Out of Your "Mine," Twentieth Sunday After Pentecost, October 6, 2013, Luke 17.5-10

            Well might the disciples ask for more faith.  Jesus has just told them that the worst thing they can do is sin against a brother (v.1-2), then added that it is even more important to keep their guard up against the temptation not to forgive a brother who sins against them, even if that sin reaches a pitch of seven-fold perfection (v.3-4).

            Jesus assures them that faith isn't the problem: A tiny speck of the stuff (which the Greek grammar here assures us that we all possess) will render both absurdity and impossibility irrelevant (v.6). The real trouble, Jesus insists, is the unexamined attitude of ownership.

            Screwtape, C. S. Lewis' virtuoso tempter, instructs the hapless rookie Wormwood to encourage in the human heart a sense of possession, particularly of time. "You have here a delicate task," Screwtape admits. "The assumption you want him to go on making is so absurd that, if once questioned, even we cannot find a shred of argument in its defense. The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift."

            Then this Top Gun Tempter introduces a slavery metaphor: "He is also, in theory, committed to a total service of the Enemy; and if the Enemy appeared to him in bodily form and demanded that total service for even one day, he would not refuse. He would be greatly relieved if that one day involved nothing harder than listening to the conversation of a foolish woman." Or forgiving a bumbling fellow-believer.

            Clearly Lewis' devil has read his Bible. Jesus uses the image of a slave to point out that exact absurdity: Nothing we have belongs to us, so nothing we do puts God in our debt. "And all the time," chuckles Screwtape, "the joke is that the word 'Mine' in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything. In the long run either (Satan) or (God) will say 'Mine' of each things that exists, and specially of each man."

            So, says our Teacher, we must indeed keep careful accounts, tote up the balance sheet at the close of each day. But the credits and debits we enter must track, not what belongs to us, but to whom we have chosen to belong.

Very Good, Sir!

Doug