Take a Risk - Be Like Jesus!

Zephaniah 1: 7, 12-18
Matthew 25: 14-30

The parable today is about a wealthy man who goes away on a long journey. Before he departs, he distributes his property to three slaves. It is a great deal of money. The first slave takes the money to the market, to a wealth management firm, and invests in high-risk ventures. The second slave does the same thing, puts the money to work at high risk. Both do very well. Both reap rewards. When their master returns, he is very pleased. He tells them well done and promises that they will receive more responsibility in the future.

The third slave takes a very different approach with his money, his one talent. He digs a hole in the ground and puts all the money in the hole for safe keeping. In a time of stock-market decline, this man looks very wise. He’s not a bad man. He is a prudent, careful, cautious investor. He is not about to take chances with the money. It is all there, every penny of it, when his master returns. He is proud of himself. “Here it is. All of it, safe and sound.” For his efforts he is treated as harshly as anyone in the whole Bible.

The point of this story was not about doubling or tripling the money lest some of you might think that’s the reason the third slave got into trouble. The point of the parable is about living and taking risks. It is about Jesus himself and what he has done and what is about to happen to him. Mostly it is about what Jesus hopes and expects of all of us after he is gone. It is about being a follower of Jesus and what it means to be faithful to him.

The greatest risk of all, according to the parable is not to risk anything, not to care too deeply and profoundly enough about anything to invest yourself completely, to give your heart away and in the process to risk everything. The greatest risk of all, it turns out, is to play it safe by living cautiously and prudently!

Let’s play ‘Let’s Pretend’. Let’s pretend that you work for me. In fact, you are my executive assistant in a company that is growing rapidly. I’m the owner and I’m interested in expanding overseas. To pull this off, I make plans to travel abroad and stay there until a new branch office gets established. I make all the arrangements to take my family and move to Europe for six to eight months. And I leave you in charge of the busy stateside organization.

I tell you that I will write you regularly and give you directions and instructions. I leave and you stay. Months pass. A flow of letters are mailed from Europe and received by you at the national headquarters. I spell out all my expectations. Finally, I return. Soon after my arrival, I drive down to the office and I am stunned.

Grass and weeds have grown up high. A few windows along the street are broken. I walk into the Receptionist’s room. She is doing her nails, chewing gum and listening to her favorite pandora station. I look around and notice the wastebaskets are overflowing. The carpet hasn’t been vacuumed for weeks, and nobody seems concerned that the owner has returned.

I asked about your whereabouts and someone in the crowded lounge area points down the hall and yells, "I think he’s down there." Disturbed, I move in that direction and bump into you as you are finishing a chess game with our sales manager. I ask you to step into my office, which has been temporarily turned into a television room for watching afternoon soap operas. "What in the world is going on, man?" "What do you mean?"

"Well, look at this place! Didn’t you get any of my letters?" "Letters? Oh yes! Sure! I got every one of them. As a matter of fact, we have had a letter study every Friday since you left. We have even divided the personnel into small groups to discuss many of the things you wrote. Some of the things were really interesting. You will be pleased to know that a few of us have actually committed to memory some of your sentences and paragraphs. One or two memorized an entire letter or two - Great stuff in those letters."

"OK. You got my letters. You studied them and meditated on them; discussed and even memorized them. But what did you do about them?" "Do? We didn’t do anything about them."

Jesus told today’s parable because he knew soon he’d be leaving the disciples and they’d have to carry on without him. He had left them with instructions in the form of his stories and actions, but he didn’t give them those instructions just so they could memorize them. He wanted these stories and his actions to become part of who they were and he wanted them to transform their lives into living examples of the love of God.

We are also called to transform our lives into living examples of Jesus by not just memorizing the bible and being able to quote it to people, but by ACTING on Jesus’ words. We are told to be faithful to Jesus and have each been given gifts to do Jesus’ work in the world. I preached this to you a couple weeks ago, about how each of us has a gift for helping others and the church in some way.

