sermon

Years ago, I had a conversation about God with an acquaintance who later became a friend. My friend was an alcoholic who had finally gotten sick and tired of being sick and tired, and he had become ready – as people in recovery will say – ‘to give up the high cost of low living’ and started going to AA meetings. And at these meetings, he heard people talking about their ‘Higher Power’ whom they chose to call God. He heard people say, “If you don’t have a Higher Power, you need to get one.” They said if at first, it’s not God, don’t worry, for now it can be your sponsor or it can be the sky you look up at at night or it can just be the group – anything bigger than you are. But get one.

My friend said, “I know I need a Higher Power to stay sober, but I don’t believe in God.” And then he talked about the God he didn’t believe in. He described God as being harsh and far away and judgmental, and ready to punish him for just being human. I said, “Well I don’t believe in that God either.”

He didn’t know it, but his description of God was right in line with the description of the Third Servant in the Parable of the Talents we just heard. Remember, he says, “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…” I don’t know where my friend got his idea of what God is like. I don’t know where the Third Servant got his idea of what the Master is like either. All we know is that the Master said, “I’m going away and won’t be back for a while. So, while I’m away, I’m entrusting you and the others with everything that’s mine, all my property. So, here’s a talent for you to use and take care of while I’m away.”

Many sermons have been preached about this talent describing it as an ability you’ve been given, like painting or singing or an ability to read the financial markets well. But that’s not what the word that Jesus used meant. It meant a sum of money. In fact, a lot of money. When Jesus first told this parable, a talent was roughly equal to the amount of money a regular worker would earn in 15 years; a really unimaginably large amount of money. If you used the median income in the U.S. from the 2020 Census and multiplied that by 15 that would be $1,035,315. The point is, he gave his three servants everything he had – all his property – to use and take care of while he was away. And it was a lot. It was all he had.

I don’t know about you, but I might be afraid about that, too. What do you do with something that big? The odds feel pretty high that you could mess it up.

My father-in-law purchased a new computer and a printer for me to take with me to seminary. He said, “You’re going to need these.” This was 1990 and the computer and printer together cost almost $5,000. Could the use I would get out of them, could anything I could possibly accomplish with them, be worth that much?! I thought it was way too much. But he’d said, “I want to do this for you because you’re going to need them.” He had more faith in me than I did. I remember thinking of him when I sat down to start working on one of my first paper and thinking, “OK, not sure it’s worth all this but here we go!”

We’re coming to the end of the Church Year and every year we’re given three Gospel readings to prepare us for Advent and a new beginning that lies just ahead of us – as brand new and unimaginably fresh as a brand-new baby. Last week, Harrison preached beautifully on the first of these three Gospels and next week, we’ll hear Jesus’ great vision of the separating the sheep and the goats at the end of all things. Along with today’s Gospel, all three of these readings ask us to lift up our heads (maybe from the latest alert on our phones) and look down the line a little and to think about the future and what’s out there. How do you think about the future? Where are we headed? Which in the short-term in our lives is pretty unsettling because it feels a little dicey. Where are we headed? Are things going to get worse – more contentious, more angry, more violent? How does this time we’re in end – with a whimper or a bang? Do we just buckle down and get through this, circle the wagons, hope for less, put that ‘still small voice’ speaking in our souls on hold with its words of forgiveness and justice and mercy and peace till things calm down a little? When the world goes temporarily ‘to the dogs’, what do cats do till all the woofing ends? If it ends?

All the commentators on this passage wonder about the same things. But they all agree that that’s why this passage is such a precious word for us. This word sees further and deeper that this present moment. We have been given a gift as great as the one described in this parable, almost beyond being able to count. You, we have been given a life that God sees as eternally precious, born from God’s own loving gift of creation and bound for love at the end. In the meantime, we are now, already, citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven, our true home. And Jesus says that God’s Kingdom is among you now because he is among us now, here and there, now and again, like yeast growing secretly in the dough, signposts of grace to light the world on its way home to God. It’s worth risking everything for – not burying in the ground because we’re afraid.

