Of Fifteen-foot Crocodiles and the God of Have Another Cookie, Basil
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the 24th Sunday After Pentecost, November 15, 2020 by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty, Dean & Rector.
One of the things that happens over the course of a healthy spiritual life is that our image of God evolves. Many of us, myself included, grew up with an image of God as an ever watchful list-checker, a policeman, a dour impassive judge, or even a capricious-minded Roman Emperor ready to decide a defeated gladiator’s fate in the Coliseum (between inebriated yawns) with a live-giving thumbs up, or a death-dealing thumbs down. What is the dominant emotion underlying each of those images? Fear. Hyper-vigilance. A tendency towards scrupulosity. A sense of never measuring up and not being enough. A gnawing feeling of always being a day late and a dollar short. At its most extreme, we can come to believe that God hates us, and we practice hating ourselves in the name of loving God. For many people, this image of God, for which they have no antidote, is what drives them from the Church and makes them lose their faith. They say things like, “I can’t believe in a bearded man in the sky who sits on a cloud and judges people once-and-for-all who don’t know any better.” Well, neither can I!
If it’s true that we become more and more like that which we worship, then what we have at the center of our lives is literally the difference between heaven and hell. Not as geographical locations we go to after we die, but as places and spaces we inhabit here and now. We’ve had fear at the center of our national life for far too long and the result is overheated vitriol, scapegoating caricature of those with whom we disagree, an inability to see or hear each other, division, violence, and children in cages. Fear breeds more fear. Violence begets more violence. Division creates more division. And it’s the same in the spiritual life. How can we expect to become kind, compassionate, and responsive people in service to the least of these when fear and judgement is at the center of our lives? At the very best, our good works are done not out of love for the other, empathy for their suffering, or standing in solidarity with them, but out of fear of punishment. Hardly an inspiring vision of the Christian life!
But what if that image of God as policeman, judge, and power-hungry Roman Emperor simply isn’t true? What if that image inherited from teachers, parents, nation, and sometimes our Church, is precisely what needs to be healed in order for us to become--as individuals and as a community--the love we see revealed in the person of Jesus? What if the spiritual life is not about scurrying about doing things out of fear of final and eternal retribution, but learning to respond to the invitation to love? What if our purpose here on earth in the short span of days we have allotted is to accept our acceptance, to integrate God’s free, unmerited, and unearned unconditional love for us and then to be that love for others? What if all we need to do to find our proper place at the banquet that has been in full swing since before the foundation of the world, is to utter with Mary the mustard seed of our yes, our consent to God’s presence and action in our life?
Basil Hume, a Roman Catholic cardinal, tells a story about the God-image his mother gave him in his childhood. His mother called Basil into the kitchen and said, "Son, I've just finished baking some delicious cookies, and I've put them into this cookie jar. I'm going to leave this cookie jar right here on the table. But don't dare sneak in here and eat any of them. Remember: God is watching you!" For years, Basil lived in fear of this watchful "God of the cookie jar." He became a priest, a Benedictine monk, gave his entire life to the pursuit of holiness, but was haunted well into adulthood by the image of a watchful, policeman God. One day, emerging from his time of prayer, however, it dawned on him. If he had snuck into the kitchen and put his hand in the jar and secretly pulled out a cookie and gobbled it down, God would have looked on and said, "Basil, they're so good! Have another one!"
Fr. Robert Capon, an Episcopal priest and food critic for the New York Times, puts it this way. “Score a sad point for the unhappy truth that the world is full of fools who won’t believe a good thing when they hear it. Free grace, dying love, and unqualified acceptance might as well be a fifteen-foot crocodile, the way we respond to it: all our protestations to the contrary, we will sooner accept a God we will be fed to than one will be fed by.” This journey--from the Policeman God to the God of the Have Another Cookie, from the fifteen-foot crocodile, to the God who feeds--is what it means for our image of God to be healed and it’s at the heart of what it means to know ourselves to be loved and then to be that love--that water to wash, that bread to feed, that oil to heal, that wine to slake the other’s thirst--for those whom we meet.
