American Idol

Propers: The Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 33), AD 2020 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

If cows had gods, those gods would look like cows. So said the philosopher Xenophanes.

What he was getting at is our tendency to project ourselves into the heavens. We imagine, in the words of the Psalmist, that God is just like us. And so a person’s image of God—or karma, or the universe, or the gods, or what-have-you—is often a reflection of how they view themselves.

This of course is why the Old Testament keeps hammering away at idolatry, why the prophets go apoplectic when someone makes a statue of God as a bull or a pole a dude on a throne. Because those aren’t really God. They can’t be. God is not just big, but infinite. God is not just old, but eternal. Every time we make an image of God in our minds, it is false, because we are limited and God is not. In the words of St Augustine, “If you understood Him, it wouldn’t be God.”

This is not to say that we cannot say anything about God at all. We can, both through philosophical reason and theological revelation: God is Good and True and Beautiful; God is All-Knowing, All-Powerful, All-Present, All-Loving. And while we must always be vigilant about destroying the false idols in our minds—the pictures we have of God, which reveal more about ourselves than about Him—nevertheless, we have been given the true Image of God, in Jesus Christ.

Jesus is God made flesh. He is the visible image of the invisible Creator. Everything that God the Father is, in His infinity and eternity, God the Son is, in space and time. Whenever we want to know who God is, what God does, what God is really, truly like, we look to Jesus. Not to Abraham, not to Moses, not to David. They were all sinners, whom God loved. Jesus is more than this. Jesus is God’s love, for us.

The human heart is a factory of idols, all of which will fail us in the end. But Jesus Christ will never fail. Jesus Christ is true.

In our parable this morning, a wealthy man, heading off to parts unknown, entrusts to his servants vast sums of wealth. And make no mistake, the amounts spoken of here are almost farcical in scope. A talent is a massive sum of money. At a time when a denarius represented a single full day’s wage, each talent here was worth some 6,000 denarii—an entire career’s worth of hard labor. And the master distributes these like candy: five to one servant, two to another, and one full talent to a third. The only word to describe such largess is superabundance.

Then the master leaves, with no stipulations given on how his funds are to be used, and goes off into a distant country for an extended period of time. And two of the servants, given untold riches with no guidelines or restrictions, enter into the life of their master. In effect they are the master now, entrusted with his wealth. And in their exuberance, in their joy, they go and use the money, investing it, risking it. And the payoff is greater than they could ever imagine, doubling their funds. Note the paradox: that the master’s riches grow when they are given all away.

When the master at long last returns, he finds that the servant to whom he has entrusted five talents has made them into 10! And he reacts with joy and congratulations, not simply taking back what was his, but entrusting the servant with yet still more. Likewise, the servant given two talents has doubled his investment, and receives the like reward. Note that there is no calculation here, no final reckoning of dollars and cents. This isn’t an endorsement of venture capitalism. What’s important is that these two have celebrated the riches given unto them with joy.

But the third servant—his reaction to having received a lifetime’s worth of riches has been neither joy nor gratitude but fear. He went and buried the treasures imparted unto him. And here he returns the single talent to his master, untouched. “For I knew,” the servant snivels, “that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid.”

Keep in mind that we have no indication that this is the master’s disposition at all. Quite the contrary. What we know of the master is that he has lavished ridiculous riches upon lowly servants, granting them freedom and discretion in their use. He has effectively gifted them with more than they could ever earn, more than they could ever dream of earning, a superabundance of grace.

That the third servant, wicked and lazy, imagines the master to be wrathful and cruel is not a reflection of the master’s heart but rather of his own. He has projected his own sins upon his benefactor, and in so doing has excluded himself from the life of joy and abundance which had simply been handed to him on a silver platter. If we hear this parable and react with fear—if we imagine the master to be as fickle and cruel as we ourselves so often are—then we are reacting in the same way, and making the same mistake, as this poor, benighted slave.

The point is not that the master tosses the servant out upon his ear; it’s that the slave has already placed himself within the outer darkness. Even taking away the single talent proves to be no punishment, because he wasn’t using it anyway. Indeed, if Jesus is the Master—if He is lavishing His gifts, His talents, His very life and joy upon poor servants such as us—then He cannot be wicked. He cannot be cruel. Jesus is the Light who shines amidst the darkness. The judgment that He brings is simply the revelation of what we already are, and how we already live.

If we know that God is merciful, gracious, forgiving, and superabundant in giving us gifts, that He lavishes His love upon us, undeserving as we are, then we have already entered into the life and the joy of our Master. We are already living in Christ, and He in us, as a foretaste of the feast to come.

But if instead we live as “a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!”—then we will imagine that God is as terrible as we are, treating us as we treat others. That’s the lesson I want us to take home: not to read this as some sort of heaven-or-hell final exam, but as a revelation of how we are living here and now, based on the grace and abundance that God has lavished upon us.

Earlier this week I was horrified to read a posting on social media exhorting Christians to embrace a more aggressive, violent, masculine faith.

It spoke of David beheading Goliath: of how hard he must’ve worked to saw through cartilage, flesh, and bone; of how God reveled in the lopping-off of heads; of how we should likewise respond to those who mock God with raw brute force; and of how anyone who dissents from this image of a decapitating God must be drawing more from namby-pamby Veggie Tales than from the witness of the Scriptures.

Ah, Lord. It’s hard to know where to begin with such sentiment, reflecting as it does so many pathologies present in postmodern masculinity—the sad little posturing of sad little men, running about playing war in the woods. It appeals to a thuggish, brutish, tribal god, incurious and cruel, fascinated by violence and titillated by gore—a so-called Christianity reflecting nothing of the Christ, indistinguishable in any meaningful way from the thugs of ISIS or Al Qaeda.

The sheer grotesquery of such false idolatry tells us far more about the sorry state of American manhood and religion than it does of who and what God is. Such hyperthyroid storm troopers would surely prefer John Wayne over Jesus. To say that God condemns such blasphemies to hell would be uncouth. To say rather that these Christianists are already living in a hell of their own making—with the grace and gifts of God summarily buried beneath their feet—would be true.

Let me be perfectly clear: we must reject, in no uncertain terms, the popular god of violence, militarism, nationalism, racism, selfishness, and stupidity. He reflects nothing of Heaven, but only the darkness festering deep in our own hearts. We must cut off the heads of any such idols before they lead us to cut off our own.

Look instead to Jesus Christ. Look to God made Man. Look to the power of His compassion, the fires of His justice, the superabundance of His mercies, and the blood He spills from His own heart to save all of this world from our hells. He is God, and none other will do. He is God, and none other will save. Come back from the darkness. Hide not in the ground. Enter into the joy of your Master.

And leave the decapitations to Satan, where they belong.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

 

 

 

Credit where credit is due: Opening with Xenophanes was Chad Bird’s idea.