Test Everything

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 12.14.14

Scripture Lesson:  1 Thessalonians 5:16-24

You meet all sorts of interesting people in churches, people whose stories set into you, and whose lives play out across the way you understand the world.  

Sometimes, one of those people has had life experiences that are so...different...that you just can’t help seeing how their story resonates with that broader story we hear in the Gospel.

So this Sunday, I’d like to highlight that person, talking about them and their experiences, some of which play powerfully across the text for today.  And you’re thinking as I’m talking, oh Sweet Lord Baby Jesus, please don’t be me, please don’t be me.

No, it’s not you.

It’s a member of my last church, who passed away several years ago.  Horst was an interesting guy for many reasons.  I got to know him in his early nineties, when he was still active and energetic and sharp as a tack.  He’d spent much of his career traveling the world and working as an agricultural economist for the World Bank, along with his beloved wife Judy.  His backstory was more interesting still, although he didn’t bring it front and center unless he was asked.

Horst, you see, was the only American prisoner of war I’ve ever really gotten to know.  And when I say, “American prisoner of war,” I don’t mean he was an American.  As a young man, Horst had been a Lieutenant in the tenth Panzer Division, serving under General Rommel in North Africa.  As American and British forces overcame the Afrikakorps in mid-1943, his division was overwhelmed, and he and others surrendered to the British.

When I talked with him about his experiences in a prisoner of war camp in Kansas, what he most wanted to convey was just how different it was than he’d been lead to believe by Nazi propagandists.  There was the expectation, reinforced by what the Nazis told their soldiers, that imprisonment by the Allies would be a difficult and potentially brutal thing.  There would be interrogations, which would be rough.  There would be near-to-starvation living conditions.  There would be all manner of unpleasantness.  Nazi propaganda was pretty relentless about just what a place America was.  According to that propaganda, America was a dangerous, unpredictable enemy, a cruel and aimless nation of racial mongrels and avaricious profiteers.  Many things were a possibility when imprisoned, but it was better than dying pointlessly in the desert for a battle that was already lost.

Or so he hoped.

While being a prisoner of war held by the United States wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, the reality proved to be very different.  It was nothing at all like the POW camps of the Axis powers.  He and the others in the camp were treated respectfully, allowed to send communications to their families, fed and housed in ways that made it clear that the country where they were held respected human life.

What they experienced, as captives, showed that the propaganda they’d been bombarded with by the Nazi party was nothing more than lies and manipulation.  When tested against the reality he encountered, it was clear that what he had been told was a falsehood, and that the truth about the nation that held him was rather different.

Sometimes, the world around us tells us one thing, a thing that resonates with what we want to believe.  It might be seductive.  It might make us feel powerful, or significant, or reinforce an existing bias or predilection.  But that does not make it right, and, more importantly it does not make it part of the Kingdom Jesus proclaimed.

Paul’s first letter to the small church at Thessalonika is a remarkably hopeful, positive letter.  It comes to us as what scholars believe to be the very earliest Christian writing.  Of all of the letters of the New Testament, this one likely was the first to be written down, somewhere between 40 and 50 CE.

I’m fond of this letter, for a bunch of different reasons.  First, I’m connected to this town personally.  Many of the smaller cities to which Paul wrote faded and were abandoned. Ephesus no longer exists.  Corinth, messy, backbiting, morally bankrupt Corinth?  That faded away into a ruin, like Vegas in 2137, standing abandoned, a waterless ruin.  

Thessaloniki is not one of them.  A healthy little port city still sits, just where it was, right there on the bend of the Thermaic Gulf, overlooking the stunning blue waters of the Aegean Sea.

For thousands of years now, there’s been a strong Jewish community in Thessaloniki.  When my wife’s ancestors fled Spain during the Inquisition, it was in Thessaloniki that they sought refuge.  There, they lived for centuries, mingling with the families there before emigrating to America.  Which means, in some way, that my sons are potentially related to some of the Jews who threw the Apostle Paul out of  town.  Reading Acts 17, or 1 Thessalonians 2?  It’s like reading a family history.  

Mostly, though, I like this letter because it’s positive, hopeful, and affirming, a letter that shows a deep connection between the Apostle and those to whom he was writing.  Here, as Paul wraps things up, a sweet letter of encouragement and support to a community that he cared for, he offers a sequence of moral imperatives, each of which rests on the radical compassion that is so central to Paul’s witness.

Those moral orders begin before the passage we just heard, as Paul gently but firmly challenges those who heard him to push themselves, to hold themselves to the high ethical standard he saw in Christ.  He presents them with maxims, plain and simple measures of what it will mean to live out the life that Jesus taught.

“Respect those who work.”  “Be at peace among yourselves.”  “Be patient with everyone.”  “Never pay back evil for evil, but show good to every single human being.”  

More than anything, he challenges those he loves to test themselves, their every action, their every commitment, their every moment, against the reality that permeates all of Paul’s early thought.  That reality?

That in Jesus of Nazareth, the world has been changed.  No matter what the reality you think you inhabit, no matter what experiences you feel define your existence, what Paul proclaimed that this reality needs to be tested against a new metric for what is good and right and true.

The new community in Thessalonica faced significant challenges.  They were small, and they were struggling, and they were exposed to intermittent imperial persecution. Paul exhorts them: Here, you know what is good.  You know that when you hold on to that good, hard as it may seem, you are serving the Reign of God that Jesus came into this world to proclaim.  That’s what gives a person their integrity.

In every time of trial, there is going to be the temptation to set aside those principles and do what seems expedient.  There is the temptation to chase after whatever feels right at that very moment, the hot fierce light of our passions.  There will be the temptation to believe things that might seem bright and clear, carefully constructed and argued, but that fundamentally violate the principles that give us our integrity.

