Will Rice - Sermon #11 - What Are We Waiting For?

Rev. Will Rice
Grace United Methodist Church
Corpus Christi, TX
pastorwillrice@gmail.com

I am going to guess that you fall into one of two camps. You are either a ripper, meaning that upon receiving a gift, you rip the paper off as fast a humanly possible to get to the gift or, you are a true unwrapper, meaning you carefully remove the tape, undo the seams peeling the paper away from the package taking as much time as necessary to open the gift. My wife is a ripper I am an unwrapper. I drive her crazy.

When I was a child I was a ripper. I never enjoyed the process of unwrapping gifts, I just wanted to get to the gifts. But I think I have to credit my current status as an unwrapper to my parents. Although we were not explicitly Christians, my family did celebrate Christmas and we had a very particular way about it. There was a certain time boundary before which we were not allowed to go downstairs where the tree was. At the specified time, we were allowed to go downstairs and open our stockings. Our stockings were mostly filled with fruit, nuts and oddly enough a new toothbrush. Sometimes there were Hershey’s Kisses and sometimes a small toy like a Matchbox car.

After opening our stockings, we had to wait. We had to wait until my parents had made coffee before we could open even one present. After that coffee was made and the first present was opened, we had to wait again, for breakfast. As a child, the process of waiting was painful, but wonderful. One of my friends was allowed to go downstairs whenever he woke up and just tear open all his presents. His Christmas was over in about 2 minutes. Mine lasted all morning.

This has turned me into quite an odd adult. I like waiting for presents. My wife Alisha can put my birthday presents out weeks ahead of time and she asks, “doesn’t it just kill you looking at those boxes and not knowing?” Actually, I rather like it. More than I love the gifts, I love the anticipation.

Today’s scripture is from Mark’s Gospel, Chapter 13:

24 ‘But in those days, after that suffering,

the sun will be darkened,
and the moon will not give its light,
²⁵and the stars will be falling from heaven,
and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.

²⁶Then they will see “the Son of Man coming in clouds” with great power and glory. ²⁷Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.

28 ‘From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near. ²⁹So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates. ³⁰Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. ³¹Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

32 ‘But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. ³³Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come. ³⁴It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. ³⁵Therefore, keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, ³⁶or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. ³⁷And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.’

What Are We Waiting For?

With our stomachs full of turkey and our mental eyes already gazing toward the holiday of all holidays, Christmas, today would seem an odd day to talk about the end of time. For those of us who would like to embrace the joy of the festive holiday season, today’s assigned reading is like a bucket of cold water or a Christmas stocking full of coal.

There is a temptation on the part of the preacher to just take today’s assigned gospel reading and quietly sweep in under the carpet and move on. In fact, it is more than just a temptation. One of the things that I have heard over and over in my short time as a pastor is a general complaint about Advent. People come to church on the Sunday after Thanksgiving expecting to see the sanctuary decorated, which it is, and expecting to hear the songs of Christmas. What are we waiting for?

If we follow the media marketing machine Christmas should begin full force right after Thanksgiving and vanish in one big flurry of gift returns on December 26^th.

So why, on what should be the first Sunday of our Christmas celebration are we reading this passage about the end of the world? It is really tempting to sweep today’s gospel passage under the rug, especially given the fact the pastor John preached about the end of time last week. Two weeks focused on the end of time when what we should really be talking about is Christmas trees, and holly, a bright paper packages tied up in ribbon. What are we waiting for?

But if I take my cue from the world around me, this shouldn’t be a problem. It seems people are keenly interested in the end of time. The series that is supposedly loosely based on the book of Revelation, a series that takes a fictional approach to the end of time, Left Behind by authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins is a publishing phenomenon.

Books in the series that talks of the rapture, horrible tribulations and an effort of converted believers to stay alive in the face of the horribly evil, yet impeccably dressed anti-Christ have sold over 58 million copies. “Publishers Weekly reports that the only authors whose publishers will print 2 million hardbacks for the first printing are J. K. Rowling, John Grisham --- and Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye.”[1]

So people are interested in the end of time, but just not right now. It is Christmas for heavens sake. Let’s get on with it, what are we waiting for?

Perhaps we should think for a moment what it is we are in such a rush to get to. Christmas, the incarnation, the virgin birth of the son of God, Emmanuel, God with Us.

Today’s text doesn’t sound very much like Christmas.

