Roots of Sin Uprooted / Luke 17:1-10 / Pr. Ted A. Giese / Sunday October 5th 2025 / Season of Pentecost / Mount Olive Lutheran Church

Mount Olive Lutheran Church / Pr. Ted A. Giese / Sun Oct 5th 2025: Season of Pentecost / Luke 17:1-10 “Roots of Sin Uprooted”

And [Jesus] said to His disciples, “Temptations to sin are sure to come, but woe to the one through whom they come! It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were cast into the sea than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin. Pay attention to yourselves! If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him, and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, saying, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him.”

The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!” And the Lord said, “If you had faith like a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.

“Will any one of you who has a servant ploughing or keeping sheep say to him when he has come in from the field, ‘Come at once and recline at table’? Will he not rather say to him, ‘Prepare supper for me, and dress properly, and serve me while I eat and drink, and afterward you will eat and drink’? Does he thank the servant because he did what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.’”

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in Your sight O Lord. Amen.

Grace peace and mercy to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Good Christian Friends our Gospel starts with a teaching about temptation into sin. Jesus makes it clear that there is a difference between falling into sin and tempting someone to fall into sin. Now you may inadvertently or accidently tempt someone with sin unknowingly like casually offering a drink to someone you are only just starting to get to know in a social setting without realising or understanding that they are struggling with alcohol in their life. But it’s another thing altogether to knowingly do it with the hope of causing them to fall into sin, or to ruin them for another purpose.

For example you know that his wife has publicly said that she would leave him if he started drinking again and you offer him the drink in the hopes that he will start drinking again because you find his wife attractive and you want her, and you desire to have her and you want to have an easier time enticing her away from him into adultery. In such a case this would be, for starters, your breaking of the Tenth Commandment: You shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbour. You remember what this mean? We should fear and love God so that we do not entice or force away our neighbour’s wife, workers, or animals, or turn them against him, but urge them to stay and do their duty.[1] Yes in such a case you are willing to destroy his reputation to get what you want and so you likewise break the spirit of the Eighth Commandment by setting him up in this way to publicly hurt his reputation in the eyes of others so that’ll be easier to break the Seventh Commandment and steal his wife away from him. In fact people may even wrongly see your theft as you rescuing her from your neighbour and this dishonest public sham may be praised even while it hides the roots of your sinful motives. And so offering that drink in the hopes that it will lead to invading the purity of your neighbour’s marriage bed to wet your own desires certainly breaks the Sixth Commandment: You shall not commit adultery[2] even if the whole World is on your side as you pour that drink. And if your neighbour then becomes aware of your plot after he is no longer in his cups and his blood boils and his temper is enraged and he finds you and assaults you and perhaps even murders you for your part in the destruction of his marriage and his life he will not be justified in taking matters into his own hands[3] even if the whole World is on his side and you will have purposely caused his ruin, of course you could also attempt all this without pouring the drink just by spreading rumours and gossip to fuel his fall into disrepute in the hopes of getting what you want; either way it would be better for you if a millstone were hung around your neck and you were cast into the sea than that you should cause your neighbour, one of these little ones of the Lord, perhaps even a fellow Christian, to sin. And so dear ones Jesus says “Pay attention to yourselves!”

It may not have anything to do with someone’s wife or husband, it might be something else like attempting to have authority over something or someone that’s not yours to have authority over or to take authority away from someone else who has been rightly given that authority because you don’t like or understand their decisions; that would be breaking the Fourth Commandment;[4] it could be about something trivial or it could be about something that would ruin lives. Yes, you may have justified your actions to yourself, but that doesn’t make them just in the eyes of the LORD and so your neighbour laments in his prayers to the Lord like the prophet Habakkuk laments in our Old Testament reading:

       “O LORD, how long shall I cry for help,

               and You will not hear?

        Or cry to You “Violence!”

               and You will not save?

        Why do You make me see iniquity,

               and why do You idly look at wrong?

        Destruction and violence are before me;

               strife and contention arise.

        So the law is paralyzed,

               and justice never goes forth.

        For the wicked surround the righteous;

               so justice goes forth perverted.”[5] 

If you are the one who has caused such ruin, who has tempted and enticed someone into sin, do you want God to act swiftly towards the wrongdoer? Or would you rather your brother or sister in Christ rebuke you first and call you to repentance that you might be saved? If by your wilful work of causing others to sin you have tied that millstone around your neck would you not want to have someone gently loosen that rope and help you away from the fate that stands before you, the dark and eternally deep cold waters of damnation? 

Saint James says, “Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love Him.” [James then continues to warn] “Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted with evil, and He Himself tempts no one. But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.”[6] Jesus says to His disciples and He say to your today, “Temptations to sin are sure to come, but woe to the one through whom they come!” What tempts you into sin? Is it your desires; is it a particular person for some reason? Is it the World? Is it your personal worries and anxieties? What is it? Is it the Devil or one of his demons? Are you the source of your own temptations? Are you holding a grudge so hard that it feeds back on itself like a snake eating its own tail, like Saint Peter says when he quotes Proverbs 26: “The dog returns to its own vomit, and the sow, after washing herself, returns to wallow in the mire.”[7] If your life has been polluted with a cycle of sin in this way are you following Saint Paul’s advice from our epistle today when he charges Saint Timothy to “guard the good deposit entrusted to [him],” by the Holy Spirit who dwells within us as Christians?[8]

When pressed on these things, upon hearing this teaching from the Lord Jesus and convicted in their sins these disciples who were still learning what it meant to forgive and be forgiven exclaim to Jesus “Increase our faith!” And the Lord then says to them, “If you had faith like a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.

