PROPER 29, YEAR A

(Christ the King)

November 26, 2023

Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, Warwick, R. I.

 

Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24

Psalm 95:1-7a

Ephesians 1:15-23

Matthew 25:31-46

 

From time to time, the liturgical calendar asks us to take a second glance at events in the Gospel story that we’ve already considered earlier in the Church year. For example, on Good Friday, we commemorate the Lord’s Passion and death; then, on the Feast of the Holy Cross (on September 14th) we look again at this sacred mystery of our redemption.

 

Similarly, the Feast of Christ the King asks us to look again at what we celebrated on the Feast of the Ascension, kept on the sixth Thursday after Easter Day. As Saint Paul says in today’s reading from his Letter to the Ephesians, “God raised [Christ] from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come.” 

 

Although a relatively new addition to the calendar, the Feast of Christ the King celebrates the Church’s ancient faith as set forth in the New Testament and proclaimed in the Nicene Creed: 

 

He ascended into heaven, 

  and is seated at the right hand of the Father. 

He will come again in glory to judge the living

   and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end

Notice how those lines of the Creed twin the images of Christ as Judge and Christ as King: He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end. 

 

This image of Christ as judge doesn’t always sit comfortably today. Decades ago, the theologian H. Richard Niebuhr satirized the faith of nineteenth century liberal Protestantism with these lines: “

A God without wrath

Brought [people] without sin 

Into a kingdom without judgment 

Ministered by a Christ without a cross. 

I fear that these lines also sum up the faith of all too many in today’s Episcopal Church. However, the readings won’t let us get away with that; they’re shot through with the images of both Christ as King and Christ as Judge.

 

They also bring in the image of the Shepherd. Again and again, the Bible depicts the relationship between a king and his people as that between a shepherd and his flock. After all, the kings of Israel are descended from David, the shepherd boy whom God took from watching the flock to shepherd his people Israel. 

 

Both the Old Testament reading from Ezekiel and the Gospel reading from Matthew describe God judging the world as a shepherd separating the animals in his flock. The prophet proclaims: “Thus says the Lord God … ‘Behold, I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep … I will save my flock … and I will judge between sheep and sheep.’” And in the Gospel, Jesus describes the Son of man coming in glory, and all his angels with him: “then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate them one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.”

 

This reading depicts a scene from real life. To this day, shepherds in the Middle East often allow sheep and goats to intermingle as they graze in the fields or migrate from one pasture to another. But every evening, especially in cold weather, the shepherds separate them, because sheep with their thick wool coats can be left outside while goats need the warmth of a shelter for the night. 

 

In the ancient world, moreover, sheep were regarded as honorable and even noble animals, while goats were seen as degenerate and shameful. So, it’s not altogether surprising that Jesus uses a shepherd separating sheep from goats to symbolize the judgment of the nations at the end of time: distinguishing the good from the evil, dividing the saved from the damned. 

 

So, who are the sheep and who are the goats? For some Jews in our Lord’s time—not all, to be sure, but some—the answer would have been immediate and obvious. The sheep are the people of Israel. As Psalm 95 puts it, “For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand.”

 

As Jesus starts telling the story that we know as the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, at least some of his listeners probably assume that the sheep are the Jews, and the goats the Gentiles, so that the judgment will bring about the vindication of Israel and the punishment of the nations. As the story unfolds, however, it becomes clear that such a distinction is not what our Lord has in mind at all.

 

The separation of sheep from goats proceeds not according to racial, ethnic, national, or even religious criteria, but instead according to the criteria of compassion and mercy. The shepherd-king recognizes as the sheep of his own flock those members of all nations, both Jew and Gentile, both Christian and non-Christian, who’ve fed the hungry, given drink to the thirsty, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked, and visited the sick and those in prison.

