Sermon for Advent 1, Year B

Michelangelo, The Last Judgment
Sistine Chapel, 1536-1541

One December several years ago, I attended a luncheon with a group belonging to a local community organization. And I was having a pleasant chat with the lady sitting next to me, who, seeing my clerical collar, identified herself as a member of [a local] Congregational Church.

Towards the end of lunch, she turned to me and said in a confidential tone that in the past week or so the scripture readings in her church had been all about the Apocalypse, the Second Coming of Christ, and the Last Judgment. She was clearly puzzled and even a bit disturbed. Did I have any idea why this might be? Then she remarked, “I thought we UCCs didn’t DO the Apocalypse!” (UCC referring, of course, to the United Church of Christ, to which the Congregational Church belongs.)

I explained that it was Advent, and that her church was obviously using the Revised Common Lectionary – which appoints these very readings during the season. I pointed out that one of the great achievements of the ecumenical movement to date is the existence of such a common lectionary used by many different denominations so that, despite our continuing separation and disagreements, we’re at least hearing the same readings on Sunday mornings. At the same time, I wondered to myself: how many Episcopalians would instinctively share her sentiments?

What are we to make of the apocalyptic imagery in so much of both the Old and New Testaments? One option is literalism. In today’s Gospel, our Lord describes the sun being darkened, the stars falling from heaven, and the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. He emphasizes the need to read the signs of the times, so that when we see these things taking place, we know that the end is near. But then he immediately qualifies this assertion by warning that no-one knows the exact day or hour, so we need to stay awake and watch at all times.

Down through history, groups of Christians have developed elaborate timetables for the Second Coming, identifying contemporary world politics and leaders with the apocalyptic events and figures described in these Scripture passages. Various sects have worked out comprehensive theologies of the tribulation, rapture, and millennium. About fifteen years ago, the best-selling Left Behind series gave a detailed fictional description of what it would be like to live through the end times.

It’s tempting for Episcopalians and mainline Protestants to be superciliously dismissive of such biblical literalism. At the opposite end of the spectrum, I suppose, would be a liberalism that simply discounts the apocalyptic material in Scripture as reflecting an outdated and anachronistic worldview with no relevance for how we should believe, think, and live in today’s world. My UCC conversation partner at that luncheon was clearly of this mind.

In today’s Episcopal Church, moreover, depictions of divine judgment and wrath are very much out of fashion. All the emphasis is instead on God’s unconditional love for each one of us. The mindset is very much that summed up by H. Richard Niebuhr as the credo of late-nineteenth century liberal Protestantism: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” Not much room for apocalyptic Sturm und Drang in that picture! 

In perhaps typically Anglican fashion, I want to propose a third way, a middle way, of approaching these parts of the Bible. One of the blessings of a lectionary based on the liturgical calendar is that it forces us periodically to wrestle with passages of Scripture we might otherwise overlook or ignore. The Revised Common Lectionary is far from perfect; it doesn’t cover the whole Bible by any means. But it cycles through Scripture in a fairly systematic way, emphasizing those passages that the Church has discerned to be foundational to a complete and balanced grasp of Christian doctrine.

So, every Advent we read and wrestle with these apocalyptic passages, even while acknowledging that we don’t fully understand them. They’re inherently mysterious; I doubt that we shall fully understand their meaning until we experience for ourselves the events they describe. This biblical imagery of Christ returning to judge the living and the dead may refer to future events in this world; or it may refer to what happens after we die, in the next world. We don’t need to have all the cosmological logistics worked out, however, to get the basic message of these readings.

That message is that the future belongs to God. Sooner or later, whether in this world or the next, we shall face Christ as our Judge. And that is good news. A universe without judgment is a universe in which our choices between good and evil, right and wrong, ultimately don’t matter. But the God-given freedom and dignity of the human person are such that our choices do matter; actions have consequences, even eternal consequences.

We hear a lot today about the need for accountability and transparency in political, economic, and organizational life. Well, the Last Judgment will be the ultimate in accountability and transparency. There we shall render account for all the choices we ever made in this life. There, perhaps as never before, we shall see ourselves as we really are.

