Be Brave.
A Homily on Matthew 25:14-30
by Griff Martin
For the Twenty First Sunday of Ordinary Time (and the Thirty Second of Covid Worship)
For the Beloveds of First Austin: a baptist community of faith
November 15, 2020
*This document comes from an oral manuscript.
After hearing that parable, let’s pray… Incarnate God, we ask that you once again take the Word and transform it into a living and breathing reality we can all together experience. Be present here in this space and in these words God, for if you are present here then nothing else will matter, but if you are not present here then nothing else will matter. In the name of the Creator, the Christ and the Comforter.
I don’t like this parable much... For starters, I prefer a parable to end with “happily ever after,” not with literal weeping and gnashing of teeth. That is a phrase I am okay not spending considerable time with these days. If Jesus had let me proofread this story, I would have circled the ending with red ink and suggested something a bit less bleak, a bit more hopeful.
But I know I can’t do that. As much as I have tried to be able to red ink Jesus’ red letters, to adjust and shift and change Jesus’ words into something that works better for me and my life, I have finally almost fully surrendered to the truth that Jesus’ words are what they are and I need to adjust my life to them, not vice versa.
So if I can’t change Jesus, well, then I have to go back to the story and find a new way into the text, and usually that means I have to identify with the one I least want to identify with and then ask the question, what could make this better?
It means that when I read the Good Samaritan, I stop trying to see myself as the Good Samaritan and realize I am either the man in the ditch or the religious leader who hurries by the wounded man. It means realizing I am not Zaccchaeus up in a tree but rather the crowd preventing Zacchaeus from seeing Jesus. It means that I am not the widow looking for the lost coin, I am the lost coin.
Basically developing a reading of the text where I just immediately know that the person in the story who drives me the most crazy, annoys me the most, makes me the angriest is probably the person I will end up identifying with the most. It’s the horrible truth that we all know and we don’t like to face, the person in your life who drives you the most crazy and makes you angriest is probably a lot like you… what you don’t like in others is what you have struggled to accept in yourself.
And that is as true in the biblical text as it is life. Who is it in Scripture that you would prefer not to have to read about because that is probably your starting point, their journey is your journey and it’s where your life work begins.
So if I were going to read this into today’s text I might as well save the time and not do the work of trying to be the two who get it right and have doubled what has been given to them. That is not me, I am not the star pupil, the model student.
And to burst your bubble, neither are you. In the words of one of the best Jesus followers to recently walk this earth, Toni Morrison, who upon hearing someone identify as a Christian responded, “You are already there, you got it? I am still doing the work and trying to be Christian but don’t have it yet.” And if Toni did not have it, we don’t have it.
Most of us are trying… which means we are the one at the end of this story holding our homework and saying, “ummm we might have missed it, we might not be there yet, we might not have aced this assignment.”
Thank God for grace.
So knowing what we know, if we go back to the start to see if we can make it better, if we are the servant, the one who was given a talent, what are we supposed to do now? Especially in light of this parable and knowing what we know now.
It’s a call to risk, to stop playing it safe.
If we were a big youth group this morning and if it were in the "before times" I would stop preaching the sermon now and we would play a big game. I would divide us right down the middle of the congregation, the center aisle and we would have the organ team and the pulpit team and I would give the organ team a red flag and I would give the pulpit team a blue flag and then we would play a really big game of Capture the Flag, like we used to play at P.E. when P.E. was not happening over zoom.
And here is what I promise would happen. Right away you have a few folks who run and they are captured and they spend the rest of the game in jail. Then you have a whole other group who make plans and they try to be sneaky, create diversions or plans like all running at once and sometimes this works. But the majority of the time this is how the game will end, with a bunch of people standing on their side of the line, afraid to cross the line, so you end up with a very boring game where fear keeps much from happening.
So we would play the game and then when it got to that point and we had been there a few moments I would end the game and talk about the problem of Christianity in these terms: most Christians play it too safe, we are too worried about flag guarding and scared to get out into the space where things actually happen.
And that is why we are here today… because of folks who did not play it safe.
Protestants as a whole were not safe. "Protestant" used to mean a whole lot more than just the other form of Christianity that is not Catholic. This entire Protestant thing began with Martin Luther, who had a really brave idea, that maybe Jesus following at that moment did not look like the Church of Rome, thus protestants where those in support of this rebellious idea, that religion could be structured according to a new system and not how it had always been structured. That is bravery.
Or baptist, who remember were quite radical in their day. Our first baptists believed that maybe following Jesus was something you choose, not something that was chosen for you. They believed that church and state needed to be separate, that you choose your own religion, the state did not choose for you. And most surprising of all, baptists were some of the first to believe that salvation was for all people, which is unlimited atonement or universalism. That is bravery.
