Risky Business

The scriptures referred to are Matthew 25:14-30.

I had a friend who died because of her fear of needles. She had this silver dollar sized black scab on her upper arm that made anyone aware of melanoma ask her if she was having that looked at by a doctor. She said she was. But she wasn't. She later said she was afraid of the needles that a doctor might use. Then one day I heard that she had a stroke and was in a hospital on the mainland. A bunch of us, her friends, went up to see her. It turns out the melanoma had metastasized to her brain. There was nothing doctors could do at this point. She was sent home and as a nurse I helped arrange for her to get home health care visits. A month later I got a call from her distraught husband. She appeared to have had a seizure and died. I went over and sat with him as we waited for the funeral director to come and get her body. A week later I conducted the burial of her ashes at sea. The worst happened because she was afraid of something less awful.

Fear can be a good thing. It can keep us from doing needlessly dangerous things. And it can help us when confronted with a real threat. In an episode of Doctor Who, the Doctor tells a frightened little boy, “Let me tell you about scared. Your heart is beating so hard I can feel it through your hands. There's so much blood and oxygen pumping through your brain it's like rocket fuel. Right now you could run faster and you could fight harder, you could jump higher than ever in your life. And you are so alert it's like you can slow down time. What's wrong with scared? Scared is a superpower.” There is a reason why God gave us the gift of fear. It gives us power to deal with danger.

But like any thing powerful, like anger, like sex, like fire, it can do both great good and great evil. Of anger Aristotle said, “Anyone can become angry. That is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right reason and in the right way—that is not easy.” Fear works much the same way. There are certain things it makes sense to be afraid of. Fear of a protective mother cougar you encounter while hiking is healthy. And then how you react to that fear is important. Should you flee, fight or freeze? The viral video of such an encounter is instructive. The hiker walked away although the cougar followed him for good 2 minutes, until he threw a rock at her and she returned to its cubs. A fear of needles, at least when wielded by a nurse or doctor and not a drug addict, is not as reasonable. Recently a lot of people have become unreasonably afraid of vaccines, though they are the single largest reason that a third to a half of all children do not die before the age of 5, as was true throughout history before the mid-twentieth century. Are vaccines 100% harmless 100% of the time to 100% of all people? No. But then nothing is.

Fear is helpful but if you react with too great a fear to things with a very low risk, you will never attempt anything. A frog was found in one of the toilets at church and thereafter my granddaughter had a fear of them when using the ladies room. I tried to explain to her that it happening again was unlikely. There was always a possibility of a frog somehow coming up out of a toilet, but the probability of that happening again was low. In 1954 a woman in Alabama was hit by a meteorite. Ann Hodges is the only person in history that has happened to. And she lived another 18 years afterwards. So it is always a possibility that you could be hit by a meteorite. But I wouldn't worry about it.

In anything you do there is some risk. Before this COVID-19 crisis, most of us did something very risky every day: we drove a car. Your odds of dying in a motor vehicle crash are 1 in 103. In comparison your odds of being killed by an assault with a gun are 1 in 285. Yet for some reason we are often more worried about the latter than the former. But most of us get into a car without thinking, “This is more likely to kill me than a gun.” Partly because most of us don't know this but partly because we judge the risk worth it compared to, say, not going to work or not seeing a doctor. Of course, the pandemic has changed things. COVID-19 has increased the risk of death for the average American by 10% and for those over the age of 70, getting infected increases their baseline fatality risk by 140%. And weirdly, though traffic on roads is definitely down, motor vehicles fatalities are up by 12.7%. Are the few who are on the road more reckless?

Weighing risks and then taking action when the benefit is a lot greater than the downside can make sense. Sometimes the value of doing something rather than nothing makes sense, despite the odds, such as when your child is attacked by a mountain lion or a coyote. In one case the father threw his backpack at the lion, which distracted it so he could rescue his bitten son. In the other case, the father leaped upon the coyote who attacked his toddler and suffocated the animal with his bare hands. Both of these incidents happened this year on the very same day, because, well, it's 2020, so why not?

But because we are social animals, sometimes what we fear is looking bad in the eyes of others. A lot of people will not do anything risky because they fear public failure or looking foolish or being ridiculed or being yelled at by others. That is the case in today's parable from Jesus. You've read this passage before. The man entrusts his property to his slaves during his absence. What he gives each is measured in a unit of weight called a talent, but what the actual substance is we are not told. It could be gold or silver. One slave is given 5 talents, one two and the last slave one talent. And since a talent could be worth about what a day laborer would make in 20 years, even one talent is a huge amount of money to work with. Jesus says the amounts were determined by the ability of each individual. And evidently the master expects them to trade or invest with them. When he returns the servants with 5 and with 2 talents have doubled their money. But the guy given one talent, fearful of failing his master, just buried his talent in the ground. He doesn't even take the most conservative course of action, which is to put it in the bank so it can make interest. The master is not pleased.

Interpreting this parable is not hard, due mainly to the fact that the word “talent” has evolved from meaning a amount of value to an ability of value. Jesus is telling us that God gives us our talents in order that we use them for him and for his kingdom. Don't bury your talent; put it to work.