 

After all, Jesus came down to earth from heaven on a mission of divine mercy and compassion. Taking human flesh, he identified with the poorest of the poor, and suffered a shameful death. But just as Christ died and rose again to show a sinful world God’s compassion and mercy, so he’ll judge us according to the compassion and mercy that we’ve shown our fellow human beings. So, the parable’s surprise ending is that in ministering to the sick and dying, refugees and prisoners, the hungry and the homeless, we discover that all along we’ve been ministering to an incognito king: ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’

 

Today we rejoice that Christ is our king; and we praise his majesty. We owe him all loyalty, obedience, and service. And we have his promise that as we minister in this world to the poor, downtrodden, and oppressed, we’re really ministering to him. Then, when he returns in glory to judge the living and the dead, he’ll bid us inherit the kingdom prepared for us from the foundation of the world. 

PROPER 28, YEAR A

November 19, 2017

Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, Warwick, R. I.

 

Matthew 25:14-30

 

As we think about stewardship and pledging, it’s perhaps providential that today’s appointed Gospel should be one of Our Lord’s great stewardship parables. The biblical definition of a steward is a servant entrusted with the management of his master’s wealth and property. The servants or slaves in the Parable of the Talents fit this description perfectly. So, it seems opportune this morning to grapple a bit with what Jesus is teaching us in this story. 

 

Interpretations of this parable have tended to go in one of three directions. First is the economic interpretation, associated with what Max Weber called the Protestant work 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 will more be given …

 

The problem with this type of interpretation is that it presupposes a thoroughly modern understanding of economics, and it fails to recognize how shocking and scandalous this parable would have been to our Lord’s original audience. In our day, 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 who stuff their life savings away in mattresses. Money loses value over time, and we’ve got to keep it invested just to stay even.

 

But people in the ancient world saw matters very differently. They didn’t understand inflation as we do; and they saw nothing wrong with hiding 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 thing to do. Indeed, one who did so bore no liability if the money was lost.

 

Moreover, the ancient world’s operating assumption was that the supply of this world’s goods was finite, limited, and already distributed. So, if you weren’t born rich, the only way you could get rich was by robbing someone else and making them poor. People who became wealthy through business dealings were 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. For the original hearers, the parable’s great scandal would have been that these disreputable servants end up being rewarded, while the honest servant, who’s done the right thing by burying his money safely in the ground, ends up being punished.

 

If the economic interpretation doesn’t work, then we have what we might call the moralizing interpretation. The word “talent” in Greek means both a measure of weight and a denomination of currency, like the British pound. But it totally lacks the English sense of the word “talent,” and so has absolutely nothing to do with the ability to paint, sing, write, play basketball, or do needlepoint. Still, innumerable sermons and devotional commentaries on this parable exhort us to use our God-given gifts, skills, and talents, to the best of our abilities. That may be good advice, but it fails to capture the full import of today’s Gospel.

 

Ultimately, this parable is about neither wealth-management nor personal self-improvement, but the Kingdom of God. We get a glimpse of this when the two servants who’ve doubled their money are invited to “enter into the joy” of their Master, while the servant who buried the money in the ground is cast “into the outer darkness; where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” 

 

And so we come to a third type of interpretation, which might be called allegorical. The Church’s traditional reading of this parable is that the Master is a figure of Christ who entrusts us with everything we have in this life: all our gifts, in every sense of the word. The master’s departure on a long journey away symbolizes Christ’s Ascension into heaven. And the master’s delayed return and demand for an accounting from his servants symbolizes Christ’s Second Coming, when he shall call each of us to account for our stewardship of the gifts he’s given us.

 

More than that, the Parable of the Talents challenged its original hearers, as it challenges us, to imagine a different kind of universe, governed by different economic laws, with a different kind of wealth, denominated in a different kind of currency. In a world governed by finitude and scarcity, 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 not commodities to be invested or hoarded, but rather gifts to be shared. Our Lord has entrusted great treasures into our care—the Gospel, the Sacraments, the means of grace. He intends us to share these treasures and to spread them abroad liberally. 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.