We get into trouble when we doubt ourselves and our church’s ability to make a difference. We get into trouble when we’re so busy memorizing lines of scripture that we do not DO anything about what we’ve learned. We get into trouble when we think we know Jesus, but do not let others know Jesus by acting like him when we’re outside of these walls.

The third slave got into trouble because instead of doing something with the talent he had been given, he hid it from the world and thought he was keeping it safe for his master’s return. But a hidden talent does no one any good. The same goes for all of us. Jesus has placed you here for a specific reason. You have the ability to make a difference in someone’s life. You have the ability to transform your life, your family’s life, and your friends’ lives.

It takes faith and faith requires risk. We have to risk being laughed at; we have to risk failing; we have to risk being tired and sore and sweaty from all of our efforts. But when our efforts pay off they pay off big as they did for the first and second slave, and when the master came back he said because of what you have done you will be given even more.

Jesus risked it all for us. He’s asking us to take chances and give the Holy Spirit a chance to speak to us about trying new things and being a force of goodness in this world. It may look completely differently from anything we’ve ever done before and that’s okay. It may require us to see people in a whole new light. It may require us to join up with other churches or invite people who have never been a Christian to take part. Jesus is asking us to listen, to learn, and to grow.

Growth isn’t about money or butts in the pews. Growth is about transforming from cautious and careful into risky and unpredictable. It’s about making the world around us ask, “What’s going on over there? What are they up to? Why are they doing that?” because when they talk about us they’re going to talk about Jesus. We don’t need to get them into a pew to change their life – we’re called to change their lives outside of these walls and then they’ll come walking in the door all on their own.

How we do it is up to us. But the first and most important thing we can do is that when we say we’re a Christian then we act like Jesus. Be who we say we are and when we falter – admit we made a mistake. Honesty goes a long way towards changing other people’s opinions about Christians and God. As does an open minded outlook on what they’re going to tell you about why they don’t believe or don’t go to church. By being their friend instead of their enemy, you will show them what Jesus showed the prostitutes, tax collectors and sinners – that God isn’t here just for the good people – God is here for everyone.

And once we stop making church be only for the goody two shoes of the world, we create an open space and a safe place for everyone to co-exist while getting to know Jesus. That’s transformational right there.. a place for everyone to be loved and no one will be judged.. what a promise we could offer the world if we lived and loved just like Jesus!

Amen.

