Sermon for the 5th of October - Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity

“Increase our faith!” the apostles ask.  A bold request, isn’t it? Increase our faith. But perhaps the deeper question is this: what is faith, really?

You may have had this experience: when someone learns you go to church, they smile and say, “Oh, I admire that. That’s lovely. I wish I had faith. It must bring such comfort.”

I don’t doubt their sincerity. Often it’s kindly meant. But sometimes, beneath the compliment, there seems to be a faintly patronising undertone: faith is for those who need comfort. Faith is a kind of spiritual crutch.

And where does that idea come from? We could trace it back to what I’d call another “trinity”: Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud. Feuerbach saw religion as a projection of human wishes. Marx famously called it the “opium of the people.” Freud described it as a kind of collective neurosis — a wish-fulfilment in the face of chaos. Small wonder, then, that many today say: “I’d like to believe, but…”

But there are other ways of looking. Rowan Williams suggests a “hermeneutic of contemplation” rather than suspicion — not reducing faith to psychology or economics, but taking it seriously in all its richness.

And perhaps we are in fact wired for faith. From prehistoric cave rituals to today’s worship in churches, people have always sought more than what can be measured or experimented on. Even when organised religion is rejected, there is still a longing for spirituality, for transcendence.

Let me share two examples. A parent here recently told me that she started coming to church only because her daughter insisted — for two years! Eventually she gave in, and now it has become part of their family’s life.

Or the journalist Giles Coren, who wrote earlier this year about “giving up atheism for Lent.” At Westminster School, he regularly went to chapel but said that Christianity simply “didn’t come up” in later life. Stating that “atheism is the assumed default position of every modern urban adult. Yet it turned that he found that peoples’ hearts and souls were far emptier than the churches. He grew up without faith, but when his son asked to go to church, they walked into the local one — and kept on going. He describes himself now as “not not believing.” It takes a lot of courage for someone in the secular and cynical world of journalism to speak with such refreshing humility and openness about his journey of life and faith.

What’s striking in both cases is this: faith didn’t begin as a set of propositions. It began as a step — a practice. It began with doing faith.

And that takes us back to the disciples’ plea: “Increase our faith!” You’d expect Jesus to applaud such a holy request. But instead he replies, almost impatiently: “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.”

What’s he saying? That faith is not about volume or quantity. Not about collecting a bigger dose. Faith is not primarily something you have — it’s something you do.

Think of the people Jesus praises for their faith: the woman who touches his cloak, the friends who lower a man through a roof, the blind beggar who cries out for mercy. None of them sign a doctrinal statement. What Jesus admires is their orientation toward him, their willingness to act, to trust, to risk.

So — faith is not fireworks. It’s not magic tricks or instant answers. Faith is the mustard seed: small, ordinary, yet full of life when planted. It’s leaning into God’s goodness, justice, mercy, even when uncertain.

And here’s the paradox: if you wait until you feel you have more faith, you may never begin. But if you take the step, however faltering, faith grows in the very doing of it.

Faith exercised becomes stronger. Faith ignored becomes weak. And Jesus knows this. That’s why he answers as he does. Not to dismiss the disciples’ longing, but to teach them the way faith truly grows.

So perhaps the prayer is not “Lord, increase our faith,” but:

“Lord, help us to do faith. Help us to live faith. And in the doing, may faith increase.”