When we look at Jesus we see God in fully human form who touches the untouchable, dines with all the wrong people, forgives when others would stone, washes the feet of those who will betray him, and feeds those who are spiritually and physically hungry. Not a crocodile in sight! What about, you may ask, those foolish virgins last week who went to get oil at the five-and-dime and were shut out of the wedding feast? Their only mistake was thinking the Bridegroom gave a fig about how much oil they had in their lamps! “Whether we are awake or asleep… we live with him” as Paul writes in our epistle. Their image of the Bridegroom was more like a Bridezilla who throws a temper tantrum when the oil lamps aren’t just so! They reacted out of their imagined fear of Bridezilla’s tantruming wrath rather than the welcoming, indiscriminately hospitable love of Jesus the Bridegroom who accepts us all if we can accept, if we can just trust, that we are accepted just as we are. No oil required. And once the foolish virgins realize the error of their ways, once they see the Bridegroom is no Bridezilla after all, what do you know… they find themselves at the party.
We see the same dynamic in our parable for today. What, would you say, casts the third servant into that dark, tooth-gnashing place? His lack of trust. His lack of faith in the goodness of the Master. He says it himself, “Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.” His God is harsh. His God is a taskmaster. His God is a bean-counting grim reaper. A fifteen-foot crocodile. A stern, watchful policeman. And the servant is rightly terrified. The servant is contracted in terror and hides his talent in the dirt for fear of reprisal.
The Master’s outrage is solely the result of the servant’s mistaking of his true identity. As James Allison writes, “The key feature of this parable is that it is the imagination of the servants as to what their master is like which is the determining factor of their conscience and thus the wellspring of their activity.” Unlike the third servant, the other two servants, “perceive their master’s regard for them as one of liking them enough to be daring them and encouraging them to be adventurous, and so, imagining and trusting that abundance would multiply, they indeed multiplied abundance.” The imagination of the servants determines their actions. Their image of God, determines who they are, and how they act in the world. An image of an abundant God leads to a life of living and giving abundantly, of sharing their gifts of time, talent, and treasure with open-handed abandon.
In the case of the first two servants, they trust the goodness, benevolence, and generosity of the Master enough to open their hands and take a risk with what the Master has given them. They are adventurous and generous in imitation of the Master’s adventurous and generous spirit. And their trust in abundance translates into more fruitfulness, more abundance. More is given to them because that’s how faith, how trust, works. It multiplies exponentially. When we live and give from abundance, when our generosity imitates the generosity of God, we find that there is always more than enough. We find our hands opening in imitation of the open-handed one who calls us home, who welcomes us in, who lays his hands upon us and blesses us. That is the adventure of discipleship, and the adventure of sacrificial living and giving in imitation of God’s only son who laid down his life for us while we were still sinners.
In the case of the third servant, his actions are determined by his faulty imagination of the master as harsh, rule-bound, and retributive. He lives from fear, scarcity, and lack. His imagination of the supposed hardness master is what binds him. The hell he experiences at the end of the parable is entirely self-created by his unwillingness to have his faulty image of God undone and remade in the true image of God we see revealed, once-and-for-all in the person of Jesus: abundance, fruitfulness, endlessly creative. Like the Foolish Virgins who thought their salvation depended on their works--how much oil they kept in their lamps--the third servant binds himself hand and foot with an image of God unworthy of name. We are what we worship and what we worship makes all the difference.
But the story doesn’t end there any more than the Foolish Virgins are locked out of the feast for eternity. That’s the tormented imagination of the Infernalist Dante, not Holy Scripture. Our God, the one, true, and living God is the God who comes to us again and again, who descends into our self-created darkness and gnashing of teeth, grips us in a fireman’s hold and drags us to himself. “Choose this day what God you will worship,” Joshua told the Israelites last week. Will it be the Policeman God or the Have Another Cookie, Basil God? Will it be the fifteen-foot crocodile who feeds on us, or the one who stoops to break bread? Will it be the trusting, loving, benevolent Master who gives all he has for us, or the third servant’s “harsh man,” product of our warped imaginings? Will we be adventurous and generous with our gifts of time, talent, and treasure as Jesus is generous, or bury our coin in the dirt and grind our fearful teeth?