Be watchful! Be Alert! (Mark 14)

 

    “Be watchful! Be alert! You do not know when the time will come.” Mark 14:33

      In Nomine, etc..

     We’ve entered the season of Advent, and the beginning of a new liturgical year. Of course, we experience more than one new beginning every year. There’s the civil New Year that begins on January 1, there’s the school year that begins every August or September, which I suspect every parent of school-age children experiences as the real new year, regardless of the civil or the church calendar. And Orthodox Christians begin their liturgical year on September 1. We remember that in the Old Style calendar, the New Year began on March 25, followed by a week of celebration culminating on April 1, April Fools Day, which we still commemorate, more or less, every year. So we have our choice of new years, every year. We have more than one opportunity, every year, to have a sense of beginning anew, starting fresh, without being attached to one way, and one way only, of experiencing the passing of time. We have three or four new years, each year, to wake us  up, to remind us of the passing of time, to get our attention, to call us out of habit and routine, to become aware of the real situations in which we find ourselves, to become watchful in fact, to be ready for the unexpected, as Our Lord is telling us to do in today’s Gospel.

     As we know, there are two themes in the Advent season, Incarnation and the Second Coming. The Second Coming is called in the New Testament the Parousia, which means presence or arrival. Our Lord is telling us to be aware of his presence, of his continuous presence and future arrival. The 24th chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, which has a longer version of what we hear today in Mark’s Gospel,  is about signs of the end of the age, persecution to come, sacrilege to be suffered, false prophets and false messiahs to be avoided, and about the coming of the Son of Man, whose angels will gather his elect from the four winds. These are alarming signs and stern warnings. 

     It seems to me that, in telling us to keep awake, Our Lord is telling us not so much to be looking forward, anxiously or otherwise, to an unpredictable future event, as he is telling us to pay attention to present reality. “You do not know when the time will come,” is a way of saying, “You do not know when you will see the real nature of things; you do not know when the veil of routine, of ordinary daily life will fall away and you will see life, the world, in all their glory!” We have glimpses of this when we mark new year commemorations, and for a moment we see things afresh, and we begin again, and then the veil of routine returns. Our Lord refers to this in Matthew’s version of today’s Gospel, when he recounts the story of Noah’s Flood. Our Lord says, “Before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away.” Now the surface meaning of this passage is clear; it is a description of a catastrophic event of a  kind we know well, and of heedless people being swept away in a natural disaster. It is a description of the kind of thing that happens when we are not watchful. But there is more to this passage than its literal natural meaning.

    The passage does not have to mean only that a lot of heedless people were swept away and drowned. It can mean that the flood, that is, the power and presence of God, can sweep through the routines of life and clear them away, so that what is left is a new perception of life and the world. The Noah story is about just that, clearing away all that blocks our perception of the world as God sees it, and as God means us to see it. The world after Noah is a new Eden.  Our Lord calls this “the coming of the Son of Man.” Our Zen Buddhist friends call this “the falling away of body and mind,” that is, the falling away of all that blocks our perception of reality. And it is reality, divine reality in the world, that Our Lord wants us to wake up to.

     We are awake when we do not take the routines of life to be the whole of life. We are awake when we do not take superficial, partial explanations of reality for the whole of it. We are awake when we pay attention to Our Lord.

    So let us take the  opportunity given us by the arrival of this new church year, another new beginning, to shake off the slumber of routine, to prepare for the experience of reality as it truly is, and to be awake to the arrival at any time, of the coming of the Son of Man.

     “Be watchful! Be alert! You do not know when the time will come.” (29.XI.20 Adv.)

        

        

Rejoice (Philippians 4)

     “Rejoice in the Lord always. I shall say it again: rejoice! ...Have no anxiety at all, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God. Then the peace of God which surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” From Paul the Apostle’s Letter to the Philippians, chapter 4, verses 4 thru 7.

     In the Name.

     This Thanksgiving Day, November 26 in the Year of Our Lord 2020, is a year of pandemic, and a year of disturbing, dangerous politics. Here we are, between the end of one church year and the beginning of another. In this liminal space, in this in-between time, we are aware of the choices before us; political change is in the offing, we believe for the better. The promise of vaccines is making people more confident and relaxed; approaching political change is adding to this confidence. But, at the same time, medical and government authorities are telling us not to travel, not to gather, not to celebrate this occasion, this “Thanksgiving”. Millions of people are ignoring the advice of authorities, putting themselves and others at risk, and why? We so eagerly want this crisis, this plague to be over, so we can celebrate without worry. People gather and celebrate, thinking that that will end the crisis, by creating herd immunity, or some other magical solution. It’s very American, especially in this time of fake news and disinformation and blatant manipulation of social media and so on, to think that we can create any reality we like just by imagining it, and ignoring the reality we’re actually in. 