Procrastination and Transformation

Joshua 24: 1-3a, 14-25
Matthew 25: 1-13
There is a fable which tells of three apprentice devils who were coming to this earth to finish their apprenticeship. They were talking to Satan, the chief of the devils, about their plans to tempt and to ruin humanity. The first said, "I will tell them that there is no God."
Satan said, "That won’t delude many, for they know that there is a God." The second said, "I will tell humans that there is no hell."
Satan answered, "You will deceive no one that way; humans know even now that there is a hell for sin." The third said, "I will tell humans that there is no hurry."
"Go," said Satan, "and you will ruin humans by the thousands." The most dangerous of all our delusions is that there is plenty of time.
In the passage on Matthew today, we read about 10 virgins who were all the same. They each had a lamp filled with oil, they were all dressed as part of the bridal party, and they were waiting outside for the bridegroom to arrive. Back in that time, it was customary for the bridal party to wait for and greet and then follow in the bridegroom rather than the bride. But as sometimes happens in weddings, something went wrong and the bridegroom was late.
The ten virgins all fell asleep while waiting only to be awoken by a shout, “He’s coming!” and they immediately wake up and began to trim their lamps. However, out of the ten women, five of them had run out of oil and had no reserves with them. The other five women, not knowing when the bridegroom might come and this not being their first long wait, knew to bring extra oil just in case. The five ladies who did not have oil asked them to share, but they refused and so they went out looking for more oil and missed the bridal procession into the house, only to be turned away by the bridegroom when they finally came back.
This parable Jesus tells the disciples is about how the kingdom of heaven will be at the end of the age when Jesus comes back. He is telling us that we need to be prepared for that time and there are things we can do to be prepared for when he arrives. No one knows the day or the hour, not even Jesus himself, but we are to be prepared anyway.
What does that mean for us as individuals and as a church?
As a people we need to know the signs to look for and we need to know what God is expecting of us. That means reading the bible more often than on a Sunday morning during church. We should be praying and listening for God’s voice. Every one of us has a connection to God that strengthens the more we pray and read the bible. If we want to know God, then we have to be speaking and listening to God. It also means we should not be afraid to be who we are as God’s child. It means we are to embrace opportunities to speak of our faith and how our lives have changed since we have become faithful disciples of Christ.
As a church, it means we constantly need to be working toward God’s goals and not our own. We need to look around our community and our towns and our country and this world and asking, “Where is Jesus? What is Jesus doing? What does he expect from us and what would he tell us to do if he was here? Who would Christ be ministering to?”
In football they have a huddle, the goal of the huddle is to give you thirty seconds to call the play. Sixty thousand people watching you huddle, and they don’t mind you taking thirty seconds to call the play. They understand that you have to get organized, that each player needs to know where they should be and where they are going to go after the snap.
A huddle is a necessary part of playing the game. But let me inform you if you do not already know, sixty thousand people do not pay $80 a ticket to watch you huddle. See, people don’t come to football games to watch the huddle. They want to see if their team can overcome the opposition who is daring them to snap the ball and move down the field to score. What they want to know is does your practice work?
Now what Christians often do is get high on their huddles. We gather together on Sunday morning and Sunday nights and Wednesday nights and we go nuts over the huddle! We say, “Boy did we have a huddle!! My quarterback can call plays better than your quarterback.” And boy do we go off on the huddle. But what people don’t seem to understand is, that the huddle is so that we can play the game. The effectiveness of our church cannot be measured by how well we do on Sunday morning. The test of the church is what it does in the marketplace. What we need today is churches that are representatives of Jesus Christ not only when gathered but when scattered.
Sometimes as a church, we get caught up in maintaining the status quo. The programs we’ve done for years, the committees that have existed since the church opened, the same materials for Sunday school and the same special programs every year. All great things, but sometimes we get so caught up in doing them we stop looking around and stop asking those vital questions that Jesus wants us to ask. We stop wondering what new things we may try and what new experiences we can have when we pause and look around.
As disciples of Christ and as a church, we are called to transform our lives into a holy experience. We need to not just be saying the right words, but doing the right things to help this world to know Jesus Christ in word and deed and spirit. The ten virgins all started out on equal footing, but when the bridegroom took longer than normal, the cream rose to the top. The wisdom of the five women showed over the foolishness of the others. They knew to be prepared, just as we are to be prepared for the long wait. Jesus may take another 5 years to come back or another 5,000 years and in the meantime, we are still called to transform our lives and the lives of those around us by spreading God’s word and sharing God’s love with everyone we meet. But that means a lot of work on our parts. That means thinking ahead and staying diligent. It’s not something many of us enjoy doing. Tim Hansel in his book "When I Relax I feel Guilty," writes some insights of what most people want from God.
"I would like to buy $3.00 worth of God, please. Not enough to explode my soul or disturb my sleep, but just enough to equal a cup of warm milk or a snooze in the sunshine. I don't want enough of Him to make me love a black man or pick beets with a migrant. I want ecstasy, not transformation; I want the warmth of the womb, not a new birth. I want a pound of the Eternal in a paper sack. I would like to buy $3.00 worth of God, please."
If we would be totally honest, the idea of transformation really scares us. That is because we know that such a radical change would be quite uncomfortable. We realize that with transformation comes a major overhaul of our lives and priorities. But that is what we are called to do. Transform our lives by being intentional about the things we do as a people and as a church. We are called not to stay too long in the huddle, procrastinating and thinking we have all the time in the world to make changes. Instead we are called to always be the person God sees when looking at us and the only way to do that is by knowing the scriptures, praying to God, and sharing what we have learned with those around us. Then, when the time comes for the bridegroom to appear we will all be ready and able to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
Amen.