We're All Gifted

The scriptures referred to are Zephaniah 1:7, 12-18, 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11 and Matthew 25:14-30.

They were discussing nuclear war on the NPR program the 1A this week. Why? Because current world events made it relevant. They also discussed the heroin overdose problem in this country. Why? Because the latest figures show that in the first 9 months of this year we have topped last year's total of 52,000 deaths. You may notice we haven't been talking about things like a slumping economy. Why? Because the economy, or at least the part that benefits corporations and investors, is booming. When things are going well, we take them for granted. We focus on what's wrong. Which makes sense.

But I think the perception that things are basically going well is part of the reason that people are drifting from faith in God. We live in the richest country in the world; there is no war taking place in the streets; we have lots of junk food, and plenty of distractions in movies, TV and the internet. It's bread and circuses, the same stuff the Roman Empire used to pacify the populace. Satisfy people's physical and emotional needs and they will oblige by ignoring the spiritual emptiness inside. Or they look for a spiritual solution that will mirror what the bread and circuses do: just make us feel good. The spiritual void will be mollified for the time being and no demands will be made on you. Just spend some time being quiet and thinking about your breathing. Or go to a church that tells you how much God loves you just the way you are and how he just wants you to be happy.

Sure, after a while of taking in consumer goods and junk spirituality, the emptiness reasserts itself. You realize that something's not right but you may not be able to figure out exactly what. It's like having vague symptoms or a slight bit of pain. It's somewhat disconcerting but it's not enough to get you to the doctor or back to church. In my experience, people don't get help until something hurts really badly. It's true of physical disease as well as spiritual dis-ease.

That brings us to all the doom and gloom in today's lectionary readings. First up: Zephaniah waxing bloodchilling in his description of the the Day of the Lord. When people note that God in the Old Testament appears to be angry a lot, I tell them to imagine a parent with a bunch of unruly toddlers, doing all the things he or she told them not to. They are hurting one another and that is not cool. Passages like this reading from the Hebrew Bible are the equivalent of saying “Wait till your father gets home!” Unfortunately, this is not working on these kids. They are saying to themselves, “The Lord will not do good, nor will he harm.” (Zephaniah 1:12) They aren't worried about Dad coming home. Everything's going well with them. How could the good times end?

I'm sure people living in Hawaii the day before December 7, 1941 felt the same way. And the people living in New York before 9/11. And in Las Vegas before October 1. We rarely see disasters coming. Even with the week's worth of warning before hurricane Irma, few of us realized just how devastating it would be. Zephaniah describes a complacent, wealthy populace who cannot imagine that things could ever get that bad.

And one reason might be that at the time Zephaniah was prophesying, Josiah, king of Judah, was making reforms. During the refurbishing of the temple in Jerusalem, the Book of the Law, either Deuteronomy or the entire Torah, was found. When it was read to Josiah, he was shocked at how far the nation had strayed. He resolved to clean up the land. He tore down the pagan shrines and reinstituted the celebration of Passover.

But the rot had set in. People had incorporated paganism into the culture. They were even sacrificing their children by fire to the pagan god Molech. And archaeologists have found evidence of enormous numbers of child sacrifices, something God explicitly rejected in the story of Abraham and Isaac. We may wonder how could people possibly let their children be killed like that. People of the future will probably ask the same thing when they look back on our lack of action in the face of Columbine, Sandy Hook, the recent attacks on a church in Texas and a school in rural California, plus the fact that at 1300 deaths a year, shootings are the 3^rd leading cause of death for US children. They will wonder if, like the people of Jeremiah's time, we love something more than we do our kids.

Besides betraying God, the people of Judah sinned against their neighbors. Jeremiah also prophesied during the reign of Josiah. He wrote, “'Among my people are wicked men who lie in wait like men who snare birds and like those who set traps to catch men. Like cages full of birds, their houses are full of deceit; they have become rich and powerful and have grown fat and sleek. Their evil deeds have no limit; they do not plead the case of the fatherless to win it, they do not defend the rights of the poor. Should I not punish them for this?' declares the Lord. 'Should I not avenge myself on such a nation as this?'” (Jeremiah 5:26-29) Jesus said the two greatest commandments are to love God and to love our neighbors. The people were violating both.