Sometimes I think our lives are like parables – signs that the future Kingdom of Heaven is already among us. Like this one. The Kingdom of Heaven is like a group of people who went out to plant 3,000 daffodil bulbs so that in the spring the beauty of God’s work would be there for all to see and a sign that God’s grace still abides. Some wondered if it cost too much to get that many bulbs. Some wondered if there were so many bulbs that maybe they wouldn’t all get into the ground and the unplanted bulbs might dry out and wither and be wasted. But then many people showed up so that there were enough and more than enough to get the job done. Some bulbs were planted expertly at just the right depth. Some less so. Some were planted in good soil. And some in not such good soil. But they were all planted. That happened here at St. Mary’s a week ago. We’ll have to wait to see what God will do with this. But I’m glad we did it. I hope we keep planting seeds of the Kingdom with our lives, acting from love and not fear, giving and receiving forgiveness, trusting that the future belongs to God no matter how much the world seems to have gone to the dogs.

Dear friends, we – God’s Church on earth – have been given a great gift. Like the servants in the parable, we have been given all that God has – the promise that God’s Son, the Lord Christ, has laid down his life for us to bring us all home. Apparently, he has more faith in us than we do. Still, God’s grace abides, and the Kingdom is among you now. Amen.

The Rev. David H. May + 

When I was a kid, we went to church every Sunday at Church of the Redeemer Episcopal Church. Back then, it was a newly planted church located on Chippenham Road. Three and sometimes four Sundays a month the liturgy was Morning Prayer. But the first Sunday of the month was always ‘Communion Sunday.’ To me, that mostly only meant that church was going to be long, sometimes lasting over an hour. For that reason, I didn’t like ‘Communion Sunday.’ But I do have other memories of ‘Communion Sunday’ that have stayed alive – so alive that they are something more than just memories. They are signs that grace must’ve happened, somehow. That, God, the real thing, had drawn near and changed us, that what is within you is not just a memory, but God’s abiding presence.

Well, when I was growing up, kids didn’t go up to the altar for Communion. We couldn’t do that until we’d been confirmed by the bishop at age 11 or 12. So, as kids, we just sat in our pews until the adults had all communed. And here’s what I remember so clearly about that. It was the smell of the wine the people had received on their breath. First it was faint, coming from the first rows of pews in front of me. But it gradually grew stronger as the people going up for communion came closer to our pew and then it was our pew and then the pew behind us, until you were surrounded by this scent. I didn’t really know what was going on up there at the communion rail. I really didn’t. But I did know that after you went up there, there was this scent, as if you had been – I don’t know – perfumed by God, that while you were up there at the rail, maybe you had come so close to God that his scent was on you. That’s what I thought was happening. You had come close to God – not a metaphor or a symbol or a memory or anything else – but the real thing, God. Sort of like when your uncle who wears way too much cologne hugs you and you smell like him for the rest of the day. Well, I thought that something like that was happening when people went up for Communion. They had come into contact with God and carried that contact, carried something of God away with them. They had come face to face with the real thing, and it had changed them.

A few years ago, I watched a child take a sip from the chalice one Sunday morning. When the wine landed on her tongue, you could see her tastebuds sending a hurricane of messages to her brain. It must’ve been the first time she had sipped wine from the cup. Her face contorted into this wild kind of expression including the little girl trying to get her tongue as far away from her mouth as possible. She turned to her mother and said, “It’s real wine!” Her mom, of course, gave her daughter a mortified shoosh and then buried her face in her hands muttering, “O God, O God, O God, O God!” Her daughter tugged at the sleeve of her mom’s dress saying, “Mom! It’s real!!”

That child, experiencing the real thing, was both so excited and also sort of so terrified all at the same time. Because what would the real thing do to her?! Would she become instantly giddy or sick to her stomach? Had she trespassed into the mysterious and powerful realm of the big people too soon? Was it going to change her in some way she couldn’t imagine? For sure, I could identify with the mom as she gathered up her daughter and tried to make it back to her pew as far under the radar as possible. The mom skulking, the daughter skipping and smacking her lips loudly and going ahhhh! But honestly, I also found myself wishing we could all experience the same sort of breathtaking exaltation and clarifying terror of knowing we are in the presence of the real thing. And that when we walk away, the scent of God is on us, a holiness clinging to us that we would carry with us everywhere we went.

I read a piece by a religious and social critic a few years ago that has stayed with me. It’s a little cranky but I’ll share it anyway. He wrote, “The Church drives me crazy! We approach the altar at church like it’s a TV tray … That altar is the altar of the Living God. We should approach as if we were walking up to a nuclear reactor with its awesome power open and exposed and dangerous, threatened to be changed by the sheer power of God’s ferocious [holy love, irradiating us so that we go away from there changed]” by the real thing.

