Sermon on Luke 17:5-10
Pastor Jennifer Garcia
Focus :Just as this passage gives us a distasteful image of Jesus without the loving context of the Gospel of Luke, the world around us can give us harmful images of God that do not align with the loving God that we find in the themes of the Bible.
Function: This sermon will challenge hearers to examine the images of God they hold onto.
Today’s Gospel reading makes me sick to my stomach.
At face value, it sounds like:
1. Jesus scolds his disciples for what seems like an earnest and understandable request.
They’re not asking for glory or riches or even for comfort.
They’re asking for faith,
perhaps hoping it’ll make it easier to follow Jesus’ prior instruction about forgiving people who have sinned against you seven times in a single day.
Who wouldn’t want divine help fulfilling that daunting task?
2. Then, Jesus uses a troubling slavery metaphor for the relationship between God and humanity.
It’s impossible as a 21st century American to read this passage apart from the history of chattel slavery in the United States,
which hadn’t happened yet when Jesus spoke these words.
And still, slavery of any kind is dehumanizing and an insult to the image of God in every person,
so it’s alarming to hear Jesus talk of forcing an enslaved person to serve dinner after a long day in the field and not even thanking them.
Please and thank you are so ingrained in many people’s upbringing that I hear people thanking Siri, Alexa, and other electronic devices.
Surely Jesus isn’t making light of a posture of gratitude.
3. And then the real punch in the gut comes when Jesus says,
“So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, ‘We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!’”
What happened to being beloved children of God?
What happened to being made in God’s image?
What happened to our loving God and compassionate Jesus?
At face value, this is a horrifying passage that portrays God as an entitled, ungrateful, dehumanizing enslaver.
So, as responsible readers of the Bible who have critical thinking skills and good questions, we can ask ourselves, “What else is going on here? What is the larger picture?”
First, let’s remind ourselves of the overall image of God we see in scripture. The Bible contains dozens of writings compiled over thousands of years, so we get a wide range of images of God (including some troubling ones), but we can find some overarching themes:
1. From the very first page, the Beginning, we see a God who delights in creating and calls creation good.
2. If we turn more pages, we see God’s faithfulness to God’s people throughout the Hebrew Bible—forgiving over and over again, calling them into relationship with God.
3. As we flip through, we’ll find some parts of God’s law and messages from the prophets that are pretty strange to our modern understanding, but we also see God calling people into new ways of being in the world: forgiving debts, taking care of the vulnerable, tending to the land, setting aside time to rest and get to know God better.
So those are some themes in the whole Bible. Let’s narrow down our search and flip to the Gospel of Luke. We find some themes here, too:
1. In the prophecies around Jesus’ birth, we see that God fulfills God’s promises.
2. If we turn a couple more pages to chapter 4, we hear Jesus’ mission statement that sounds a lot like the new ways of being in the world God lays out in the Hebrew Bible.
3. On pretty much any page in Luke we can find healing stories—Jesus cares for those who are suffering and marginalized and restores them to their community.
4. We also find Jesus teaching a lot about money and power and the dangers of both. He invites us to realign with the upside-down order of the Reign of God.
5. And between the Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts, written by the same person, we see God’s work in the world spread beyond a single group of people into an invitation for all into the banquet of the Reign of God.
Now that we’ve reoriented ourselves to what God is like in the whole Bible and specifically in the Gospel of Luke, let’s get even narrower by looking again at today’s reading.
Our reading comes at the end of a series of those parables about the danger of wealth and power. Jesus calls us instead to compassion, mercy, and relationship.
Right before our reading, Jesus warns against being the reason someone sins. Focusing on
1. Jesus’ admonishment not to cause one of these “little ones” to sin
2. and looking again at the themes in Luke of mercy for vulnerable people:
Jesus is not saying “don’t wear a halter top because the men around you might sin”
but instead “don’t cause your neighbor to steal because they were hungry and you didn’t share.”
Then, Jesus tells his disciples that if someone sins against them seven times in a single day and asks forgiveness seven times, they must forgive them.
This is a lot to take in. It’s no wonder the disciples ask for some help: “Increase our faith”!
Hidden somewhere in Jesus’ harsh words and troubling metaphor is the message that the disciples are asking for the wrong thing.
It takes only the tiniest speck of faith to participate in the upside-down Reign of God and do things the world doesn’t expect.
And faith isn’t something you store up or hoard—it’s something that you show through your actions. You also don’t show off your faith or expect a parade—it’s simply something that happens when you embrace the new lifestyle of the Reign of God.
Far from the image of God as an entitled, ungrateful, dehumanizing enslaver, in this passage we can see our loving, creative God as inviting us into a new way of living that lifts up the lowly and fills the hungry with good things.
As we see in this passage, we can find some pretty troubling images of God when we don’t look at the overarching themes of the Bible and the context of the passages we’re reading.
Reading verses out of context is called “proof-texting,” and it can be used to justify a lot of horrifying things, like slavery and genocide.
A couple examples:
If we only read about God’s judgment and apocalyptic passages, we can find a fire and brimstone God who will punish anyone who doesn’t comply.
But that completely ignores God’s grace, forgiveness, and love. God loved the world God created so much that God became human in Jesus to restore our relationship with God. God knows we mess up all the time and loves us anyway.
Or, if we pick and choose verses about God’s blessings, we can construct a prosperity gospel God who wants us to “name it and claim it”—“it” being a mansion or helicopter or a billion dollars. Of course, a handsome donation helps your chances of your wishes being fulfilled.
And yes, God wants good things for you, but that probably doesn’t mean a private jet. Instead it means the loving relationships that form when you show compassion and generosity to your neighbors, when you join in the lifestyle of the upside-down Reign of God.
We don’t have to stick to extreme examples either to find unhelpful images of God. None of us has a perfectly accurate image of God, so our images of God always deserve to be examined. They grow and change as we do. Our understandings of God don’t always serve us well, so comparing them to the themes we see in the Bible and the truths we see about the world in our daily lives can help us know God better.
For example, I grew up in a loving environment with supportive adults and a faithful church community. But as a child I still absorbed an image of God as a benevolent but distant King who wanted us to be humble servants.
It took time for my image of God to be more personal and loving and less distant and severe. My image of God wasn’t serving me well. But as I grew God showed me the more personal and attentive aspects of Godself. And my image of God will continue to grow and change for the rest of my life. Hopefully yours will too.
It’s important to pay attention to our conceptions of God and whether they’re helping us grow closer to God and better love our neighbors or whether they are making us fearful or judgmental.
Reading passages of the Bible without considering the context and the themes of the Bible as a whole can lead us to some trouble images of God, like an entitled, ungrateful, dehumanizing enslaver, instead of a loving God inviting us into a new, creative, abundant way of life.
When you come across difficult passages and troubling stories in the Bible, consider that an opportunity to take a long view of God’s story and wrestle with your image of God.
God is bigger than we can imagine
and more compassionate than we can ever know.
With critical thinking,
good questions,
and a curious mind,
let’s get to know God better.