 

To go one step further, the original hearers of Saint Matthew’s Gospel would have understood, just as we understand today, that the two servants who doubled their money were risking everything, while the servant who hid his talent in the ground was playing it safe. Here the parable illustrates the principle that our Lord twice enunciates elsewhere in Saint Matthew’s Gospel: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” 

 

In other words, just as the two enterprising servants laid down everything they had in a game of double-or-nothing, even so, those who’re willing to lay down everything in the Lord’s service, including even their lives, are the ones who gain eternal life. But those who cling to their belongings, their fortunes, and their lives are the ones who end up losing them, like the servant who buried that one talent which is death to hide.

 

To understand this parable, then, we don’t really need to identify what, if anything, the talents represent. They’re not really the point. The parable calls us to a bold generosity of spirit, a self-sacrificial willingness to risk everything, in the assurance that if we do so, then in the end, we shall hear the Lord saying to us: “Well done, good and faithful servant … Enter into the joy of your Master.”

PROPER 27, YEAR A

Sunday, November 12, 2023

Saint Mark’s Church, Warwick, R.I.

 

Wisdom 6:12-16

I Thessalonians 4:13-18

Matthew 25:1-13

 

Today’s Gospel addresses themes of preparation and readiness. A wedding feast is about to take place. By custom, the bridegroom has gone to the home of his bride’s parents, to sign the marriage contract, and then bring his bride back in a festive procession to his house, where the celebrations will begin. But for some unexplained reason the bridegroom is delayed in his return. Perhaps the last-minute negotiations have bogged down in some difficulty.

 

The bridegroom’s return at midnight reveals who are wise and who are foolish among the young women who’ve been waiting outside his house to greet him. “Bridesmaids,” by the way, is a bad translation. If they were really bridesmaids, they’d be at the bride’s house rather than the groom’s. The word Matthew uses is more akin to “virgins” or “maidens.” In any case, having anticipated the possibility of just such a delay, the wise maidens have brought along extra flasks of oil for their lamps; but not so the foolish maidens who are caught with their lamps flickering out – and who at length find themselves locked out of the marriage feast.

 

The Church has traditionally interpreted this parable as a commentary on Christ’s Second Coming, and I see no good reason to depart from that line of interpretation. After our Lord’s Resurrection and Ascension, the earliest Christians expected him to return within their lifetime to judge the world and inaugurate the Kingdom of God.

 

Again and again, the Bible describes the Kingdom of God as a wedding feast, with Christ as the bridegroom. In the parable, then, the shout at midnight: “Look! Here is the Bridegroom! Come out to meet him” evokes the imagery in today’s reading from St. Paul to the Thessalonians: “For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven …”

 

But as we know, the years went by and Christ didn’t return as soon as expected. The bridegroom was delayed. Perhaps some Christians in the second and third generations were tempted to give up on the hope that he’d ever return, and grew slack and lax in their faith. They’d once been eagerly waiting; but as time went on some of them found their faith flickering and growing dim, just like the lamps of the foolish maidens. Perhaps for them Matthew remembered and wrote down in his Gospel this parable of the Lord.

 

The parable thus functions as both a warning and an exhortation. Even though the bridegroom seems delayed in coming, we need to remain alert, prepared, and ready. Regardless of whether we believe in a literal return of Christ to earth in human history, we’re all going to meet him sooner or later, one way or another. And when he does arrive, at an unexpected hour, there won’t be time to begin making the preparations that we should have been making all along. So, in today’s Collect, we pray that “we may purify ourselves as he pure; that when he comes again with power and great glory, we may be made like him in his eternal and glorious kingdom …”

 

Our Old Testament reading for today indicates our need for divine wisdom. After all, the presence or absence of wisdom was what made the difference between the wise and foolish maidens. And today’s reading from the book of Wisdom comes from a genre of biblical literature that treat's God’s wisdom, in Greek Sophia, as a manifestation of God’s Word, or Logos. The implication is that we grow in holy wisdom by attending to God’s Word.

