Two weeks ago, I preached a sermon in which I spent a fair bit of time talking about all the connections between the gospel reading for that morning and the preceding two chapters. This is not that sermon. Luke gathered a fair number of sayings and brief scenes which he wanted to use that didn’t belong to any larger collection of stories and sayings; he dealt with them by inserting them between the main sections of his narrative. Luke 17:1-10 is one such insertion, comprised of four brief scenes of Jesus teaching his disciples; the compilers of the lectionary, for whatever reason, have given us two of the four.
I thought at first about just doing one of those two. It’s easy, if a biblical text seems to lack unity and coherence, to chop it up like a butcher into chunks of disconnected meat. Several major commentators on Matthew, for instance, take this approach to the Sermon on the Mount. One of the things Regent taught me was to resist that easy assumption and look for connections and structure; so I decided to see if I could find a common thread between the two parts of our passage this morning. Spoiler alert: I think I found one, as you’ll see in a little bit.