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Nineteenth Sunday after
Pentecost
October 7, 2007 Sermon by
The Rev. Bill Van Oss, Rector
Readings
“Jesus has a very special love for you. As
for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not
see, listen and do not hear.”
These are words that the great Mother Theresa wrote to her friend and
confidant, Michael Van Der Peet, in 1979.
Much is being made of the recent publication of some of Mother Theresa’s
letters and writings. You might have read about it in Time Magazine. It
seems this towering saint of a woman, this woman who dedicated her whole
life to pulling dying children out of the gutters of Calcutta, this
woman who inspired hundreds of young women and men to enter religious
life and follow her example of serving the poorest of the poor, this
woman who received the Nobel Peace Prize and was heralded by pops and
kings and presidents.
This woman famously pictured sitting in the convent chapel of the
Missionaire of Charity, eyes closed, hands folded, deep in prayer. This
woman described God as “the Absent One”. She bemoaned in her letters the
“dryness”, “darkness”, “loneliness”, and even “torture” she felt in her
relationship with God – over 50 years she suffered “the dark night of
the soul”.
Shocking – people are shocked – as we look at the peaceful portrait of
Mother Theresa at prayer, as we admire the heroic good works of this
humble woman who gave her whole life to God by serving the poorest of
the poor, literally pulling them from the gutters day after day – we
imagine that God would reward her with consolation, with solace, peace
with warm fuzzies for her selfless dedication and love of the least.
But it seems that was not the case. Mother Theresa did not find in God
solace, warm feelings, comfort, consolation and reassurance.
She addressed her letters to “The Absent One”.
And yet, in spite of the absence of good feelings and warm fuzzies,
Mother Theresa kept feeding the hungry and clothing the naked and giving
drink to the thirsty and comforting the dying.
For decades of days she was God’s faithful servant, God’s slave, to use
a word we don’t care for very much, but a word Jesus uses in today’s
Gospel.
Day after day Mother Theresa was that slave in today’s Gospel:
dutifully, faithfully, lovingly serving God in the poorest of the poor.
Plowing the endless field of poverty, tending the ever-growing flock of
the needy, one sheep at a time. And when she cam home at the end of each
long day of plowing and tending, it seems she knelt down in that chapel
seeking a God who would set a banquet before her – a God saying “sit
her”, good and faithful servant, I’ll wait on you.”
But she didn’t find that: no banquets, no kudos, no pats on the back.
Instead she was left with only the last line of the Gospel: “I am a
worthless slave, I have done only what I ought to have done.”
This makes us very uncomfortable. We believe good people, saintly
people, should be rewarded for their good deeds. And it seems it is not
so, at least for Mother Theresa.
And yet, she was a person of deep, deep faith – the deepest of faiths –
faith that survived five decades of “the dark night of the soul.”
Because, for Mother Theresa, her faith did not depend on the warm
feelings we so often associate with faith.
For Mother Theresa, faith was about action. Faith was about loving her
neighbor, it was about seeing God’s face in the faces of the hungry, the
naked and the homeless, and then not just standing back and feeling bad
for them, but reaching out and lifting them up, feeding, clothing,
comforting, doing.
Faith is about action and not about comforting feelings. This is Jesus’
message to the Apostles in today’s Gospel and it is His message to us.
The Apostles say to Jesus: “Increase our faith” – demanding more of the
good feelings they think faith should offer. But Jesus has just finished
telling the story of a rich man who ignored a poor beggar named Lazarus,
who laid at the rich man’s gate for years, longing for scraps from the
rich man’s table. But the rich man never even tossed Lazarus a scrap . .
.
“Faith”, Jesus says, “is reaching down and lifting Lazarus up, feeding
him, caring about him”, doing something.
That’s “mustard seed” faith: one small act of kindness at a time, one
small good deed at a time. This kind of faith – faith in action – can
move mountains. It can say to a mulberry tree, “Be uprooted and planted
in the sea”, and it will obey.
Deep faith is not about saying, “I love God” and then hoping to feel
God’s love in return. Deep faith is about putting God’s love into
action, becoming God’s servants, even slaves, so that God’s kingdom
might come here on earth as it is in heaven.
Mother Theresa, who signed her letters to Jesus with, “Your Little One”,
once said, “Our job is not to do great things, but to do small things
with great love.”
That is faith, as deep and high and broad and wide as faith can be.
Trusting that the small things we do with great love are helping to make
God’s dream for our world come true.
As we pray, in our Eucharistic Prayer today, to be delivered from the
presumption of coming to this table “for solace only and not for
strength”, “for pardon only and not for renewal”, let us pray that God
will strengthen and renew us with courage to live out our faith in our
actions, the way Mother Theresa and many others, have lived out their
deep faith in God.