Sermon: Seventeenth Sunday of Pentecost
By the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D ’13
Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity
Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, Oct. 5, 2025)
In the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us this day and always. Amen. Please be seated.
As we're finishing the hymn, I'd look down at Danny and he mouthed up to me, "Am I in the sermon?" I said, "No," and now he's sad, but I guess you're in it, buddy. There you go.
There are lots of Christianities, lots of different versions of this faith that we try to follow, and the one we try to follow here at the Memorial Church is one we hope that tries to be rooted in love. God is love. We believe God is love, and so we try to be loving. What we do is try to shape our lives and our worship in that way.
Those of you who have been coming to church for a while may have noticed that we changed the way we begin this service. Now, our opening acclamations, our opening sentences are about the love of God. There's so much in Scripture that speaks to the love of God, and the Psalms are great. That's what we used for years, but we thought now's the time to really lean into love. Today, we're having communion, and I've changed the communion prayer, and we're going to talk more about love and the communion prayer. The old communion prayer is great, but let's talk about love.
We do all these things, and we try to make this space and our words as loving as possible. Then Jesus shows up and says the sort of awful things he says today, "You worthless slaves. Do what you're told." This is a hard teaching, and I'm not going to be able to undo it with a Greek etymology or the tricks I usually use to try to undo it. It's a hard teaching. It's always a hard teaching. It's especially hard in a country which is built upon a history of slavery and the unrepented, unrepaired wounds of that original sin.
Jesus also lived in a time that was built upon slavery. Greco-Roman culture, the culture in which he lived, was built upon slavery. These are just hard words and I'm not going to be able to convince you that they're not hard words. I don't believe Jesus was a fan of the system of slavery or the time that he lived in of that system and the time. There's so many verses in this gospel and Luke's gospel where Jesus gives blessing to the poor and blessing to the vulnerable and condemnation to the powerful and woe to the rich. In the last supper chapter 22 of this gospel, he says to His disciples, "The greatest is the one who serves. Be servant of all." I can't imagine the Jesus of this gospel on the side of slave owners at that time or any time, and so what's going on?
I think in this moment, just to describe it straight, I think Jesus is angry, and he's impatient, and he's trying to get his disciples’ attention, and he's using really harsh rhetoric to get their attention. I'm not going to be able to make the case, like I said, that he's not angry or that the rhetoric isn't harsh. I am going to describe why I think he might be angry at them, why he might be impatient with them, and why he has cause to be. It's not obvious in the excerpt we have, the gospel lesson that we have this morning starts with the disciples coming to Jesus and saying, "Increase our faith." That seems like a reasonable request.
Who wouldn't want more faith? What they're asking is not the problem. I think why they're asking is the problem. To know why we're asking, we have to look back a bit further, not start just with the excerpt we have today, but with the verses that precede it. If you've been coming to the church the last few weeks, you've been hearing us preach about Jesus, speaking of mercy and forgiveness. In the summer before we were back, there were a bunch of lessons from Luke where Jesus talked about rescuing the lost one, reaching out to the one that's fallen to the wayside, forgiving the sinner. He repeats this over and over again and in fact, we started at verse five of chapter 17 here in the beginning of chapter 17, Jesus says to His listeners, to His disciples, Jesus says, "You need to forgive. I've been teaching you all this stuff, telling you all these stories. I'm going to come straight at it. You need to forgive, and if anybody repents, you got to forgive them, and if they come to you seven times a day, they sin against you seven times a day, and seven times a day, they repent. You must forgive."
Then the disciples respond, "Increase our faith." Now, again, that's not unreasonable either. Forgiveness is hard. If you are praying to God for help forgiving someone, I don't think Jesus would condemn you. The issue here is not that the disciples asked for faith in this instance. It's what they haven't asked for more faith about so far in this gospel. In the 10th chapter of Luke, Jesus calls the disciples to him and he says to them, "Listen, I want you to go out and I'm going to give you some power. You're going to be able to cure illnesses. You're going to cast out demons. When you walk into a town, if they don't accept it, you are going to be able to call down the judgment of God Almighty upon that town. I'm giving you this power." They all say, "Okay, great," and go. They come back and they say, "We did it. The demons obey us and we healed the sick, and we call down all kinds of judgment."
After this, Peter calls him the Messiah, and after they call him the Messiah, they start heading towards Jerusalem, and while on their way to Jerusalem, Jesus starts telling them that the poor are going to inherit the kingdom. They are poor and he is saying, "The rich are in trouble and the Romans and the Herodians, they are rich," so they're on their way to Jerusalem and Jesus is the Messiah and Jesus has said, "Us poor, we poor are going to inherit the kingdom, and woe to those rich and they are on their way." They believe in all of this. They believe in their own power. They believe in the certainty of the revolution. They have plenty of faith in what they think they're going to do. On the way, he stops and he turns to them and he says, "By the way, if anybody wrongs, you have to forgive them."
This is the thing they don't believe. This is what they can't fathom. Mercy. They believe they can cast out illnesses and boss around demons, and they are ready to march right into the heart of Jerusalem and overthrow the Roman government there. Jesus asked them to show mercy to someone who has wronged them and they say, "Help. How can we do that?" My favorite Christian theologians, a 14th-century woman named Julian, and in one of her writings she says, "It's a funny thing about us Christians. We have faith that God is all-powerful and can do anything. We have faith that God is all-knowing and knows how to do everything, but when you tell us that God is all-loving and is willing to do anything for anyone, for you, for your neighbor, for your enemy, we can't believe that. That's too much."
This is why Jesus is impatient, because they have believed everything he said when he says, "I will give you all the power to triumph over everything," they believe that, but when he says, "Now, I need you to show some mercy," then they stop short. I think that's why he gets angry, and that's why he uses this analogy of the slave owner. He's speaking to them in the terms of the power that they understand, and he's flipping it back at them.
These disciples, we disciples, we have faith. We just have faith in the wrong things. Jesus says, "If you just had a mustard seed in the right things," this mustard seed analogy is interesting. It sounds like if you with a mustard seed, you can do miracles, right? Make the fig tree get up and go into the sea. I don't think Jesus is actually worried about replanting fig trees, and I don't think this is an instruction in miracles. I think it's an exhortation to build our kingdom upon something other than the illusions of power. Because this mustard seed metaphor is actually a callback. The mustard seed shows up for the first time in the Gospel of Luke in chapter 13 when Jesus says, "The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed," and that analogy doesn't really make much sense until this moment.
The kingdom of God is not a conquest. It is not royal splendor. It is not overwhelming power and might. It doesn't require anything as grand as all that. It doesn't require a triumphant historical miracle, just lots of everyday relational miracles. Maybe you can't make a fig tree uproot itself and go plant itself in the sea. I bet you can't. Maybe you're not the Messiah. I bet you're not, but even if all you have to offer are daily acts of grace and mercy and kindness and forgiveness of love, then you are building the kingdom. Because grace and mercy and kindness and forgiveness and love, that's the kingdom. That is it in your hands already, be it even as small as a hazelnut or a mustard seed.
To be clear, I don't think Jesus is a quietist. I don't think he's complacent. I don't think he's okay with the way his world is. I don't think he's trying to reduce revolutionary politics to routine politeness. I think Jesus believes in historic transformations and radical revolutions and big solutions because he does, in fact, in the end march right into the middle of Jerusalem. In the end, he is just as brave and as bold and as daring as all of his disciples want him to be. The problem is he has all those things for something they don't believe in yet. He does it for something else. He does it for mercy. He does it for forgiveness. He does it for love. May we have faith to do likewise.