Sermon — November 22, 2020

The Rev. Greg Johnston

A few weeks after I started here, a parishioner from my old church in Lincoln passed away. It wasn’t a tragic death; she died in her home at the age of 99, surrounded by family, at the end of a long and, in fact, heroic life. I say “heroic” because that’s what she was: a hero.

I had only learned this the year before, when she was presented with a Congressional Gold Medal at the age of 98, but Patricia Warner, three quarters of a century before I knew her, had once been a spy. In 1942, her husband—a naval officer—had been killed in combat in the Second World War. Patricia, aged twenty-two, promptly headed to a Navy recruiting office to join up. On learning that the Navy didn’t take widows, she turned to a younger, scrappier service: the newly-formed Office of Strategic Services, OSS—America’s first modern spy agency.

During the war, she was stationed in Spain, where she helped smuggle downed American and British air crews out of occupied France. When Allied airplanes were shot down over Europe, the Belgian and French Resistance would try to rescue any survivors, hide them, and bring them through a kind of underground railroad all the way to the Spanish border. Then British and American agents could transport them through Spain to the British base at Gibraltar and bring them home. Spain remained neutral during the war, but its leader was a dictator sympathetic to the German cause, and it was full of German military and intelligence officers.

So Pat went undercover as a flamenco dancer, gathering information on German activities and recruiting friendly agents to the Allied cause, sending Morse code from her apartment and arranging for submarines to pick up downed fighter pilots off the coast.

Now I tell you all this, not just because it’s a cool story, and not just because I once applied for an internship to be a CIA analyst—I was rejected—but because this is, in a sense, exactly what we Christians are: spies embedded deep behind enemy lines.

This Sunday morning, the last Sunday after Pentecost, the last Sunday before a new liturgical year begins in Advent, is often called the feast of “Christ the King.” It’s a fairly recent feast, as far as church calendars go. The Pope only created it in 1925, soon after Mussolini’s rise to power in Italy. In the face of a rising tide of fascism, the Church emphasized the struggle between two kinds of kingdom: the empires of the world, with their values of power, wealth, and domination, and their bombastic, demagogic dictators; and the kingdom of God, with its values of compassion, love, and peace, and its self-sacrificing ruler, Christ the King. The feast of Christ the King stands at the transition between two great seasons of the Church: the season of Advent, when we quietly await the arrival of Jesus our newborn King, the Messiah, the Prince of Peace; and the long season after Pentecost, when we recognize that Christ still lives and reigns in the Church, and we seek to follow him and obey.

The kingdom of Christ is a kingdom that’s both “now and not yet.” We proclaim that that little baby who lay in a manger two thousand years ago was and is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords; yet we know as well that his kingdom is incomplete. We believe that God will come to set the world aright; yet we can see clearly that it hasn’t happened yet.

Christ’s reign over the earth is something like the French government-in-exile during World War Two. It was the legitimate government of France; there were French citizens who obeyed it, served it, gave their lives for it; but its land was occupied by a hostile foreign power. And while it was a true that a climactic moment of liberation was going to come, for years people did their best to live faithfully deep behind enemy lines—maybe with the help of the occasional spy.

Today’s Gospel reading shows us this conflict between the kingdoms of the world and the kingdom of God. Jesus returns in glory and separates the sheep from the goats, the righteous from the unrighteous, and he uses a simple test. It’s not whether they call themselves Christians or Jews, Hindus, Muslims, or atheists. It’s not whether they’re active members of their local church. It’s not even whether they’re upstanding and well-respected citizens. It’s whether they gave food to the hungry, and drink to the thirsty; whether they welcomed the stranger and clothed the naked, tended the sick and visited the imprisoned, because, Christ the King says, “just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25:40) Whether they knew it or not, when these sheep were caring for one another, they were meeting Jesus face to face. The same Christ who becomes present in the Eucharistic bread and wine becomes present in people who are sick or hungry or locked behind bars. And woe to us, the ancient Christians used to preach, when we clothe the Body of Christ in silver and fine silk in the Church and bow down in awe, while we leave his Body hungry in the street and turn away our eyes while he asks us for something to eat.

