“Faith & Service” Colchester Federated Church, October 5, 2025, World Communion Sunday (Luke 17:5-10)

Today we encounter Jesus’ disciples being a bit demanding in the Gospel according to Luke.  The disciples ask Jesus to increase their faith.  Perhaps it’s an earnest request, though it can also be read as a little entitled.  “Increase our faith!”[1]  There is an exclamation point at the end of this sentence after all!

Jesus responds with what would become a famous teaching: “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.”[2]  The disciples believe that they need to have more faith in order to follow Jesus’ teachings.  “Increase our faith!” 

Though throughout Luke’s Gospel, faith is shown time and again by people who overcome some sort of barrier or obstacle in their path to reach Jesus.  These are folks who trust that Jesus can heal those they love or heal themselves—like the friends of a paralyzed man who lowered him down to Jesus through a roof, like a Roman Centurion who asked Jesus to heal a beloved servant, like a woman who had been bleeding for twelve years and touched the hem of his clothes to be healed.[3]  Jesus is patiently telling his disciples that even a speck of faith is enough.  Mustard seed faith is all that is required to follow him.  This is reminiscent of the proverb from Lao Tzu that “the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”  The invitation is to take that single step to begin the longer journey.  Because we are never going to get anywhere if we don’t take that one step.

This teaching can remind us about the power of faith.  After all, faith is about trusting God in all things, trusting that God is there for us in both the good times and the bad.  Trusting that Jesus is Emmanuel—God with us.  Trusting gets to the heart of the matter, to go deeper into our souls as opposed to believing something to be true staying up in our heads.  It is great to know things—knowledge is power after all!  Though faith is perhaps better defined as trust.  Because following Jesus is not just about believing the right things about him in our heads.  Faith as trust is what makes the move from our heads to our hearts.  Faith as trust helps us to put our faith into action to be of service to our neighbors.  

When it comes to this idea of mustard seed faith, we can consider that faith comes from the Greek word fiducia meaning trust.  We could define faith as commitment to God and reliance on God.  We can consider how differently our text would sound if we consider that Jesus was inviting the disciples to be committed to him and to trust in him.  That’s the point of a life grounded in God. 

An image that may help was once shared by philosopher Soren Kierkegaard.  Kierkegaard related that “faith is like floating in seventy thousand fathoms of water.”[4]  Now this is a metaphor because no body of water is actually that deep.  The Challenger Deep located in the southern end of the Mariana Trench (near Guam) was recorded as 35,876 feet deep.[5]  That’s about seven miles deep, and that is the deepest recorded part of the ocean.  Another way to say this is that faith is like floating above the Challenger Deep (knowing that the ocean floor is seven miles beneath you).  Maybe that’s a helpful image because it’s an image rooted in trust and the unfathomable, mysterious depths of God.

This reminds me that when I was growing up my sister and I took swimming lessons.  One of the most important lessons we learned was how to swim in deep water without panicking.  Because all of the skills used to swim in shallow water apply in deep water too.  Our hometown of Wadsworth, Ohio had an awesome recreational complex with both an indoor and outdoor pool.  Our swimming lessons were robust at the Steiner Youth Center.  We learned the basics like how to properly get into the pool and out of the pool.  No running!  We eased into being fully submerged in the water.  And we learned some of those breathing exercises like blowing bubbles and then fully submerging our faces in the water and breathing side to side. 

Then we moved onto more advanced swimming skills.  We learned how to tread water and would get timed to see how long we could last.  We would tread water in both the shallow end and the deep end.  We learned the main swimming strokes: freestyle, breaststroke, backstroke, and butterfly.  We learned how to swim laps utilizing those four strokes and how to do underwater flip turns.  We learned how to properly dive into the pool both from the side and from the diving board.  Our swimming class took skill tests to advance through the levels of swimming mastery to move from being tadpoles to minnows to guppies to dolphins to sharks.  Maureen was helping me remember some of this, and the order might not be exactly right (because we’re old now).  But anyway, swimming lessons at Wadsworth’s Steiner Youth Center were serious, okay?

Now the final test to attain the coveted rank of shark was to retrieve an object placed on the bottom of the deep end.  We had to dive from the side of the pool (not the diving board because that gave you too much momentum!) to retrieve the object and swim back up to the surface (all in one breath!) and hand the item to our teacher.  Oh, did we practice for this test because Maureen and I were determined to become sharks.  For me, the intimidation came from being in the deep end of the pool which was 12 feet deep.  Treading water or diving into the middle of the pool or swimming around in the shallow end?  No problem.  But the deep end?  It was the deep end!  Though as for me and my sister—we successfully became sharks!

Okay, so faith is like floating in 70,000 fathoms of water.  On the surface, that sounds very intimidating.  The point is that if we struggle and flail and have a complete meltdown—we might sink.  But if we have deep and abiding trust, if we trust that the water can and will hold us up—we float. 

Here’s the thing, it doesn’t actually matter how deep the depths are beneath us.  It doesn’t matter when we are in the deep end.  We will float.  And so it is with mustard seed faith.  It only requires this pinch of faith, and we will float because we can trust that God is there holding us up.  Now this does not mean that waves and storms won’t come along.  This does not mean that we won’t face hardships.  That we won’t contend with illness or heartbreak, with death itself and all sorts of losses in our lives.  But if we have faith the size of a mustard seed, ultimately we will float.  Friends, hear the invitation of Jesus—trust that God is with us through it all.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

[1] Luke 17:5, CEB.
[2] Luke 17:6.
[3] Luke 5:17-26, Luke 7:1-10, Luke 8:43-48.
[4] Soren Kierkegaard, as quoted by Marcus Borg in Speaking Christian: Why Christian Words Have Lost Their Meaning and Power—And How They Can Be Restored, pg. 122.
[5] “How deep is the ocean?” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/oceandepth.html

Photo by April Walker on Unsplash