Both Scripture and Tradition warn us to live our lives in such a way as to be always prepared for that Day of Judgment. Today’s Gospel states this theme clearly: “What I say to you I say to all: Watch!” The further good news, however, is that our Judge is also our Advocate. In the end, we escape eternal perdition not by proving ourselves worthy of heaven, which is impossible, but by casting ourselves on God’s mercy. God manifests his love for us not by pretending that our sins don’t matter or that they never happened, but by forgiving us. Indeed, our sins matter so much that Christ paid the price of them upon the cross. To be prepared for the Last Judgment, then, we need to repent, and place our whole trust in Christ as the agent of God’s forgiveness and mercy.

Faith and repentance, then, are the keys to being prepared. But they depend in turn upon constant recollection of the Judgment that awaits us. Otherwise we get distracted and caught up in the concerns of the present moment. So again, our Lord warns us: “Watch therefore – for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning, lest he come suddenly and find you asleep.”

During Advent, the Church asks us to attend to those passages of Scripture that warn us of our need to stay awake and alert, so that we may live in such a way as to be prepared to meet him and face his judgment at any time – whether in an hour from now or a hundred million years from now. In the coming Sundays and weekdays of the season, we shall have the opportunity to explore further what it means to be a people prepared for the Advent of the Lord.

Sermon for Proper 28, Year A

Matthew 25:14-30

It’s perhaps providential that the appointed Gospel on Stewardship Sunday should be one of the great parables of stewardship. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, the Master who entrusts his property to his servants stands as a figure of Christ who entrusts us with all our material possessions and spiritual blessings in this life. The Master's going away on a long journey represents Christ’s Ascension into heaven at the end of his earthly life. And the Master’s long-delayed return and settling of accounts with his servants points towards Christ’s Second Coming and the Last Judgment, when we shall be raised from the dead to give an accounting of our stewardship of the gifts entrusted into our care.

Beyond that, interpretations of this parable have tended to go in one of two directions. First is the economic interpretation, associated with what Max Weber called the Protestant ethic. By this reading, the parable justifies the accumulation of earthly wealth and the enjoyment of material prosperity as signs of God’s favor. To those who have, more will be given; to those who have not, even what they have will be taken away. That’s good news for the rich: not such good news for the poor.

Second is the moralizing interpretation. Even though the word “talent” in Greek means a huge sum of money, and has absolutely nothing to do with the ability to paint, sing, or do needlepoint, innumerable sermons on this parable exhort us to use our God-given gifts to the best of our ability. That is good advice in itself, but it’s not really the message of today’s Gospel.

We generally fail to realize how shocking and scandalous this parable would have been to our Lord’s original audience. They didn’t understand economics the way we do. We’re apt to admire the first two servants who invest their money and double their return for their good business sense. And we’re apt to scorn the servant who buries his money in the ground just as we scorn people today who stuff their life savings away in their mattresses. After all, money loses value over time with inflation and you’ve got to keep it wisely invested just to stay even.

That’s how we think; but people in the ancient world thought very differently. They didn’t have the same understanding of inflation as we do; and they saw nothing wrong with burying treasure in the ground. In fact, the rabbis taught that when someone entrusted you with a large sum of money, burying it for safekeeping was the most morally responsible action you could take. Indeed, one who buried such money in the ground was released from liability if the money was lost.

Moreover, the operating assumption in the ancient world was that the supply of this world’s goods was finite, limited, and already distributed. So, if you were not born rich, the only way you could get rich was by making someone else poor. People who became wealthy through their business dealings were thus universally suspected of fraud, deceit, or theft. Financial success was not the badge of respectability that it is today: quite the opposite.

So, our Lord’s original audience likely regarded the first two servants, who double their money, as shady and dishonest characters—just like their master who reaps where he has not sown and gathers where he has not winnowed. The great scandal of the parable is that these disreputable servants are the ones who end up being rewarded, while the honest servant, who’s done the right thing by burying his money safely in the ground, is the one who ends up being punished.

