The Lord be with you.
Reading from the Holy Gospel according to Luke.
Glory to you,
O Lord.
The apostles said to the Lord,
Increase our faith.
The Lord replied,
Were your 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.
Which of you,
With a servant plowing or minding sheep,
Would say to him when he returned from the fields,
Come and have your meal immediately?
Would he not be more likely to say,
Get my supper laid,
Make yourself tidy and wait on me while I eat and drink?
You can eat and drink yourself afterwards.
Must he be grateful to the servant for doing what he was told?
So with you,
When you have done all you have been told to do,
Say,
We are merely servants.
We have done no more than our duty.
The Gospel of the Lord.
Praise to you,
Lord Jesus Christ.
In as much as we always want to see the saints as people who lived perfect lives,
I think Jesus had his hands full sometimes with them.
Not listening,
Squabbling.
Who's the most important?
Letting earthly drives still take over and be their drivers,
Even if they are with the Christ,
The Christ who came to reset everything,
To reboot life.
We see it here again,
Where they come to Christ and say,
Increase our faith.
Could Christ?
I believe so.
Nothing is impossible.
But why would Christ increase their faith?
When the whole journey is about faith,
It's about love,
It's about trust.
Christ,
God gave us free will.
God gave us the ability to choose.
I remember growing up,
I adored Choose Your Own Adventure books.
We didn't have a massive library where I grew up.
So I had,
I think,
Read all of the books in that library,
The Choose Your Own Adventure books.
And hope and faith and the decisions that we make,
To me,
Is like that.
It is a Choose Your Own Adventure book.
Each one of our lives is a book.
It's not a linear book,
Where you go from page one to page 100,
One,
Two,
Three,
Four,
Five,
Up to 100.
You will reach page one,
Page two,
Page three,
And then it would say,
Do you turn left or do you turn right?
If you turn left,
Go to page seven.
If you turn right,
Go to page 93.
And so you almost never know what happens if you take the page seven.
You'd never read page 93.
And that is okay,
Because somewhere you reach the end of a of the book,
Or an end.
But here's the thing,
Those books did not have a predetermined ending.
Because I chose.
There were several endings.
And isn't that life?
God gives us a book.
Here,
My child,
Here is your life.
It has several options.
It has a lot of choices in there.
In the framework of this book,
Of this reality,
Choose your own adventure.
God is the writer.
God has written that story.
But God allows us to choose how we go through this life.
And in the same way with hope,
The same way with faith.
There is an abundance of faith available for us.
But Jesus says,
Don't ask me,
Your master,
To give you what you do not necessarily deserve right now.
You need to work for it.
Faith doesn't come just because I ask for it.
Faith comes because I believe it.
I choose faith.
I choose to believe in this expression of God.
I choose to believe in the green of ordinary time that I wear today.
It doesn't mean that somebody else who doesn't wear green is wrong.
It doesn't mean that somebody who expresses their religious views in a completely different way to me is wrong.
But that's not my book.
That's not part of my adventure.
That's another book in the library.
An equal book,
Not mine.
So what does that mean?
What do we do with Choose Your Own Adventure?
I think it is important that we recognize how beautiful it is that God gave us this option.
God gave us the ability to choose.
We are not merely reading from a script.
We are not actors in a play with a director who says,
You have to do this.
No.
This is an improv stage.
We're going to make fools out of ourselves many times.
That's part of the game.
That is part of living.
That is part of getting to grow into God.
Life is challenging.
And I don't know if it's just me and my friends who are noticing that it's getting more and more challenging.
What do we do?
Think this is a test.
It's one of the tests that we as a race,
A human race,
Are faced with.
What do I do with all of this pressure?
Do I turn outwards?
Do I choose?
Page 37,
The page that says you get caught up in the maelstrom of life.
You start fighting just for survival.
And every moment is a moment of wakefulness.
Every moment is a moment that you are in fight and flight mode.
Every moment you are productive and you are a good,
Upstanding community member.
Or do you choose page 34?
The blank page,
The page where you sit,
You breathe,
You be.
And from in that silence,
You are full of God's mercy,
God's love,
God's grace.
And then when you turn and you look at this world of catastrophe,
You see it with the eyes of Christ.
And you see Christ throughout this world.
You treat this whole world with compassion.
It's just.
.
.
It just reignites.
It's justgreSQL.
It just reignites.