The Pharisee and the Herodian whom we hear from today in the Gospel reading may have been as narrow-minded in their focus and small in their imagination as any of us who are just trying to get kids fed and bills paid and just somehow survive from day to day. But we do them a disservice if we assume that they didn’t get Jesus. They may not have been clear on all the details, but they knew that he was the real thing. He was just as dangerous to them and to the world as they wanted it as a nuclear reactor core, and they knew it.

When they sipped in his words, it was not a bland beverage they tasted. It was the real thing. What else but the real thing could threaten them enough to put the Pharisees and the Herodians arm-in-arm against Jesus. Let’s just say they weren’t exactly natural allies. The Pharisees thought of the Herodians as sell-outs and compromisers, appeasers who didn’t really believe in anything beyond holding onto power by cutting dirty deals with the hated Roman occupiers. The Herodians thought that the Pharisees were self-righteous, moralistic conservatives who didn’t understand that in the real world sometimes you just have to shave corners to keep everything from coming unglued.

And lately, Jesus has been exposing the littleness of their lives. He has been drawing back the heavy curtains and letting the light of God’s holy love bring into the light both the good of who they wish they could be and the bad of who they all too often end up being. And they react the way any of us would – they want to stop him. Which is where this question of paying taxes to the emperor comes from. It’s supposed to be a trap, a ‘gotcha’ question. And whether this got him in trouble with the Roman rulers or the common folk made no real difference to them. He just had to be stopped.

But the question they cook up for him falls flat. For starters, Jesus shows that they are the ones carrying around Caesar’s money, not him. They are the ones who had the emperor’s image in their pockets, not him. His words, ‘render to God what is God’s’ left them to examine their own hearts, which is not what they came to Jesus for. They had come face to face with the real thing and they didn’t want any part of it.

“Render to God what is God’s,” Jesus says.

Since at least the second century, interpreters of this passage have said that the coin of the realm in question to be rendered is not the denarius or the dollar. Do you know what it is? It is you. You bear God’s image. You bear God’s image on you like the scent of wine, God’s holy love clinging to you; so we have everything we need to God what is God’s.

We come to this altar with all of our lives – the good of them that we hope for and all the rest of it. Side by side with friends and strangers and children who might know more about what is happening than we think and even an exasperated mother with her face in her hands, side by side, our lives, the real thing, the coin of God’s realm.

We come together to render to God what is God’s. Our hearts. With adoration and hope and fear and sometimes something closer to ‘Oh God, Oh God, Oh God, Oh God!’, that we may be changed; and carry that, something that God has given us, like we have been perfumed by God’s holy love, wherever we go. Amen.

David May

When I graduated from high school, my parents cooked a special meal for a family celebration. After dinner, they presented me with two gifts. The first was a set of luggage. The card that went with the luggage read, “Bon voyage! Have a wonderful adventure!” And the second gift was a signet ring with our family crest engraved on it. The card that went with the ring read: “And don’t forget who you are and where you come from!”

They were really wonderful gifts, just right for someone just stepping out into the world. But I was so ready to get out there on my own, living my own life, that at the time, I didn’t really appreciate what they had done for me with those gifts. That would come later.

Over the next several years, in ways that seemed pretty dramatic at the time (but which I now recognize fall squarely in the spectrum of plain old stupid human stuff), I did my best to lose track of who I was and where I’d come from. Probably a certain amount of that is just part of growing up. But even if it is, lost is still lost.

The amount of time Jesus took to tell us about things getting lost makes me wonder if ‘getting lost’ isn’t something he knows is going to happen to all of us and probably with some regularity: we have erred and strayed like lost sheep we admit in the traditional confession. It’s certainly a major theme in the Bible: us getting lost – one way or another, and God finding us – one way or another.

The backstory to the story of the giving of the Ten Commandments is God’s people forgetting who they were and where they come from. And not through bad choices or any particular moral failing.  Mostly because this world is glorious, yes, but also one we can get lost in.