 

That, after all, is why we’re here in Church today. We all need continuing formation. All the spiritual practices of our faith – Mass, Offices, daily prayer, spiritual reading, meditation, confession, retreats, and so forth – constitute a regimen of training to steep us in God’s Wisdom and so prepare us for whatever crises and joys lie ahead.

 

I once knew a woman whose teenage sons periodically rebelled and gave her a hard time about coming to Church on Sunday. Her response was to tell them this: Much as you might think you don’t need Church now, someday you’ll be grateful for a place to turn for comfort and hope when you lose your job, your girlfriend, or your spouse. Otherwise, without something solid to fall back on, you’ll be tempted to lose yourself in drinking, drugs, gambling, or some other addictive form of escape. But to gain any meaningful support from your faith at that moment, you’ll need to have been practicing it all along. Otherwise, it’ll be the worst possible time to start learning.

 

A youngster in the Sunday School class in one of my parishes once asked the teacher: “Isn’t it hypocritical of us to say the Lord’s Prayer by rote every Sunday when we don’t really mean it or don’t even think about what we’re saying?” “Not at all,” the teacher replied. “Think of each Sunday as a time of training to pray. We teach you to know the Lord’s Prayer by heart because one day, when you find that you really need to pray more than anything else, you’ll at least have the words to get started.”

 

But the practice of our faith isn’t just preparation for the bad times, the inevitable moments of crisis in our lives, but even more for the good times. How much more we’re able to enter into the joy of a baptism or a wedding, for example, when already we’re accustomed to being in Church, when we understand what’s going on, and when we know the responses, symbolism, and customs!

 

Most of all, however, the practice of our faith is preparation and training for the joy of heaven itself. There, we shall be caught up in the continual praise and adoration of the Blessed Trinity; and here, Sunday-by-Sunday, our worship affords us the opportunity to practice and get ready for that. Again, if we hope to spend eternity with God, it’s a good idea to spend some time every Sunday in Church, and every day in prayer, getting to know him now!

 

The Bridegroom is coming. We can be ready to meet him if by divine Wisdom we attend to God’s Word and practice the spiritual disciplines that constitute the oil by which we keep our lamps burning brightly. Then, when he comes, we shall enter into the never-ending joy of the wedding feast celebrating the marriage of heaven and earth.

 

THE SUNDAY AFTER ALL SAINTS

November 5, 2023

Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, Warwick, R. I.

 

 

On our observance of the Feast of All Saints, it seems opportune to remind ourselves that the word “saint” literally means “holy one.” In the Bible, the term refers to all the people of God. In the Old Testament, the “holy ones” or “saints” are the congregation of the people of Israel; in the New Testament, the “saints” are the assembly of the Church.

 

Early on in Church history, however, the word “saint” took on the more specialized meaning of the saints in heaven. In this more restricted sense, the saints are those departed Christians whose lives on earth exhibited such holiness that we’re sure that they must now be with God in Christ.

 

In the early Church, the definitive sign of sainthood was martyrdom. For the early Christian faithful there was no question that those who’d shed their blood and given their lives rather than deny the faith were now reigning with the Lord in glory. But as the early ages of persecution waned, it became clear that Christians of exemplary holiness who’d lived and died peacefully could also reliably be counted among the saints in heaven.

 

Like most ancient peoples, the early Christians revered their dead. So, they often gathered for worship, devotions, and festive banquets at the martyrs’ burial places, particularly on the anniversaries of their deaths, their “birthdays into heaven.” On these days they sometimes used the horizontal slab on top of the sarcophagus as a makeshift altar for celebrating the Eucharist. They soon discovered that the martyrs’ tombs were holy places, where healings and other miracles were apt to occur.