If this is what the kingdom of God looks like, then it seems clear that we’re not living in it yet. Despite our best efforts, we do not manage to feed all those who are hungry, and to clothe all those who are naked, let alone to care for all those who are sick or in prison. And we do display that hypocrisy that honors Christ’s body in the Church and ignores it in the streets; at least most of us do, at least much of the time.

But God is coming back to set things right. And that’s the real story here. The kingdom of God is not just a set of ideals or values that we ought to follow. It’s a real kingdom, it’s a real government; it’s in exile now, but it’s going to return in force. This is what the “shepherd” imagery of the prophet Ezekiel is all about. “Shepherd” was a common image for a king, who leads and guides and cares for the people like a flock. And, God says, after generations of human kings have failed to care for their people, “I myself will search for my sheep, and seek them out… I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep… and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak… I will feed them with justice.” (Ezekiel 34:11, 15-16) It’s this “coming again” to lead the sheep, this “coming in glory” with “all the angels” (Matthew 25:31) to “restore all things,” that we await in Advent. It’s the D-Day of the Christian story, the final liberation that will end with the kingdom of peace, and love, and justice, the kingdom of God that feeds the hungry and heals the sick, finally ruling the world.

But that day has not yet come. We’re left here in this world, like a bunch of spies, living in a hostile kingdom, but doing our best to help our cause. We can’t liberate France all on our own. We can’t feed all the hungry on our own. We can’t end the pandemic on our own. Those victories are up to forces beyond our control. But we can feed a few people who are hungry. We can visit a few people who are imprisoned. We can slow the virus enough so that just a few fewer people might be sick and die. These little differences will never be enough to change the world. But to one person, from one person, they can mean everything.

So here we are, spies for the kingdom of God, living subversively as agents of God’s love in an often-unloving world, slowly chipping away at the reign of cruelty, violence, and destruction until—one day—our God returns to reign. We don’t know when that final victory will come, and we’ll see Christ returning in glory; but we do know when we can see him walking among us now, because he’s told us where to look.

So where, O undercover Christian, have you seen Christ this week without knowing it? Where have you seen someone hungry, for food or for meaning, and how could you feed them? Where have you seen someone thirsty, for water or for God, and how can you give them something to drink? Where have you seen someone sick or imprisoned, in body, mind, or spirit, and how can you give them relief? Because this is our mission while we’re here behind enemy lines: to seek out our neighbors when they need us and to help, to smuggle them out of the kingdom of this world and into the kingdom of God’s love—and there, in them, to meet our Lord and God. For “Truly I tell you,” Jesus says, “just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25:40) Amen.

Sermon — November 15, 2020

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Last week, Alice and I took advantage of an earlier-than-usual bedtime to play a hard-earned game of Scrabble. Toward the end of the game, I struck gold. As I pulled a handful of letters out of the bag, they looked awfully familiar. After a few seconds, I rearranged them to form one perfect, seven-letter word: “MISSION.” And then I sat and stared at the board for what felt like about fifteen minutes, trying to find the perfect place where I could play the whole word at once. All I needed was one common open letter: an E and I’d have EMISSION, an O and I’d have OMISSION, an S and I could play MISSIONS. I was so dedicated to finding the perfect place to play my perfect word that I spent several turns making little one-letter moves, playing one of my S-es and hoping I’d eventually be able to use the rest.

Then Alice played “HE” across and I could finally play “EMISSION” all the way down to a triple-word. 80 points! And the crowd goes wild! Granted, this involved some cheating. In other words, I told Alice I needed an open E, and she obliged. If we had followed the rules of Scrabble, I never would have played the word; I would have just wasted turn after turn waiting for that perfect moment. (Luckily, we’re both so competitive about Scrabble that we don’t keep score any more, and we’re both perfectionists, so we tend to work cooperatively toward the end to use up all our letters.)

So maybe, Scrabble perfectionist that I am, I understand this third servant’s fear when he buries his talent in the ground.

This parable is tricky, because it’s become so much a part of our culture that we take its meaning for granted. A typical interpretation goes something like this: God has given you many blessings in this life, among them your personal talents. If you put them to use, you’ll be rewarded. But if you bury your talents in the ground—if, to borrow a phrase from another saying of Jesus, you “hide your light under a bushel” (Matthew 5:15)—well, God won’t be so pleased.

