Sermon — November 19, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Like many of you, I sometimes wake up at night, troubled by important questions. Did I remember to reply to that email, or did I leave it as a draft? Should I buy a copy of Britney Spears’s new memoir, or should I just my name on the library waiting list? Is it possible that that the Revised Common Lectionary is past its prime? (You know. The big questions in life.)

For anyone who doesn’t know, the Revised Common Lectionary or RCL is the three-year cycle of readings that we follow on Sunday mornings. The lectionary was first created in the 1970s and 1980s and revised in the 1990s as a kind of inter-denominational project bringing together Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopal, Anglican, Presbyterian, and Methodist churches to settle on a common way of reading the Bible. We believe different things and pray in different ways, but on Sunday mornings, you can walk into any church of any one of these denominations, and you’ll probably hear the same readings from this shared sacred text that you’d hear down the street.

And this is great! Not only is it a nice form of ecumenical cooperation between churches, but it prevents preachers from inflicting the same small set of favorite readings on their churches over and over, and exposes us all, over the course of three years, to a wide breadth of selections from the Bible.

Sometimes too wide a breadth. I worry sometimes that the lectionary assumes that we’re living in a very different era of the church: an era when weekly church attendance was much higher, and most people who were in church on any given Sunday are there four Sundays a month. And it sometimes selects readings that make sense if you already have a developed faith and understanding of Christian theology and the narrative arc of the Bible, but otherwise just seem weird. Let’s be honest: Many of you here are regulars. But if you just walked in off the street, hoping for a little spiritual uplift on a sunny fall morning, hoping to hear some compassion and love in an often unkind word, and you heard that reading from Zephaniah about the coming day of wrath, would you not simply write off Christianity as a lost cause?

So I sometimes worry that the RCL is past its prime. 

But then, of course, the lectionary providentially assigns the Parable of the Talents on the day that turns out to be our Stewardship Ingathering Sunday, when people will make their annual pledges of financial support to the church, and pairs it with the fearsome prophet Zephaniah, and you all hear that “neither [your] silver nor [your] gold will be able to save you!” (Zeph. 1:18) So hand in your pledge cards, for “in the fire of his passion the whole earth shall be consumed!”

Let’s see the NPR Pledge Drive top that.

Seriously, though, this Parable of the Talents has often been read as a parable of stewardship, and it is. Not in the narrow sense of “stewardship” as in “annual church fundraising campaign,” but in the broader, theological sense of stewardship. Stewards, after all, are people who care for property that is not their own, people who are entrusted with something that they will ultimately give back.

Each of the three slaves in the parable is entrusted with a vast sum of money. A “talent” is a unit of measurement, of weight; one talent is a quantity of silver worth about 20 years’ wages for a laborer, something like $600,000 at today’s minimum wage. One enslaved steward is given $3 million by the enslaver before he heads off on a journey; he invests it for a 100% return. The second is given about a million, invests it, and doubles it as well. But the third is either very wise or very foolish: this one, fearing the wrath of the master, doesn’t risk losing the one talent he’s given by putting it into a high-risk, high-reward business venture. He buries it in the dirt, and when his enslaver returns, he gives it back: Here. This was your property. You entrusted it to me. Take what’s yours.

The returning master is not impressed. These other two had great success, he says. Maybe you don’t have their business acumen—he had given to each one of them, after all, according to each one’s ability—but couldn’t you at least have put it in the bank to keep it safe, and earned a bit of interest on top? And the third slave is cast out into the outer darkness, to weep and gnash his teeth, without a dental plan.

In the traditional reading, this preaches well. Each one of us has been given many gifts by God. We live by grace alone; we haven’t earned our lives, and we could never pay God back for the price of every day we’ve woken up and drawn a breath. We’ve been given a certain of time, and a certain amount of money. And we’ve been given certain talents; and the modern English sense of the word “talent” as a natural or God-given ability comes directly from this metaphorical reading of the parable. Our “talents” are the things God has entrusted to us, and we ought to use them, and use them well, in the service of God and our neighbors.

Put a bow on it and send it to the printers, Amen.

But I have a problem with that. Because while that sermon might preach well, on this Stewardship Sunday, I think it skips over of the most troubling parts of this morning’s texts, as if the preacher could simply razzle-dazzle you into forgetting how you felt after that reading from Zephaniah.

The third steward is right. The master is a “harsh man.” He reaps where his slaves sowed, and gathers where they scattered seed. He punishes him in a way that’s way out of proportion to the loss he suffered, which was exactly nothing, or an “opportunity cost” at most. And he’s not just a harsh man; he’s a bad manager. He failed to communicate to this third steward that he cared more about the upside than the down; that he’d be angrier at him for doing nothing with the talent than he would for losing it.