 

Beginning in the third or fourth century, churches began to be dedicated and named in honor of individual saints, often built over their earthly resting places. The most famous is St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, built over the cemetery on the Vatican Hill where Peter himself was buried. In other cases, where the burial place was too remote and hard to get to, a saint’s relics might be disinterred and brought to a more conveniently located church, where they were usually placed under the altar. 

 

At around the same time, the Church began to designate official feast days in memory of particular saints: usually the anniversaries of their deaths. And so, in the end, the term “saint” characteristically came to designate those heroes and heroines of the faith who had both churches and days in the calendar dedicated in their honor.

A problem began to emerge, however, when the Church found, after several major persecutions, that it had more martyrs than days in the year to commemorate them. So, between the fifth and ninth centuries, the Feast of All Saints grew up as a sort of catchall festival when the Church honored all the holy men and women throughout its history who’d lived and died in the faith of Christ. And in the year 732, Pope Gregory III dedicated a chapel to All the Saints in Saint Peter’s Basilica on November 1st, which has been kept ever since as All Saints Day in the Western Calendar.

 

So, we come full circle to the biblical understanding of the saints as a great multitude, many more than we can name or number. While we remember and celebrate some of the more notable ones on their designated days in the Church year, All Saints Day reminds us of the millions of anonymous holy men and women down through the centuries who’ve gone before us to their heavenly reward: a great cloud of witnesses cheering us on as we run the race that they’ve completed ahead of us.

 

Now, when we have questions about what the Episcopal Church believes, practices, and teaches, one of the key sources for us is the Book of Common Prayer. And I’d like to draw your attention to two texts in the Prayerbook that elucidate the Church’s teaching on the saints. If you’d please be so good, open your Prayerbooks to page 504. (Don’t worry, I don’t intend to make a habit of this, but every once in a while, it can be helpful.)

You’ll notice that we find here some of the Additional Prayers for use in the Burial Service. Now, please follow along with me while I read the second prayer on page 504. [Read the prayer.]

 

This prayer reinforces some of the points I’ve just been making. On All Saints Day we praise and glorify God for the Blessed Virgin Mary, and all God’s other righteous servants known to us and unknown. And then the prayer describes our relationship with these saints. They encourage us by their examples; they aid us with their prayers; they strengthen us with their fellowship—so that by the merits of Jesus Christ we can look forward in hope to becoming partakers of their inheritance in the heavenly light.

 

For this reason, incidentally, it’s perfectly legitimate to ask the saints in heaven for their prayers. Just as we ask one another here on earth for prayers in times of need, so the Blessed Virgin Mary and all the saints in heaven intercede for us. It’s right there in the Prayerbook!

 

Now, if you would, please follow along as I read the fourth prayer on page 504, found at the bottom of the page. [Read the prayer.]

 

Here we encounter a slightly different kind of relationship with those who’ve gone before us. Instead of the saints in heaven praying for us, here we pray for those whom we love but see no longer—that God will give them peace, that light perpetual will shine upon them, and that God will work in them the good purpose of his perfect will. 

 

This prayer is perhaps more suited to All Souls Day on November 2nd than to All Saints Day on November 1st. It reminds us that most of us, when we die, still have some considerable way to go before we’re ready to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light. The good news, however, is that even at the moment of death, God still isn’t finished with us. Between this life and the world to come, there’s an intermediate stage of continued growth in grace and holiness—purging away all our imperfections, reforming us into the creatures that God intended us to be from the beginning, and so making us ready to enter into the brightness of divine glory.

 

To put it briefly, then, the difference between All Saints Day and All Souls day is that the one focuses our attention on those whose prayers we need, whereas the other focuses our attention on those who need our prayers. But these two relationships are merely different dimensions of the same great mystery of the Communion of Saints. By virtue of our common baptism, we enjoy fellowship in Christ with both the living and the dead. As so, as the great hymn puts it: “yet all are one in thee, for all are thine. Alleluia, alleluia.”