Hellfire and Dalmatians

Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
October 6, 2019
Proper 22, Year C
The Rev. John Taliaferro Thomas
 
My bizarre sense of humor has deep familial roots.  I will spare you the commentary on by gone generations, but my older brother and I share an odd fascination with the odd, the ironic, and the twisted wherever we find them in life.  As we live 2,865 miles and three time zones apart, the ubiquity of texting has fueled our connective sharing with threads reading more like Monty Python skits than communications between family members.  When people who know him meet me for the first time, they almost always comment that we have the same weird sense of humor.
 
Christmas and Birthday gifting is always a pleasure in our brotherhood.  Mostly, we find random and unique objects from our travels to give: sometimes Elvis themed kitsch, or t-shirts with bizarre college mascots (Like the fighting Okra of Delta State or the Banana Slugs of UC Santa Cruz) or shirts with pithy, if not questionable, slogans.  Some of these gifts are not suitable for public display, so we wear them when vacationing together where nobody else knows us.
 
By far, one of my favorites is a shirt he gave me early in my time as an ordained priest of the Church.  It shows a church full of spotted dogs sitting in the pews and one dog in vestments at the pulpit saying: “… And He said unto them, bad dogs!  No. No.”  Underneath reads the caption: “Hellfire and Dalmatians.”  I wore that one out.
 
I love that shirt because it pokes fun at the all to human tendency to transfer its own short-lived mercy for others to our miscast image of God.  It rolls us back to some bizarre childhood picture of God as angry man with a white beard hurling lightening bolts at hapless sinners.  Or, it harkens back to some am radio preacher whose sole motivational theology is built around shame and blame.  Only when we put dogs in the pews, do we see how silly it all looks and sounds.
 
“Lord, Increase our faith!” The disciples and followers are seeking special righteousness once again in our Gospel telling.  But with the analogy of the tiny mustard see that yields a prolific bush, Jesus sets the straight that they have what they need, they just need to accept, understand, and leverage faith’s power to grow itself.  Faith is not a quantifiable store housed thing that puts one person’s amount ahead of another’s.  That would make one human inherently better than another simply because of a commodity of faith.  In this way, faith is a lived out thing that can and does start with an inkling, a hope, or a promise, growing from there under God’s steam of creation.
 
To drive the point home, Jesus uses the most problematic and troubling example of a slave doing the slave’s duty first because that is what he or she is supposed to do.  There is no translation or spin that can rescue this image for modern ears.  Its use is more than troubling when considering the human tragedy of American slavery and all of its repercussions.  We do well to try and hear it for what it intends to convey rather than explaining it away, or carrying the metaphor beyond the scope of its intent.  Nevertheless, it is there, reminding us that we are not the ones with the power in the grand scheme of things.  For that we look to an abundantly loving God working in and through us.
 
All of this increased faith seeking is so problematic for an American narrative of lifting ourselves up through deliberate intent and ambitious goal setting.  This reality for some is a myth for others because playing fields are not even and inequality of opportunity is more and more prevalent.  This is not to say that good old hard work is not a virtue, but that we must be careful not to fall into the trap of the so-called prosperity gospel where God is always on my side, concerned with my goals, and materially favorable to the most righteous among us.
 
If you are on any form of social media; Facebook, Instagram, or the like, you might come to believe that the world is loaded with righteous people (#blessed) who are happy, successful, beautiful, vacationing constantly.  While we may try to keep our looks into other people’s lives balanced and realistic, we do compare ourselves to those drinking wine on a tropical island in perfect harmony with their perfectly dressed-all-in-white extended family posing for the family photo.  Or we believe the skinny and ageless faces on the covers of those magazines at the checkout are real and unretouched.  It is not a giant leap to translate those images to be reflective of some sort of blessedness or wholeness that we seek and desire.
 
But keeping it real and in perspective, nobody puts out pictures of their D- paper, their kid getting cut from the team, or their last day in a job where they have been downsized and let go.  I continue to fantasize about starting a news feed called “Realgram” where you are only allowed to show the foibles and fumbles of life: unflattering pictures, burnt casseroles, and the grandkid hitting into a double play.  While “Realgram” would crush the illusion of looking ‘just fabulous’ that we seek to cast, it might help us feel a little better and, certainly, more real.
 
What the disciples seek from Jesus today is some secret, some leg up, some way to get ahead.  And when we are honest, we would love some of that secret sauce too.  If only God would sanctify what I want for me, this would show that my faith is increased.  This is a dangerous calculus.  It sets us up to believe that if we do not get what we want, God must not be listening, or worse, God doesn’t care.  This was never the promise.  The Gospel story hinges on the absolute human rejection of love in person, and even at that, God is all about coming back towards us.  Nothing depends on us completely.  Everything depends what happens next.  That is redemption.  As mother Thesea once said: “We can do no great things - only small things with great love.”  The greatness is God’s.
 
We have to be careful in life not to buy the lie that our story is tragic.  Life is hard, then we die. Sin ruins, and death plays for keeps.  This is the setting where fear, shame, and blame thrive and consume hope.  Instead, our story is the Gospel story.  It is all comedy, because in spite of the worst we do to God, God shows up again.  God comes back to us gain and again not with vengeance, but with love.  We do not need more faith.  We need a great and holy sense of the humor and joy in all as God intends.  Thus, I propose a new and more appropriate t-shirt than the one my brother gave me.  It will read: “And he said unto them Good dogs.  Come on home, and I will feed you forever.”  Amen