Sunday, November 19 - Angry

This sermon was preached for Sunday, November 19 at St. Mark's in East Longmeadow, MA. The texts for this sermon were: Psalm 123, 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11, and Matthew 25:14-30.

I once had a middle schooler in my Sunday school class ask me in all sincerity why we say grace before dinner. Why do we thank God for the food? He wondered. God didn’t do anything. People made this happen. Why should God get all the credit? How is that fair?

I heard echoes of this question in the words of the third slave from Jesus’ parable - the who was given just one talent, buried it, and gave it back to his master when he returned. Here’s how he explains himself to his returned master, ‘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, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.’

The slave names his fear, but I hear anger, too, in his words, and resentment. You went away. You were gone. You left. Why should you deserve anything more than what you gave me? Why should you get credit for any of our efforts?

This parable is part of a string of parables Jesus told his disciples. This string of parables ends with Jesus saying, “You know that after two days the Passover is coming, and the Son of Man will be handed over to be crucified.” Jesus tells these parables to prepare his disciples for his absence. He will be entrusting them to carry forward his ministry, while at the same time, he promises that he will return.

In context, it’s easy to see the traveling master as standing in for an absent Jesus. There’s lots of reasons different interpreters are reluctant to put him in that role, the implication that he’s exploitative and harsh, for example, or the suggestion of earning interest, which would have been the sin of usury. But I also think it is interesting to note that the master/king/landowner character in Jesus’ parables is often depicted as pretty flawed. I think of the parable of the persistent widow and the unjust, uncaring, and unethical judge, for example. Are we to conclude these things about God?

“Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow.”

I wonder if part of the stark honesty of the parables is the acknowledgement that in this in-between time - between God’s ministry on earth in the person of Jesus and his promised second coming - our experience of God will sometimes be angering, alienating, hurtful. There will be times in our journeys of faith when God seems very, very far away. When God’s decisions about our lives feel terribly unfair. When the voice of God lands on our ears with harsh judgment, or excruciating silence. When we are so frustrated that God has given us so much to do with so little to do it with. The choice is whether we let those moments become how we define how we relate to God - and therefore we carry about our lives.

I’ve been asked on different occasions whether anger at God is okay or not - whether it’s sinful. So let’s first define sin. Sin is whatever we have allowed to get in between, twist, or corrode our relationship with God, with one another, and with ourselves. Whatever gets in the way of love of God, self, and other.

Sometimes anger at God is what fuels our first steps toward a deeper relationship with God. I know a priest who regularly posts what she calls “rage prayers” that definitely reflect her intimacy with God, and her comfort with being herself with Jesus. God can take it. God can take all of it. And, and anger can become a prison. It becomes what motivates us to pull away, to bury down our gifts and what we know of God’s goodness until all we see is the ways it’s all gone wrong. Until everything is distorted. 

In his book The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis writes that in Hell all the doors are locked from the inside. It is we who barricade ourselves in, piling the grudges, resentments, and unexplored hurts high, high against what could be our own way into the abundance and utter love of the kingdom of heaven.

A life lived in fear and resentment leads to outer darkness and locked doors, weeping and gnashing of teeth. When I think of gnashing of teeth I think of that visceral feeling of grinding my teeth in frustration at the foibles of others when I am stuck in my most petty, my most uncharitable self. I think of the sort of self-pitying weeping that swallows me whole, down down down into myself when I want no one to touch me and when I throw every kind word back into the face of the one who said it. 

When you close yourself to kindness, cruelty will be all you know. When we let envy or disappointment or resentment guide how we relate to God, others, and ourselves, joy, God’s joy, will ever be out of reach. 

Someone quite dear to me felt excluded and unwelcome that first Sunday when her beloved church was forcibly merged with another across town. Those slights, which for her were not slight at all, became the reason she never went back to church and never will again. I can’t speak to her relationship with God throughout all that, but I do know that she became more and more isolated. From the outside looking in, I was painfully aware her lack of connection to a church community, especially in difficult times when it would have been vital for her to have more folks to lean on - but even in good times, too, when giving back could have given her meaning and purpose, the way it did for her peers. I grieve what could have been - the talents that could have multiplied - had she not buried herself down and locked herself away. Had she not given up on the parts of God she could have known through a church community. 

But then there was last Sunday. Right toward the end of Phil’s class, I had the honor of listening to folks sharing stories about the moment they or someone they loved were told they were condemned by God or were not welcome in church. Some of those memories were more than 50 years old, but they were crystal clear. I walked away reminded that people never forget being told, especially by a priest, that they did not belong. And yet, you all were still there in that church room, decades later, because you chose not to let that moment define who you believed God to be, or what the church could be. Something inside you knew that - that rejection, that harshness - that was not who God truly is. So you stayed, or came back, or switched churches, until you found a place where God’s loving voice was loudest. 

You knew, did you, that I reaped where I did not sow? You knew, did you? Says the master in the end to the buried-talent slave. Ah, so this is how you choose to see and know me. In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis writes, “"There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'THY will be done.'” Your choice to pull away and reject. Your choice becomes your reality.

We have a choice to see the harshness, greed, and despair that surrounds us, that’s inside us, and declare that to be the character of God, the intent of God. That has desperate implications for the way we then walk in the world, the way we treat ourselves and others. But we can also make the opposite choice to look around and see glimmers of God’s goodness, love, and mercy that will, in the end, be all in all. If we do, that will inform how and why we live and love. 

When we sit down at a table filled with God’s abundance, our grace begins with gratitude to God but it often doesn't end there. Our gratitude overflows onto thanking the laborers, and chefs, and all the people who were involved in the creation of a meal. We remember those who are without a seat at a warm and loving table. These prayers shape us, bend us, turning us toward our neighbor. Grace and gratitude multiples. 

Here is what I choose: I choose to live my life as if God can break down every door, in the end. Even the ones we’ve barricaded ourselves. I choose to allow myself to be convinced, like Paul “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ.”

I love what that vision calls out of me, where it draws me. It draws me here to this table, amidst all of you. It compels me to be soft-hearted in a hardline world. Whole-hearted in a fragmented society. It gives me the courage to give myself away.