24 ‘But in those days, after that suffering,

the sun will be darkened,
and the moon will not give its light,
²⁵and the stars will be falling from heaven,
and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.

²⁶Then they will see “the Son of Man coming in clouds” with great power and glory. ²⁷Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.

What is Christmas, but a celebration of God breaking into our reality? This is why I think Advent is so important, because it can cause us to dwell on what we are really celebrating. If we just rip all the paper off of our Christmas gift, we may either miss the gift, or be truly shocked by what is inside. Maybe one of the reasons I am not ever in a hurry to open my gifts, why I like to wait, is that the anticipation is more of a certainty than the gift itself. What if I don’t like what is in the box? It is nice to sing,

Away in a manger,
No crib for His bed
The little Lord Jesus
Laid down His sweet head
The stars in the bright sky
Looked down where He lay
The little Lord Jesus
Asleep on the hay

But think about it this way, the very creator of the Universe decided to enter into our reality in a somewhat frightening way. Think about it this way. When we pray to God and ask for stuff, we don’t think much about how God will pull it off, do we?. “God, help me not be late for work.” Somehow, magically, we hope that God will turns all those signals to green. But, What if God came crashing through the clouds, landed in the middle of S.P.I.D. in a flash a radiant brilliance and started directing traffic. You might, at least, think twice about your next prayer. It would be nice if God would be relatively discreet about coming into our world, using gentle whispers, quiet miracles, perhaps the occasional virgin birth, but,

²⁶Then they will see “the Son of Man coming in clouds” with great power and glory. ²⁷Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.

Is certainly over the top.

Just like these images, Christmas can be a wonderfully frightening thing. The birth of a child, who happens to be God who will disrupt the world as we know it. In Luke’s Gospel, from which we get most of the imagery that surrounds Christmas, the angel, the manger and the shepherds, the narrative quickly hints that this isn’t going to be all warm and fuzzy. In chapter two, when Mary and Joseph are presenting the child Jesus at the temple, a man name Simeon says:

³⁴“This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed ³⁵so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed-- and a sword will pierce your own soul too.”[2]

Advent helps us to remember and prepare for the fact that Christmas is much more wonderful than some warm and fuzzy celebration of the birth of a child 2000 years ago. We are considering a wonderfully frightening event, God coming to us. And in Advent we are not just preparing to celebrate that one isolated wonderfully frightening event, we are making sure we are prepared for it to happen again.

For many, Christmas is the central day of our Christian beliefs, but really it is just the beginning. We believe in the amazing birth of Jesus, and we also we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and we believe, it is central to our faith, that Christ will come again.

32 ‘But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. ³³Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come. ³⁴It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. ³⁵Therefore, keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, ³⁶or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. ³⁷And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.’

I love how big dogs sleep. My sister’s Labrador retriever Hobie, after a hard day of running and sniffing and retrieving will curl up and sleep in such a way that, if it weren’t for the snoring, you would think he was dead. But, if you were to go two rooms away and drop a piece of meat on the floor, Hobie would be up, across the house and eating it before you could lean down and pick it up. My lab can be sound asleep in bed with me and he will be up and at the door ten seconds before I hear my wife’s car pulling into the driveway. Dogs sleep watchfully.

These dogs are not anxious, but they are watchful. I think we have trouble being watchful, especially without being anxious Many of us have alarm systems on our homes to help us with the fact that we are simultaneously afraid of what might sneak up on us and totally unprepared to deal with something should it come.

Can we live in the tension of feeling the anticipation without it leading to a feeling of fear or even worse a feeling of self-righteous satisfaction?

We do not know when the next Christmas, the next Easter will come, so what should we do in the meantime? By carefully unwrapping the gift of Christmas, that answer may come easily to us. Over the next few weeks, as we read and consider the scriptures and we search for meaning in the stories surrounding Christmas, we may find ways to live our lives searching for those glimpses of God’s breaking into our world, little Christmas, places where we can be a part of God’s coming to us. We need to stay awake and alert, not so that we can see signs of an impending rapture, but so that we can be able so see those things in front of our very eyes that are ways that we may be participants in the breaking of God into our world.

Advent, for me, is about more than helping us to take our focus away from the commercial side of Christmas and look instead to the Christian side, it is about refocusing ourselves to see that not only is it Christmas every day, it is Advent every day. Every day is about anticipating, preparing for, participating in, searching for God’s revelation, incarnation, God’s breaking into this world.