But there is another message Jesus is giving us here. It's that to serve God properly, we have to take risks. When he comes back, Jesus doesn't want us to say, “We preserved everything just as you left it.” He wants us to do all we can with what we have. And that means risking failure. The guy with 5 talents had the equivalent of 100 years of wages. If anything, he should have been more afraid of losing that amount of money than the guy with just one talent. He had a chance to make more but also a possibility to lose more. Having a lot to lose tends to make people more conservative in their actions. The 5 talent guy should have been more risk adverse. But he knew that the master wanted him to make more money and so he took the risks necessary. How the master would have reacted to a big loss is unknown, though based on his reaction to the guy who simply saved everything he was given, I think the master would have understood any setbacks. He is more interested in seeing courageous actions by his servants than cowardice.

And Jesus also seems to be saying, “Use it or lose it.” If you don't use a talent, it gets rusty and you could lose the ability to do some things well. Practice and experience are necessary to hone talents. Pavarotti didn't start off with the breath control and range to sing whole operas. Whatever raw talent he possessed had to be trained and shaped by tens of thousands of hours of work and practice. The same goes for a doctor or a writer or an engineer or an athlete or anyone else who is successful. Many a child prodigy has to come to the realization that the head start their natural talent gave them as a child disappears when they are an adult competing with other adults unless they put in the work to maintain their talent. You may not get thrown into the outer darkness for neglecting your talent but you will find it has deteriorated and started to decay from the years it spent buried.

Jesus' call is also a call to adventure. It is a call to step out of our comfort zone and take risks. It is the reason we are told “Do not be afraid” so often in scripture. Fear makes sense in some contexts, like when you are tempted to do something foolhardy and unnecessarily dangerous, but not when God calls us. Abraham left the cradle of civilization to come to the land of Canaan where God promised him land and a nation of descendants. Moses left a pastoral existence to lead a nation of slaves out of an evil empire and into the wilderness. Nehemiah left a comfortable position as the cupbearer of the Persian king to go to Judea and direct the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem and work with Ezra who was both rebuilding the temple and the commitment of the Jews to God's law. The apostles left their jobs and homes to travel with Jesus around their homeland and then to go to the ends of the known world preaching the gospel. It would have surprised them that in 250 years the word “church” would evolve from meaning a group of people who follow Jesus to a building specially constructed to worship him.

And perhaps that when Christians stopped being so adventuresome. Now they had earthly property, possessions—and power, a stake in the status quo, a reason to stop thinking of themselves as pilgrims in a foreign land, passing through on the way to a better, heavenly country. (Hebrews 11:13-16) Some did become missionaries to the barbarian tribes outside the empire but for many, Christianity devolved to simply going to church on designated days, saying prayers and doing rituals. Few thought that following Jesus meant showing radical love for your neighbor and your enemy. Few dared to speak truth to power and uphold the rights of the destitute, the diseased, the despised and the disadvantaged. It literally took nearly two millennia before Christians tried to realize a world where, as Paul says in Galatians, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female—for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28) And we still are not at the point where all people are treated equally as persons created in the image of God and objects of his love.

To change that scares people. It means the world would have to change. It means really having to trust God, as the Israelites had to when leaving the familiarity of Egypt for the a nomadic existence in the wilderness on the way to the promised land. Or as the disciples had to rely on God when Jesus sent them out two by two to heal and spread the good news without bread, money, spare clothing and, significantly, without baggage. (Mark 6:7-9) It means truly treating everyone the way we would like to be treated. (Matthew 7:12) It means truly loving others without asking if they deserve it in same the way God loves us even when we don't deserve it. (1 John 4:10-11) It means seeing everything we are and have, all our money, possessions, and talents, not to mention our time, as being on loan from God to use in serving him and not ourselves.

And it means to take risks. Not foolish or unnecessary ones but we must not let possible losses or failures keep from doing what God wants us to do. No investor can be sure of the results. But the results are in God's hands. What he wants is faithful servants, boldly investing the talents he's given them into the growth of the kingdom of God.

A parable usually has one main point. It isn't an exhaustive treatise on any subject. One thing not mentioned in this parable is that as Christians we don't operate in isolation. We can and are supposed to help each other discover and develop our talents and gifts. In Hebrews we are told, “And let us take thought of how to spur one another on to love and good works.” (Hebrews 10:24) So we are to encourage people not to bury their talents but use them to serve God.

And we should not discourage people from doing God's work because there might be risks. God wants us to be courageous and not rest on our laurels from the past. As someone once said, “Success is not final and failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts.” In attempting any achievement, things will go wrong. You rethink it; make adjustments and try again.

Edison tried more than 100 different materials before he found one that made a good filament for his light bulb. He didn't give it up as impossible. And we have an advantage Edison didn't. We have a loving and powerful God on our side. When facing odds that seem insurmountable, remember what Jesus our Lord said, “What is impossible for mere humans is possible for God.” (Luke 18:27) And when we are merely facing ridicule or opposition, as it says in Hebrews, “So we may say with confidence, 'The Lord is my helper, and I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?'” (Hebrews 13:6)