A Homily for the Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

A sermon preached by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on November 19, the Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Pentecost.

It’s easy, I suppose, as we reach the end of the lectionary’s “Year A”--where we’ve been praying, hymning, confessing, eucharisting, preaching, doubting, wrestling and limping our way through the gospel according to Matthew–to breathe a great sigh of relief. No more weeping and gnashing of teeth! We might even make flip jokes about hoping that Matthew is getting the dental care he deserves in heaven. Funny as that may be, it misses a very important point about the parables of judgment that we find in New Testament scripture. And the point, helpfully spelled out by Robert Capon, is this: “inclusion before exclusion is the chief interpretative principle of the parables of judgment. As a general rule–and in his specific parables of judgment–Jesus is at pains to show that no one is kicked out who wasn’t already in.” Hell, in other words is the refusal to let oneself be loved–to entrust ourselves to the One who entrusts Himself to us to free us from sin and death. It’s a refusal of relationship that results in painful self-enclosure.

You’ve heard this story before. The one cast into the outer darkness for a wardrobe violation–refusal to wear the freely given wedding garment–is only booted out because he won’t dance to the Lamb’s done, finished, accomplished safe-and-sound, olly olly all come free music of radical grace. The only thing that keeps the foolish virgins who ran out of oil from the wedding feast is the thought that something they do, some work they perform other than simple trusting faith, will save them. Simple faith and trusting surrender are usually the last thing that occurs to us. That’s what makes faith simultaneously so easy and a narrow gate. Self-sufficiency and self-reliance die hard.

In this morning’s gospel we have a similar situation. The man–Jesus going on a journey into the far country of death–entrusts each of his slaves with his money. The man enters into a fiduciary relationship (fides in Latin and pistis in Greek) with each of the slaves. He places his faith in them, giving up control over how they use it. The man takes a risk, and the expectation is that the slaves respond in kind by taking a similarly faithful risk, by putting it to adventurous use for the building up of the kingdom. When the man comes back–when Jesus rises from the dead–the first two slaves have faithfully gone about their business. They do the work they have been given to do with faith in the Master, Jesus, and the Master is well-pleased. Not because they earned him a profit (he really couldn’t care less), but because they acted from a place of trusting, faithful relationship with the one who entrusts his very self, his love, to them.

Not so with the third slave. He thinks he knows that the master is a, “harsh man, reaping where he does sow, and gathering where he does not scatter seed.” He is given the gift, but because his image of the Master is a false one, a fearful one cooked up by his own imagination, all he can do is bury the coin in the ground. Fear wins the day. And it’s his inability to accept that he is accepted, his inability to trust in the bedrock trustworthiness of Mr. Trust Himself, that leads to the dustup. The problem with the third slave is that he imagines himself into a place of judgement, and for this reason does not dare do anything but bury the money in the ground. And he receives treatment according to his imagination.

This is the effect false images (call them what they are–idols) have on us. And it's why a good part of our Christian life is about making conscious and letting go of false, fear-based images of a vengeful, score-keeper, capricious God prone to fits of violence. It probably won’t surprise you that I was, let’s say, “a handful,” as a child. I remember one beautiful summer day, my parents took us in the pumpkin orange Volvo station wagon with vinyl seats to Qew Beach in Toronto–a lovely park and boardwalk along the shores of Lake Ontario. Everything was going fine until we parked. Right outside my window was an expanse of manicured lawn with a sign prominently displayed: Please Keep Off the Grass. The trouble was, you see, that the boardwalk was on the other side of that grass. No problem for my parents, but simply insurmountable for me. I refused to get out of the car. I wouldn’t budge. It said, “Please Keep Off the Grass,” after all. And so they left me there in a hot car, walked freely across the grass and enjoyed a lovely time at the beach. Meanwhile, I just sat there all alone stewing and fretting and gnashing my teeth in that hot, stuffy car, because I imagined in my fear that some Keep Off the Grass policeman was going to pop up out of nowhere and throw me in the slammer for crossing a lawn.

So the question for us is this: under what false, fear-based, ultimately idolatrous images of God do we labor? The cold, distant watch-maker God of our fathers? The score-keeping, list-checking Santa Claus God who's gonna find out who’s naughty and nice and respond in kind with either something from the Elvin Workshop or the coalfields? The God whose love is there notionally, but who is always a little disappointed in us? The God of conditional love: if you do ____, then I’ll love you? 

This is important work, and no one can do it for you. These secret, unconscious false Gods are operative and part of the work of grace is to let them come undone in the fiery love of the Living God. The God we see revealed in the person and work of Jesus whose only desire is to draw, to drag, all people into the wide-flung embrace of his all-encompassing arms. The Living God who stoops, kneels, washes and feeds, who meets us in the dark of our deepest need. The Living God who asks only that we place our trust in his unconditional love for us just as we are. The Living God who has prepared a place for us in his blessed lap and only wants us to come to him for the peace and rest that only he can provide and then go with his peace breathed from our lips.

Coming to know the Living God–coming into a relationship with the loving, liberating, and life-giving presence of Jesus–entails the risk of faith. In the words of the parable, there is something “wicked and lazy,” about remaining in the thrall, possessed actually, by images of God inherited from teachers, parents, nation, church that no longer serve. It’s quite easy to remain in that lukewarm place Zephaniah so devastatingly describes as, “The Lord will not do good, nor will he do harm.” It takes no small amount of courage, I’d say, to let these diminishing stories be called into question, to let them come undone, so that the Living God–the real presence of Christ available to us by grace through faith and trust here and now–to rise like the morning star in our hearts. It takes old-fashioned courage because these habitual images are so seductive: they are so familiar and close. They are like the smell of our own armpit. Stinky, and not like the bracing freedom of life in Christ that freshens like the cool breeze off Lake Ontario, but known, comfortably homey even if they make us sour and miserable.

After I’d been sweating in the backseat of that old Volvo for a while–my parents swung back by the car, opened the door and rolled down the window. Without saying a word, they brazenly trespassed over the lawn once again(!) and resumed their stroll along the boardwalk. Not to be outdone, I harrumphed and doubled down in my imaginings of Lawn Police God poised and waiting to strike the moment my Keds grazed the first blade of grass.

A little while later, they swung back around again. Rather like how God is described in the Eucharistic prayer–again and again he called them—this never give up nag of a loving God dying to love us into loving others. By this time, the breeze from the lake, the cries of the gulls, and the laughter of the other families were luring me outside the cramped confines of the car—my imagined hell mobile. Joy jostled. Love lured. There was something so deliciously enticing about it all. Something that beckoned, something that knocked at the door, something beyond my dire, stale, armpit imaginings finally won. The divine lure was simply, finally, irresistible. This time, I eased open the door, and skipped–albeit gingerly and a little frightened–across the grass. What a strange, graced, enticement that breeze, those gull cries, those Saturday afternoon at the beach hoots and hollers. What a strange, graced form of courage for a seven year old. What a strange, graced kind of saving faith this, “Yes, Jesus, Savior. Thank you.” And I swear, that gull poop stained boardwalk with its hot dog stands, and halter-topped roller bladers, and Cyndi Lauper blaring the boom boxes… I swear that Lake Ontario boardwalk was nothing less than the shores of Galilee itself and I discovered I’d  never been out except by refusing to be in.

Amen.