Or Jesus, Godself. The whole concept of incarnation that we are about to celebrate and experience in Advent might be as brave as it gets. This idea that God could not be understood through laws and prophets and stories alone, that God’s very goodness and love were not being adequately communicated to people so God would become human because the only way we were ever going to fully understand God’s goodness was that… so God became a baby, a baby who relied on human beings to protect him, who had to go through childhood and puberty where nothing is safe, who had to be fully human, so human that other humans could murder him. This is bravery.
Who we are… as truly protestant, baptist Christian was created by a bunch of brave people and we let that be tamed. We have become domesticated and tamed Christians which is nothing like Jesus wanted us to be. He trusted us to do better.
We get scared by politics and who is in control and upsetting things when in our gut we know we need a revolution, we get scared by our bank accounts having too little when we know we are called to share abundantly and not store up, we fall for the lie of scarcity, we get taken by status quo, we limit our dreams to the horrible guidelines of possible and predictable, we don’t risk rocking the boat, we value comfort and security over everything else… and all of that is as far from the life of Jesus as possible.
So no wonder a lot of talk in churches these days is about trying to make budget to keep programs going that are no longer really serving a need outside the church but they make the church feel like something is happening, no wonder so many churches are choosing to enter a hospice path and accept a quiet comfortable death instead of risking something big that could actually change the world, no wonder that even though the expiration date of how we have done a whole lot of church was expired in 1957 but instead of facing that truth we are trying to live on outdated expired sustenance.
And First, even though we do so much right, don’t think I am not talking about us here as well, because we need to face some truth there, too.
Christianity has never been about playing it safe, about security and comfort. And I think in our gut we all know that, which is why there is something about Jesus following that to a lot of us feels just a bit off today… and if you are not feeling it right now, you are missing it.
Glennon Doyle has written one of the best books I have read on this subject, it’s titled Untamed and the first story she tells in the book has captivated me this year.
She tells about her and her wife taking the kids to zoo and at the zoo there is this cheetah run. I have posted a link in the email today to her telling of the story because it’s so much better than mine. As the cheetah run show begins the zookeeper comes out with a Labrador and asks the crowd, "is this a cheetah?" to which they all yell "no." The zookeeper explains that the cheetah and lab were raised alongside each other to tame the cheetah; whatever the lab does the cheetah does now.
So the zookeeper explained they were going to have the lab run the race first and then the cheetah would follow. So they put a stuffed pink bunny on the back of a jeep and the jeep takes off and the lab chases the jeep. Then they bring out the cheetah, who is named Tabitha, who from her cage has been watching this entire thing and the jeep pulls back up and takes off again and there goes the cheetah running after the jeep just like the lab did.
The crowd goes nuts because of course a cheetah in full sprint is a sight to behold.
The run ends and the cheetah is put back in her cage and given a nice raw steak to eat. She eats the steak while the zookeeper is talking and then she began to roam the edge of the cage, which is when Glennon’s daughter grabbed Glennon's hand and said, "Mom, I think she turned wild again.”
Glennon said at this moment it all made sense, and she stood there looking at this beautiful cheetah which was locked in a cage way too small and she said in that connection she could hear the cheetah’s voice, as if Tabitha the cheetah was saying to Glennon, “Something's off about my life. I feel restless and frustrated. I have this hunch that everything was supposed to be more beautiful than this. I imagined fenceless, wide open savannas. I want to run and hunt and kill. I want to sleep under the ink-black silent sky filled with stars. It’s all so real I can almost taste."
Then she’d look back at her cage, the only home she’s ever known. She'd look at the zookeeper, the bored spectators, and her panting bouncing begging best friend the lab.
She’d sigh and say, “I should be grateful. I have a good enough life here. It’s crazy to long for what doesn’t exist.”
And then Glennon writes, “I’d say [to her] Tabitha you are not crazy. You are a cheetah.”
Church, I think we have been caged and tamed too long. So what are the dreams we want as a faith community? What do we want to create in our world that looks more just and fair and faithful? How do we want love to be expressed? Where have we fallen for the status quo too long? Where is it time to let our dreams loose, to risk big, to love bigger?
Because the world no longer needs tamed Christians. So maybe we be brave, risk big, dream big and love bigger because God has a life in store for us so much bigger and more beautiful than the one we have settled for.
And if we do this right, we end this pandemic as the bravest, wildest, most beautiful and loving Jesus followers this world has ever seen. The world deserves nothing less. Jesus deserves nothing less. We deserve nothing less.
Amen and Amen.
*artwork: This woodcut portrays the parable of the talents. It was made by an unknown artist, probably of African descent.
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