Advent is about realizing that when God enters into our happy little world, it may be in ways that startle us. God was born to a virgin in a stable, Jesus will come unannounced, with odd repercussion to our solar system. God may appear in the face of the homeless, in the cry of the oppressed. God may be revealed in our actions or in the inactions of others.

Christmas is less like ripping the wrapping off a gift and more like watching a gift slowly revealed before our eyes. Let’s get ready to watch and wait.

What are we waiting for?

³⁷And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.’

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[1] FaithfulReader.com, online at: http://www.faithfulreader.com/authors/au-jenkins-jerry.asp, accessed 20, November 2005, internet;

[2] Luke 2:34-35, NRSV

Will Rice - Sermon #10 - Protecting God?

Rev. Will Rice
Grace United Methodist Church
Corpus Christi, TX
pastorwillrice@gmail.com

Matthew 25:14-30

This parable makes me nervous and uncomfortable. For the first couple years of my ministry, when someone would ask me what it meant, I would usually say something like, “I don’t know, leave me a alone.” Back in Austin, a member of my Disciple class become so frustrated by my lack of understanding that he bought me a book on the subject hoping I would read it and explain it to him.

The book made it worse.

This is the Parable of the Talents. What is a talent anyway? Scholars argue about this but lets say that a talent is a certain sum of money worth about 6,000 denarii. We learned back in The Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard that a denarius was the value of a days wages, so a talent was worth about 6,000 days wages or about 16 years of day wages if one worked 7 days a week. A nice chunk of money.

But this parable is not about money.

Talent has come into our own language in a different way. Our dictionary definition of talent is:

• A marked innate ability, as for artistic accomplishment.
• Natural endowment or ability of a superior quality.[1]

That definition actually comes from here. Our word talent is from the Greek word ta,lanton (talanton), which is simply a unit of money.

Now I often warn people about using the dictionary to interpret the Bible. This is a good example, because this parable is not about using our innate abilities, our talents.

This is the Parable of the Talents. We get our word parable, which the dictionary defines as “A simple story illustrating a moral or religious lesson,”[2] from another Greek word parabolh,, (parabole). Which conveys a meaning of setting one thing along side another. We get other words from here parallel, parabola.

This parable is then not about money or our innate abilities. It is, in fact using other things, that we may understand to help us see something we don’t understand but what?

‘For it is as if a man,

Our parable starts out with “it is as if.” What is the “it”? We have picked up Jesus mid conversation. If we back up to the beginning of chapter 25.

‘Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this. Ten bridesmaids took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom.’

Jesus tries one explanation of what the kingdom of heaven is like, now another.

It, the kingdom of heaven, is as if…

14 ‘For it is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them; ¹⁵to one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away.

I want to point out that, after Jesus’ death, his followers initially thought that his return was imminent. They were basically just waiting around for Jesus to come back and change everything for good. As Matthew’s gospel is being written down in the first century, people are realizing they may be waiting a while and these words of Jesus become very important. In fact this parable comes in the line of a bunch of words about watchfulness and what Christians are called to do while we are waiting for the return of Jesus. We are still there today. We are living in the joy of knowing Christ now, but still waiting for the great day of Christ’s return, although we aren’t all that sure what that will be like.

The parable that comes right before this, about the bridesmaids and their lamps uses the image of having enough lamp oil for when the bridegroom comes, about being prepared and watchful. That was one attempt at a parable, laying one thing alongside the other with the hope that it will help us understand. Here is another.

14 ‘For it is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them; ¹⁵to one he gave five talents,^* to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away.

The scripture uses the term slave. The word dou/loj (doulos) could as easily be translated as servant and it often is. The first servant gets right to work, takes his boss’s five talents invests them in something and doubles his money. The second servant, got a little less, but works just as hard and doubles his money. The third buries his in the ground. Now, and this is one of the reasons I love scripture so much, he technically follows the law. In Jesus time, Rabbis or teachers, read the Law of Moses, in Exodus and Leviticus and Numbers, etc. and acted sort of like judges and lawyers, taking those laws and devising more specific case law around them. We call that case law rabbinical law and it stated that if someone lent you money, and you buried it the ground, you wouldn’t be responsible for its loss.

This parable makes me nervous and uncomfortable. This servant has done what is right in the eyes of the law and he is getting in trouble for it.

