Sermon on November 15, 2020: 24th Sunday after Pentecost
In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Holy Scripture is like a window for us to peer through and see the world as God sees it, the world in the light of the Gospel. It is the lens that shapes our seeing; the food that nourishes our life in the Spirit. In our liturgy today, we affirm that God, has “caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning,” and we ask that God would give us the grace to “hear them,” and to “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.” Not just hear, not just read—but mark, learn, and inwardly digest.
Is the Prayer Book being redundant? Do we really need all five verbs to show us just how important Scripture is? It’s like a subtle guilt trip, as though the Prayer Book knows that we do not actually take Scripture quite as seriously as we ought.
Episcopalians on the whole are not known for their devotion to the Bible. Not long ago, I was corresponding with someone who was inquiring about membership at St. Paul’s, and after a few emails and phone calls, she wrote to me that “finding a church that holds true to the Bible is the top priority for our church home,” and expressed concern that The Episcopal Church has moved away from its “biblical foundations.” She ended up pursuing membership in a church that is known for having a much more, shall we say, conservative approach to Scripture.
While I may be tempted to dismiss her judgment of our church as not being sufficiently grounded in the Bible, I admit that, to some extent, she has a point. When Episcopalians talk about our faith, we do not often reference Scripture directly. In general, it is not our strong suit. In the church culture wars of the last fifty years, we have been more inclined to ignore Scripture than to make use of it. In the debates over women’s ordination, did we hear Episcopalians refer to their Bibles, arguing that because Mary Magdalene was the first to witness the resurrection of Jesus, and then went and gave this good news to the disciples—that this is an excellent example of why women may be validly ordained as priests? I doubt it. In the debates surrounding marriage, did we hear Episcopalians referring to their Bibles, and pointing to the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15 when the early church was moved to include Gentiles in their community, as the adopted people of God—saying that this gives us a biblical warrant for including same-sex couples within the sacrament of marriage? Probably not. Episcopalians have made solid arguments that women can be priests and gay people can get married, but rarely are these arguments grounded in Scripture. Perhaps we are worried that if we hear it, that if we read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest it, we won’t like what we find.
We shouldn’t be worried. In fact, if we are regular in our worship, we know the Bible better than we think we do. Did you know that about 90% of The Book of Common Prayer is direct quotation from the Bible? If you know your Prayer Book backwards and forwards, you are already praying in the language of Scripture. Even so, beyond public worship, it is essential for our spiritual lives as Christians that we develop a fluency with the Bible. That we study it. Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest it. By ourselves, and with other people. In public, and in private. Listening to the voices of others, who will help us to hear it in ways that we may not be inclined to hear. Reading it not as isolated individuals, but a corporate body that hears and receives the Gospel, the good news of God in Christ. And no matter what page you turn to, the Gospel will always be present in some way—whether it is out in the open and easy to spot, or hidden away like buried treasure.
The parable of the talents is one of those challenging passages in which the Gospel is hidden, where the good news is hard to spot. In a different parable, Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure that someone finds in a field—and then buries it, and goes and sells everything in order to buy that field. In the parable of the talents, however, it is the burying of treasure—of a talent—which leads to judgment, and to being placed on the wrong side of God’s kingdom. The problem is not just that the servant buried his talent in the ground, as if he didn’t know any better. The problem is that his choice was based upon fear.
It is easy to identify with the fearful servant, don’t you think? We may not bury talents in the ground, but we definitely know something about hoarding toilet paper and hand sanitizer. It isn’t the pandemic that is to blame: fear-based decision-making has been around as long as we have been around. It was around when Jesus told this parable. The wicked servant makes a fear-based decision. The other servants make use of the talents they have been given, but the wicked servant is paralyzed. He worries that what he has is not enough, that he must hide and protect it or else it will be taken from him. But his protectionism is not consistent with the Gospel; in fact, it places him on the outside of God’s kingdom.
Fear is paralyzing. It has no place in our life with God; as Scripture tells us, perfect love casts out all fear. And yet we know that fear is the fuel that keeps the anxiety machine running. Fear tells us that life is a zero-sum game—that your betterment is my detriment, that the world is a place of scarcity rather than abundance. Fear tells us that what we have is not enough, that we had better go ahead and bury whatever we’ve got deep down, before someone else comes along and takes it. Such fear will impact the decisions that we make, and those decisions will end up blinding us to the needs of our neighbors.
If fear is the default mode that drives our way of life, how is it possible to be faithful stewards of the talents that we are given? How can we be generous with our money? How can we devote time to others outside our immediate family? If fear becomes our guiding principle, then how can we seek and serve Christ in all persons, and love all of our neighbors as we love ourselves?
It turns out that the parable of the talents is a strange passage for “Stewardship Sunday.” It reminds us that, to whom much has been given, much will be required. That what we have is not really ours to begin with, that our lives are built with borrowed tools on borrowed time. And so we are called to respond in love, in compassion, in generosity of spirit. And we can only do that if our lives have been shaped by the Word of God, who is living and active, whose life we have taken into ourselves.
After all, Holy Scripture is like a window for us to peer through, and see the world as God sees it, the world in the light of the Gospel. Without this window we won’t be able to see the kingdom that Jesus imagines. So let us hear the Word of the Lord, and so read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest it until it has become a part of our bodies, part of our DNA, dwelling in our minds, on our lips, and in our hearts.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.