There are times when a pall of discouragement, anxiety or paralysis can fall over our lives and suck the life out of us. Have you been through a time like that?

Maybe you’re pulled down by self doubts, difficult memories or unsettling regrets, and can’t seem to move forward.

The biopsy comes back. It’s cancer, and it’s already spread. You know people deal with these things all the time, but it’s a lot different when it’s you, or your spouse, or your child, or your best friend.

Maybe you’re getting worn down by the daily grind, and you just don’t seem to have a sense of purpose any more.

Jesus said, “If you had faith like a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.”

Yeah, right! What kind of teaching is this, anyway? Is faith like having a magic genie in a lamp? If I believe strongly enough, can I make anything happen that I want? What does Jesus mean, “If you had faith like a mustard seed”?

When Jesus talked about faith, he didn’t mean believing real hard that whatever our egos want will happen. He didn’t mean believing that God is going to solve all of our problems for us. And he didn’t mean believing the right things about God and himself.

For Jesus, the essence of faith is a trusting relationship with God that affirms God’s power to bring healing out of brokenness, forgiveness out of guilt, hope out of despair, goodness out of misfortune, even life out of death. For Jesus, faith creates an opening between our need and God’s power, our world and God’s realm, our limitations and God’s limitlessness.

This kind of faith is less a thing we have and more an action we venture into. You might believe that the ice on a big pond would be thick enough for a person to walk across it. Your belief turns into faith when you start walking across the pond. And when you take that walk of faith, you move to a different place from where you started.

When Jesus talks about faith like a mustard seed uprooting a tree, he’s saying that it just takes a little faith, a little trust, a little opening to God, to uproot the obstacles we face and rearrange our world. Let me give you some examples.

I’ve been reading a book entitled Christianity for the Rest of Us. One of the people the author met is a woman named Deanna, who didn’t grow up in any religion. She felt increasingly overtaken by depression and couldn’t figure out where these negative emotions were coming from. She finally came to realize that something in her felt unforgiven.

Deanna said, “I began to review the world religions in my mind, looking for a balm for my crabbiness. Of all the world religions, I found Christianity the least understandable and least appealing. I mean, couldn’t they find a more appealing symbol than a dead guy on a cross? How inviting is that? However, upon reviewing and searching for an inspirational figure to help me out of my funk, I thought of Jesus. Wasn’t his big gig forgiveness? So I began to mutter to myself, ‘Okay, Jesus, if you are the big guru of forgiveness, give me forgiveness. How about sending some my way?!’” She even began screaming at God, “I’ve tried to be good; why am I not forgiven? If you’re the great forgiver, then give me some _____ing forgiveness NOW!”

Now here’s faith a lot like a mustard seed. It’s very small. It’s hard. It ain’t pretty–it’s very earthy and gritty. But there’s a little bit of life in it–Deanna’s recognition of a her deep need to be forgiven and released from her dark past, a desperate hope that maybe there is a God who can forgive her, and a little bud of a root reaching out for some spiritual soil to find a home in.

Much to Deanna’s surprise, after she screamed her prayer, she felt Jesus’ presence right there in the room with her. She said that, wordlessly, Jesus communicated that he’d been waiting a long time to be asked, and that forgiveness was hers. Immediately, she felt “peaceful and calm,” feelings that stayed with her the rest of the day. She found her way to a church, where she has been learning more and more about who Jesus is and what it means to have a living faith in God.¹

God worked through Deanna’s tiny faith, uprooted her guilt, and transplanted it far out in the sea. That mustard seed of faith is continuing to grow, and it’s dramatically changing the landscape of Deanna’s life.

Now let’s look at terminal illness, because our fear of death can so easily squeeze the trust and faith out of our lives even when we’re healthy. A woman I know of was born with a crippling condition. Let’s call her Ann. The doctors said that Ann would never walk or talk. But she persevered until she did both, and after years of living in a group home, she finally got her own apartment–an incredible triumph of determination. This past year, Ann was told she had terminal cancer and had only a few months to live. The doctor offered to refer her to a hospice. She ranted and raved in her anger and frustration. How could the freedom she had worked so hard to achieve be taken away from her so cruelly?