If you read the gospels carefully, Jesus doesn’t shun the commandments and the laws that God gave in what we call the Old Testament, but he never, ever lets the law get in the way of Grace. Jesus healed on the Sabbath day. The rabbis said that it was against the Law of Moses, but Jesus put grace first. From Matthew 12:

⁹He left that place and entered their synagogue; ¹⁰a man was there with a withered hand, and they asked him, "Is it lawful to cure on the sabbath?" so that they might accuse him. ¹¹He said to them, "Suppose one of you has only one sheep and it falls into a pit on the sabbath; will you not lay hold of it and lift it out? ¹²How much more valuable is a human being than a sheep! So it is lawful to do good on the sabbath. ¹³Then he said to the man, "Stretch out your hand." He stretched it out, and it was restored, as sound as the other.

For Jesus grace always comes before law.

The Church tends to be conservative. I think many are shocked to hear the way the “conservative” servant is treated. Think about it like this, if you had to go away for a while and you had, say $100,000. Before going, you give it to me and say, “will you take care of this for me?” I say I will. You call up a few weeks later, which of the following would you rather me say, “they money is fine, I invested it in a number of highly volatile stocks, but man if they pay off, you are set.” Or “It is in my safe.”

Many of us would like to reward the final servant for being prudent. He didn’t squander the master’s money, he didn’t take any unnecessary risks. If you have ever invested money in something that offers a greater return than the bank you have heard or read that non-FDIC insured deposits carry inherent risks. But remember this is not about money. This is a parable. “The kingdom of heaven is like.”

When we read this as a parable, we can see that the servant misjudged the master when he said:

²⁴Then the one who had received the one talent also came forward, saying, “Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; ²⁵so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.”

The servant misjudged the master when he thought that the master would punish him for taking risks with the money. What really upset the master was that his money sat idle.

I think we misjudge God when we think that God will punish us for taking risks with the Gospel. What I believe will really upset God is if the Gospel sits idle, protected by physical and mental barriers that keep it safe. I think we misjudge God when we think that we will be condemned for not defending God’s holiness. I think we misjudge God when we think that God will be upset that we opened up to the church to the wrong kind of people that God will be mad that we erred on the side of Grace. I think we misjudge God when we think God will punish us for taking risks with the church.

I truly believe that I want to stand before God and say, “God I was nearly reckless with your grace, I invested the gospel in high risk, high gain investments. I tried to share your gospel and your grace with everyone. I tried to share your love with men and women, rich and poor, black and white, gay and straight, petty thieves and corporate criminals, democrats and republicans, I took your 5 talents and made five more.”

And I hope to hear:

“Well done, good and trustworthy slave… enter into the joy of your master.”

A relative of mine, who had been away from the church for some time visited us one Sunday. When I made the invitation to communion I said, this table is open to all, and she believed me and she came forward. I saw her the other day and she said that she was sorry she hadn’t asked me first if it was ok, she just felt moved to come. I said, don’t apologize, who am I to deny you God’s grace? Another relative of mine, one from a much more conservative denomination that closes their table to non-members gave me a look that I read as “there he goes again, being reckless with God’s grace.”

If I am wrong, I am going to be really, really, wrong, and I am ok with that.

This is my hammer. It is in really good shape. If you look closely, you will see that it is still quite clean and shiny. The stickers that came on it are still there. This hammer has been well cared for.

This is my father’s hammer. My father works with wood, does all his own home repairs. He has been a mechanic, on cars and airplanes and a shop teacher. His hammer is all marked up. It is dirty. It is even a little rusty. My father uses his hammer and he isn’t at all worried about getting it dirty because it is a hammer and that is what hammers are for.

This is one of my Bibles. I received it as a gift from the Annual Conference on my commissioning as a pastor. It is really good shape. It is really well cared for. I keep it in this box I got it in. This is my other Bible. It is dirty, torn, marked up, beautiful. I am not worried at all about getting it dirty, because it is a Bible and that is what it is for.

A pastor in Virginia recently began a huge stir in the United Methodist Church by telling a certain man that he couldn’t be a member of his church because he felt that the man was guilty of a certain kind of sin that the pastor felt was somehow different than the sins the rest of us carry around. I guess he felt he was protecting God or God’s church from something. It was sort of like putting this Bible back in the box and on my shelf. It becomes fairly useless.

God doesn’t need our protection. Jesus isn’t going to come back and say, “Why were you so reckless with grace?” If I am ever so misguided as to try and deny God’s grace to anyone under the guise of protecting God, I believe I deserve to hear “You wicked and lazy slave!” Pretty harsh, but pretty clear.

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[1] Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

[2] ibid