What a thick lesson! Will you pray with me: God give us the wisdom to invest the love which you have for us. AMEN.
The bottom line warning in our lesson for today, as you can probably discern is “don’t bury your talents” – which means don’t bury that which God has given you to use to serve God, be it money, abilities, time.
[Retell a bit…]
And how easily we can do this. The third slave didn’t seem to me so terrible. He was just being safe and respectful of his master. But his fear and his tendency to be safe led the master to call him “wicked.” Did you catch that? Wicked is the one who buries their talents, even themselves in the dirt.
A colleague of mine in our text study this week reminded me that C.S. Lewis defined evil as not being anything by itself. Evil only exists as a perversion or a skewing of the good. It’s a parasite that rides on Good. Without Good there would be no evil.
The one who buries his/her talent in the dirt is only evil or wicked because they are not good. Well that’s humbling. Because that makes us all wicked. (here’s the other side of All Saints Day from last week, where I drove home this point that God names us all saints in our baptism). We are wicked saints. How often we can shy away from risk taking, just to be safe. And it’s pretty easy to convince ourselves it’s more sensible too. But here God calls us to the “wisdom” of risk-taking…not for the sake of a thrill, but for the sake of the Glory of God. How might we use our gifts, our talents, our money, our wisdom, our lives to make God’s love and God’s welcome more known and spread throughout this world?
That’s the challenge for us today. We have a Gospel, a message of good news that is really for everybody – it’s as simple as “God loves you. God forgives you. God stays with you, no matter what.” That’s the message we’re “entrusted” with…to use wisely, to invest. How are we investing God’s love and God’s welcome. How are we investing this Good Book from which we gather all these rich stories? Are we investing these so that they multiply and grow? Or are we burying God’s word, God’s love, God’s welcome and God’s book?
We have been entrusted with a story of a God whose love is wildly welcoming – I’m going to go ahead and say that’s a liberal message. God’s love is liberal, it’s reckless, and expansive. It’s not calculated and careful (which is what I’d prefer). God’s wisdom is hidden in what the world sees as foolishness: crazy liberal love. God’s forgiveness as we hear week after week is ever-flowing – that makes no sense. That seems crazy. God’s arms are open so wide, that there’s always room for the stranger, the outcast, the immigrant, the persecuted, the lost, the gay, the straight, the people sitting right here, and the people standing hungry down on the corner of 3rd and Ash, and the people in the halls of power in Washington D.C., the coaches and the victims at Penn State, victims of abuse all over the world! God’s arms are open wide! And that’s crazy! God’s love is so cosmic through Jesus! What do we do with that liberal message of our church? How do we invest it? Or do we bury it?
When I say God’s love is liberal…my tendency is to want to keep that quiet. I know it, but I want to bury it in the sand. Keep it for ourselves. But what are the ways we can be more like the first two servants…multiplying what God has given us? That’s a question that I’d like to ponder together as we move together into a new year…How can we better invest God’s welcome? How would God want us to answer that question?
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I want to shift gears a bit here. First God moves toward us and then we respond to God in lives of service and also in prayer. This is really what worship is. And I wanted to take some time today to reflect on the Psalms, and the diversity of the Psalms. This is something else that God offers us to invest and share wisely: a diversity of Psalms. I love to think of Psalms in terms of music. What music would you set to the various psalms?
As we consider risking and investing a message of a God whose love is so liberal, let us also remember that that God welcomes also all kinds of our emotions and prayers – our anger, our fear, our pain and our joy and praise. Thanks be to God for all the generosity – toward each of us, toward this world, and toward our response. And thanks be to God who goes with us now and always. Amen.
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