And so we see the miracle of faith regarding forgiveness. When the roots of the mulberry tree of sin have grown deep into a person’s heart how hard, — how impossible — it becomes to remove them without faith and yet with faith it is possible, even with a small amount of faith, with faith as small as a mustard seed.

How much faith in Jesus do you have? Is your faith in Jesus bigger than a mustard seed? Can you then forgive your neighbour, your brother your sister in Christ with the faith you’ve been given? Are you afraid to forgive? Are you afraid of letting go of your anger and displeasure? Afraid of having to face a World in which you have forgiven someone who you made into your enemy? Is pride the fertilizer on the roots of your mulberry tree of sin? Do you water that tree with spite each day, just a sour sprinkle when ever your eyes lay upon the one who grinds your gears? Are your eyes hampered by beams and sticks of wood from the trunk and the branches of the mulberry tree of sin, a mountain of mulberry sawdust overflowing in your tears and the tears of your neighbour?[9] With sin no one wins, all are in need of rescue.[10]

Dear ones the faith of a Christian is not a nebulous idea, some feeling, some philosophical supposition, the Christian faith has an object and that object is Christ Jesus. So it is that the question is not how much faith do you have but who do you have faith in? And once you grasp hold of that then the question becomes, ‘is your faith in Jesus bigger than a mustard seed? Can you then forgive your neighbour, your brother your sister in Christ with the faith you’ve graciously been given?’ Dear ones if you have any faith in Jesus at all you can forgive your neighbour and you are called to do just that even if they were to sin against you seven times a day, which is to say all day long. And especially so if they come to you in repentance and ask for forgiveness. Which by the way means that you need not be afraid of asking forgiveness of others when you have wronged them, even if you have caused them to fall into in. If you are hearing these words today there is time for reconciliation.

For His disciples, to help them “increase their faith,” Jesus springboards from this teaching about forgiveness into a teaching about faithful and unfaithful servants which ends with Jesus giving this advice to the one who serves, “So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.’ This is about entitlement and humility. The one who is humble will eschew and brush away feelings of entitlement. Jesus says of Himself, “For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many.”[11] The one who has become resentful or feels unappreciated may be tempted to feeling entitled to what they believe that they’ve earned. These are temptations of the World, and of the concerns of the flesh unhinged from faith. All that we have, every good and perfect gift is a gift from God the Father.[12] Love and forgiveness are joined together and so in the Gospel of Saint John Jesus says to these very same disciples, “This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You are My friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you. You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in My name, He may give it to you. These things I command you, so that you will love one another.”[13]

Jesus said this to them after our Gospel reading today from the Gospel of Saint Luke but before His crucifixion and death upon His Good Friday Cross where He laid down His life upon the cursed tree for His friends, for me, for you. They didn’t presume to call themselves friends, they waited on the Lord and in due time that gift was bestowed upon them, they didn’t demand the inheritance as an entitled brat but waited for it to be delivered to them by the Lord, it is no different for us. And upon His Resurrection from the dead Jesus on the evening of that first Easter Sunday stood before these same disciples and said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent Me, even so I am sending you.” And when [Jesus] had said this, He breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.”[14] As the proto-pastors, as the template of what the pastor was to be, they were sent out with the duty to forgive, to forgive seven times seventy times seven times when their brother or sister came to them seeking forgiveness[15] and to encourage people to forgive each other; to uproot sin and cast it into the eternally deep cold waters of damnation, to plant it there away from you and away from your heart, so that you no longer need to live a life choked by those mulberry tree roots of sin. The faithful servant does this without concern for approval and accolades, they do it because it is their duty and what they have been charged to do, because the World and everyone in it desperately needs it, because the World and everyone in it desperately need Jesus and the grace of God. Therefore when it comes to temptations into sin and forgiveness “pay attention to yourselves,” and pay attention to what part you play. Stand firm in your faith in Christ Jesus and if need be return to the Lord your God and He will forgive you by the blood of His Son seven times a day, which is to say every time, the perfect amount of forgiveness. Amen.     

Let us pray: Lord have mercy on us, Christ have mercy on us, Lord have mercy on us, “take our minds and think through them, take our lips and speak through them, take our hearts and set them on fire; for the sake of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Amen.

[1] The Tenth Commandment, Luther’s Small Catechism, Concordia Publishing House 2017, Page 15.
[2] The Eighth, Seventh and Sixth Commandments, Luther’s Small Catechism, Page 14.
[3] Romans 12:19, “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is Mine, I will repay, says the Lord.”
[4] The Fourth Commandment, Luther’s Small Catechism, Page 14.
[5] Habakkuk 1:1–4
[6] James 1:12–15
[7] 2 Peter 2:22
[8] 2 Timothy 1:14
[9] Luke 6:41-42
[10] Romans 3:23
[11] Mark 10:45
[12] James 1:16–17
[13] John 15:12–17
[14] John 20:21–23
[15] Matthew 18:21-22

Photo Credit: Main photo detail of illustration of roots from rawpixel.