Ann had never been a person of faith. When her best friend offered to pray with her and for her, the only prayer she would allow was for a miracle cure...and make it fast. Her friend longed for Ann to open up to a bigger miracle, the miracle of knowing and trusting the power of God’s love that was bigger than mortal life and bigger than death. But Ann wouldn’t hear of it. She fought and struggled against losing the only life she knew almost to the bitter end.

Betty Hobby, a member of our church who died recently, never took her faith at face value. She was always questioning, probing, and seeking for more certainty. But when she was told her cancer was terminal, she let go of her need to know things for sure, and opened into the most beautiful trust of God, of the passage called death, and of the unknown. As all her family gathered around her to say good-bye, she joked, “What if everybody comes to say good-bye, and I don’t go?” I asked her how she accounted for her good humor and the powerful sense of peace she exuded in the face of death. She shrugged her shoulders and said, “I’m just going along, singing my song.”

Her mustard seed of faith was small. She didn’t know what lay ahead, any more than Ann did. But unlike Ann, Betty surrendered that human need to know and opened to God in trust. Ann could only pray for a miraculous cure, which isn’t really a prayer of faith, but a prayer of fear of loss and fear of the unknown. And fear leaves no real opening for God to work, because it demands that God just work on our own human terms. But Betty was able to pray prayers of gratitude for all the blessings in her life, blessings in the past and even blessings she was receiving as she lay dying. Her faith had freed her to appreciate them all.

All it takes is a mustard seed of faith to open us to the power of life abundant, life that is bigger than all the identities, roles, achievements, and possessions that we have acquired, life that is bigger than death.

Mustard seeds aren’t just for holding onto. They’re for planting. This week someone I know talked about his aunt Mimi, who grew up in the early 20^th Century in a small farming community. Right from the beginning of 1^st grade, she didn’t like school because the teachers routinely paddled, yelled at and berated her classmates when they did something wrong. Though that was the norm in most homes around there as well as in the school, Mimi determined that when she grew up, she’d become a teacher who would help children want to learn without harsh punishment and shaming. This was her little mustard seed of faith, that she could make some kind of difference.

She graduated from normal school and finally had her own classroom, back in her home town. The kids were used to being treated rough, and they were pretty unruly. Every morning she prayed that God would open her eyes to something good in her students that she could encourage. She later said, “Lord knows, it took months for me to find something praiseworthy in some of those kids!” But every time she did, she would recognize the child for it, until each of her students really knew they had something good about them and began to believe in themselves. By the end of the year, they were practically falling over each other doing whatever Mimi asked of them.

She taught in that town long enough to teach that generation’s children, and then those children’s children. She was everybody’s favorite. And three generations of people in that town learned that you can teach children and shape their character a lot better with love, appreciation and encouragement than with fear and humiliation.

Her nephew, who shared this story, talked about how he had applied these same principles to the management position he had held. He made sure his employees knew all they needed to about their job, praised them in front of the whole department when they did well, addressed his concerns to them privately, and advocated for their fair treatment. His employees always excelled.

Aunt Mimi’s mustard seed not only grew to maturity under her care, but it also did what mustard seeds do–it bore fruit and proliferated, spreading new seeds everywhere. I think this is why Jesus liked the mustard seed so much. Not only does it grow from tiny to big, but it also grows from one to many. It only takes one tiny mustard seed of faith to dramatically change the landscape around you.

Is there a place in your life that could use a mustard seed of faith? Where have you been feeling discouraged, anxious, paralyzed, or useless this week? You might close your eyes, and take a moment to tune into a place in you that feels like your faith is on empty....Now look deeply and see if you can find a little mustard seed of faith-- some part of you, however small, that is willing to open to God in that place that feels faithless. That little mustard seed is where the Life is in you--the real Life. Can you feel it gently opening in trust to a Power beyond your own? Can you feel it putting out a little root, and drawing on God’s guidance, God’s wisdom, God’s forgiveness, God’s love? Can you feel it putting out a shoot of hope that sees above the barrenness around you and envisions new possibilities? Can you see it growing big enough to produce new seeds that offer hope to other people in your life? Can you begin to feel that this growing mustard seed is who you really are, rather than the fears and discouragement and anxiety that you thought were you? Can you be this faith? If you can be this faith–be this living growing channel between the world around you and God–then there is no obstacle in your life that cannot be uprooted and transplanted out in the sea. There is no limit to how God can use you. Because to the extent that you embody faith, you are filled with Life–abundant Life, eternal Life, Life that has no limits.

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