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Sermon for the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost – October 5, 2025
Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4, 2 Timothy 1:1-14, Luke 17:1-10
Dear friends, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
We have a golden thread running through our scripture readings for this morning, and that golden thread is faith.
In our first reading we hear from the prophet Habakkuk. This is the only reading we get from Habakkuk in the entire three-year lectionary cycle. But while he only makes a triannual appearance before the church, the problems he describes are perennial. They are always with us. Habakkuk laments the violence that is all around him. He points to destruction and strife and contention he sees everywhere. He complains that the law has become slack, and so justice never prevails. It is hard to tell the difference between these verses and the news we watch or hear or scroll through every day, right?
Habakkuk cries out, “How long, Lord?” He cries out with brutal honesty: “How long shall I cry out for help, and you will not listen?” The Lord then replies with a promise. The Lord says to him, “There is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay. Look at the proud! Their spirit is not right in them, but the righteous live by their faith.”
In our epistle reading we hear the Apostle Paul writing a letter of encouragement to his young protégé, Timothy. It is hard to know exactly what is troubling Timothy, but we can infer some things based on what Paul writes. It is pretty clear that Timothy is upset about Paul’s imprisonment. He is probably worried about his beloved father in the faith. He doesn’t have the same access to his mentor. He is now responsible for the Christians in Ephesus and is probably feeling overwhelmed, especially as persecutions are starting to ramp up.
And in order to comfort and encourage Timothy, Paul points him to faith. He encourages Timothy to hold on to the faith that first lived in his grandmother and his mother, and now lives in him. He encourages Timothy to rekindle this gift of God that is within him, to blow on that coal that has started to cool. He reminds Timothy of what faith really is, which is relying on the power of God, especially in times of suffering and struggle. Paul points him to the promise, the promise that Christ has ultimately abolished death and brought life and immortality to light, and so he has nothing to fear. Paul describes faith beautifully when he says to Timothy, “I know the one in whom I have put my trust, and I am sure that he is able to guard until that day what I have entrusted to him.” Do you hear how many times Paul uses variations of the word “trust” here? That’s what faith is. It is not a generic optimism. It is not self-confidence, confidence in your own power. Christian faith means putting your trust in Jesus. It means putting your trust in the power and the promises of God.
In our gospel reading, when Jesus tells his disciples they will need to forgive others over and over again, they ask Jesus to increase their faith. It’s funny, actually. If you read Luke’s gospel before this, Jesus tells the disciples they will cast out demons and heal people of their diseases, and the disciples are like, “Really? Cool! Let’s do it!” And they do! But when Jesus calls them to forgive those who sin against them, that’s what they think is impossible! And so they say to him, “Increase our faith!”
But Jesus says it is not impossible. Not with faith. And you don’t even need a lot of faith to do it, Jesus says. “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.” This is an obviously absurd image meant to illustrate that faith can do things that seem impossible. Faith is not magic! This is not the Force we’re talking about. This is not Yoda teaching Luke Skywalker to use his mind powers to lift his X-Wing out of the swamp. This is obviously an illustration. But what the illustration points to is absolutely true – even a little faith can accomplish the seemingly impossible things our Lord Jesus calls us to do.
That’s because faith is not trusting in ourselves. It is not trusting in our own power or strength or abilities. Christian faith means putting our trust in Jesus. It is not so much a matter of how much faith we have, but where we put it! When we put our trust in Jesus, his power is at work in us to accomplish things that we could never accomplish on our own.
It makes sense that forgiveness would be the thing that the disciples would balk at. Forgiveness is, in many situations, the most difficult thing we are called to do as Christians. I hear from people all the time who have spent years struggling to forgive. They know they should. They want to, but it is so hard. I know this struggle myself. There are people I think I’ve finally forgiven, letting the past go, and then something stirs up those old resentments again and I’m back at square one. So this isn’t easy. It is completely understandable for the disciples to ask Jesus for help with it. It isn’t easy, but with Christ’s power at work in us, it is not impossible.
A few weeks ago, a young political activist named Charlie Kirk was shot and killed during a live debate on a college campus in Utah. His wife Erika and their young children witnessed it first-hand. Charlie might not have been your cup of tea, but I’m going to ask you to take off your ideological lenses for a minute. You can put them back on later, if you must. Take off your ideological lenses and put on your human lenses. Better yet, put on your Christian lenses. Because what happened a few days after this gruesome murder in broad daylight was nothing short of a miracle. At Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, which was held at a football stadium in Arizona, his wife Erika took the stage. As she memorialized her husband, at one point she took a deep breath and said, “My husband Charlie, he wanted to save young men just like the one who took his life.” She paused as the audience offered some subdued applause. She took a few more deep breaths before continuing. “That young man,” she said, “That young man.” She paused again, and then said, “On the cross our Savior said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do….That man, that young man, I forgive him. I forgive him because that’s what Christ did.”
Just days after this wife witnessed her husband’s murder, she publicly forgave the assassin, and it is estimated that more than 20 million people around the world heard her do it. There were lots of things said on that stage, but that was the headline that came out of it. For a grieving young widow to be able to say those words on a stage in front of millions of people seems impossible, but it happened! And it happened, as Erika herself said, because of Christ. It was his power, not hers.
This forgiveness does not mean that there will be no consequences. Jesus himself talks about the need for rebukes and for repentance. He even discusses millstones for the worst of unrepentant offenders. St. Paul teaches us in scripture that worldly authorities have the God-given responsibility to restrain evil by holding people accountable for their actions, and that they do not bear the sword in vain.
To forgive is something different. To forgive means to let go of the anger and the hatred that only poisons you. To forgive means to seek reconciliation whenever possible, but to pray that your enemy might be reconciled to God, even if they can’t be reconciled to you. To forgive means to hand the person who hurt you over to the mercy of Jesus, when what you really want is for them to be condemned to hell. To forgive is to respond to the worst in others with love, because that’s exactly what Jesus has done for you.
This is not easy. It isn’t easy for me, and I know it isn’t easy for you. Sometimes forgiveness takes years. Sometimes it is a life-long struggle. Sometimes we need to do it again even after we already did it. Forgiveness might not come immediately – but never let it be said that it is impossible. Faith makes it possible, because faith means relying on Christ’s power and not our own. It isn’t a matter of how much faith we have, but where we put it. And when we put our trust in the Lord Jesus, he makes the impossible possible.
Violence and strife continue to dominate the news cycle. Strife and contention continue to plague our lives. But with Habakkuk we wait on the Lord, trusting in his promise, because the righteous live by faith.
We continue to worry about those who are dear to us, as Timothy did. Like him, we experience tragic separations. Like him, we experience anxieties and discouragement. Like him, our faith needs to be rekindled from time to time. And this happens as we listen to God’s Word and are reminded of the promise and the power of the One in whom we place our trust.
We are asked by our Lord Jesus to do things that seem impossible, and so we ask for more faith. We worry that we aren’t up to it. And we aren’t. But Jesus is. He has already forgiven you. He has seen the worst in you, even the worst that is still there, and he has responded to it with his self-giving love and his saving grace. He died and rose to forgive your sin and make you his own forever. To trust in this good news, to have faith in this Savior, even just a little, is all he needs to begin to go to work in us, accomplishing all that we could never do on our own.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev. Jeffrey R. Spencer
Oak Harbor Lutheran Church