“Increase Our Faith”

Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost

October 5, 2025

2 Timothy 1:1-14

Luke 17:1-10

Children’s Message:

‘Ride’ a broom like a horse, rounding up the kids.

Who loves playing pretend? I just rode a horse in church! But this broom could be a LOT of things. What kinds of things can you pretend it is?

Pretending is saying that something is real when it actually isn’t. Like standing on your deck and pretending it’s a ship. Or pretending the mud and berries your just mixed up is a fancy soup you’re going to serve a customer. But you don’t want to eat it, do you? Because it’s not soup. And I can’t just believe hard enough that this broom is a horse and then actually ride it to visit my mom in Kansas. (Not to mention, even riding a real horse would make that a very long and uncomfortable trip.)

Today, we heard the disciples ask Jesus to increase their faith. How do you think faith might be different from pretending?

Pretending is saying something is real when it’s not. Faith means trusting something is real when you can’t see it. It’s like believing the sun is still in the sky, even when the clouds are dark and rainy—or at night, when the sun is lighting up the other side of the earth. If you can’t see the sun, does that mean it doesn’t exist? No. Instead, we have faith that it will greet us again tomorrow morning.

Let’s pray. Dear God, thank you for being present even when we can’t see you. Help us trust in you, even when it’s hard to do. Amen.

Message:

“Increase our faith,” they begged Jesus. Increase our faith. Jesus’ teachings have become harder and harder for the disciples to accept. And Jesus has already warned them about his upcoming death and resurrection as they turn their mission toward Jerusalem. Toward conflict. Toward death. Nobody’s ready. Nobody understands. And everyone is a bit on edge. It doesn’t take much for us to imagine, does it?

Increase our faith. I wonder, when we make this plea today, what it is we might be asking for. Is it a supernatural ability to manipulate God?—if I have enough faith, my prayers will be answered above someone else’s. Is it that we want more intellectual bandwidth?—if I have enough faith, I can better understand what I’m seeing and experiencing. Is it that we want an antidote to anxiety?—If I have enough faith, I’ll have the courage and certainty of conviction to act.

But faith isn’t something you have. It’s something you do.

Barbara Brown Taylor said, “all we lack is the willingness to imagine that we already have everything we need.” Imagine. Imagine that God has given us everything we need, and that now it’s time to do something with it. While pretending isn’t the same thing as faith, imagination is inextricably linked to faith. Because faith requires imagination. And trust. And memory.

Throughout the Bible, the people of God are called to remember—remember when God brought their ancestors out of Egypt. Remember when God was with them on the journey. Trust that God is with them now. And imagine where God can be leading them—leading us.

All of that is part of faith. All of it is required when it feels like there is no good way forward. And I know that many of us are struggling to find a way forward these days. I know this from what I hear. And I know this from what I see. I see lower attendance in worship lately. And VERY preliminary numbers show that our income was over $11,000 short last month.

These are symptoms of despair. Of fear. But this isn’t about shaming anyone into giving or showing up. This is about the hope we need in a time of darkness. Derek Penwell posted an article that talks about the work of faith and the message of Jesus. He said, “the tools Jesus left us don’t sound impressive. But these are crowbars with the leverage to move the world: advocacy, solidarity, and imagination…Advocacy is work gloves and raw throats…Solidarity means standing where it hurts…[it] isn’t just ‘thoughts and prayers.’ It’s showing up at food banks, in courtrooms, and legislative chambers…it’s companionship from beside…And without imagination, we end up stuck in Caesar’s script. Empire always tells the same story: there isn’t enough, so the powerful are ‘forced’ (very much against their will) to hoard while the rest scramble for scraps.

“But, see, Jesus told a different story: loaves and fish that feed multitudes, a widow’s two coins outweighing fortunes, mustard seeds that change the landscape. The early church understood the whole ‘they had all things in common’ thing not as a fairy tale but as a roadmap. And imagination is daring to trust that story more than Caesar's. It means experimenting with communities that share abundance and invest in mutual aid, churches that budget for people over prestige, and faithful people who refuse to believe when the people in charge insist that ‘there’s not enough to go around.’”

Penwell ends by saying that when we “advocate because lies are loud…[when we] practice solidarity because pain is heavy…and [when we] cultivate imagination because despair is so persuasive…the church becomes a sign that another reign is already breaking in—a reign where abundance is real, justice is possible, and empire never gets the last amen.”

You see, faith isn’t something you have. It’s something you do.

And what we do is stand together. Because despair too easily convinces us that we are alone. We turn in on ourselves. We isolate and insulate. We find it harder to connect, to trust, to believe. We stop showing up for one another. We stop giving of ourselves to the work of hope. And when that happens, evil wins.

The disciples begged Jesus, “Increase our faith.” What I think they meant was, “Make our faith louder. Make our faith bolder. Make our faith brighter. So that those around us will know and believe that they don’t walk this road of chaos alone.”

Lord, we pray for a loud, bold, bright faith. We pray for the courage to proclaim it and act on it. We pray that when this world makes us weary, we know that our Church is a community built for support—that when we show up and speak up and rise up, we are so much stronger together.

Pastor Tobi White

Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church

Lincoln, NE