A homily for the Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, October 5, 2025
Habakkuk 1:2-3; 2:2-4, 2 Timothy 1:6-8, 13-14, Luke 17:5-10
We’re slowly edging into autumn. It’s more than a month old, meteorologically, and a little over a week old astronomically. The trees are starting to show their fall colors (though this looks like a dull season), and not long from now the leaves of brown will come tumblin’ down (to steal some lyrics).
It’s the annual cycle of seasons here in the Northeast.
It’s the circle of life, to borrow some other lyrics.
And because all life on God’s Green Earth is interconnected, because every singular aspect of life — our lives — contributes to the whole of Creation, there’s a spiritual aspect to the very physical cycle of death and rebirth. A metaphor.
As witnessed by all the plants we refer to as deciduous or annuals.
I’ve never seen the kind of gigantic mustard plant Jesus refers to in this Gospel and others, but reliable sources say most mustard plants are annuals. They sprout, grow, bloom, shed seeds, wither and then return to the earth. The seeds they yield become the source of the next generation, and generations far into the future.
So if faith is like a mustard seed, growing tremendously to be seen by God’s creatures far and wide, then does it also wither? Can it?
Can ours?
And if our faith waxes and wanes, what can we do?
If our faith slides into crisis mode, what can we do?
We can have faith.
We can have faith that we’ll rediscover our faith, that we’ll renew our faith, that we’ll grow and regrow and intensify and altogether improve our faith.
One slogan is “Faith It Until You Make It,” a takeoff on “fake it till you make it.” That sorta works. Habits, rituals, spiritual muscle memory can re-familiarize us with how we felt, how we thought, how we acted when our faith in God and in God’s ways seemed strongest in our lives.
That “Faith It” can be like our own seeds, fallen from the withered plant and then re-planted in the soil where our mustard-y faith once sprouted.
And most of the time, through the miracle of God’s seasons — seasons of the year and seasons of our lives — those tiny seeds sprout anew. Often bigger and better.
But not always.
Sigh.
Fortunately, when God created the universe, math was in the divine mix that rules nature and nature’s laws. Math gives us numbers, and numbers help us count a lot of things.
And when mustard trees shed seeds at the end of their allotted time, they shed a lot. A whole lot of seeds. A large number of seeds. A whole lotta lot of those tiny but magnificent seeds.
So if our own seeds of renewal don’t take root in our lives, for whatever reason (and there could be any number of them), it’s possible that the faith of any or many of our sisters and brothers can sprout in our hearts.
We can see their faith in action, loving God and their neighbors as themselves. We can hear their explanations of why they do what they do.
We can share our longings for deeper meaning in our lives, and listen as they share how their relationships with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit guide their every waking hours.
Their seeds take root in us, and become our replacement mustard tree of faith.
And — ‘nuther miracle! — like a scientific farmer, we are now growing a hybrid. We are cross-pollinating. Better, stronger, more flavorful (to wring every bit out of the metaphor).
When we share our faith with each other, whether giving or receiving, whether through words or actions, we grow individually and as one.
Our personal faith will be afflicted by droughts, just as actual mustard plants are. There will be times when we thought our faith would be bigger, taller, wider, with more places for birds to nest and squirrels to chuck shells from.
Life — God — doesn’t always work that way.
But if we believe that our faith always survives — because it does, it absolutely does — then we will grow as people, as children of God, as members of the Body of Christ.
