The Object of Our Faith--October 6, 2025

The Object of Our Faith--October 6, 2025

The apostles said to the Lord, "Increase our faith!" The Lord replied, "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."(Luke 17:5-6)

Here's some rough back-of-the-envelope math for you. When a single atom of uranium splits in nuclear fission (yes, a single atom), it releases about 200 million electrical volts of energy.  That's 200,000,000 volts, thanks to Einstein's famous equation that a tiny amount of mass can yield mind-blowing amounts of energy through relativity's exchange rate of E=mc squared.

All that from a single tiny atom, something so small you can't even see it, made up of even tinier particles you can hardly even comprehend.  And all of us are made up of unthinkably large numbers of atoms (the rough number is 7 x 10 to the 27th power of atoms in a single human being, or seven billion billion billion atoms).  So there is a LOT of energy in VERY LITTLE things out there--it's really just a question of having the right particular atoms and the right way to harness their energy.  After all, that uranium atom can either be used as part of a nuclear power plant or a nuclear bomb--both unleash huge amounts of energy, but in very different ways.  And the right kinds of atoms are needed, too: the carbon that makes up you and me is a great deal more stable and less likely to start a chain reaction than uranium is.

It's right about here that my recollections of high school chemistry and physics comes to an end, but the takeaway for me is this: sometimes we don't need "more" in order to tap immense potential. Sometimes we simply need to learn how to unleash the power of the very small things already in our hands. In fact some things that are both quite powerful and very real don't really work in terms of quantifiable terms of "more" and "less." You can't commodify things like "love," "wonder," "trust," or "hope" into serving sizes or standard units--nobody says, "I love you three units more than yesterday," and no one would break out a calculator and determine they have "58% more awe at the beauty of nature than last year." Some things can't be reduced to quanta like that. 

I have a hunch that Jesus would put faith in that category--at least when we are talking about faith rooted in the living God. 

In this scene from Luke's gospel which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship, some of Jesus' disciples ask him, "Increase our faith." They are immediately thinking of faith like it is a commodity that can be measured, quantified, and boxed up in appropriate serving sizes.  "Don't give us a small, Jesus!  We want the extra value meal version--supersize our faith!"  And to our ears, I imagine there is a certain logic to their request.  After all, why settle for the regular size candy bar when there's a "king size" available?  Why get the six-pack of toilet paper when I could buy the twenty-four pack of extra-large double-size rolls?  Why settle for a small drink when there's a Big Gulp as an option?  The disciples of Jesus are thinking in the same terms--if a little faith is good, well, then, it must be better to have more.  Therefore, they assume, the smart and pious thing to ask of Jesus is for more faith.

Jesus' response suggests that maybe the issue with faith isn't really whether you have a lot or a little.  After all, Jesus says, "if you had faith as tiny as a grain of mustard, it could turn the world upside down." And we're back to the immense amounts of power held in tiny subatomic odds and ends.  It's not a matter of needing more, but perhaps of how to use the immense energy already at hand.

But... wait a second. If you and I only need such a tiny amount of faith to uproot mulberry trees (or move mountains, as another Gospel passage puts it), then why aren't we seeing shrubberies flying through the air and landing in the lake on a regular basis? Why aren't we mowing down forests with our minds or bulldozing the Rockies with a wiggle of our ears and a nod of our heads? Don't we have faith?

Maybe, once again, we are thinking of things the wrong way. Maybe we are imagining that faith is simply a raw power source that can be used like fuel--to go in any direction we choose--when in reality, faith's power doesn't come from faith itself, but from the One in whom we place our trust.  That is to say, from the vantage point of the Scriptures, it's not so much that faith is a magic power, but that the God in whom we believe is powerful.  We aren't called to have faith in the sheer power of faith, but faith in the living God.  It's not that if I believe "harder" my faith will become more powerful, but rather it is always about whether the One in whom my faith is rooted is able to do great things.  

But that's different from me wielding power like the Force in Star Wars, to use as I choose in any way I see fit.  In stories like that, mastering "the Force" is about learning the proper techniques, developing a certain concentration, and acquiring a set of skills to do what you want to be able to do: lightning from your fingers, making your spaceship levitate, healing a wound, seeing an object even when your eyes are covered, or whatever.  Jesus doesn't talk like that. Jesus doesn't offer Jedi training in how to use your faith to levitate shrubberies on a whim, because that's not how faith works.  Faith's power depends entirely on the object of our faith--that is, the One in whom we place our trust.  I can't uproot a mulberry tree by believing in myself hard enough, even if I call it "having faith in myself," because I don't have that kind of innate power.  I can't make myself levitate by wishing hard enough on a star in the evening sky, because stars do not have that ability to grant, and wishing is meaningless. But I can trust in God (who is never my personal genie), who does indeed part the sea and raises the dead.  That God can do infinitely more than I can ask or imagine, but not like a short-order cook or a cosmic vending machine.

Like we said on the subatomic level, the atoms in my body aren't going power a generator because my atoms (and yours) aren't made of the right stuff. For fission you need uranium or plutonium, of course--and the means to harness their power in the right ways.  Maybe something similar is true about our faith.  It's not faith in my own faith that can move mountains or transplant trees.  It's a trust in the living God who made the world in the first place that has potential, because that God is the One who formed the world in the first place.  The One in whom we place our trust makes all the difference--and yes, even a tiny amount of trust in the living God opens up awesome possibilities.  

Maybe today, our job is to unlearn the way our culture has taught us to see everything--including faith itself--as a commodity that can be quantified, and therefore supersized.  Maybe we can see that some of the most essential things in life--like faith, love, beauty, and courage--do not work like that. And instead, we can spend our effort rooting our trust in the living God, who can not only uproot mulberry trees, but can raise the dead and create a universe from scratch.  After all, that God is the One who gives us faith in the first place.

Lord God, enable us to place our trust more fully and honestly in you--and then do what you will among us and in us.