The lectionary committee, in their great wisdom, assigned this reading from Zephaniah to be paired with the reading from the gospel, because the day of the Lord described in Zephaniah is like the day on which these three men’s enslaver returned: “a day of wrath, a day of distress and anguish, a day of ruin and devastation, a day of darkness and gloom,” a day on which God will make “a terrible end…of all the inhabitants of the earth.” (Zeph. 1:15)

And here’s my problem: This doesn’t sound very much like the God I know. Or, to put it a different way: this doesn’t sound very much like the God who reveals himself in the life and death of Jesus Christ; a God who comes to earth, not to destroy us, but to be destroyed by us, and somehow, through that self-sacrifice, to save us.

The traditional reading assumes that the slaveowner is God, and the slaves are us, and there’s a whole other sermon in that. But Jesus doesn’t say that that’s how it is. Jesus sandwiches this parable between two others, without any explanation or interpretation, just the segue: “Likewise: a man was going on a journey…” We’re left wondering: is this a parable of how God behaves or a parable of how we behave? Is it God who punishes people for not making a sufficient profit, or is that us? I wonder how much the master in the story really tells us not about God, but about how we behave at our worst.

Jesus doesn’t answer: he just tells another parable, which is next week’s Gospel reading about how when you feed the hungry, and clothe the naked, and visit those who are in prison, you’re feeding, and clothing, and caring for him; and how it’s our stewardship of the poor, and the naked, and the hungry that determines whether we’re exalted in the kingdom of heaven or not.

The day of the Lord may be a day of darkness for Zephaniah’s listeners, seven hundred years before Christ. But “you, beloved, are not in darkness,” Paul says. (1 Thess. 5:4) Because between that prophesied day and you, Jesus came, and the story didn’t unfold the way we expected. Jesus came, not with a sword in his hand, but with love in his heart. And he gave us spiritual armor, a “breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation.” (1 Thess. 5:8) He gave us the assurance that we are loved and that we are being saved, whether we use our talents well or not; because when Jesus came, he died for us, he died in our place, “so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live with him.” (5:10)

So use your talents well! Be good stewards of what you have! Not because you’re afraid of being punished by God if you don’t. But because you aren’t afraid of anything. Because there is no risk. Because everything you have has been given to you by God, not as an investment, and not as a reward, but as a gift of love, given to you so that you might love as well. And when we our “seventy years” are passed—“perhaps in strength even eighty”—and we “fade away like the grass” (Ps. 90:10, 5), God will welcome us in, and say to us, talented and talentless alike, “come into the joy of your master.”

Sermon — November 12, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

If there’s one thing I’ve learned while homeschooling a kindergartner whose tastes lean toward the spookier elements of the spooky season, it’s that if you’re going to teach out of an early-elementary curriculum on ancient history, you need to have a strong stomach and a good sense of humor; a graduate education in religious studies doesn’t hurt.

Take, for instance, the case of Ammit the Devourer. The ancient Egyptians, our textbook tells us, believed that after they died, people journeyed to the underworld, in a process that inspired the practices of mummification and pyramid-building that most of us have heard of. At the climax of the journey, they reached the Hall of the Two Truths, where the dog-headed god Anubis would bring them to a set of scales. The heart of the person who had died would be weighed against a feather as a measure of their purity and righteousness. If their heart weighed less than the feather, they passed on into blessed eternal life. If their heart weighed more than the feather, then it would be handed over to be eaten by Ammit the Devourer, a ferocious demon with the head of a crocodile, the body of a lion, and the rear end of a hippopotamus.

(Like I said: equal parts strong stomach and sense of humor required.)

Most religions contain a balance between the inspirational and the gruesome, and it seems to me that our readings today contain more than a hint of that Ammit-the-Devourer side of religiosity. Did you hear it in the readings? Can you hear it in the music? Daylight Saving Time ends, and suddenly the hymns are in minor keys, it’s dark in the middle of the afternoon, and our lectionary readings are full of doom and gloom! It’s as though the season of Advent has already started, even though it’s still a few weeks away. The liturgical themes of this time are unsettling and sometimes surprising: in the weeks leading up to Christmas, our readings anticipate not the “First Coming” of the cute baby Lord Jesus to lie in a manger, but the much more ominous “Second Coming,” in which he “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.”

It’s this day of the coming of the Lord that unites our readings today. We began with the prophet Amos warning the people of Israel against looking forward too eagerly to the coming day of judgment. You want God to return and save you from your enemies, Amos asks the people, judging the world and destroying the unjust? “Alas for you!” You’re trading a fearsome enemy for a God who’s even more frightening! “Why do you want the day of the Lord? It is darkness, not light; as if someone fled from a lion, and was met by a bear,” (Amos 5:18-20)— with the head of a crocodile, you might be moved to add, and the bottom of a hippopotamus! Amos certainly has that Ammit-the-Devourer vibe. And he goes on to explain. He condemns the people for their injustice. God doesn’t want their sacrifices and songs; God wants justice and righteousness, and they are sorely lacking. And that’s why the day of the coming of the Lord will be gloom for them: an unjust people, Amos says, should not be so eager for God to come and judge their enemies, because they will be judged as well, and found sorely lacking.

