Faith Envy

October 5, 2025. Saint Barnabas Lutheran Church, Howard Beach, Queens, N.Y.

Luke 17:5-10

Today we observe the awesome power of the littlest things.

Take my wife. Please. 

Martha is an enormous presence in my life. She fills my days with unconditional love, support, and – on occasion – constructive criticism. It’s only when I see her from a distance that I’m surprised how petite she is, a small thing with a titanic aura.

There is power in little things. 

In our Gospel reading this morning, Jesus’ disciples ask him to make their faith bigger. They think this is a logical request because they know Jesus can do anything he wants and they are eager to increase their faith. They think that their does faith not necessarily grow just because they walk, eat, and sleep with Jesus. Faith is not contagious, and Jesus has been known to criticize them for having too little of it. They no doubt remember watching him sleep serenely on a boat being swamped by a storm, and they shout at him to wake up because “we are perishing.” Jesus awakes, calms the storm, and chides the disciples: “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” So it's not unreasonable that they think they need Jesus’ intervention to increase their faith. (Mark 4:37-40)

But again Jesus seems to chide them. Faith is not measured by its quantity but by its quality.

“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 17:5-8)

Jesus could have used examples other than mustard seeds. Poppy seeds are smaller. Orchid seeds are smaller. Microscopic spores grow into spritely ferns. In a later era Jesus might have mentioned the tiny atom and it’s incalculable potential for power.

This month on Saint Francis Sunday, thousands of beloved critters ranging from elephants to hamsters are brought to churches for the annual blessing of the animals.

Unseen but just as important will be billions of microbes too small for the naked eye to see. Few pastors will be aware of their buggy presence when they are pronouncing the blessings, but none of the creatures seeking blessing could live without them.

Ed Yong, science writer for The Atlantic, probably didn’t know he was writing a theological tome when he penned I Contain Multitudes, The Microbes Within Us And a Grander View Of Life. But Yong has raised questions that are deeply spiritual as well as complexly biological.

According to Yong, more than half the cells in your body aren’t even human. But without these infinitesimal creatures, we could not survive.

They keep ward off disease, aid digestion, repel bad bacteria and viruses, and keep our bodies in healthy balance.

It’s probably just as well that God didn’t reveal this in the beginning. Genesis might have sounded like this:

So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them, and he created them a microbiota, a microbiome that resideth in the skin, mammary glands, placenta, semen, uterus, ovarian follicles, lung, saliva, oral mucosa, conjunctiva, and gastrointestinal tracts. And God saw that it was good.

There is enormous power in the tiniest things. Faith, even when it is little, is fierce. 

And to drive his point home, Jesus uses an exaggerated and, if you think about it, funny example to catch his disciples’ attention. If you imagine a mulberry tree suddenly ripped from its roots and hurled into the sea, you might stifle a chuckle. The anecdote was so memorable that the disciples remembered it all their lives and the story was still around sixty or ninety years later when the Gospel of Luke was written.

Whenever Jesus used this type of embellished humor, he was making a point he wanted us to remember.

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle,” he said drolly, “than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 19:23-24)

This image, too, is vivid and unforgettable. 

It’s also one of those biblical narratives we’ve heard so often that its rhetorical power is waning. To get a better measure of how delightfully surprising the camel-needle image can be, tell it to a nursery class – checking, of course, that they know what camels and needles are. Children who encounter it for the first time recognize a riotous Sesame Street image when they hear one.

Dr. Elton Trueblood, the Quaker writer and theologian, thought anyone who missed the fact that Jesus sprinkled his sermons with witticisms – that on some occasions Jesus was, as Mort Saul would put it, apocryphal of wry – is missing an important dimension of Christian theology.

God knows how easy it is to miss that dimension of Jesus’ homiletical style. Some of us grew up in congregations where a sober frown was regarded as the appropriate mask of faith and the giggles of children were sternly shushed. 

Trueblood writes in The Humor of Christ (Harper & Row, 1964) that the scriptures prove how much Jesus loved to laugh. His sermons and parables were generously sprinkled with irony, hyperbole, and droll scorn. 

Actually, Jesus’ scorn could be quite piercing. His reference to the Pharisees as “you snakes, you brood of vipers” (Matthew 23:33a) is harsher than the more genteel “sons of bitches.”

Jesus’ love of laughter and the good life was used by his enemies to criticize him.  “For John came neither eating nor drinking,” Jesus said, referring to his cousin, the ascetic baptizer, “and they say, ‘he has a demon.’ The Son of Man came eating and drinking and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’” (Matthew 11:24) 

It’s hard to imagine eating and drinking without jokes and laughter, so it’s no theological leap to conclude Jesus was a joke teller and a laugher.

The camel-and-needle schtick is not the only time Jesus uses gross exaggeration to get his point across. It’s an entertaining spiritual exercise to leaf through the Gospels to identify the times Jesus was just kidding and did not intend his words to be taken literally.

In the Sermon on the Mount, for example, Jesus uses hyperbolic images to drive home the point that everyone sins. 

Jesus said, “Everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28)  

This is a dismaying revelation to all us guys whose eyes stray toward well turned ankles in a crowd, telling ourselves it can’t hurt to look. It is especially challenging today as we are assaulted by mass media that offer images of hundreds of beautiful women and men for instant ogling and free-based fantasizing. 

But wait, there’s more. 

“If your right eye causes you to sin,” Jesus continued, “tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.” 

Point made, but Jesus was not advocating mass blindness on an Oedipal scale. If vicarious lust required wandering eyes to be cast out, the whole world would bump blindly into another Jesus story: “If one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit.” (Matthew 15:14b). Slapstick humor. 

Nor is Jesus is not above sardonic scatology: “Do you see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles.” (Matthew 15:17-18) Again, the point is made and the mental image – even if it doesn’t elicit a giggle or two – is unforgettable.

Also unforgettable is Jesus’ send-up of the scribes and Pharisees as he explains in quick-fire Rodney Dangerfield staccato why they should get no respect:

“They do all their deeds to be seen by others, for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long” (referring to the more visible sartorial symbols of pharisaic piety, Matthew 23:5). “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” he said, “For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth.” (Matthew 23:27).  

Jesus! Lighten up!

“Or,” Jesus said to the crowd gathering on the mount, “how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye’ while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.” (Matthew 7:4-5)

But as hard as it is to imagine a log in someone’s eye, it’s a hyperbolic tour de force. 

When Jesus uses humor to grab the attention of his congregation, it’s usually to call attention to a very serious point.

Let’s go back and imagine that mulberry tree ripping out of its bed and soaring into the sea.

Speaking apocryphal of wry, and with more than a hint of wit, Jesus is telling his disciples – and us – that the size of one’s faith does not matter.

As Audrey West, a Moravian scholar, puts it:

“When it comes to faith, even a seed of faith holds tree-like potential. Jesus’ followers can live and act on the basis of whatever faith is theirs, no matter how small or insignificant it seems. 

“Even the immeasurable reign of God is compared to a mustard seed (Luke 13:19).”