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Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost

Luke 17
5 The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!”
6 He replied, “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it will obey you.
7 “Suppose one of you has a servant plowing or looking after the sheep. Will he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, ‘Come along now and sit down to eat’? 8 Won’t he rather say, ‘Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink’? 9 Will he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? 10 So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.’”


I wouldn’t say I was a bad Boy Scout, I just wasn’t very good at it.

All the kids were unruly, the scouters appeared to be on the cusp of a nervous breakdown, and every other kid seemed to have more badges than me. Fires wouldn’t start, knots came untied, uniform disheveled: if I could blame someone else I would, but I can’t.

I do, however, retain a vague memory that I promised to do my duty, and after some careful research I can report that I promised this:

On my honour I promise that I will do my best—

To do my duty to God and the Queen

To help other people at all times and

To obey the Scout Law.

Naturally the promise has changed somewhat over time—now they promise to obey the spirit of the scout law—but the text is relatively unchanged since Baden-Powell wrote it in 1908. Curiously, he included very specific directions on taking the vow—right hand raised level with his shoulder, palm to the front, thumb resting on the nail of the digitus minimus—and then described it as a secret sign. Not much of secret if you publish it in a book.

In other countries, of course, they varied the wording based on local need. The Swedes made their promise IKEA-like in its simplicity: “I promise to do my best to keep the Scout law.” The Americans? Well, they changed it to “God and country,” having lost their king in brawl, and they just couldn’t resist the urge to embellish it, adding: “To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.”

Maybe the solution to the whole government shutdown situation is to replace the lot with some boy scouts and girl guides and maybe then someone will do their duty to God and country and make it work.

Meanwhile, here is churchworld, we have some of the same challenges around duty. At one time, we could say to people ‘you have a duty to come to church, make an offering, serve on a committee, baptize your kids, take communion, give generously, etcetera.’ And then that stopped working. Part of it is generational change: there remains a generation in our midst whose earliest days were defined by duty and the need to defend others. They, then, were followed by a generation who felt a duty to question everything and defy the generation that and perhaps spent too much time focused on duty. And the generations that follow, everyone under age 48, simply watches this generational struggle unfold and tries to keep out of the way. This may explain why so many people under 48 are missing.

The Gospel lesson, with it’s apparent focus on duty, is not immediately helpful in settling any outstanding question about the place of duty in our life together. First, Jesus must endure more foolishness from his disciples, this time they demand that Jesus somehow increase their faith. And Jesus being Jesus, doesn’t give them the straight ‘yes’ or ‘no’ that another boss might give, but gives instead something so cryptic that we still struggle to understand.

He does begin with a helpful simile, reminding them that something as small as a mustard seed can uproot a tree if it’s planted nearby. So far so good. But then it’s off to the unclear, where servants can’t expect thanks for doing their work, and disciples should be quick to say ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.’

All of this, it would seem, relates back to Luke 9. We’ll call it the Luke 9 problem, even though it occurs throughout the Gospels. But in Luke 9 things are out of hand as the disciples argue back in forth about who is the greatest among them; they offer to call down fire on a local village (as if they could) and they even commit the cardinal sin of pretending to understand the things Jesus has said. They are a mess. And so, but Luke 17 Jesus has plainly had enough, and he let’s them know: Stop bickering and do your job. (Note to politicians everywhere: Jesus says ‘stop bickering and do your jobs’)

I think it also explains the statement ‘we are unworthy servants, we have only done our duty.’ The disciples want to be spiritual super-stars, and we know for certain that they will someday achieve this, but for now they’re just kids in the back seat who can’t get along. Jesus is reminding them that it’s not about pride-of-place, or being deemed somehow more worthy than others, but rather just doing your duty, meaning doing your work.

This passage, and my trip down memory lane at the beginning got me thinking about a church promise. Why don’t we have a church promise like the scouts or the guides? We could have a not-so-secret hand-thing, a few lines to commit to memory, maybe something we could recite every time we get together. Yes, we have promises at baptism, but most of us were sleeping or crying through those. So what would we recite, thumb holding digitus minimus?

It them occurred to me that many of our hymns serve this function:

Take my life and let it be, consecrated Lord to thee.

I’m gonna live so, God can use me, anywhere Lord, any time.

Open my eyes that I may see, glimpses of truth thou hast for me.

Again, we’re not asking to be spiritual giants, just a collection of believers who do their duty: lives consecrated to God, useful to God, open to truth, dedicated to others, willing to serve, humble as possible, never demanding more than God is able to give.

But there’s more. Duty is seldom heroic or life-threatening or even that interesting. The saints displayed ‘heroic virtue’ and lives worthy of eternal fame, but we’re not being called to sainthood, only service. The argument Jesus makes for his disciples is this: in the simple, in the everyday, and in the smallest act of dedication to each other—that is where your duty lies.

And think about all the small acts of kindness and mercy that happen each day. People of faith doing the seemingly ordinary in the service of an extraordinary God. People of faith planting single seeds that become a forest of goodness. People of faith who have a duty to God, a duty to each other, and a duty to the people they have yet to meet. Amen.

posted by michael jacob kooiman @ 6:07 AM