This understanding of the parable is where our English word “talent” comes from, not the other way around; people have assumed for so long that the parable is about our innate skills and abilities that we’ve started calling these things “talents,” after the parable. Originally, a talent wasn’t a skill; it was a unit of measurement, of weight; the “talents” in this story are huge chunks of silver worth around fifteen years’ wages for an ordinary worker. What the servants have been entrusted with in this story are those literal talents, those blocks of precious metal. The master in this parable goes off on a journey and hands over his incredible wealth to his slaves: decades’ worth of their salaries, to be guarded until the boss returns. This was normal in the ancient world. Unlike modern American slaves, Roman slaves often occupied roles in their masters’ household like butler, or teacher, or, well… wealth manager. Now, two of these slaves pursue what seem to be almost reckless strategies, throwing the whole principal into what turn out to be successful investments, and receiving huge rewards. The third takes an approach that seems at first to be entirely reasonable; afraid to lose this huge wealth entrusted to him, he hides it as best he can. If the first two servants could be said to be a bit reckless, this third is clearly fearful. He seems to be so risk-averse, so afraid of failure, that he precludes the possibility of success. And that’s one way of preaching this sermon.

But even more than fear, he starts from a place of misunderstanding. Because he was not afraid, as I was in my Scrabble game, that he was going to miss the big opportunity to invest this talent in the right thing. And he wasn’t even quite afraid that he would lose this wealth that his master had entrusted him to keep safe. When he explains his fear, he doesn’t say either of these things. He says, “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.” (Matthew 25:24-25) He calls the master a kind of thief, harvesting the fruits of others’ labor, reaping where he didn’t sow and gathering where he didn’t scatter seed. He seems to think, in other words, that the talent is rightfully his.

So this third servant’s fear is complicated. He’s not only afraid that thieves will come and snatch away what he’s been given in trust. He’s not only afraid that he’ll invest this talent in the wrong way, and miss out on some better opportunity, or even worse, lose the whole thing. He’s also afraid to face the fact that it isn’t his; that he’s not its ultimate and rightful owner, but only a temporary steward.

This, I think, is the key to the parable of the talents. It’s not about how to offer something to God and to the world with the talents we possess. It’s about how to be good stewards of the things God has entrusted to us.

“Stewardship” is one of those words that has become an unfortunate shorthand in the Church. We’ve turned it into a term of art, so that “stewardship” has come to mean the pledge drive that happens in the fall, and the “stewardship committee”—if the chair is lucky enough to have a committee—is the group who organize it. This is important work, and pledges are an important commitment; but this is only a fraction of what “stewardship” means. Every one of us is a member of the stewardship committee; every week of the year is part of stewardship season.

And I don’t just mean that you should pay your pledge every week.

“Stewardship,” after all, is the state of being a good steward, of being like one of those “good and trustworthy” servants who, entrusted with great wealth, built up what they’d been given and then gave it up when their lord returned. Our stewardship certainly includes the practices of giving money to the church and to the poor, but it’s broader than that. It’s not about what we give to God from what we have; it about what we do with what God’s given us. To be a good steward, the parable seems to say, is to recognize that all that we have, and all that we are is a gift from God; and not our own. That gives us some freedom, and some responsibility. We are free to take risks, to think big, to be bold, because ultimately, we’re playing with God’s money. We’re not free to do whatever we want with our bodies or our fellow human beings, with our earth or with our wealth; we’re not free to claim them for our own and hide them from our God, to abuse them or exploit them or try to possess them.

But we can put our talents to work to grow and multiply. We can put our money to work, giving to organizations that are loving our neighbors. We can put our bodies to work, baking pies or shoveling neighbors’ sidewalks or marching in the streets. We can put our earth to work, cultivating and tending it like a garden, not using and polluting it as though we can throw it away when we’re done.

This practice of good stewardship isn’t something we do for the church, on a pledge card, once a year. It happens every day, everywhere, at every moment when we face the choice between cultivation and exploitation, between sharing what we have and hiding it away—at every moment when we make the choice to act in love, as we walk ever closer those precious final words: “Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.” (Matthew 25:21 KJV) Amen.