Because life isn't all sweetness and light. There are bad things out there: murder and betrayal and sexual abuse and theft and greed and hypocrisy and arrogance and gluttony and genocide and envy and gossip and laziness and neglect and exploitation and cruelty and prejudice and pollution and rage. Do you really want a God who turns a blind eye to all that and says, “Oh, well. Boys will be boys”? If God really loves us, he has to hate those attitudes and behaviors, just as any parent who loves her childlren hates to see them pick on each other and fight. If you really love someone you want the best for them and you want the best out of them. You want them to be the best version of themselves that they can be. And sometimes you have to let them know that while there are no limits to your love, there are limits to what behaviors you will tolerate. We have all encountered parents who let their kids get away with selfish and destructive ways of acting that society will not allow them to do when they get older. They are setting up their kids for a life of conflict with others.
God loves us too much not to warn us about the consequences of our actions. Like any parent it seems half the time he is telling us he loves us and the other half he's telling us that what we are doing is wrong. And, like all kids, what really drives us crazy is that deep down we know that he is right.
Mosts of the things God hates are well known. They are in the ten commandments. They are catalogued in Proverbs 6:16-19. But in today's lectionary we see 2 things not usually mentioned: complacency and fear.
In our passage from Zephaniah, we find out that God really hates indifference to sin. He is pictured as prowling the streets of Jerusalem at night, paying back those who sit around and ignore all the injustice and evil in the world, rather like Batman. Not only are they blasé about the violence and deceit which Zephaniah mentions in verse 9 but they are indifferent about God as well. They cynically say, “God won't do anything, one way or the other, despite what anyone does.” It's an attitude one finds among people who consider themselves sophisticated and worldly. But this idea is both self-serving and wrong.
If you really think God is indifferent to evil, why bother to fight it? Or even to resist it? This attitude does get you off the hook. Injustice and inequities has always been with us; they will always be with us. Why try to change things? It's a very comforting way of thinking...if you're not the one suffering from injustice. Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness...” (Matthew 5:6) The Greek words are more intense. This is better translated “Blessed are those who are starving and parched for justice...” God wants us to feel keenly what's wrong with the world and work to make it a better place. God never blesses the status quo.
You may have heard the saying, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” We saw this complacency when the Nazis rose to power in Germany. They never won the majority of votes. Yet Hitler was granted power by people who naively thought they could control him.
We saw it when Senator Joe McCarthy rose to power by lying about ever increasing numbers of Communists in our government. People's careers and lives were destroyed yet those in power, like President Eisenhower, didn't shut him down.
We saw it after the first attempt to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993, the unsuccessful attack with a truck full of explosives. John P. O'Neill, who was head of the FBI's counter-terrorism unit in New York, knew that this would not be the last terrorist act carried out against the US. He was not surprised by the attacks on our soldiers in Saudi Arabia in 1996, on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and on the USS Cole in 2000. He investigated each and was behind the intelligence efforts that stopped a wave of terrorism on the eve of the millennium celebration. But those higher up in the FBI and officials in the White House thought he was an alarmist and not a team player. So he was sidelined and quit in frustration. Without his agitation, our government became complacent. Ironically, on September 11, 2001, John O'Neill was beginning his third week as head of security at the twin towers. He died saving people from the evil actions he had foreseen and tried to prevent.
Another reason we don't do what we ought to is fear. That's what Jesus' parable of the talents is really about. The master in the story isn't concerned about how much each servant makes; he simply wants them to make whatever they can out of what they have been given.The Greek word “talent” originally meant a unit of weight and when it came to precious metals, a measure of wealth. Somehow in English it has come to mean a natural ability. This parable says that God has given each of us gifts. Viewed properly, they are treasures which he expects us to use. It is our duty to be good stewards of the time, treasures and talents God has graced us with. He doesn't expect us to work miracles with them, just develop what is inborn. Often what stops us from doing this is fear.
