In praise of small things - a sermon for the fourteenth Sunday after Trinity

We have heard a lot about growth, well at least the hope of growth recently.

The political and economic turmoil of the last week has been driven by our new Government’s single focus on what they believe to be policies that will stimulate growth within our economy. Whether these policies are the right or wrong answer to this is perhaps too soon to say. But what is clear is that economic growth is the single reason and rationale given for these new policies.

Similarly, we live within a Church which remains, in many ways, transfixed on the idea of growth. Years of declining numbers has meant that over the last decade there has been a radical refocusing of the resources of the Church on mission and growth. For instance, in the past money was redistributed across the Church of England from richer dioceses to support the poorer ones through a financial and demographic formula.  Whereas now half of these funds are awarded through a competitive tendering for mission and growth projects.

Now there is nothing intrinsically wrong with growth in these different forms. A growing economy, structured to benefit all backgrounds and contexts, can be one of the most important motors of social and economic wellbeing we can create. Similarly, it would be churlish to think that we would not want the church to grow both in faith and numbers. Who would not want more people to know more deeply of the love God reveals for all who follow him in Jesus Christ?

The problem with a focus on growth is not growth as such. Rather the problem comes with the moving seamlessly from a desire for growth to the false equivalency that as we seek growth bigger is always better.

A bigger economy, we are told, will be better. But what if that economy systemically excludes people in certain regions or certain socio-economic backgrounds? A bigger church is better, we are led to believe.  But what is the effect of this mantra on places and contexts where “bigger” is not simply possible?

That was certainly a feeling and pressure that I felt as a Vicar in small rural parishes in Northumberland.  Northumberland is the most sparsely populated county in England. There we worked and developed the life of the church where the reality of “small” was simply a given.

I remember taking a service in one Church in a very remote corner of the county and feeling disheartened that we were worshipping in single figures. And then I flicked back through the service register, which stretched back many decades, to see that congregations had always been in single figures. There in that place, in God’s plan, small was the reality.

Our Gospel reading begins with the Apostles, to use the modern jargon, asking Jesus for a strategy for growth:

Increase our faith!

they ask. However instead of offering the theological equivalent of economic shock-and-awe, or suggesting they develop a strategic vision for spiritual and numerical growth of his followers, or encouraging them to have big hopes and big dreams of a bigger future. Jesus instead asks them to do something completely different. Jesus asks them to focus on the small. And Jesus said: 

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.

Jesus’ response to the Apostle’s desire for growth, for an increase in their faith is not to seek the false equivalency that bigger is better. Jesus, as he so often does, asks us instead to focus on the small things.

When I was Vicar of my small and faithful rural parishes I would have to remind myself that, in a wider church context where all the focus seemed to be on large urban churches, Jesus’ advise to the Church was in fact counterintuitively simple. That at its heart the church is called to be “two or three” and “salt and light”. That, returning to today’s Gospel, if we want things to increase, we should look to the small things and see the growth and transformation that only they can bring.

As we move into a new chapter in the life of this Cathedral we need to remember this wisdom. We are a small Cathedral and that physical reality is not going to change. For some this is a limitation of this place. When I arrived an acquaintance with considerable experience of Cathedral’s, suggested – only half in jest – that we should really think about rebuilding the nave! “What a difference that would make” he jested.

But this smallness is a gift. Where we can find an intimacy in our worship within the grandeur of this place. A unique combination which is hard to find in many of our bigger and brasher Cathedral siblings. Similarly, through the summer we were able, through our Rest under the Stars installation, to find a small, simple, and creative way for us to draw new people into the unique gifts of this small place.

The desire for growth that we hear of in our political and church life is one we can all recognise and understand. Whether it is for our society, our church, or for our own faith we can all understand the apostles’ prayer for things to increase and grow. 

So, as we make this prayer for ourselves we need to avoid the temptation that this can only come from seeking the things that we are told are bigger and better. Instead, we need to look to the virtues of the small in our life, and in our church, and in ourselves. We need to nurture those small things, like mustard seed, and know what unexpected growth that will bring, if we only have the patience and faith to see the deep gifts that God reveals to us in the small things God gives us.