A sermon for the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost, observed as St. Francis Sunday, October 5, 2025. The scriptures are Lamentations 1:1-6,  Psalm 137, 2 Timothy 1:1-14, and Luke 17:5-10.

If someone asked you, “What does it mean to have faith?” what would you say?

Hebrews 11:1 suggests “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” But sometimes faith is more than that, and sometimes faith is less. But what is faith, really?
Is faith a feeling? Is it a habit or a discipline, something that one simply does? Is faith a thing that is handed down from parents and grandparents, like an old chair or a quilt? Or handed down as a tradition, something one does to connect oneself to those who have gone before? If faith the same thing as a fairy tale or a nursery rhyme—a story we tell ourselves when we’re afraid of the dark?
The subject of “faith” comes up in each of the readings we have heard.

In the Book of Lamentations, God’s chosen people are symbolized by a holy city that has broken faith with God. The people have not kept faith with their beloved, and have forgotten God’s faith in them. And so there is lamentation, and heartache. It’s all the sadder because it’s so needless. Faith is not a physical deposit that can be held on to, or lost. Faith is a relationship, one that God continually calls us into.
In Paul’s Second Letter to Timothy, we see how faith is FULL. For Paul, faith has especially to do with knowledge, with having information about Jesus Christ, understanding that this information is sacred and holy, and then protecting this sacred treasure of teaching and knowledge. This is often referred to as the Deposit of Faith, that is, the combined force of written-down Holy Scripture plus the oral and gathered tradition of faithful people who have read and prayed and lived and loved in every age. As Anglicans we believe that this Deposit of Faith was given by Jesus to the Apostles and has been handed down through the line of bishops from the very early church even into the church of our day. And so faith has something to do with God’s using our heads to organize our hearts.

The eleventh century Saint Anselm of Canterbury had as his motto, “faith seeking understanding.” By this he didn’t mean to suggest that understanding might replace faith, as though once a person can memorize a few verses of scripture, say the creed and repeat certain concepts, faith is somehow achieved. Instead, Anselm meant to encourage a kind of active love of God which seeks to know and love God ever deeper.

When we turn to today’s Gospel, it seems like the disciples are pretty clear about what faith “is” and “is not.” They know faith and they just want more of it. “Increase our faith!” they ask Jesus. He replies with the well-known words to the effect that if they had just a little bit of faith, faith even the size of a mustard seed, they could command all kinds of things to happen—in this Gospel, “trees to be uprooted and planted in the sea.” (It’s in Matthew’s Gospel that faith the size of a mustard seed can move entire mountains.) But then Jesus goes on with confusing words, especially confusing in our day because the idea of a slave is so repulsive at every level. Remember that in the first century, slavery was a kind of social norm, a given that simply was not addressed very often. Jesus speaks of slaves not in the context of moral right and wrong, but simply as an example of a role in which one is serving another, a role in which one is acting in a predictable and expected way.

In the beginning of the Gospel, the disciples ask about increasing their faith. They ask with the confidence that they know what they’re asking for. But when Jesus goes on to talk about servants and slaves, about mundane work, about doing the expected, — I think Jesus is still responding to the question about faith. He is saying that before we look for the miraculous, before we ask that our faith be increased in some supernatural way, we should look for faith to grow in the ordinary things we do.

Jesus is suggesting to the disciples and to us that things are increased not by magic, but by predictable means. Gardens grow when plants have nutrients and water. Children grow when they have food and water. And Christians grow through service and sacraments, by participating in the life of God in the world.

St. Francis of Assisi embodied this truth beautifully. Born into privilege, Francis gave up wealth and comfort to serve Christ completely. His faith was not in grand miracles but in quiet trust. He rebuilt broken churches with his hands, cared for lepers with compassion, and praised God with the birds and beasts. Once, when asked if his order would ever accomplish great things, Francis reportedly replied, ‘Start by doing what is necessary, then what is possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.’

That is mustard seed faith—small steps taken in obedience, which God blesses abundantly.

We don’t have to wait to feel strong before we serve. We don’t have to measure faith by what we can see. Instead, Like Francis, we can go out with open hands and obedient hearts, trusting that God will take our small offerings and turn them into something eternal.

As with St. Francis, as with the disciples, our faith is increased when we are able to live our lives in the grace of God, one day at a time. We serve and work together. We learn and practice our beliefs. We eat and we drink. This is what it is to be the Church. This is what it is to increase in faith.

In the prayer attributed to Francis, we pray that God turn our seeking into action:

Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is
hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where
there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where
there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where
there is sadness, joy. Grant that we may not so much seek to
be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is
in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we
are born to eternal life. Amen