     Anyway, I don’t want to be too gloomy here. I want to turn to Paul the Apostle’s teaching, which is pertinent to our situation. “Rejoice in the Lord always!” he says. There are no exceptions to this instruction. “Always!” he says. “The Lord is near!” he says. In other words, the crises we’re experiencing are not the whole story; the Lord is present, he is bigger than these crises. We can rejoice because he is near. I don’t think that the instruction to “Rejoice” means “pretend to be happy when we’re not!” Paul goes on to tell us what this rejoicing is, and how to attain it. Rejoicing, in Paul’s understanding, is much deeper than that; it is not mere emotion, but awareness of divine presence, divine peace.

     “By prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests made known to God.” When we do that, our anxiety can drop away. By prayer to God, the Lord, who is near, we hand our anxiety over to him. That allows the “peace of God that surpasses all understanding” to flow into us. By prayer and petition we remove the blockage that prevents that peace from reaching us. And that peace surrounds, guards our “hearts and minds” That peace is the rejoicing that Paul is talking about. That peace “surpasses all understanding!” In other words, it is beyond human creation, beyond human limitations; it is divine. That peace, that rejoicing, that confidence, will enable us to recognize, to make right choices in the current crisis, make good decisions in the pandemic. Paul lists the right choices in the Letter to the Philippians: whatever is true, honorable, just, lovely, excellent, praiseworthy. All these become available, become visible, when we accept that the Lord is near, when we make our requests made known to God with thanksgiving.  “Rejoice in the Lord always. I shall say it again: rejoice! ...Have no anxiety at all.”

In the Name. Amen. (26.XI.20 Adv.)

Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25)

 

            Tonight’s sermon is about Jesus’ so-called Parable of the Talents. As we shall see, this is the wrong title. This is an extremely hard-nosed parable, showing Jesus’ in his most worldly, most financially acute, most psychologically penetrating mode. Let’s see if we can make sense of it.

            This is a subject for the end of the Christian year, which will be upon us in two weeks.         If you listen carefully to the Bible readings on Sunday morning, you have noticed that after All Saints Day (November 1), the church shifts into high gear. The  “long green season” is finally coming to its conclusion. The Scripture readings communicate a sense of urgency, so much so that many liturgically-minded scholars and church people think of Advent as seven Sundays, not just four. We’re already in this pre-Advent mode. Lessons  speak of the Last Days, the end-time. We can think of this as our own personal end, or we can think of it as the Last Judgment of the whole world, or both, because the Bible speaks of both. The year’s end puts us in mind of that future time when Christ “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.” Whether he comes tomorrow or a hundred millennia from now is not the important thing; entering into a new state of mind is what matters.

                                     The 25th chapter of Matthew is divided into three parts, one for each of three Sundays at the end of the church year. This Sunday is the Parable of the Talents. The Sunday after that is the Feast of Christ the King, the last day of the church year, and the reading is the Last Judgment. It takes fortitude to face up to these challenging passages.

            The idea of Jesus as the cosmic Judge is disturbing to most American Christians. We have not grown up with those Greek Orthodox mosaics of the Lord’s head looming over us in the domes of our churches. Those images show Christ as Pantokrator, Judge of the universe. Our American version of the faith is more likely to show Jesus holding a lamb, or a child. We’ve managed to domesticate our Lord’s parables as well. We tend to think of them as suitable for the children’s story hour. How can a gentle story-teller be also the present and future Arbitrator of the cosmos? This is an important question. Here’s what one New Testament scholar has to say:

Jesus used parables, and Jesus was put to death. The two facts are related…Why was this man crucified?…The parables must be understood as part of the drama. No one would crucify a teacher who simply told pleasant stories to enforce prudential morality…the parables are not harmless tales, but weapons of warfare.

            The weapon of warfare that we have before us today is the so-called Parable of the Talents. I think most of us who grew up with this parable thought it meant that people should use their God-given gifts and talents for the good of others. According to this version, God gives different abilities to each of us, and he expects us to use them wisely and generously.

