Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost
Luke 1232 “Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom. 33 Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will never fail, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. 34 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
35 “Be dressed ready for service and keep your lamps burning, 36 like servants waiting for their master to return from a wedding banquet, so that when he comes and knocks they can immediately open the door for him. 37 It will be good for those servants whose master finds them watching when he comes. Truly I tell you, he will dress himself to serve, will have them recline at the table and will come and wait on them. 38 It will be good for those servants whose master finds them ready, even if he comes in the middle of the night or toward daybreak. 39 But understand this: If the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. 40 You also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.”
For those who feel the holidays are too short, I suggest time-travel.
We seem to live with the assumption of progress: that whatever is bad today was worse in the past. But if we look at a simple measure like days off, people in the past were living in a kind of paradise.
If you were a fourteenth century farm hand, toiling in the fields from dawn to dusk, you might be an object of pity until you count the non-working days: Sundays, vacation periods such as Christmas and Easter, various saints’ days, and ales—days of celebration that meant the host, either the church or the lord would provide the ale. All together, a third of the year was holiday.[1]
And that describes the seemingly overworked English. In France, they took things to the next level: 52 Sundays, 90 rest days and 38 additional holidays—nearly six months off each year. Vive la France!
Now, you might think that with so many holidays to choose from, our hypothetical farm hand would be unable to pick a favourite. How would you choose? One that stands out, and has for centuries, is the Twelfth Night, January 5th—the day that marks the end of the Christmas season.
On Twelfth Night you could look forward to a sumptuous meal, including tasty twelfth-cake, washed down with wassail (mulled cider). If you were really lucky, your piece of twelfth-cake might have a bean in it, meaning that you were appointed the Lord of Misrule for the evening.
And this is when things got interesting. As Lord of Misrule, you assumed the role of the Lord of the Manor for the evening, and the actual lord would serve you. You could command others as the lord would, and by tradition they would obey. The same tradition happened in the royal court, and even among churchmen, with the appointment of a boy bishop for the Twelfth Night celebrations.
And like other Christian festivals, this too was stolen from the Romans. They celebrated Saturnalia in late December, a week-long celebration that ended with Sol Invictus, the day of the unconquered sun. And at the heart of the celebration was a reversal of roles: masters served slaves at table, or sometimes ate together, and slaves were free to speak their minds—while remembering that one day the normal order would resume.
Call it a brief social revolution, where people got taste of how the other half (or the one percent) lived. In some ways it must have acted as a bit of the relief valve, or at the very least a reminder that the existing order belongs to the present time, and not the time to come.
And this brings us to Luke 12. At this point in the story, Jesus has attracted a vast crowd to him. He speaks first to this disciples and warms them to be on their guard: against hypocrites, then the greedy (last week’s lesson) and finally the unprepared. But before he attends to the unprepared, he as a final word about wealth:
32 “Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom. 33 Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will never fail, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. 34 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
This has nothing to do with my sermon, I just love the thought. After this last look at treasure, he shares not-quite-a-parable about watchfulness. The words are familiar—they appear throughout the gospels—but there is something else. Listen again:
Be dressed and ready, keep your lamps burning for the master’s return. “It will be good for those servants whose master finds them watching when he comes. Truly I tell you, he will dress himself to serve, will have them recline at the table and will come and wait on them.
What’s this? Saturnalia in Luke? [The master] will dress himself to serve, will have them recline at the table and will come and wait on them? Where did that come from? And just as quickly as this little aside appears, it disappears. “It will be good,” he says, “for those servants whose master finds them ready, even if he comes in the middle of the night.”
Last week I mentioned the over-zealous scribe, tacking on some interpretation or explanation to tie off a parable. This week we meet the anxious scribe, most likely St. Luke himself, with a snippet of speech that belongs somewhere, and gets inserted here.
Think of the gospels as an assemblage of stories and sayings, collected throughout Jesus all-too-brief time on earth and repackaged in four gospels. These words lived in memory and mutual sharing, only to be set down in the years that followed the cross. Luke has a verse about reversing the role of master and servant, and inserts it here. Except it doesn’t really fit. This is a passage about watchfulness, not reversals.
If Luke had the earliest version of Word Perfect, or Microsoft Word, he might have cut this and pasted it in a better spot, namely chapter 22. There we find Luke’s late version of ‘who is the greatest’ and Jesus’ response: “the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves. 27 For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one who is at the table? But I am among you as one that serves.”
This verse may be familiar to you if you know our national men’s group, AOTS. They take their name from 22.27: “But I am among you as one that serves.”
In Luke 22, we learn that Jesus is the master that serves, that sponsors the great reversals where the least and the last become the greatest and the first of all. Jesus will dress as one who serves, allow others to recline at table, and will come to wait on them and meet their needs. He will humble himself, and set an example for his disciples to follow. Later, as Philippians notes, he will humble himself and “become obedient to death—even death on a cross.”
So how do we apply this to today? What message can we draw beyond the eternal command to love and serve others? I know you’ve been thinking about a certain billionaire, so we may as well talk about him.
In a perverted version of Twelfth Night or Saturnalia, a troublesome leader is promising to reverse the social order by the simple act of voting for him. He as tapped into all the anger and resentment that comes when the people are ignored or belittled by their so-called betters and the gap between them grows to the point that there is little hope for the future.
He is promising to somehow return power to those left behind without being troubled by details, reason or anything that a normal politician might promise. Instead, he provokes more anger, and invents enemies—and all the while continues to profit from the existing order he condemns.
The sad part of the story is that the anger and the resentment are largely justified, and it is equally sad that the invitation to revenge and mayhem has been sold to them in such a bewitching way. His opponent will have to work twice as hard to present an alternate vision: to listen to the people who have been left behind, to offer concrete solutions, and to offer to truly serve them.
There are many examples of servant leadership, beginning in scripture and demonstrated in the lives of saints and leaders through time. We pray for our friends south of the border, that they may come through this experience with a greater commitment to each other and the promise of peace. Amen.
[1] The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, by Juliet B. Schor
posted by michael jacob kooiman @ 4:36 AM
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