Served by the Master | a sermon

Sermon by Jamie Howison on Isaiah 1:1, 10-20 and Luke 12:32-40

At first glance our readings today might seem marked by demands, vigilance, and a need to reform. Take this reading from Isaiah, which comes from the opening chapter of that book. It is identified as “The vision of Isaiah son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.” That places this portion of the book the mid to late 8th-century BC, which means it is in a time when the northern Kingdom of Israel has fallen to Assyria, while the southern Kingdom of Judah—which was centred in Jerusalem—had essentially been turned into a vassal state in 701. In short, very difficult days indeed, which is something Isaiah is wanting to address.

The prophet’s line of address is relatively straightforward: things like sacrifices of animals, the offering of incense, and the close observance “solemn assemblies” when so much is out of line in the nation are not desired by God. Instead,

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean,
remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes;
cease to do evil, learn to do good;
seek justice, rescue the oppressed,
defend the orphan, plead for the widow.

And then this:

If you are willing and obedient,
you shall eat the good of the land;
but if you refuse and rebel,
you shall be devoured by the sword;
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

In short, line up the life of the nation faithfully with the core demands of torah, and stop saying all the right things without actually doing what is right.

And then from the Gospel according to Luke there are these admonitions to “Sell your possessions, and give alms,” “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” And then this call to be ready with your lamps lit, “for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.” It sounds a whole lot like what we get in the opening week of Advent, this call for readiness and watchfulness, yet here we are in the middle of the summer wishing maybe we has a lovely parable or a comforting teaching!

Yet I think it must be said that right in the midst of these demanding teachings, Jesus does offer a little parable that must be received as a source of deep hope and comfort. Let me give you Eugene Peterson’s rendering of the parable, from his translation The Message:

Keep your shirts on; keep the lights on! Be like house servants waiting for their master to come back from his honeymoon, awake and ready to open the door when he arrives and knocks. Lucky the servants whom the master finds on watch! He'll put on an apron, sit them at the table, and serve them a meal, sharing his wedding feast with them. It doesn't matter what time of the night he arrives; they're awake - and so blessed!

Now there is a wonderfully unexpected reversal at work in this parable, which I think gives the whole of the gospel reading a fascinating spin. The servants who are wakefully watching for the master are deemed “lucky” in Peterson’s translation and “blessed” in the more traditional translations, because the master who is returning from the wedding banquet “will fasten his belt and have the servants sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them.” Now we don’t live in a world where most of us have any first-hand experience of masters and servants, much less masters and slaves, but maybe imagine it this way instead.

You’re working at a really nice restaurant as a server, and arrangements have been made by a very wealthy patron to keep the place open long past its usual hours. That patron has been off to a wedding, and really wants to end the night with a visit to his favourite restaurant… and he’s got the funds to make that happen. So there you are, with a couple of cooks out in the kitchen, a host at the door, an extra server, and a person whose job is to clear off the table and keep the water and wine glasses filled. The clock is ticking, and you’re waiting and waiting and waiting… until that patron arrives, and is so delighted to see that all is ready that he insists that the staff sit down at the table while he dons an apron and begins to whip up a lovely little meal in the kitchen. What the heck is happening here, you ask one another as appetizers and a fine bottle of wine arrive at the table. No sooner have you finished that first course than a lovely main dish arrives, with the wealthy patron hardly having broken a sweat to dash it all together.

Well, that’s rather upside down, of course, as anyone who has ever worked in the restaurant business can tell you, yet it strikes at the very heart of what Jesus is offering up in his odd little parable. And in case you have any doubt about the audacity of his imagery, let’s try on Robert Capon’s interpretation.

[The servants’] great good luck is that the Master will come home in a hilarious mood. He will not come with sober assessments of past performances or with grim orders for future exertions; rather he will come with a song in his tipsy heart, a chilled bottle of Dom Perignon in each tail of his coat, and a breakfast to end all breakfasts in his hands: bacon, sausage, grits, home-fries, and eggs sunny-side up. (Capon, The Parables of Grace)

And because Capon insists on hearing this parable against the background of all of the party imagery that is used to envision what life is meant to be—and will be in the fullness of time—he continues:

We too, then, are blessed in the risen Jesus, for he comes to us from his nuptials in death, and asks only that we wait in faith for him. He will knock at the door of our own death, and he will come in and throw us a party.

And just in case you had any doubts about how Capon is applying the party imagery, I’d invite you to attend to this portion of his thought:

[Jesus] has made it clear that he will keep the party going both now and forever: now, in the mystery of the Lord’s Supper by which we celebratively “show forth the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor. 11:26); and forever, at the “Supper of the Lamb” (Rev. 19:9) where we will “sit down together with him in heavenly places” (Eph 2:6) as his “Bride’ (Rev. 19:7)

For all of the glory of the inversion of roles in this little parable, and for all that the reader should delight to think that the master most desires to serve the servants, the urgency resurfaces in the closing section of this evening’s reading, with the imagery of the thief who comes to break into the house. I don’t think that Luke was anything but intentional in offering these teachings in this particular order, as I suspect he knew how easy it would be for a reader to rhapsodize over the imagery of the master serving a meal to his servants, and then forget some of the urgency that characterized so much of what Jesus offered to his followers. And so with that in view he concludes this little section with that mandate to “be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”

I think we always stand in something of a tension between the promise of comfort and the need always to be ready. In some real sense that is actually carried in the shape of the Christian calendar, wherein the call for the preparedness and readiness of Advent folds into the glory and comfort of Christmastide, and then slowly turns back toward the demands of Lent which then resolve into the celebrations of Easter. I think this is part of the call of the Christian life, to observe both kinds of seasons and to live within the tension of the “already, but not yet.” We already know and celebrate the birth of Jesus and ultimately his defeat of death, but we still live provisionally in a time when there is so much need, so much hurt, so many big questions and challenges. As Christians we have to be realistic about the hard stuff, but then unremittingly hopeful about the world’s future in Christ. In that sense, we are servants who have been sat down at the table by Jesus, and are fed time and again by his love and generosity, and then mandated to keep alert and attentive to the needs and hungers of the world.

And that, my friends, is the good news and the challenge for this Sunday evening in August.