This, however, is not what the story means. Nobody would be crucified for telling a story with a moral as inoffensive as that. When Jesus originally told this parable, and when the church re-told it later, it had a shocking impact. Matthew makes this particularly obvious, because he’s arranged his Gospel to put this parable into the section that dramatizes the intense confrontations between Jesus and the religious conservatives in the last week of Jesus’ life. Here’s the introductory setting. Jesus has been engaged in a three day battle to the death (literally) with the religious leaders in the Temple, and now he’s withdrawn with his disciples to the Mount of Olives. They ask him a question that seems very strange to us, but in Jesus’ time it was very much on people’s minds because they knew by heart the prophecies like that of Zephaniah.They ask, “What will be the signal for…the end of the world?” (J. B. Phillips translation) Jesus warns them in no uncertain terms to pay no attention to any predictions of the end; the important thing is to 

emain vigilant and faithful. “About the actual day and time, no one knows….only the Father…You must be on the alert, then, for you do not know when your master is coming” (Matthew 24:36, 42).  So the parable of the talents is closely related to the final judgment of the world by the arriving Kingdom of God. Next Sunday on the Feast of Christ the King, the last Sunday of the Christian year, we will hear Jesus’ own account of the Last Judgment.

      

As you can see, the master does not give out what we call “talents,” as in “gifts and talents.” The master gives out money. This parable is about money

We may call this “The Parable of the Money in Trust.”

            In the parable, Jesus assumes that his listeners know something about good business practice. The whole point of the master’s apportionment of the money was that it should be used to make more money. Jesus takes for granted that his hearers are going to understand this. Money is not just to sit there. It is meant to go to work. 

            “Some years later,” Jesus continues, “the master of these servants arrived and went into the accounts with them.” Now here comes the third servant.  “Sir, I always knew you were a hard man, reaping where you never sowed and collecting where you never laid out, so I was scared and I went and buried the $20,000 in  the ground. Here is your money intact.”

            What a craven statement this is! Instead of acknowledging the trust his master placed in him, he seeks to transfer the blame. “You are so demanding, you are so intimidating, you make me feel so inadequate.” The landowner is disgusted: Throw this useless servant out into the darkness outside!“

     Now this is interesting. We’ve gotten so tender-minded in the church that we worry about this poor servant and his fate. That’s not what our response is supposed to be. Remember, this parable depends on our understanding financial practices. We’re supposed to be thinking of a stock portfolio that we’ve turned over to an investment banker. That’s the correct reaction to the parable. We are supposed to understand that the third servant blew it. The shock of the story is not related to the fate of the third servant, because Jesus expects the disciples to agree with the judgment on him. The challenge in understanding the parable does not lie here. The offense lies somewhere else.

            This parable was told just a few days before Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion. In order to figure out why this parable, among others, would make people want to seek Jesus’ death, we need to look deeper. We need to figure out who the parable was directed against. Who, in the world of Jesus and his disciples, was like the third servant? Jesus told this parable against the powerful religious aristocracy of his day. All four Gospels tell us that this group found his teachings intolerable. Very early in Jesus’ ministry they began to see that many of his parables were directed against them. That was the reason that they began to plot his death.

            Jesus warns in the parable that God’s gifts must never be passively possessed. They may not be clutched, grasped, hoarded. That which the Lord gives must be put to work, must live, must increase and multiply. Personal and institutional security is not what God gives. 

God asks for servants who are ready to invest their resources in his cause. God asks for servants who are ready to extend themselves, to venture and to risk for the sake of the Master. The third servant never understood this. He apparently expected to be commended for his prudence and caution. 

        Jesus, however, is looking for a breakout. When God gives riches, he doesn’t give them to hoard and hide. He means for them to be put into action. God’s gifts are never to be passively possessed. They are to be put to work, spread around, made to increase and multiply. Jesus lets us know that the third servant’s timidity and lack of imagination are unacceptable. 

            What’s going to happen to the third servant? He’s going to miss all the fun, all the excitement. Listen again to the landowner as he praises the first two servants: I’m going to put you in charge of a lot more. Come into my house and celebrate with me!” Now that is classic end-of-the-world imagery. When the Bible talks about a celebration or a marriage feast, that means the Kingdom of God is near. God loves a party; the theme of God’s great everlasting banquet runs all through the Bible. This third servant is going to miss the party because he was afraid to trust the master’s commission.

                    For the sake of the Lord Jesus Christ, let us expend what he gives us so that it will increase. Let us fear nothing except the loss of meeting together to praise God for his salvation. Won’t it be wonderful when the last day comes and Jesus Christ on his throne says to us,

“Well done, good and faithful servants; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will make you rulers over many things; come and enter into the joy of your Lord.” (Matthew 25:21).

                                                                                                AMEN.