This morning I’d like to mine the parable
in our Gospel lesson
for
what it might say to us as we mark
the 25th
Anniversary of Grace in the Desert.
Parables aren’t neat little allegories.
They don’t have one clear meaning.
They are stories you can take one way or
another.
Parables are zinger tales to make us
wonder.
No single interpretation works with all the
detail
of
the story.
In this story of the master entrusting his
property
to
three servants,
it
isn’t at all clear to me that the master is God,
we
are the servants, etc.
We might hear this as a story of injustice.
The poor guy with one talent did the right
thing.
He followed the SEC investment regs of his
day.
But he gets the shaft.
This may be a cynical “them that’s got
gets” story.
Our conservative investor gets cast into
the outer darkness.
But maybe it’s the outer darkness of Gethsemane
where he and Jesus
will weep and gnash their teeth.
But we can just as easily take the story a
different direction.
We can see ourselves individually as the
servants
who
own nothing but have been trusted by God
to hold and care
for his blessings.
The master handed his property over to the
servants,
and
in the end, they returned it to him.
That dynamic is as profound as anything in
the Bible
and
if we base our lives on it,
we’ll
find ourselves in a new world.
St. Ignatius of Loyola gave everything back
to God
when
he prayed,
“Accept O God my memory, my will,
my understanding,
my imagination.
All that I am and all that I have
you
have given me.
I give it all back //
to
be disposed of according to your good pleasure.
I ask nothing but the comfort of your
presence
and
the joy of your love.”
To think of everything as a gift from God
and
to believe the best thing about that gift
is
the opportunity to give it back – that changes
how
we experience everything.
To see the world as an ever flowing gift
exchange
between
God and us is to join the cosmic dance.
Dorothy Day titled her autobiography The Long Loneliness
because that’s what our lives so easily become.
In Thomas Dumm’s book, Loneliness
As A Way Of Life,
he describes the Death Of A Salesman character
Willy Loman as lonely, alienated
-- cut
off even from himself
--trapped
in the ceaseless struggle to acquire,
to
succeed by amassing possessions, to have, have, have.
We trust owning things
to insure our well-being and our freedom.
We are driven to become
people “of independent means.”
But Dumm says that the
life of having is empty, deeply lonely.
As Wordsworth put it,
“Getting
and spending we lay waste our powers.
Little
we see in nature that is ours.”
We’re like Citizen Kane
dying with the word “Rosebud,”
the
name of his boyhood sled, on his lips.
He had built an empire
but died longing
for
the simple innocent humanity he had lost.
Psychoanalyst Eric Fromm
wrote in his book, To Have Or To Be
that
Western culture had gone off track.
It promises happiness
through material possessions.
But that life of
getting, spending, having, and clutching
had failed to make us happy.
It had drawn us away
from authentic experience.
It had cut us off from
our real selves, cut us off like Citizen Kane
and
Willy Loman from our humanity,
reduced
us to jumping through economic hoops.
Fromm says there is
another way.
It is psychologically possible
to live deeply and happily
through
participation in the whole dance of humanity.
He calls that experience
“being”
and
says we develop the capacity for being
--the capacity for life –
through letting go of
possessions
in
order to connect with each other.
But it’s bigger than
that. The problem of having metasticizes
French philosopher
Gabriel Marcel’s book Being And Having
says the problem isn’t just material
possessions.
It’s how we relate to
everything.
It’s treating the world,
even our own bodies and ideas,
as
something we can watch, dominate, possess, manipulate.
That’s what Marcel means
by “having.”
We can have our families
as well as having our homes.
The problem is that we
stand back one step
removed
from everything,
using it instead of celebrating it.
That’s lonely.
Real life is breathing
in and breathing out,
embracing and letting go.
We live out of our
gratitude -- not just to have received
but for the opportunity to give back freely and joyfully.
When we place our lives and
labors
on the
altar for Eucharist,
God blesses our gifts and returns them to us.
The question is: how
might we bless
what we have received before
we give it back to God?
What can we do with our
lives, our labors, our possessions,
that would be gracious and pleasing to God?
That is the question for
each of us to discern each day.
It is also a question
for this congregation.
God has given us a
church in Summrerlin.
The people who founded this
parish delivered the gift,
but it is fundamentally God’s gift to us today.
How do we bless this
Church?
How do we give it back
to God?
The answer lies in a shift
like the one
that Dumm, Fromm, and Marcel prescribed.
I call it the shift from
Consumer Spirituality
to
Missional Spirituality.
It’s natural that we
come to Church as consumers
needing something.
We are here “to get
something out of it.”
People sometimes say “I
stopped going to that Church
because I wasn’t getting anything out of it.”
I just read a message
from someone
who in another congregation.
She was resigning from
the vestry
because she wasn’t “getting what she needed
from the Church.”
It’s natural that we
start with what we need.
But the Catch 22 is that
we only get what we need
when we stop trying to get what we need.
When we step out of the
Willy Loman
mode of acquisition and
to leap into the dance of Being,
our neediness dissipates
like the fog.
So how does a Church do
that?
By engaging the Kingdom
Mission.
The Anglican Communion,
the Episcopal Church,
and this Diocese all define the Mission with 5 Marks:
Proclaiming the Gospel
Teaching and nurturing believers
Caring for hurting people
Challenging injustice
Safeguarding the environment
The Church is a
5-cylinder engine.
To run smoothly, it ha
to be hitting on all 5 cylinders.
You can do all those
five marks right here in Summrerlin.
All it takes is time, effort,
and money.
Right now almost 25% of
your budget goes
to pay
debt for your buildings.
You need your buildings.
You need more buildings
to do more ministry.
But to do a world
changing Kingdom Mission in Summrerlin,
to do any of the 5 Marks well,
you have to get free of debt bondage
to Pharaoh’s
State Bank.
At the same time, you
have to connect, connect, connect
with this community around the 5 Marks of Mission.
We need some of you in
Family Promise,
others
in Nevadans for the Common Good,
others teaching Sunday School,
others publicizing Grace in the Desert
all over town
-- not because you need to grow
but
because the people out there need some gospel.
When we join hands in
God’s Kingdom Mission,
we join the dance of Being.
The need to cling to our
stuff falls away.
We forget about getting our
needs met.
We celebrate what God
has given us
because giving it back is so much fun.