The apostle Paul offers a more uplifting take on the “coming of the Lord.” By the time that Paul writes to the Christians of Thessalonica, it’s been a couple decades since Jesus died and rose again. They believed that Jesus was going to come again soon, to achieve his final victory in this world, and yet it hadn’t happened yet. And even worse, some of that first generation of Christians had themselves died before the Lord’s return. Paul reassures the Thessalonians that their hope has not been in vain. Jesus hasn’t come back yet, but he will come, Paul says; and those who have died will not be left out of the kingdom. They too will be raised. It may be hard for us to wrap our heads around, two thousand years later and still waiting for Jesus to return, but this was a very real concern for the first Christians. But Paul foretells a trumpet’s blast and an archangel’s call, the dead descending from the heavens and the living rising up to meet them in the clouds. The day of the Lord, for Paul, will be a day of reunion and celebration, and we do not need to worry if it seems like it isn’t coming soon enough.

And then Jesus gives us a middle way between the frightening vision of Amos and the hopeful vision of Saint Paul, with a parable about ten bridesmaids: five foolish, five wise; all staying up late into the night to wait for the groom, and all eventually falling asleep. At midnight when the groom arrives, the foolish have no oil for the lamps; the wise have oil but will not share. And so while the foolish run down to 7-Eleven to stock up, the wise bridesmaids and the groom go into the wedding feast together, and shut the door behind them. (Matthew 25:1-12) The five foolish bridesmaids are left out in the darkness, where—as Jesus says often in the Gospel of Matthew, although not in this passage—“there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Matt. 8:12, 22:13, 25:30, et al) At least they’re not the teeth of Ammit the Devourer. But this is a rather grim vision from Jesus, nevertheless, and it closes with a warning: “Keep awake, for you know neither the day nor the hour.” (Matthew 25:13)

Amos warns the people not to pray for God’s judgment, because they’re going to be judged by it. Paul encourages the people to remain faithful, because the day of the Lord going to be even better than they thought. And Jesus tells us that it all depends: Did you have oil for your lamp?

I wonder, though, whether Jesus’ parable is as stark as it may seem.

Why is it that the five foolish bridesmaids are left out in the dark? Is it because they’re bad people and the wise bridesmaids are good people? There’s no indication of that. If the wise bridesmaids were particularly virtuous, maybe they would’ve shared. Is this a parable of decadence and luxury—did the five foolish bridesmaids burn up all their oil partying late into the night? No, not at all. In fact, they never brought any oil to begin with. Foolishness, in the parable, consists of showing up to wait for the groom, and thinking that he’ll arrive before sunset. Wisdom is being prepared to wait.

It’s foolishness, in other words, to expect that this great day of the coming of the Lord is going to arrive any time soon; and wisdom to expect God to show up when you’ve already gone to sleep. It’s foolishness to act as the Israelites did in Amos’s day, and allow injustice to fester because God was coming soon to make it right. But it’s also foolishness to worry, as the Thessalonians did in Paul’s day, that God won’t be able to make things right for us in the end, whatever’s happened and however long it’s been. Jesus tells us that we know neither the day nor the hour, and that saying encompasses this tension: we ought to live every day as if it might be our last; and yet to say it might be means that it might not.

Maybe you have a strained relationship with someone, and that relationship needs to heal. And maybe you’ve been putting off that difficult conversation, because it’s hard, and there will always be time for it later. But you know neither the day nor the hour! You may never have the chance to say the things that need to be said. Or maybe you’re in a “grass is greener” mode, where you’re putting in your time now doing something hard, and hoping and yearning for better days ahead. But you know neither the day nor the hour! Those days of greener grass may never come, and it’s a reminder, to me, to try to live in a way that’s satisfying now, and not to push happiness off to a future that may never arrive.

But in the end, here’s the thing: we live in the world of Paul, not Amos. We live in the hope of the Resurrection, not in the fear of judgment. If the world ends tomorrow, and you haven’t made amends—if your father or sister or friend died long ago, and you were never reconciled—you’ll be okay. Because we do not believe in Ammit the Devourer. We do not believe that God is coming to judge you harshly. In fact, in Jesus, God already came to us, and we judged God, and God was devoured by death—and found to be indigestible, and gave Death a stomachache so bad that one day we will rise with him again, and be reunited with Christ and one another, and that there will be time for all the things we never had the chance to say.