You know the backstory, I bet. It’s a story we learn in Sunday school. On the way to God keeping his promises to the Children of Israel to bless all the nations of the world through them, Jacob and his great, large sprawling family ran into hard times. There was a famine in the land, so they all packed up and headed down to Egypt where there was plenty of food. They landed on their feet and grew and prospered. In fact, they grew so much – in numbers and in wealth – that the leader of Egypt, with the title of Pharoah, who insisted that the world revolve around him, got nervous about them. He got so nervous that he eventually rounded up all the sons and daughters of Jacob, confiscated their property, took away their identity papers, and made them slaves of the empire. They became a commodity to keep the machinery of Pharoah’s economy and cult worship of him humming along smoothly. And this went on for 400 years. Four hundred years of captivity for God’s holy people, Pharaoh after Pharaoh after Pharaoh.

As time went by, year after year, generation after generation, they forgot about being God’s people with a holy calling to be the ones through whom God would bless the whole world. Eventually, as far back as anyone could remember, they had been the personal property of Pharoah, with no idea that that would ever or could ever change. Their mothers and fathers were slaves, their children were slaves, and their children’s children would be slaves, too.

God’s children got lost and forgot who there were. They forgot they belonged to God, not Pharaoh.

You don’t actually have to be enslaved by some kind of Pharoah to suffer the same sort of fate. I remember an uncle of mine saying to me once with a kind of quiet desperation, “As far as I can tell, all I am to anybody is a checkbook. That’s the way people see me… my wife, my kids, my friends. That’s all I am.” And then he said, “I’m a person too. I am,” as if he were trying to convince himself. We were nowhere near the Nile River, but Pharoah’s shadow was heavy on my uncle that day. Or, I remember a conversation with an older woman years ago who said, “Who am I? Not that anyone seems to care, but I’m the one who washes the clothes and cooks the meal and makes the bed and keeps the house clean and runs everyone else’s errands. Who am I? Is that a question I’m even allowed to answer? I’m not sure I’m allowed to be a person.”

There are lots of ways we get lost and forget who we are and there’s always a Pharoah out there ready to capitalize on that.

I ran across an old newspaper clipping the other day that I’d saved in a folder. It’s the story of a man, a convicted murderer, in prison for the rest of his life. The story describes a pilot program in the prison where stray dogs who have come to the end of their stay in a local pound are paired with inmates. The idea is that the prisoners become their trainers for a period of a few months. Their job is to try to socialize the castaway dogs and help them find good homes.

It’s a story of the redemption that comes through remembering who you are. The inmates are people who in many ways have lost the right to be persons. I suspect that they have to forget that they are people in order to survive. They belong to Pharoah.

But apparently these castaway dogs can change that. One inmate who was picked to receive a dog said, “I was worried because I thought guys would think I was soft, and I was afraid for the dog’s safety.” But when he got to his cellblock the men gathered around. They seemed afraid to get too close, to show that they cared about something. The inmate put the puppy on the ground, and she started to run and jump like puppies do. The other men instinctively laughed and reached out to touch her. When the man who was considered the coldest and most hateful one of the block dropped to the floor and rolled around, laughing, with the pup, everyone knew it was going to be OK.

The same worried inmate said, “I didn’t think I had any humanity left in me. But when I received one of the first dogs in the program, that brindle boxer pup named Brin, I fell in love as soon as they laid her in my arms.”

This man will always be a prisoner and because of his own deeds. But he was given a way to remember that he was more than a prisoner.

God knows how easily his children can forget who they are and where they come from and get lost. So, after breaking Pharaoh’s strangle hold and drawing them through the waters of the Red Sea, God gathers them at the foot of Mount Sinai, and there God gives them their identity papers. He inscribes with his own hand words to show us how to be human the way he created us to be, to be his children.

Then God spoke all these words [saying], I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, you shall have no other gods before me.

God didn’t deliver the children of Israel from bondage just to turn the tables on Pharaoh. God’s covenant with them, bound in the Ten Commandments, is for them to be something different – not just another rich and powerful kingdom. There are too many Pharaohs as it is. They and we are to be something different, God’s own peculiar treasure out of all the world through which the lost are found.

There is a technical liturgical word used to describe Christian worship. The word is anamnesis. It the opposite of amnesia. Anamnesis means remembering what you’ve forgotten about who you are.

We do not belong to Pharaoh or any of the other little gods of power or wealth or social standing or the latest fad on Tik Tok, all the Pharaoh’s who want to take God’s place in our hearts.  Sunday by Sunday we come to remember what we may have forgotten: we are children of God made in God’s image, bound to him by a sacred promise sealed by the blood of Jesus, to heal the world.  So, in this week before us, bon voyage! Have a wonderful adventure.  And don’t forget who you are or where you come from. Amen.