Sci-Fi Messiah

Lections: The Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 27), AD 2025 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

I read a lot of science fiction, growing up. Shocking, I know. Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel Comics, the old hard sci-fi of Niven and Pournelle. Philip K. Dick had me questioning whether androids could have souls, even souls of silicon. Such was the lens through which I looked at the tales told in Church. How, exactly, I wondered, did God work within the universe? What were the mechanics of our miracles? Science and faith for me were only ever two sides of the same existential coin.

Of course, I was still very young, and tended to take things rather literalistically. I hadn’t yet the background in the humanities, let alone theology, that life would later afford me. So when I heard Jesus say things like, “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,” I then would immediately imagine Jedi Knights and X-Men moving things with their minds.

Faith here appeared to be the key to telekinetic abilities. If I could just believe it hard enough, focus my awareness, hone my will to a razor’s edge, then Birnam Wood could come to Dunsinane. We’d have the March of the Ents, tossing trees about left and right. Now take it one step further: What if we were to genetically engineer people to have no doubts whatsoever—to believe perfectly, to have within themselves an adamantine grain of unwavering, indestructible faith—wouldn’t they all then have psychic powers?

Faith after all is far older, deeper, stronger than magic. Faith, I surmised, could be the will to power. Hadn’t all those stories told me so, from Green Lantern to King’s Firestarter? Yes, this is the sort of thing about which my elementary-aged self would wonder after Church. I was a nerd before it was cool—which is another way of saying that I was not cool at all.

“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.” Lo and behold, I came to discover that not everyone else had. There remain Christians to this day who interpret this morning’s Gospel passage in the same way that I did in the sixth grade. They claim that if we only have a pure enough faith, then we can accomplish anything. We can perform miracles. We can raise the dead.

It wasn’t that long ago, just a couple of years, that a local fundamentalist congregation in our area held an all-night charismatic service claiming that they would resurrect a teenager who had tragically taken her own life. What on earth did they expect to happen? It was like watching a slow-motion trainwreck, the emotions, the expectations, that they put her mother through. But they thought—or pretended to think—that if they just prayed hard enough, believed hard enough, had faith but the size of a mustard seed, then that dead girl would get up, like Lazarus from the tomb, or the monster from Frankenstein’s lab.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I believe in miracles, always have. But they do not occur on demand; sometimes not even for Jesus, according to our Gospels. God is not a genie granting wishes. I believe that that poor girl will rise again in Christ. But we aren’t St Nicholas the Thaumaturge. We aren’t even Orpheus. Faith is not a power that we possess inside, not some spiritual fluid produced by the wringing of our livers. Nor are the laws of nature at our beck and call. That’s magic, not faith.

Faith is trust. That’s all it is: faith that God is good; faith that God is God. We have faith in the faithfulness of Christ; trusting that no matter what may befall us, no matter what we may suffer, God is still with us, still loves us, and still has a vision for the appointed time. Miracles do occur, but we cannot be magi who conjure them up. The promise we receive in Christ is sure; if it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come. For Christ is faithful, even when we are not. And through His Spirit, the righteous live by faith.

So then—if faith is trust in God, trust in Jesus Christ, and not some psionic personal power, by which we move things with our minds, or reanimate our dead—what do you suppose that Jesus means when He proclaims that, “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.”? Well, I have a theory.

Here’s where things get interesting. First recall that Jesus says this after instructing His followers: “If the same person sins against you seven times a day and turns back to you seven times and says, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive.” And this proves a little much for them. Forgiving someone seven times a day? Not sure that I could muster that much mercy, good my Lord. “Increase our faith,” they say. Help us out with that.

And Jesus’ response, in effect, affirms that the quantity of faith is not the issue, but the quality thereof. It matters not so much how faithful one is, but in whom one places her faith. Savvy? Christ will get it done. The promise of God is secure. We are but to trust that He is worthy, as He is. A little faith in Christ will change the world. Or rather, we of little faith will know the faithfulness of God.

Fair enough, so far as it goes. But why then all this talk of mustard seeds, mulberry trees, and the Mediterranean Sea? For this we simply need to know that Jesus is Jewish. He is a Jewish rabbi, raised by Jewish parents, steeped in Jewish tradition, and educated on Jewish stories. This, incidentally, is why we as Christians read the Hebrew Bible: because we have no hope to understand Christ if we do not know His people.

The mulberry, or sycamore fig, shows up several times in the Bible. David hears marching in these trees before a victory; Amos dresses sycamores while prophesying on the side; Zacchaeus climbs a sycamore tree in order to see the Lord. More generally, the fruitbearing tree represents God’s people. The Prophets speak of Israel as a tree, or a vine, which God protects and cultivates, pruning it of wrongdoing, expecting it to bear the fruits of righteousness.

The sea, meanwhile, dark and chaotic, the mother of monsters, typically stands in for the Gentiles. From Jonah through Revelation, the peoples of the sea are the nations who know not the Lord. Yet God still has His plans for them. And as for the mustard, Jesus Himself provides an explanation for this image earlier in this same Gospel, when He compares the Kingdom of God, His Kingdom, to a mustard seed, small and innocuous, which nevertheless spreads and takes over the field.

Taken together, these well-established biblical images become a single-sentence parable. If you have faith in the Kingdom of Christ, then you will see the people of God uprooted from their land and sent out amongst the Gentiles, sent out into all the peoples of the world. That is what Jesus has come to do: to forgive us our sins, to shatter our graves, and then to send us out, proclaiming the Good News, that death is defeated, to every tribe and tongue, in order to gather together all of us who are scattered unto the ends of the earth.

That’s what our faith is all about. Not psychic powers, not mind over matter, not miracles on demand. Faith is trust in Jesus Christ: that He is who He says He is; and that He does what He promises to do. Even an ounce of faith in Him reveals the depths of His love. For Christ has come to save us all: to uproot us from our barren soil and to hurl us out into the world, gathering, forgiving, teaching, healing, and raising the dead from their graves. For faith is not a work we do but God at work in us.

Trust in Him, and we shall see our tree hurled out and into the sea; and then, far greater things, which have yet to be. Such is the promise of God. And God does not break promises.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Nidaros Lutheran

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