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| Be not afraid |
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(please email questions or comments) Nov. 13, 2011, Memorial UCC 1 Thess. 5: 1-11; Matt. 25: 14-30 May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, O God, who sent your word to live among us. Amen. Sometimes when that word that God sent to live among us speaks, we wind up scratching our heads. Today’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel is one of those days. What’s this thing about master and servants and coins to invest about anyway? Investment advice? Quick, see if you can double your money with some particularly lucrative derivative? Consolation for the wealthy? “Those who have much will receive more.” Bad news for the poor? “For those who don’t have much, even the little bit they have will be taken away from them.” Is it about a harsh and cruel God who demands escalating good works or else get ready to be thrown into the darkness? For a day we call Celebration Sunday around here, there does not seem to be much to celebrate in this story that Jesus tells. There’s not much good news in this Gospel. Yet there it is, plunked down right before us, a story important enough that it shows up in a slightly different form in the Gospel of Luke (19:17-27) and also in some early Christian writings that fall outside the collection we call the New Testament. Can't we just go back to the nice sweet Jesus who talks about a loving God and a world where everything will be turned upside down and the last will be first and the poor will be rich and all will look out for one another? That’s the thing about Jesus, you know. Just when you think you have him all figured out, he asks you to think again. And again. So let’s wrestle with this story a bit. That’s probably what Matthew intended anyway in his Gospel. The way the story of Jesus gets told in Matthew’s Gospel plays to our imaginations, does not seem to concern itself with logical consistency and is often provocative. It really is an invitation for us to play with what the meaning is. Let me try a few different takes on this. See if one of these has some resonance for you as you think about the way you choose to be a follower of Jesus. First, Matthew may well have been telling this story to encourage the early Christians to be bold in spreading the Good News, not to just keep it to themselves in the safe confines of their community. He drew on the image of servants investing their master’s money, an idea that certainly carried risk with it. If they were successful, they would hear the master say, “Come and celebrate with me.” If they were not successful, if their investments crashed, this master might well make them pay with their flesh. The Christian community at this point was pretty isolated. The Romans had destroyed Jerusalem. The Jewish community saw the Christians as trouble. To go out to spread the Good News carried a lot of risk. Would it not be better just to stay in the house, gather with the community you knew, say the prayers, sing the songs, share the meal? Why take a chance? The way Matthew tells this story, Jesus is telling them to take a chance. To fail to do that is to risk letting the Good News sink into darkness. Are there times we just want to bury our beliefs, our sense of the Gospel rather than take the risks that come with trying to live them out? Are our beliefs just something for the safe spaces of a Sunday morning or perhaps a crisis in life or do we do our best to carry them with us into the world around us? Here’s another way of thinking about this story. The third servant, the one described by the master as evil and lazy, may well have been the one who saw through the complex financial schemes and oppressive policies of the master. Rather than be drawn into an economy that tilted toward rewarding the wealthy and punishing the poor, the servant resisted. He did not invest. He spoke truth to power: “You are a hard man. You harvest grain where you haven’t sown. You gather crops where you haven’t spread seed.” In Luke’s telling of this story in his Gospel, the master has gone away in search of greater power for himself. Luke writes: “The citizens of his country hated him and sent a delegation after him, saying, ‘We do not want this man to rule over us.’ ” You could almost see this servant standing on a corner near Wall Street holding up a protest sign while others cheered him on. The master was not amused. But the people who heard Jesus tell this story - the dispossessed of Israel - might well have both have envied the smart servants who got rich and admired the rebellious one who stood up to the oppressor. Don’t we find ourselves inhabiting all of the characters in this story at different times? The powerful one blessed with many of life’s advantages, the shrewd ones trying to find a way to improve our financial and social position, the one who is disgusted by an economy that crushes those not just on the margins but ordinary people throughout the land? When do we choose to stand with those who are hurting, to resist those who would oppress others for their own gain? Is that a message in this story? Here’s another way of thinking about this story. Credit for this approach goes to Andrew Warner, who is the pastor of Plymouth United Church of Christ in Milwaukee. Andrew wonders if the servant who protected the money might have known one of the five foolish bridesmaids from the story Jesus told right before this one. In that story, ten bridesmaids are at one of those wonderfully extended wedding gatherings that goes on for days. They are waiting for the groom to arrive and it is getting on towards midnight. Five