Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Zephaniah 1:7,12-18
1 Thessalonians 5:1-11
Matthew 25:14-30
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The poet Scott Cairns writes “I love the Word’s ability to rise again / from chronic homiletic burial.” No parable in all the gospels is in greater need of such resurrection than this morning’s, which has been used as fodder for stewardship sermons for generations. This is not such a sermon, though you should feel free to make a donation by check, cash, or Venmo at the church door. Let’s get this out of the way at the beginning. This parable is not about using your God-
given talents for personal fulfillment or societal improvement. Although our addiction to power often leads us to find God in the kings, landowners, and masters of Jesus’ parables, we need only examine the behavior of the master here to realize that he does
not represent God. He yells at his slave “You wicked and lazy slave! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest.” By the way, violating Jewish laws against usury. He then orders the slave to be thrown into the outer darkness, because, as he says, “to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even
what they have will be taken away.”
If the master corresponds to your image of God—and let’s be honest, he might. Many of us still carry around a vindictive and violent God image—I suggest you find a good spiritual director. And I’m not kidding here. Jesus is the antidote to the toxic God-image so many of us carry. Jesus, who heals all who come to him. Jesus, who eats with those on the margins. Jesus, who pours out his life in self-sacrificing love on the Cross, forgiving his murderers. The God we know as self-giving love in Jesus is nothing like the master in this morning’s parable. Rather, the master, and the system he represents, shows us the cruel reality of the world in which we are still living today. The world in which our corporate overlords goad us into frantic activity for their own enrichment. The world in which we are complicit in the devastation of the natural world in order to extract enough so-called resources to maintain our lives of privileged excess. The world in which we judge ourselves and one another based on what and how much we can produce. Our world, the world we live in and the one we help to prop up, is a place where those who have get more and those who have practically nothing, lose even what little they have. But what if, instead of giving the spotlight to the master and his atrocities, we follow Jesus to the margins? For if the Gospel is to be our guide, it is not in the centers of well- lit power that we will find him, but with the outcast slave, in the darkness, with all that weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Following the exiled slave into the outer darkness, stripped of even the nothing he has, we find that God has preceded us there. Jesus, who took the form of just such a slave, as scripture tells us, has already made a place in that darkness to welcome those who have been exiled there. In proceeding us, and all who choose or are forced into the dark, Jesus makes a way out of no way. As Psalm 139 puts it, darkness is not dark to him; the night is as bright as the day. And even when the darkness threatens to shut down around us, we cannot be lost, not because we know the way (small w) ourselves, but because the Way (capital
W) is closer to us than our own heartbeat. The God who fearfully and wonderfully made
us will not—cannot—let us go.
We are living today in a world threatened by the darkness of annihilation. I don’t need to give you the rundown. You all already know it too well. Our systems of domination and control are collapsing, and those who steer them only tighten their grip and increase their pressure on us. These peddlers of power offer us their well-lit certainties and fundamentalisms. They assure us that they know who is to blame and that they have the power to return us to a fabled golden age. Really, they seek to return us not to the
paradise of the garden but to the unthinking sleep of the automaton in a neon-lit nightmare. One of Teilhard de Chardin’s great insights is that God is not a god of the past, but of the future. God draws us out of the well-lit cities into the dark margins of the cosmos, into the unknown future where greater and deeper wholeness awaits us—the fullness of love in the heart of God.
Writer and activist Rebecca Solnit reminds us that the future is always dark, but that it is a darkness as much of the womb as of the grave. That is not to say that we should give thanks for the metaphorical and literal hurricanes and earthquakes. But it is to say that, given the context in which we are living, we can choose to seek the oblivion of the shopping mall or we can move out into the night, where the stars can be our guide. If God seems to be absent or aloof, it may be that our world is too polluted with certainty and light to see the outline of the hidden one.
Scott Cairns again:
Suppose the Holy One Whose Face We Seek
is not so much invisible as we are ill equipped to apprehend His grave proximity.
Say the One is not so hidden as we are kept by our own conjuncture blinking, puzzled, leaning in without result.
Let’s say the meek, the poor, the merciful all suspect His hand despite the evidence.
As for those rarest folk, the pure in heart?
Intent on what they touch, they see Him now.
Scott Cairns, “As We See,” in Pilokalia (2002)
There is no place that is separate or hidden or cut off from God’s merciful love. Though sometimes we must consent to our own stripping to stand naked before the one who beheld our limbs yet unfinished in the womb. Sometimes the choice for life is the choice of conscious darkness and unknowing. But the stars are there, even when the world is too bright for us to see them. And the outer and inner darkness shine, too, with God’s radiance, if we have the courage to consent to our own unblinding. Let the master rage. Give him back his talent and be gone. For when his breath his spent and all his worst is wrought, we will already be gone into the long and starlit night of Jesus’ loving Way. Love does not destroy the masters of the world. But love outlasts them. And hand in hand with love, we will do, too.
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