Sunday, November 13, 2005

Sun, Nov 13, 2005 - How Will You Live?

Zephaniah 1:7, 12-18
Psalm 90:1-12
1 Thessalonians 5:1-11
Matthew 25:14-30

"For God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ." Well, that’s a nice way to start out the day, isn’t it, what with all the verses in our first reading about the day of the Lord being at hand, being a day of wrath, and the second reading talking about it coming like a thief in the night. It’s nice to know that God is looking out for us and that, when the day of sudden destruction comes, God has already planned for us to be saved from obliteration.

At least, that’s what Paul’s letter tells us, but how can we be so sure that he’s right? It’s pretty serious stuff he’s talking about - the end of the world and our very existence - so we want to be darn sure that he’s right about all this, that God’s wrath won’t fall on us. After all, knowing where we stand when the end comes makes a big difference to the way we live our life in the here and now.

Well, Paul reassures his listeners by reminding them that they are "children of light and children of the day." Now, the Thessalonians to whom Paul was writing may or may not have known the opening to the Gospel of John, but we certainly do, and Paul’s use of the word "light" brings back for us "what has come into being through [the Word] was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it." For us, when Paul calls the Thessalonians children of light and children of the day, we know that he is, intentionally or not, calling them children of Jesus Christ, the light of the world. And certainly, the light of the world would never destroy light’s own children.

We are these children, too, because of our relationship with Christ. Or maybe I should say because of Christ’s relationship with us. Just as Jesus died for Paul and the Thessalonians, he also died for us, and in our baptism we are made sisters and brothers of Jesus, children of light - yes, I know the exact relationship is a little fuzzy - and we live and die and will one day live again in Christ. As Paul indeed said, God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Which is a darn good thing, because none of us know when the day of the Lord is coming. Zephaniah tells us that the day of the Lord is near, at hand, even. Paul says that it comes like a thief in the night without any warning whatsoever, or like unescapable labour pains, which personally doesn’t make me feel too happy. Jesus describes it as a master who went away on a journey and suddenly returned to settle accounts with his slaves. It’s true, none of these references are particularly date-specific, and in fact, we’ve been hearing them for almost two thousand years, so we do wonder how near it is, but whenever the actual date all of our readings warn us that there’s no way for us to know when that will actually be. There’s no way to stop it from happening, and we better get used to it happening when we least expect it.

But that is something we’re used to living with, actually. I suspect that not many of us worry about when the day of the Lord is coming, but I know that more than a few of us wonder when our day is coming - that is, we wonder when our last day is coming. After all, none of us know when we might die. Sure, we can make predictions based on our health and our lifestyle, on our weight and our eating habits. But there’s no way to know for sure what might happen - we have no way to predict accidents - no way of knowing for sure when our time is going to run out. So, like I said, it’s a good thing that God is looking out for us.

So, since we don’t know when we’ll die, even though we’ll be in good hands when we do, how do we live? How do we go through each day, never knowing if it will be our last?

Well, one way is to live carefully, fearfully even, hiding away from the unavoidable day. That’s how the third slave in Jesus’ story lived. He knew that one day his master would return wanting to know what he had done with his time, whether he had been industrious with the money entrusted to him, and he was afraid. He was afraid that when his master came, when the judgement was made on how he had spent his time, it would go badly. And so the slave avoided all possible risks, he hid his money in the ground, he lived his days in fear, waiting for the end to come, waiting for the wrath of his master to fall.

Some of us live that way - we play it safe, we choose the path that has the least amount of risk, we hide from anything that might take us out of our comfort zone, that might challenge us. Rather than risk loss, and incurring the master’s wrath, we hide ourselves, and what the master has given us, away. We look at what the master has given us, our lives, our abilities, our possessions, our family, and afraid of losing it all, afraid that the master will come and take it away, we bundle them all up and hide them in a hole in the ground. We don’t risk them by following a dream, we don’t endanger them by following a path our heart says is right even though our head questions it, we don’t run the chance of losing them by answering some radical, inconceivable call God’s made to us. We’re too afraid of God’s wrath if we fail.

But living that way shows a lack of trust that God really does mean us for salvation and not wrath. When we doubt God’s intentions for us, we live in fear, like the slave, and we hide away what God has given us to use. And if anything’s going to make God unhappy, it’s not failure and risk-taking, it’s that we are afraid to use what God has given us, that we’re afraid to live out the life God has given us, that ultimately we’re afraid to trust God and God’s promises of salvation. There is no entering into the joy of the master if we’re too afraid to trust God.

But, God has a different way of living in mind for us, one built on trusting that God is a God of salvation and not of wrath, one where we take full advantage of what God has given us, one that does bring us joy instead of fear. Now I didn’t know this until I did some research, but apparently the only way for the first two slaves in Jesus’ story to have doubled the money they were given was to gamble with it - the parable says they traded with it, but that means gambling. Surprising, I know, that a parable of Jesus would highlight gambling as model behaviour, but the point is that the only way for the slave to double five talents - which, by the way, was 75 years’ worth of wages - was to do something risky with it. The slave had to put aside his fear of losing it all, he had to trust that the master wouldn’t punish or even kill him if he made a bad investment decision, and he had to go ahead and take bold action. And he was rewarded.

We are encouraged to live that way as well. To live without fear of wrath or death, not so that we’ll live lives of irresponsibility and selfishness, and not so that we’ll take unhealthy and life-endangering risks, but so that we can fully believe in God’s goodness towards us. The end is coming, sooner or later, but how we live in the meantime determines whether or not we enter in the joy of our master - that is, whether we live lives fearing our future with God, with the result that God is unhappy because of our lack of trust, or whether we live lives trusting in God’s promise of salvation, with the result that God, and we, are joyful because of it.

So what is it that you’ve been afraid to do? What gift or ability is God calling you to use that until now you’ve been shy of using? What path is God calling you to that until now you’ve thought was too risky to walk? What hope has God instilled in you that until now you’ve been afraid to count on? These are the "talents" you are called to gamble with. God is encouraging you to risk using that gift, to risk following that path, to risk acting in that hope. To risk trusting God.

So be bold, trust God, and step forward. We don’t know how long we have, or when the day might come when we will come face-to-face with the Lord, but we do know that we are destined not for wrath but for salvation, and so we can live joyfully, using the many gifts God has given us, trusting in God’s good will towards us. Thanks be to God. Amen.

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