Increase our Faith, Oh Lord!

In tonight's gospel, the disciples cry out to Jesus, "Increase our faith!" Who among us would not ask the same of Jesus? The disciples ask this of Jesus immediately after he commands them to forgive those sinners who ask for forgiveness no matter how often they repeat their sin.

In asking Jesus to increase their faith following a command to be forgiving, the disciples reveal a simple insight about humanity and godliness. We know that the kingdom of God that we pray will come whenever we recite the Lord's Prayer is a reign of peace, love, and mercy; of forgiveness and reconciliation; of a transformed world that is utterly and profoundly unlike the world we now live in. Yet we also know that we have a hard time accepting that such a transformed world could ever be possible. So we cry out with the disciples, "Increase our faith, Lord!"

I suspect each of us has had our faith challenged and tested in the last month. After watching more television than I could stand on the morning of September 11, I decided that I should just walk around campus to see if I could offer anything to anyone who might be distressed by the horror. Or maybe by walking around I was trying to deal with my own anxiety. In any case, as I walked down the front steps of Procter House I noticed that a young woman who had just walked by the house stopped and turned back toward me. She was crying and shaken and she spoke to me about her fears for her friends who worked in New York near the World Trade Center. She asked if I would pray with her, so I did, holding hands with her there on the sidewalk. We had no sooner finished praying than she said, "I need to do something." And I said, "You just did quite a lot." She answered, "I need to do something concrete, something more!"

I knew what she meant. It didn't seem that prayer was enough to me either. We both wanted to go give blood or organize a vigil or call someone to offer help. It's not as though she, or I for that matter, felt that the prayers we had just uttered were trivial or unimportant. It was just that somehow prayer was not enough. Prayer was necessary but not sufficient. It was a natural impulse that we both shared. Prayer was a good thing, but more was somehow needed in the enormity of the events of the previous few hours.

As I walked through campus that noontime, I had three more exchanges with students, faculty, and staff that were exactly the same as the one I just described. Yes, yes, we'll pray, but isn't there something more we can do?

As I thought about this all day and into the night it came to me that the answer that Jesus would surely give to us who were so far from the scene of the tragedies in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania would be, "No, my friend, there is nothing you can do now that is more important than to pray."

Increase our faith, Lord!

I struggled all night with the question, what is prayer, anyway? What good is it? What's the use of praying? Will praying bring six thousand people back to life or take away the pain of thousands of fatherless and motherless children? The problem of course, is that giving blood or organizing a vigil wouldn't either.

Finally, it came to me that the kinds of prayers I was saying - or, more precisely, screaming in my heart - could best be summarized this way, "Listen, Lord, your servant speaks." It further came to me that I had it wrong; I had it backwards. The prayer that I needed to be praying instead of, "Listen, Lord, your servant speaks," was, "Speak, Lord, your servant listens."

The fundamental problem I was wrestling with - and I don't think I'm alone in this - was whether my prayer was intended to change God or whether it was intended to change me. The more I tried to change God, the more frustrated I got, and the only measure of peace I've been able to garner has come from my feeble attempts to let my prayer change me - to let God change me. It boils down to a crisis of faith: Do I have enough faith to move mountains and do I have enough faith to accept that God is working for the good of us all even in the midst of senseless and horrible tragedy?

Theologians argue about this point. There are some, who call themselves process theologians, who say that God's act of creation is a work in progress and that we, through our prayer, are active participants in this process of change and transformation. So prayer can be a kind of lever that moves things around as long as our faith is sufficient. The biblical scholar Walter Wink says, "...history belongs to the intercessors, who believe the future into being." And there seems to be a scriptural warrant for this view in tonight's saying of Jesus, "If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, 'Be uprooted and planted in the sea,' and it would obey you." So it might then be proper for us to pray, "Listen, Lord, your servant speaks."

Others view the evil acts of sinners and the capriciousness of nature as having been set in motion by God in the single moment of creation and no amount of prayer will change those evil trajectories. Instead, it is for us to place ourselves humbly before God and recall that we are nothing without God and that, as the apostle Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, all of the pain and suffering of this life are as nothing compared with the peace and joy in God's eternal presence that await us after this life. This view would require us to pray, "Speak, Lord, your servant listens."

We would like to know which view is the correct one, wouldn't we? But just as the young woman in front of Procter House wished not only to pray but also to do something else because she knew both impulses were right and good, it is probably the case that God wishes for us to do both - to pray and to act in behalf of others. But praying requires more faith than acting does. We wonder whether we are engaging in a kind of mental exercise of hitting golf balls into the dark or does prayer actually have an effect?

For answers to this question we can turn to the gospels in which Jesus not only tells us to pray, he also shows us how in the words of what we call the Lord's Prayer. Elsewhere he tells us to knock and the door shall be opened to us. And he tells us that a sinner whose son asks him for bread or fish will not give him a rock or a snake; so how much more will God answer us when we pray.

We can also find the answer in our own experience of prayer, for it is true that prayer not so much changes God as it changes us. By entering into silence before God and bringing before God all our joys and all our anguish, we are changed by the awareness that God is closer to us than we thought, that God is very near and very present. And knowing that - even just for a fleeting moment - changes everything.

So we cry out with the disciples, over and over, "Lord, increase our faith!"

Amen.