Proper 28

This sermon I preached on November 13, 2011, at St. Paul's Cathedral in Buffalo, NY (it also was my 31st birthday). It was on Matthew 25:14-30



In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

At the time of the Revolution, the Anglican church in the American colonies was the established church in Virginia, Maryland, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and the southern counties of New York. It was funded generously by monies coming from England. It had legal standing, wealth, and power. It was comfortable. But, it was entirely absent of bishops. Nominally, the bishop of London was solely responsible for every single Anglican in the colonies. All of the priests serving in the colonies had to face the perilous journey to England for their ordination, and also submit to the requisite oaths of allegiance to the Crown.

After the eruption of the Revolution, the Anglican parishes in the colonies were ripped apart by division and argument over the rifts between the colonies and Great Britain. Gone was the security they had known under English rule. Many of the clergy, in particular, felt bound by honor to respect the vows they had taken to the Crown, and publicly opposed the Revolution. By the end of the war and the emigration of Loyalists to Canada or back to England, the Anglican parishes in the new United States were disestablished, no longer received funding from England, and half of the parishes were closed or destroyed. It’s estimated that almost 65% of clergy left for Canada; North Carolina had no priest; Virginia’s pre-Revolutionary parish count of 107 dropped to 42. And, there was an ocean and some sour feelings dividing the Anglican churches in the US and the closest bishop. Eventually, though, priests traveled to Great Britain, and were consecrated bishops for the American church, first in Scotland, then in England. But the sense of loss and change wasn’t entirely gone even after America obtained its own bishops: the first bishop of New York, Samuel Provoost, despaired that the church would survive, so in 1801, he retired as bishop and became a botanist, convinced that the Episcopal Church would fade away when the last members of the pre-Revolution generation died. At his time, there were only 10,000 Episcopalians in the entire nation of 4 million.

But that wasn’t the end of the story. The Episcopal Church rose and grew and changed and flourished. Like the first two servants in the Gospel, it returned to its master more than it had been given, by having faith that its efforts would bring growth, that the seeds it planted would bear fruit. It accepted its call to mission, to spreading the Gospel, to proclaiming the message of the love of God given in Christ. For those of you who remember well the 1928 Prayer Book, you may recall the popular passage from the first book of Chronicles commonly used in the Offertory: All things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given Thee. Our forebears in the Episcopal Church here in the US trusted that all things would come from the Lord, and they returned to the Lord what they had been given. They returned it multiplied and flourishing.

In the Gospel this morning we heard about the three servants, the first two servants who returned double what their master had entrusted to them, and the third who hid the gold out of fear. He allowed what he had been given by his Lord to lay fallow, undeveloped, unused, and returned it: sterile, stale, and useless. Instead of using the gifts his lord had given him to grow and to develop, he hid it out of anxiety. He refused to accept his lord’s call to mission and growth because it might be too hard, might be too costly, and certainly was too scary. Instead of mission, this servant delivered barreness.

Less than 70 years after Bishop Provoost had lamented the end of the Episcopal Church, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a group of religious brothers, the first in the Anglican Communion since the Reformation, founded a house. In their Rule, or constitution, the Society of St John the Evangelist, which still flourishes on the banks of the Charles River, writes about mission as follows:

Knowing that grace is powerful in weakness, we hand over to Christ any anxiety about our own adequacy. We are to trust our own experience of God and draw directly from it so that our witness can be authentic. We also need to let go of any grasping for immediate results; much of what the grace of God achieves through us will be entirely hidden from our eyes. We also expect to experience failures. Some of these contain lessons that can help us become more skillful in the future. Other failures are means by which we enter further into the mystery of discipleship; we are not greater than the master.

The Society of St John the Evangelist enjoins its brothers to be like the first two servants in the Gospel, to use the gifts God gives them, to plant seeds of grace that might grow, to take risks, to try and maybe to fail, but, then, to try again.
None of us is wholly adequate, none of us is perfect: we are each flawed, and limited, given specific gifts and talents, but not all talents, and none of our talents are given in complete perfection. We are weak, prone to faithlessness, distraction, and sin. But that imperfection means that, like the first two servants, the gifts that we are given and the fruits that they produce are the product not of our own power, but of God’s grace working in and through us. All things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given Thee.

That grace works not only for our own individual growth in holiness, but for the spread of the Gospel, for the service and relief of our neighbors, and for the advancing of Christ’s reign on earth. Reflecting on our imperfection drives us to recognize that no matter how hard we try, no matter how long we work, or wealthy we become, no matter what we do or try to be, we will not be able to do anything under our own power. Only the power of God working in our lives can accomplish anything, only grace can call forth fruit in our lives.

And that is freeing. It frees us from the anxiety of always having to be right, of always having to be perfect; it frees us from the anxiety of trying and failing, of feeling that all burdens are borne on our shoulders alone. It allows us to lay aside the lie that unless we achieve, unless we produce, unless we work our fingers to the bone, then we will be a failure. It allows us to accept that we are creatures who have limitations. But when we embrace those limitations, and ask for God’s grace to overcome our limitations, there is no force in heaven, earth, or hell that could stop us.

Releasing our fear and trusting in God’s churning within us allows us to be released from the apprehension that entraps each of our hearts. It also allows our hearts to be changed. When we recognize that we have room to grow and that our hearts could be more pure, we become more patient and understanding of others and their own struggles. I’m not perfect, and neither is the person with whom I disagree. But God is moving in both of us. I have inadequacies that God is using to work out my salvation and to remind me that I’m dependent on Him, and so does my neighbor. So, I can reflect that I should cut my neighbor some slack, maybe give my neighbor the benefit of the doubt, and pray for myself and for my neighbor.

Accepting that we are given gifts by God to grow for our edification and for his glory, we will come to recognize the giftedness of others around us. We’ll also be led by grace to see that any actions that belittle or demean others must be acknowledged for what they are: blasphemy and derision of God’s handiwork. In our own hearts are where change must first occur if we desire to move past our fear and convert from being the third servant who hides his gifts to the first two who grow them.

Christ’s call to mission is a call to each of us individually, and to all of us gathered together as the Cathedral family. Christ begs us to enter out into the harvest, using the gifts he has entrusted to each of us and to the Cathedral, so that we might return to him with doublefold, like the first two servants in the Gospel. The Cathedral exists for the sake of mission, for the blossoming of grace in the world, for the preaching of the Gospel, and for the salvation of souls. The gifts each of us has been given and the gifts entrusted to the Cathedral are intended for the growth in holiness of its members, and for the spread of Christ’s love to those who are not yet its members. Our unique talents and the talents of the Cathedral are given so we can invest in our future, not so we can sustain our present. As St. Paul, our patron wrote, “We preach Christ crucified”. That is the mission of every single Cathedral parishioner and the mission of the Cathedral itself.

We are not called to give up and all become botanists like Bishop Provoost. What would the world possibly do with all those botanists, anyway? We are called to convert our hearts, marshal our gifts, and unite together as a family gathered here, in this Cathedral, so that our love and our work might bear fruit and help bring healing to a struggling world. The fields are ripe for the harvests, and we can either bury our treasures or grow them and return them doublefold to Christ, and hear the sweet words in return from the King of heaven Himself: Well done, good and faithful servant! Come and share your master’s happiness!

Amen.