Fear can be healthy. Fear tells you not to do stuff that is reckless. Don't approach the growling dog or the wild buffalo in Yellowstone Park. Don't jump off your roof into the pool like the idiot on You Tube did. Don't play with fire. But other fears are irrational. One very common fear is that of public speaking. I have never heard of anyone dying of public speaking but there are people who would rather die than get up in front of a large group of people and speak. That's not too bad because they can still function in other roles and situations. Other folks suffer from agoraphobia, fear of open spaces, and shut themselves up in their homes. Some are unable to go to the store, or to work or even to the doctor. Which is too bad because psychiatrists and psychologists can treat these unreasonable fears. These extremes fears can serve as natural parables about how fear can make your life narrow and unfulfilled.
We have all encountered someone whose hidden talent we discovered by accident. They may be secretly an artist or a writer or a singer or have extraordinary insights into the world but they are too shy to share these abilities with others. Imagine how poor the world would be if Bach had kept his music to himself, or if Einstein had put his observations in a diary he locked away or if J.K. Rowling had never sent her Harry Potter stories out to publishers.
Sometimes we are embarrassed to reveal our talents to others. After all, our abilties may not compare with those of famous people. But that's not the point. You may not sing like Taylor Swift but you may sing well enough to help out a choir. You may not be the CEO of a major corporation but you may do just fine as a member of a church council or civic organization. You may not be a trained psychologist but you might be a good enough listener to help someone in distress through a crisis.
In the parable it's not the quantity of talents given that's important. We are told that the master passed out the talents to each servant according to his ability. So he made allowances for their individual capabilities. While the servant who is condemned in the story only received one talent, the master isn't expecting him to get as good a return as the man with 5 talents. He praises the man who made 2 more talents with the same words he used for the man who made 5. He was, however, expecting the 1 talent man to invest as much effort as the other servants. Just so, God doesn't hold us responsible for results as much as whether use our gifts to serve him.
And we are not talking about salvation here. What we do doesn't save us; God saves us. If you come to a surgeon with a broken hip, he, not you, can replace it with a new one. But he would be very disappointed if you had the surgery and then never followed his orders to go to physical therapy and never got out of your wheelchair to learn to walk again because you were afraid of the pain. He didn't give you the new hip so you could do nothing with it. In the same way, God doesn't want us to just sit there on our assets.
One thing that most people don't know is that a talent was not just a unit of weight; it was a major one. It was as much as a man could carry. In silver, it was as much a man might earn in 15 years. That's a considerable fortune. So one talent was nothing to look down upon. The master had entrusted the 1 talent servant with plenty. It was the man who sold himself short. His lack of trust in himself and in his master was what led to disaster.
Faith is the antidote to fear. If you have trouble trusting in your own abilities, then trust the God who gave them to you. He feels you can handle them. He doesn't ask you to exercise abilities you don't have; just develop the ones you do. None of them are lowly. And we should not look down on any of them. For instance, most people would probably rate the ability to write and preach a sermon as more important than the ability to lift a can of garbage. But if you went 2 weeks without hearing a sermon and 2 weeks without having your garbage collected, be honest: which would you miss the most?
You may not see how your talents fit into God's plans. It doesn't matter. Some day you will find that your talent is exactly what is needed at the moment. David's gift for music brought him into contact with King Saul, whose depression was eased by the shepherd's songs. Later David's skill with the sling brought down Goliath. This led to his military career and then to his becoming the next king of Israel. Similarly, Joseph's foresight eventually led to his rise from a slave and a prisoner to Pharaoh's vizier, which enabled him to save a nation, and his family, from famine. But not being famous or powerful doesn't diminish your importance in God's plan. God commanded an obscure Christian in Damascus to go to a man he had never met and heal him. In fact, Ananias was afraid of the man, who was a persecutor of Christians. He went anyway and laid his hands on Saul of Tarsus in the name of Jesus and helped both his physical and spiritual blindness fall away. Saul became the apostle Paul. We don't know what became of Ananias but his courage and his gift of healing changed history.
God doesn't make junk. You are a work of art in progress. God doesn't give crappy gifts either. He gave you abilities for a reason, even if you don't see what it is at the present. So work on them. Refine them. Hone them. Explore them. Grow them.
When I went to college, my mother made me a decorative pillow. And on it, in needlepoint, were the words, “What you are is God's gift to you; what you become is your gift to God.” Conquer your complacency with caring and your fear with faith. Dare to make your life the most splendid gift you can, worthy of the trust and love God has given you.
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