of the bridesmaids brought oil for their lamps. The other five, described as foolish, brought their lamps but forgot to bring flasks of oil. They all started to drift off to sleep and then the cry went out that the groom was getting near. This was when the bridesmaids were supposed to light their lamps and go out to lead the groom in. The five foolish asked the five wise bridesmaids to share their oil. Nothing doing, said the wise ones. We only have enough for ourselves. Run to the 24-hour Walgreens down the street and buy your own oil. They did, but they came back too late to join the wedding party. Just like the servant in today’s story, they found themselves locked out in the darkness of the night. So you can imagine that if a foolish bridesmaid and our cautious servant had chatted with each other, she would have told him to be careful to protect what he has. She knew the consequences of not being cautious, not being prepared. Maybe he even was in tune with what Paul wrote to the people of Thessalonica in the letter we heard today – “You know very well that the day of the Lord is going to come like a thief in the night.” Better then to protect the master’s money from a thief, the servant calculated. These stories and one yet to come are stories about the end of time. The early Christians expected Christ to come back at any moment, so these stories were designed to help them be ready for that. It’s like the apocalypse is just around the corner. The servant acts on the advice of the bridesmaid. He protects the master’s money and winds up locked out in the darkness of the night, exactly like she was. “Just what do you do in an apocalypse?” Andrew Warner asks. He suggests that there is a big difference between focusing on preservation and on preparation. He poses this thought to Christians gathered in congregations like his and like ours: “We have received gifts of daring generosity. When we are called to account, the question will be not how we preserved the balance sheet or the bricks and mortar, but whether we emulated others’ daring and doubled it, taking audacious action to preserve principle (that which we believe) or over principal (our financial status).” That leads to a fourth take on this story of the master and the servants and the coins. It’s a take that I think offers us both a challenge and a bit of hope as we contemplate the hard words of Jesus, the hard places in our lives and how we go about living from day to day. I mentioned that these stories are part of the way Matthew is helping the early Christians be ready for the end times. These stories come toward the end of Matthew’s Gospel as Jesus heads for that last meal with his closest friends, his betrayal by one of them, his denial by another and his crucifixion and death. There are three stories in this set. The one about the bridesmaids tells people to stay awake, to be prepared. The one that comes right after today’s story is the very familiar story of God embracing those who feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome the stranger, care for the sick, visit the prisoners. We will hear that story next week. So if the first story about the bridesmaids tells us to live life prepared for whatever may happen and if the third story tells us to act in ways that help others, I think today’s story tells us not to live paralyzed by fear. You know how often in the Bible when someone encounters God or Jesus, the first words they hear are “Be not afraid.” If we live in fear, we will find it hard to reach out to others. We fear that they may reject us. They may take advantage of us. They may make us feel foolish. If we try to act, we may fail and we fear failure. A few of us here learned that in a small way in the last few days. We had a request from a social worker in our neighborhood to try to gather a few folks to help a young mother move yesterday morning so that her disabled son could have a handicapped accessible apartment. Within a few hours of a plea by email, five folks from here had volunteered to spend their Saturday morning helping out someone they did not know. And then things got complicated. The woman who was going to swap her first floor apartment for the mother’s second floor apartment decided on Friday night that she did not want to move. So we had to call off our effort to help. Schedules were disrupted. Our effort to be of service was a failure of sort. But those folks who responded did not let the fear of failing, the fear of a stranger, stop them from acting. We all need to be conscious of what things we can do and what are beyond our limits, whether those limits are physical or emotional or financial. That is living with common sense. What Jesus calls us to today, though, is to find ways to move out of the zones of fear that can keep us hunkered down, where we bury our treasures that are on loan from God and just hope that we can survive unscathed. One of the themes of Jesus’ time speaking God’s word in our midst was a theme of abundant life. Loaves and fishes can feed far more than you might expect. Water taken from a well at midday is but a symbol of God’s grace filling us to overflowing. A despised tax collector takes a chance on encountering Jesus and winds up not only making things right with those he cheated but spreading his wealth far and wide to those in poverty. Be not afraid. Don’t live in fear. As Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, keep encouraging one another and building each other up. Together, we can take the risks that come with following the way of Jesus. When we do that, the rewards are far greater than a few coins. They are joining us to the expanse of God’s love. May it be so. |