Faith like a Mustard Seed

June 13, 2021

Following is the prepared text from Bishop Olmsted’s homily for the 11th Sunday in Ordinary Time and the Groundbreaking of a new Rectory at St. Bernard of Clairvaux parish.

“Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter into the Kingdom of heaven.” – Mt 5:20

Righteousness means right relationships – good rapport with your wife, your neighbor, your parents, your children, and God… Right relationships take work, daily efforts of honesty and patience, forgiveness and perseverance – doing little things with love from morning until night.

“The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed.” – Mark 4:31 These words of Jesus remind us that right relationships like solid marriages and healthy parishes, and friendship with Jesus are built on what seems to the world too small to matter, unimportant and unworthy of notice. Not true.

In particular, right relationships require attentiveness to the truth. I recall receiving this advice for handling complaints, “Lie a little but not too much.” It sounds clever and funny; but not so. “Say yes when you mean yes and say no when you mean no. Anything else is from the evil one.” “Little lies” can quickly lead to dishonesty, to “not being true in good times and in bad.” We can forget the need we all have of saying even in small things, “I was wrong, I am sorry. Please forgive me.” Virtue and integrity are not built through big battles but through thousands of little efforts to be true to one another, whether noticed or not. Jesus says, “This is how it is with the Kingdom of God; it is as if a man were to scatter seed on the land and would sleep and rise night and day and through it all the seed would sprout and grow, he knows not how.” -Mk 4:30 The mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds – we can barely see it. And right relationships, including with God, are like that. Servant of God Dorothy Day wrote, “Most of our life is unimportant, filled with trivial things from morning till night. But when it is transformed by love it is of interest even to the angels.”

Today, St. Bernard’s Parish breaks ground to build a rectory – not something as important as building a church, but still a day for which we have waited a long time. It is not built to impress but to serve Jesus and His Kingdom, to provide a home where the priests can be nearer to those Jesus calls them to serve. It is built, after the church and the offices and parish hall, and built for the sake of facilitating the priests in their mission to give a Shepherd’s care to the faithful, day after day. The building of a rectory can remind us all to keep building right relationships in the ordinary events of life. The Lord tells us how (1 Cor 13:4f): “Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, not pompous. It is not inflated. It is not rude. It does not seek its own interests…” That is what love looks like. That is how right relationships are built.

In today’s Second Reading (2 Cor 5:6-10), the Lord speaks of two other things that are pivotal for building right relationships: faith and courage. St. Paul writes, “…we walk by faith, not by sight. Yet we are courageous.”

Here on earth, we have no lasting home; we are on pilgrimage to the Father’s House, trusting in God at all times and keeping our hearts set on our destiny: “leaving the body and going home to the Lord.” (2 Cor 6:8) Any earthly home or rectory is temporary. Our real home is with the Lord. So, build up treasures in heaven. Do not live “by sight”, that is, not by appearances. Live by faith in the Lord.

“Yet we are courageous,” St. Paul insists. It takes courage to keep doing little things with patience anc love. Jessica Powers wrote, “The door to God, the door to any grace, is very little, very ordinary… all truth, all love are by humiliation guarded…”  So, where does our courage come from? It comes from the Lord, who told the disciples at the Last Supper (Jn 16:33), “In the world you will have trouble, but take courage, I have conquered the world.” He conquers our fears when we put them in His hands.

The Book of Revelation says (Rev 12:11f), “They conquered [the accuser] by the Blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; love for life did not deter them from death.”   Our courage comes not from ourselves but from the Spirit and the Blood of the Lamb; that is, especially through the Sacraments of Confirmation and the Eucharist. With the help of the Holy Spirit, and the virtues of faith and courage, our relationships can be upright, even if it feels like our faith is weak. For Jesus says to us (Mt 17:20), “…if your faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, “Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”