22nd Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 28A

22nd Sunday after Pentecost—Proper 28A
November 13, 2011
This past week, I learned something that has disturbed me greatly. A behavioral psychologist in Jackson was sharing with a group of clergy that she had been doing research among people of faith as we approached the vote on the controversial personhood initiative. She said that her research group had gathered significant data that showed that many people of faith were afraid of what would happen to them if they voted no. The data showed that the people of faith believed that God would be watching them when they entered the poll booth, watching to see how they voted, and they feared divine retribution if they voted no. People of faith actually told this behavioral psychologist that they believed that if they voted no on ballot initiative 26 then God was going to get them.
At first I was incredulous. And then I was somewhat scornful. None of these people could possibly be Episcopalians, because surely our theology is much more sophisticated than that! And then I felt so very terribly sorry for those people, for whom that is their faith, those whom have chosen to live their lives in that kind of fear of God.
And then I read the gospel for today. In today’s parable, Jesus tells of a man who is preparing to go on a journey, and he entrusts to three of his slaves an enormous amount of his money. Two of the slaves take the money and use it to make more money, so when the master returns, they give him his money back and then some. The third slave takes the money the master gives him and he takes a shovel and digs a hole in the ground to bury the money and keep it safe until the master returns. But when he returns that money to the master and confesses his fear to him, the master severely chastises him and has him cast into the outer darkness.
We make a mistake if we read this parable to be about God and the nature of God’s kingdom. This parable is, instead, about us and about all the people of God. The chief problem of the third slave, especially in contrast to the other two slaves, is the failure of his imagination. It is the chief failure of all people of faith, this failure of imagination. We can see it all throughout the story of God and God’s people: God invites peoples’ trust; God invites peoples’ best hopes, their best dreams, and our imaginations fail us. We cannot get over thinking that God is just as small as we are. We cannot imagine God to be any bigger, better, different than ourselves. And in that way, we fail, again and again and again.
Think about the stories of our faith, how the Israelites turned away from God over and over again because their imaginations failed them, their trust failed them. Think about the Pharisees, the Scribes, even the disciples. How they could not see the glory of God who was right in front of them because of the failure of their imaginations. We see this failure of imagination at work in the faithful community at Thessolonika, to whom Paul is writing to invite them to expand their imaginations, to not be discouraged, to remember their hope. He writes to capture their imaginations once again with the real hope “that God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live with him.”
If we are truthful, we see this failure of imagination at work in our own world, in our own church, in our own lives. Truly we are not so different from those people who thought that God was going to get them if they voted a certain way. We all share in this failure of imagination regarding the goodness and the abundance of God.
The theologian James Allison writes about the success of the imagination of the first two slaves in this parable. He writes, “The key feature of this parable is that it is the imagination of the servants as to what their master is like which is the determining factor of their conscience and thus the wellspring of their activity. The first two servants…trusted that their master was the sort of daring fellow who would do rash and crazy things for which there was no script, would dare, would experiment, would risk losing things and so would end up multiplying things greatly. In other words, they perceived their master’s regard for them as one of liking them enough to be daring them and encouraging them to be adventurous, and so, imagining and trusting that abundance would multiply, they indeed multiplied abundance.”i

Again and again, Jesus invites us to step beyond our fear; to allow ourselves to be inspired by hope; to leave behind the limits of our own imaginations; to give our hearts to God’s abundance; and to stake our lives on this radical abundance that is so far beyond anything our own imaginations can provide. If only we could do this, if only we could give our hearts and our imaginations to God’s abundance, what a different world we would dwell in! How different our own lives would be!

Here are the readings for today: http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Pentecost/AProp28_RCL.html

i Allison, James. On Being Liked. London: Darton, Longman, & Todd, 2003, p 109.