Yet the sense that things were generally going well kept the people from noticing how spiritually and morally sick they were. But just as a neglected mole that's changing color and growing in size can eventually turn into metastatic brain cancer, the spreading spiritual rot would erupt in the horrific consequences we see in Zephaniah.

Paul saw the same complacency in his time. The Pax Romana made folks blind to the corruption and injustice around them. So he warned Christians to “keep awake and be sober...We belong to the day." Nowadays we would say, “Our lives should be transparent.” People should see no deception in us, let alone self-deception. We need to acknowledge that we are all sinners. The difference is that Christians are forgiven and are letting God's Spirit reform them from the inside out. In response to the spiritual threats in a complacent culture, Paul also uses the metaphor for the armor of God that he more fully develops in Ephesians 6:10-18. Here he mentions simply the breastplate of faith and love and the helmet of the hope of salvation. Faith, hope and love. How do those protect us?

Faith is trusting in God, in his goodness and love. That keeps us from putting our ultimate trust in the lesser things of this world that pretend they can replace God. Hope is believing in a future where God will triumph and fulfill his promises to save us. That protects us from despair. Love is our response to such a good and faithful and loving God. How can we help but love a God who loves us enough to send his son to die for us? Love of God and of those he made in his image and for whom Jesus died motivates us to fix and not simply accept what's wrong with the world. 

But how can we show that love? One way is found in our gospel reading. Jesus tells a parable about a man who entrusts his property to his slaves. The “talent” in question is actually a measure of weight, around 75 pounds of either copper, silver or gold. So even the guy given just 1 talent had a considerable amount of money to work with. And while the other 2 servants get enterprising with the money they are given, the man entrusted with 1 talent buries it. Perhaps he is intimidated by the responsibility. Perhaps he is comparing himself to his energetic coworkers and thinking he can't compete. For whatever reasons, he is too afraid to take chances on even the most conservative form of investment. He never heard the expression “Use it or lose it.”

The moral is clear. God gives us all gifts and we are to use them in his service. And even the least of them is fairly awesome. We are not to bury them. We are to do as much good as we can with them. It's not a competition. The master praises the person with 2 talents using the same words he says to the person with 5. God is just interested in seeing what we can do with what we have.

Now when we look at this parable we often think of talents in the modern sense: abilities to do things in different fields of endeavor. We say things like, “She is a talented actor,” or “He is a talented singer,” or “She has a talent for dealing with people or computers or money.” And sometimes we compare ourselves with people with a lot of talents like composer, lyricist, playwright and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda of Hamilton and Moana fame or like composer Richard Rodgers, an EGOT (winner of an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony) who, like Miranda, has also won a Pulitzer. Such people can intimidate those of us with lesser talents. But why? There are plenty of people who have singular talents that are invaluable. You don't care if your doctor is also a gifted violinist. You don't care if the guy who puts on your new roof is also a chess grandmaster. You don't care if the cook at your favorite restaurant is a novelist n the side. You can do a lot with just one talent. But you need to exercise it, hone it, and practice it until you get better.

But let's look at gifts God distributes other than talents. Some people just have 1 good idea. I recently heard of a 12 year old girl who had a neat idea on how to keep roofs from flying off in hurricanes. She remembered how airplane wings work. The curved top side lessens the wind pressure over the wing so the pressure under the wing lifts it. What if you turn the wing over and put it on a roof. The very wind pressure of the hurricane that peels roofs off pushes the inverted wing down onto the house, keeping the roof in place. It worked on her model in a wind tunnel. Will it work under real world conditions? Who knows but it is certainly worth looking into. There are lots of people whose contribution to society was one main thing, like George de Mestral, inventor of Velcro, but that one thing made the world or some aspect of it better.

Other gifts God gives us are good qualities such as perseverance and bravery, both of which were displayed by Desmond Doss. He was a Seventh Day Adventist who refused to kill or carry a weapon but who nevertheless volunteered for military service in World War 2. He became a medic. He managed to save 75 wounded infantrymen during the Battle of Okinawa despite being his being wounded 4 times. While under fire, Doss dragged the soldiers, usually one at a time, to the edge of an escarpment nicknamed Hacksaw Ridge and lowered them by rope to help below. He is the only conscientious objector to win the Medal of Honor. He didn't display talent so much as virtue.