So “keep awake,” remembering that you know neither the day nor the hour. And “let justice roll down like waters,” remembering that there’s no time to lose. But be encouraged, always, with the Resurrection hope that you do not have to make it all right, in this life: that all things will be made well, in this world or the next, because God loves you with a love that’s stronger than any crocodile’s jaws. Amen.

Sermon — November 5, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“Beloved, we are God’s children now;
what we will be has not yet been revealed.” Amen.
(1 John 3:2)

You know that I love languages, English and otherwise. Clever wordplay, etymological trivia, puns; these things bring me really unbelievable amounts of joy. Some of you heard me expostulate just a few weeks ago on the distinction between “continuous” and “continual” in something C.S. Lewis had written; and yet I don’t get invited to parties very much…

English is full of odd little pairs like “continuous” and “continual,” in which changing a single syllable changes the meaning in a very precise way. (For those who don’t know, something is continuous if it forms an unbroken whole, without interruption; it’s continual if it occurs again and again, but with breaks in between.) But sometimes there are examples that are even better. Sometimes you get two words in which the literal meanings are exactly the same, but the connotations are completely different.

All of which is to say: “Beloved, we are God’s children now” — at our best, we’re childlike, and at our worst, we’re childish, and they are not the same thing. When we say “childlike,” of course, we evoke all the joy and innocence of childhood: the infant’s wonder at seeing their first piece of bark, the toddler’s excitement to go out playing in the snow, the inexplicable ability some elementary schoolers have to memorize details of paleontology known otherwise only to PhDs.

The Beatitudes, these words of blessing Jesus says to the crowd in the Gospel reading today, are the manifesto of a childlike faith. What is more blessed than being “poor in spirit,” holding adult possessions lightly but being rich in wonder and joy? Who are more blessed than “the meek,” who hide shyly behind a parent’s legs until you ask them about the firetrucks on their shirts? Who hungers and thirsts for righteousness more than the playground rules-enforcers, who insist that every child has a turn. (You know who you are, and we love you for it.) We adult Christians are at our best, Jesus says, when our lives are characterized by childlike simplicity, and innocence, and justice.

When we say “childish,” though, we mean the other side of children’s nature. The toddler’s refusal to allow any other child at the park to touch that toy, even though they don’t actually want to play it themselves. The preschooler’s hunger and thirst for more candy, from more houses, long after bedtime has come and gone. The older child’s self-confidence that they alone, and fourth graders like them, know anything about the world, and you know absolutely nothing, Mom.

And of course, we don’t blame children for being this way. (Well, sometimes we do. But we shouldn’t.) When a child is filled with childlike joy, we can rejoice with them. But when the same child, moments later, fills with childish rage, well… for a child to be childish is pretty much what you should expect, at least linguistically speaking.

In just a few minutes, we’ll welcome three more children into the Church through the sacrament of Holy Baptism. Abby and Nora and Bo will be formally adopted as children of God; they will become full members of the Body of Christ. They will become saints, in the oldest and best and most Biblical sense, members of the holy people of God, as when Paul called the members of all the local churches “the saints”; “for the saints of God are just folk like me,” as the hymn goes, “and I mean to be one too.”

But sanctity isn’t perfection, and we’re not perfect people. Billy Joel is right about many things, but he’s wrong about this. We don’t get to choose whether we want to “laugh with the sinners” or “cry with the saints,” because we are all mixed, every one of us. There is no child who is so childlike that they are never childish. And this is true for all of us, adults and children alike. The mixedness of our nature doesn’t change over time; the stakes just get higher, and we remain children at heart.

You may be a parent or a grandparent, a beloved uncle or aunt, teacher, mentor or friend. You may be wise; you’re almost certainly wiser than me. But in God’s eyes, every one of us is still like a little child; and in our more childish moments, we all sometimes act our age.

I don’t mean this as an insult! I mean it as an invitation to empathy, for one another and for yourselves. None of us ever become perfect, fully-formed adults in this world. We are all still growing up, still children of God, through our whole lives. And what a relief. God looks on our childishness like we look on theirs: with frustration, maybe; with impatience, sometimes; but ultimately, more than anything, with love.

“Beloved,” St. John writes, “we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.” Every one of us is, already now, a beloved child of God, valued and cherished beyond anything we could imagine. And every one of us is being transformed, growing into a maturity so incredible that its nature has not yet been revealed. Together, day by day, we grow together toward life in the world that Jesus describes in the Beatitudes, toward a world of righteousness, and mercy, and peace.

Today, Abby and Nora and Bo join a “great multitude…from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages,” (Revelation 7:9) who are being slowly drawn toward the God who loves them now and who love them all their lives. May God give them, and all of us, the grace to love in return; to serve God and our neighbors; to be patient with every childish moment and to share in every childlike joy.

Amen.