Now, what could our Lord possibly mean by telling such a transgressive story? Well, I would propose that the parable challenged its original audience, just as it challenges us, to imagine a different kind of world, governed by different kinds of economic laws, with a different kind of wealth, denominated in a different kind of currency. We live in an economic world governed by finitude and scarcity. In such a world, there are circumstances in which hoarding treasure makes perfect sense. We’d better guard what we have or others might take it from us.

But maybe the talents in the parable represent a different kind of treasure: not commodities to be invested or hoarded, but rather gifts to be shared. Our Lord has entrusted into the care of his Church great spiritual treasures—the Gospel, the Sacraments, and all the gifts of grace. He intends us to share these treasures and spread them abroad liberally. And when we do share them—freely, generously, and abundantly—we find that unlike material wealth and possessions, which diminish the more we give them away, these spiritual gifts keep on multiplying back to us until the day when the Master returns and bids us enter into his joy.

What special insights might this parable offer us today, on Stewardship Sunday? Well, first, consider the key difference between the two servants who enter into the joy of the Master, and the servant cast into outer darkness. The first two servants exhibit bold generosity of spirit and a willingness to risk everything in their Master’s service, while the third is motivated by fear, insecurity, and the desire to protect himself by eliminating all risk. Similarly, when we consider how much we can afford to pledge to the financial support of our Church, we need to cultivate that same spirit of generosity and willingness to take risks in the Lord’s service.

Second, notice the transformation of relationships that takes place at the end of the parable. The Master bids the two servants, “Enter into the joy of your Master.” That invitation implies that henceforth they are no longer servants but partners, fellow heirs with the Master in a joint inheritance. This point is of crucial importance for us. So often, conversations on pledging seem to presuppose a dichotomy between “us” and “them.” That is, we, the representatives of the institutional Church, stand up here and try to persuade you, the members of the congregation, to part with more of your hard earned income than you think you can afford, and you, in turn, occasionally give us pushback and tell us why we shouldn’t be so demanding. That kind of “us versus them” dynamic is a lose-lose proposition for everyone concerned.

The crucial breakthrough takes place when we replace this “us versus them” dynamic by a collective taking of responsibility, which acknowledges, “we’re all in this together.” That is, this is our parish, no-one else is going to support it but us, and we all need to do whatever we can to ensure that it has the financial resources it needs to fulfill its mission, even at the cost of significant risk and sacrifice to ourselves. When we accept collective responsibility for stewardship in such a spirit of love and generosity, then we may be confident that when our Master returns we shall hear the words, “Well done good and faithful servant; you have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your Master.”

THE SUNDAY AFTER ALL SAINTS

(Sermon at the 10 am Mass)

Towards the end of his classic work The Shape of the Liturgy, Dom Gregory Dix describes a tomb of one of the saints of God. He writes:

           “There is a little ill-spelled ill-carved rustic epitaph of the fourth century from Asia Minor:— ‘Here sleeps the blessed Chione, who has found Jerusalem for she prayed much’. Not another word [Dix continues] is known of Chione, some peasant woman who lived in that vanished world of Christian Anatolia. But how lovely if all that should survive after sixteen centuries were that one had prayed much, so that the neighbors that saw all one’s life were sure that one must have found Jerusalem!”

Here Dix sums up a large part of the meaning of our annual commemoration of All Saints. Throughout the Christian year, we remember the great heroes and heroines of the faith: apostles, evangelists, missionaries, martyrs, confessors, virgins, visionaries, widows, monks, nuns, kings, queens, and founders of religious orders and houses of charity. Many of them are well known to history, and we can read not only their biographies but also their own words in their own writings.

But then, on All Saints Day, we pause to remember also the countless forgotten holy ones of God, most of whom don’t even have an epitaph. As the collect puts it, today we celebrate all God’s righteous servants, known to us, and unknown.

Sometimes I wonder, though, what Dix’s blessed Chione was really like. Even though she prayed much, I like to imagine Chione having her idiosyncratic quirks and crotchets, her annoying habits, and perhaps even her moral weaknesses. Maybe her family, friends, and neighbors found aspects of her personality irritating. But still, they were sure that she’d found Jerusalem. She’d prayed much, and that was enough.