Another gift God gives us is our family. This may be the hardest gift to work with. You can invest most of your life into family members and they still may not turn out as you expected. But we see what happens when people neglect their families. For every one inmate I meet with who has a stable, intact family that loves them, I meet 10 who have experienced such adverse events in their childhood as abuse, neglect, alcoholic or drug-abusing household members, and family members who went to prison. Small wonder people who come from chaotic families have a hard time becoming stable productive citizens themselves. You can't protect your children from all trauma; you can work not to be the one to traumatize them.

Another gift God gives us is one another. We are supposed to love others, not leave them to deal with their demons by themselves. We are supposed to pray for them, not prey upon them. We are supposed to support them, not squeeze every last ounce of work and value out of them and then discard them. As we saw in Jeremiah, God expects us to help and not harm one another. We are especially commanded to look out for the poor and unfortunate. That, not our GNP, is the true measure of a nation's health. Again we are the richest nation on earth. If we invest it in the pleasure of a few rather than the good of all, how do you think God will view our stewardship of what we've been given?

One last gift I want to bring up is that of our planet. God has given us a great place to live. One of the reasons we are on earth, according to Genesis 2:5, is to take care of it, rather as a gardener does. We haven't been good to our planet but for most of our history there weren't enough humans and our technology wasn't powerful enough to do lasting damage to our world. But in the early 1800s we reached a world population of 1 billion and just 200 years later, we have 7 ½ billion people. By the end of this century we are projected to have 11 billion humans on earth. Anyone who thinks this won't affect our environment is not using the brains God gave him. We are rapidly converting land from forests, wetlands and other natural landscapes into farmlands, suburbs, mines, sites for wood extraction and infrastructure, destroying the habitat of millions of creatures. Again this is God's creation and we are meant to be stewards of it. How do you think he will feel about what we are doing to the place?

Which brings us to the instrument of the awful things we see in the few apocalyptic parts of scripture. All the movies and novels about the Biblical end of the world usually have it starting through supernatural means. But the immediate calamity that Zephaniah predicted was accomplished by humans. King Josiah was killed in an ill-advised battle with Pharaoh Neco. He was their last good king. 12 years later, Babylon invaded Judah and took its people into exile. And if you look at the disasters in the middle of the book of Revelation, a lot of them—war, famine, disease, economic collapse, drought, water pollution, fires—are or could easily be man-made. Even earthquakes, we've discovered, can be caused by fracking. You can see many of the calamities predicted as merely the results of us ignoring the natural laws built into creation and the moral laws most human beings intuitively understand. To quote the comic strip Pogo, we have met the enemy and he is us!

All of these problems, by the way, are already in process. But we humans are really bad at recognizing threats that are slow-moving. I'm not sure you really could boil a frog to death by incrementally turning up the heat under a pan of water he was in but the analogy, in terms of global warming, is definitely putting that to the test. And we have no place to jump to.

So what is the solution? Using our God-given talents, ideas, perseverance and bravery to invest in our families and our planet. But this is going to take sacrifices. So we need something more: we need to turn to Jesus, open our hearts to his Spirit, disown ourselves, take up our crosses and follow him. We need to love one another not merely as much as we love ourselves but as self-sacrificially as Jesus loves us. As it says in Philippians, “Instead of being motivated by selfish ambition or vanity, each of you should, in humility, be moved to treat each other as more important than yourself. Each of you should be concerned not only about your own interests, but about the interests of others as well. You should have the same attitude toward one another that Christ Jesus had...” (Philippians 2:3-5, NET) Jesus was smart, eloquent and articulate; he could heal and feed people; he could even raise them from the dead. He could have used those gifts to make himself the most powerful man the world has ever seen. But he didn't. He didn't use his powers to make himself rich or even comfortable. Instead he used them to help people. He invested his talents and his time (all his time; his entire life) in making the world a better place. He used all he was given for the good of others.

So we need to ask ourselves: what would Jesus want us to do with our time, our talents, our treasures? Because they aren't really ours. They are on loan from our Lord. When he returns he's going to want to see that his trust in us has paid off. And as we've seen in the parable, it needn't be spectacular. Your results may vary. But he does want to see a result.

What has God given you? What are you going to do with it?