here, telling them that this isn’t a matter of increasing their faith or their loyalty to him. This is simply a matter of doing what they’ve been told to do, which, if they are loyal to him, they will just go ahead and do.

Which is actually what the second half of the Jesus’ remarks amount too; all that stuff about masters and slaves. And to be clear, I don’t like these words anymore than you do. This is a harsh, ugly, and in many ways unhelpful analogy. However, knowing Jesus the way I do, I have to trust that the point here is not to reinforce the institution of slavery, but rather the dire need for our obedience. So please hang in here with me.

“Do you thank the slave for doing what was commanded?” asks Jesus. No. If you’re a slave, you do what you’re asked to do simply because you’ve been asked to do it.  You don’t quibble, you don’t question, and you certainly don’t ask your master to help make you more obedient.

One can only imagine where that would lead.

No, once again you’re either obedient or you’re not. You’re either obedient or you’re in trouble. You do the work set before you because that is the work you are expected to do, and when you have done it you don’t draw attention to yourselves by saying, “hey look at us, look what we just did.” No, you say,  “We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!’”

Again, I’m not crazy about the wording here and it’s hard to believe Jesus would say something this tone deaf and open to abuse, until I remember the way he was abused and how he responded. That is, Jesus’ words sound totally inappropriate until you read them in what? Until you read them in context.

If you go back to the beginning of this chapter and look at what it was Jesus said that caused the disciples to ask him to increase their faith in the first place, all of this starts to make a heck of a lot more sense. Because once you go back to the beginning you realize this isn’t about having enough faith to believe the impossible but about having enough faith to do something that often feels impossible. Verse 3:

³Be on your guard! (said Jesus) If another disciple sins, you must rebuke the offender, and if there is repentance, you must forgive. ⁴And if the same person sins against you seven times a day, and turns back to you seven times (in that same day) and says, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive.”

“O Lord, increase our faith!” said the apostles.

And can you blame them? “Help us do this,” they begged, because forgiving like that… forgiving over and over and over again….now that’s hard. Forget about uprooting trees, if there is any act in life that requires faith it is forgiveness.

I’m not talking about faith in some idea or doctrine about forgiveness.

I’m not talking about believing really, really hard that forgiveness is right or true. 

I’m talking about having enough faith in God’s justice and trust in God’s mercy to let go of our anger and give it to God. I’m talking about placing our need for vindication, justice, satisfaction, and revenge in God’s hand.

I’m talking about having enough faith in Jesus to go ahead and do the last thing we want to do simply because he has asked us to do it, trusting that he wouldn’t have asked us to do it if it wasn’t of ultimate importance.

I mean let’s be honest, forgiveness, more often than not, feels … wrong. Why should you forgive someone who has hurt you? And why would you ever forgive someone who has hurt you over and over again.

It makes no earthly sense at all, and because of this sometimes you have to go ahead and put as much earthly distance between yourself and harmful people as you can.  I’m not advocating that anyone stick around just to be abused.

And yet Jesus still asks us to go ahead and forgive these people, to at least get to a point where we bear them no ill will, because here’s the thing: forgiveness might not make any earthly sense, but this earthly life is not all there is.

Friends, we have all of eternity ahead of us, ahead of all of us, and you don’t get to bring your grudges with you to heaven. You can’t. It simply doesn’t work that way.

No, with God’s help, you get to leave your hurt, your pain, and your anger at the door.

You don’t get to love some people in heaven and not others. You either have to learn to love everyone the way God does or come to terms with the fact that you still haven’t learned what it is to love at all.

You can’t forgive some of the people most of the time or most of the people some of the time.  You need to forgive all of the people all of the time and that takes a faith only God can give.

Dear ones, we can’t be at peace with our Creator until we have made peace with all whom he created, just as we can’t be truly fed at this table until we are reconciled to eating here all together. It’s a hard truth. All things considered, uprooting trees with Jedi mind tricks might actually be easier. It’s just not, in this context, what Jesus is asking us to do.

You either forgive or you don’t. 

You’re either faithful or you’re not….

because ultimately forgiveness….

forgiveness is a non-negotiable in the kingdom of God.

The word of God, in context.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

^[1] Many thanks to David Ewart, www.holytextures.com for pointing this out. The ideas expressed in this sermon are nothing earth shatteringly new.  I’m also indebted, as always to Sarah Dylan Breuer at www.sarahlaughed.net , Anthony Robinson www.anthonybrobinson.com , Fred Craddock by way of several commentators, and all the good folks writing for “Feasting on The Word” this week for the ideas expressed in this sermon.