A common misconception is that a saint is one who has displayed complete moral rectitude and spiritual perfection in this earthly life. After a number of years of cycling through the Church’s calendar of saints at our weekday Masses, one builds up a degree of familiarity with their lives and personalities, and one discovers that many of them were far from perfect.

Consider Saint Nicholas, whose life provides the inspiration for the popular figure of Santa Claus. Nicholas was a bishop in Asia Minor, what is today Turkey, in the fourth century. He was by all accounts a good and kind bishop, who took special care of the poor in his diocese, and was known for giving gifts to their children. He suffered imprisonment and torture in the persecution under the emperor Diocletian, but was released upon the accession of the emperor Constantine.

When Nicholas attended the Council of Nicaea in 325, he became so enraged at the heretical teaching of the presbyter Arius, that he walked across the room and punched Arius in the face – an act for which his fellow bishops suspended him from the exercise of his episcopal ministry for a time, and for which he repented, even though in the end the Council confirmed his view and condemned Arius’s teaching as heresy.

Nicholas was a real saint, but his besetting sin – at least according to this legend – was anger. He was not perfect. The same can be said for many of the saints we commemorate throughout the church year. They were not perfect. They had their share of besetting sins and moral shortcomings.

Why then do we honor them as saints? The designation saint suggests not that they were morally or spiritually perfect, but rather that God’s grace was visibly at work in their lives. After they died, people remembered them as those who had made God’s presence known and manifest to all those around them. I suspect we’ve all encountered at least one or two such people. When we spent time in their presence, we found our own faith strengthened. They made us feel good about being Christians. Their example made us more hopeful about the potentialities of our own life in Christ.

The good news is that sainthood is not some ideal of perfection attainable only by an elite few. We don’t have to be perfect in this life to be saints. When we get to heaven, we shall be made perfect. Otherwise we could not bear the pure brightness of divine glory. But in this life, we’re still in via, on the way, works in progress. Nonetheless, as baptized members of the Body of Christ we’re all called to be saints. That’s why the Mass of All Saints Day is one of the occasions during the Church Year when we renew our baptismal vows.

In his autobiography The Seven Story Mountain, Thomas Merton recounts a conversation with a Catholic friend in the months following his conversion and baptism. As they were walking together, his friend turned and demanded to know:

               

           “What do you want to be, anyway?’

                  I could not say [Merton continues], “I want to be Thomas Merton the well-known writer of all those book reviews … or Thomas Merton the assistant instructor of Freshman English … so I put the thing on the spiritual plane where it belonged, and said: “I don’t know. I guess what I want is to be a good Catholic.”

                  “What do you mean, you want to be a good Catholic?”

                  The explanation I gave was lame enough, and expressed my confusion, and betrayed how little I had really thought about it all. [He] did not accept it.

                  “What you should say”—he told me—“What you should say, is that you want to be a saint.”

                  A saint! The thought struck me as a little weird. I said: “How do you expect me to become a saint?”

                  “By wanting to,” [he said] simply.

                  “I can’t be a saint.” I said. “I can’t be a saint.” And my mind darkened with a confusion of realities and unrealities: the knowledge of my own sins, and the false humility that which makes [us] say that [we] cannot do the things that [we] must do, cannot reach the level that [we] must reach …

                  But he said, “All that is necessary to be a saint is to want to be one. Don’t you believe that God will make you what he created you to be, if you will consent to let him do it? All you have to do is desire it.”

What Merton makes clear in this little dialogue is that the first step to becoming a saint is simply consenting to let God make us into the people he has created us to be. The tragedy is that so many people fail to become saints because, deep down, that’s not what they really want.

 Every year, on All Saints Day, I insist on having the hymn “I sing a song of the saints of God.” Behind the surface appearance of a slightly silly children’s Sunday School ditty the lyrics express precisely the same profound spiritual point that Merton makes in The Seven Story Mountain. For the sake of our eternal salvation we need above all to make these words our own: “the saints of God are just folk like me, and I mean to be one too.”