Some years ago, when I first encountered the Episcopal Church and its Book of Common Prayer, I also discovered a prayer called A General Thanksgiving. This isn’t The General Thanksgiving we recite at Morning Prayer. It’s A General Thanksgiving, located at the end of the prayer book.
I was in my mid-20s at the time and would often thumb through the prayers and thanksgivings in the prayer book before I went to sleep at night. There was a line in A General Thanksgiving that stirred something deep within my heart. In this prayer of thanks, we offer gratitude to God for many things: “for the splendor of the whole creation, for the beauty of this world, for the wonder of life, and for the mystery of love,” among others. And then, we thank God “for those disappointments and failures that lead us to acknowledge our dependence on [God] alone.”
That line was unspeakably beautiful to me. In my nightly prayers, I kept returning to this curious expression of thanks. The possibility of thanking God for disappointments and failures was a seismic shift in my own understanding of the nature of human beings. In my mid-20s, I was moving away from a religious understanding that often seemed to emphasize what was wrong with humanity before God. It could, at times, suggest an easy connection between our misfortune and God’s wrath. But in A General Thanksgiving, I sensed a more optimistic and hopeful perspective on humanity’s relationship with God. There was a mystery of goodness hiding beneath the experience of adversity.
Rather than a dour appraisal of disappointments and failures, this thanksgiving pressed for more meaning. Disappointments and failures, in the providence of God, are not the end of the story, and they are more than an indication of God’s condemnation of human sinfulness, as we often find in the Bible. In that unsettling theology, God’s people fall prey to their enemies because they have sinned—or at least that was the flawed understanding of God’s people as they wrestled with their own disappointments and failures.
This still persists among us today. Hurricane Katrina was God’s vengeance on a sinful city. My cancer is the result of my lack of faith. The Church’s decline is the punishment of God on a rejection of orthodoxy. We do not have to search very hard to find this theology very much alive.
When things aren’t going our way, it’s all too easy to blame God or ourselves. When something is wrong, then we must have done something wrong. Rather than viewing humanity as intrinsically good, even if it’s prone to sin, or creation as ordered towards flourishing even if it’s marred by abuse, we view everything as spiraling downwards into despair. Disappointments and failures, inadequacies and challenges are simply what they are and quite possibly the effects of God’s vengeance upon us. If so, then how could they ever be thankful for opportunities to recognize our dependence on God alone?
When Jesus’s apostles ask him to increase their faith, they are overwhelmed by their disappointments and failures. The ministry field has not been perfect bliss, and they don’t believe that they have enough faith to accomplish what they’ve been asked to do. It’s a bit difficult to determine this from today’s Gospel passage. With no context, the first thing we hear is a desperate request from the apostles. But immediately before their request, Jesus has told them that if any of them should cause another to sin, it would be better for a millstone to be hung around their necks and that they be cast into the sea. And if someone sins against them, even as much as seven times a day, and then repents seven times, they should forgive that person. Before these warnings, our Lord has made it abundantly clear that the cost of discipleship will be very steep. It all seems like a hopeless, impossible task.
No wonder the apostles ask for an increase of faith. They are feeling wholly inadequate and unfit for discipleship. Quite simply, something is missing in their lives. Something is wrong. Their feelings of unworthiness pitted against God’s demands must seem like a disappointment or failure on their part. And for them, that seems to be the end of the story.
What’s needed is a divine intervention. God must add something to what they perceive they don’t have. They don’t have enough, and without that increase of faith they won’t have enough to flourish as apostles. And now, the disappointments and failures of the apostles are prompting them to rely on God alone. So far, so good.
But I think there’s more. The apostles want Jesus to be at their beck and call. We’re in a crisis, they say. We’re ill-equipped for the task. So, now, Jesus, give us more faith. Only chapters before in Luke’s Gospel, when confronted with a ravenous crowd of 5,000 people, the disciples throw up their hands and ask Jesus to fix the situation. Jesus volleys their request back to them. You give them something to eat, he says.
And yet, a moment of spiritual insecurity for the apostles must require more than relying on God simply so that God will fix the problem. As Jesus says, “If you had 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.” And the apostles’ frustration can’t be neatly ascribed to a lack of faith. The answer is more complicated. The apostles already have what they need to do what God is asking them to do, Jesus seems to say. They just can’t see it.
No special reward is due because of their service. They don’t need some extraordinary booster shot of faith, nor do they need a divine intervention. Look around, Jesus urges them. Look within your hearts. See that God has already given you enough. God is always supplying you with sufficient grace to follow me.
In asking Jesus for more faith, the apostles hint that they don’t believe they have enough. It should remind us that a scarcity mindset has infected Jesus’s followers even before his resurrection from the dead. The danger, though, with such a mindset is that our perceived inadequacy becomes the occasion for us to make demands on God. If God would only do that for us, we could be better disciples. And before too long, we have become the master, and God has become our slave. Our relationship with God is now one of needy manipulation. If our success in life is tied to the strength of our faith, then our misfortune is tied to our lack of faith. Every illness becomes God’s punishment. Every challenge becomes some cruel test from God to see if we have the mettle to make it through.
But this is all wrong. When our disappointments and failures are occasions for thanksgiving, then they are gifts, not punishments, because in them, we learn to be fully human. We learn that God has called us not to superhuman strength or to be God, but rather to grow more into the likeness of God, to be exactly who God is calling us to be by his grace, which is fully human and fully alive. And in this mindset of abundance, we can recognize that God is always supporting us lavishly with grace. Our disappointments and failures simply invite us to see the magnanimity of God’s provision.
Perhaps the modern Church has received a profound gift in the humility of our present moment. Plenty of people are adept at judging the decline of the Church as a just comeuppance for watered-down morals and glaring heterodoxy, or alternatively, for ruthless exclusiveness and disgusting hypocrisy. But maybe this present moment of disappointments and failures, of emptier pews and leaner budgets, is a moment to rely solely on God. We turn to God not to fix our problems but for God to open our eyes to the abundance that is already before us. In this, we begin to see that in and of ourselves, we have no ability to control our moment of crisis. If we refuse to accept our present condition as God’s wrathful condemnation, then we must return to the small things.
Faith the size of a mustard seed is enough to work wonders. Faith is not something to be added to what we lack but a gift to be accepted because it has already been given by God. Only in our humility can we recognize that everything we need for Gospel ministry is right before our eyes. In relinquishing our desire for control, superhuman status, and eternal rewards, we as God’s servants bow humbly before our Master, who calls us not slaves but friends. And whatever our disappointments and failures may be, that is surely cause for thanksgiving.
Sermon by Father Kyle
The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
October 5, 2025