My conversations with Horst came floating back this week, as our nation struggled to process the outputs of a report on what were being called, as George Orwell would have put it, “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

There were all manner of justifications and explications being offered up, rational arguments and arguments appealing to expediency and what is necessary in a time of crisis.  Funny word, krisis.  The word derives from a Greek term, which means “a time that forces a decision.”  A time of crisis is, among other things, a test of authenticity.  Do you hold to your principles, or do you set them aside?

It is self-evident that in this instance, the choice was to set them aside.  That is a challenge for us as citizens of this country, one which illustrates the challenge we face as Christians.

Our lives, and our culture?  They offer up tests, moments of krisis, every single day.  Power and pride, anxiety and greed, desire and self-serving, all of these things come pouring at us.

When they do, and when they try to command your allegiance and your obedience, remember the words of Paul.  “Test everything.  Hold fast to what is good.  Abstain from every form of evil.”

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

In the Wilderness A Way

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

12.07.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 1:1-8

There’s this tendency we have, ensconced in the comfort of our homes and our neatly managed lives, to think about wilderness in romantic ways.  We look to the moon and stars, to the loveliness of the trees and the flowing of brooks.  We imagine ourselves at one with nature, cavorting through the woodland, dancing with the llamas and the majestic moose.  We are part of the beauty of nature, we tell ourselves, dreamily.  This tends to end up with us being eaten by bears.

Or we imagine ourselves to be mighty adventurers, powerful individuals, a loner and a rebel.  We see the wilderness as a challenge to be sought, something that we in our big mighty man strength will overcome.  We’re a true nature’s child, born, born to be wild.  This also tends to end up with us being eaten by bears.  

Wilderness is rather less forgiving of our romantic notions about it.  Once we step outside of the bounds of our carefully managed relationship with its wild, chaotic creativity...even just a tiny little bit...we discover that it isn’t forgiving at all, and that we are small, fragile, and taste just like chicken.

It doesn’t take much to remind us of the power of the wild.

Years ago, when I was a scrawny young twenty-something, I was travelling with my parents and brother in Nigeria, journeying down from their compound in Ibadan to a resort on the Abraka river in the southern Delta province.  The Abraka is an unusual river.  The water is deep and spring fed, pouring from the earth at the base of a sacred tree.  The spring water is crystal clear, so clear you can see perfectly all the way to the bottom, which ranges from three to five meters in depth.

Quick math for Americans...how many feet is that?  Answer: plenty.

We were staying at a little resort on the river, which offered a unique opportunity.  Rent an inner tube, go up to the bridge, and ride on the sacred waters through beautiful, untouched jungle.  It sounded cool, so we rented the tubes...big black rubber truck-tire inner tubes...loaded them into the back of the uparmored Chevy Suburban that was assigned to my parents as part of the diplomatic corps, and asked our driver to take us to the bridge.  He checked his map, and drove us along dirt roads for several miles, until we reached a large bridge at a nearby road.

We unloaded the ‘burban, put the tubes in the water, and headed downriver.  The water was as advertised.  Clear as crystal, clear as air, with fish swimming twenty feet below us, looking so close you could touch them.  In a minute, the bridge was behind us.  There was no evidence of humanity.  No houses, no cars, no passing aircraft.  Nothing.

Around us, it was beautiful, lush, and unspoiled, the branches of the trees hanging down into the water, animals dancing furtively in the trees, just out of sight.  We drifted and paddled about, chattering and pointing out beautiful things.

The river got narrower, and faster.  And then narrower still, snaking back and forth, and we found we were having to paddle fiercely, awkwardly, just to stay in the flow.  We began to wonder.

Five minutes passed, then ten, then fifteen.

We passed a bend...and the river disappeared entirely, spreading out, flowing swiftly into thick jungle, not swamp but jungle, trees reaching down three meters into the water.  And we were in it, flowing through sharp-edged razor grass and dense thickets of thorny vines.  We were lost, in a jungle, in deep cold fast-flowing water.

It was thickening, and we worked together, to avoid trees and tangles.  We started to get cut up, a large slash across my father’s arm, the thorny vines poking holes in not just us, but the thick rubber of our flotation,  my brother’s inner tube hissing.  As we fought our way around another dense thicket, mine exploded, sinking rapidly away into the water.  Littering is bad, but at that moment I wasn’t worried about it.

I paddled around, staying away from vines, hanging on to one family member’s tube after another, helping get unstuck and untangled.  We stuck together, worked together, helped one another out, and stayed in the flow.

Fifteen minutes later, we were out, as the river opened up again.  Ten minutes after that, we passed a little tiny footbridge, just five hundred yards from the hotel.  This, as it turns out, was the bridge we were supposed to have started from.

Wildness, real wildness, even just for half an hour, is considerably less fun than we pretend.

Here John the Baptist was not in the wilderness for his health, or out of any dreamy idea about the beauty of the Judean desert.  He was not a tourist, or an adventurer, or a romantic. For the people of ancient Israel, the desert was a place where you could stand in direct encounter with the I Am That I Am, which in and of itself was a shattering, shaking experience.  It was not a place you entered lightly. What he sought there wasn’t solace, or comfort, or distraction, but an experience that would fundamentally shake him.

The wilderness was neither tame nor safe.  In Judea, it was desert scrubland, harsh and hot and merciless.  You could live there, but you could also much more easily die there.  For those who journeyed through what the prophets called ba midbar, which among its many meanings can be translated as the space beyond, it was both a dangerous realm and a place of liberation.

Wilderness is the place that received the people of Israel when they fled from Egypt, the place that hid the prophets when they were struggling with the powers that tore at their lives.  It was the place evoked by the prophet Isaiah, who looked at the mess of the world that he encountered, and proclaimed that there was, within that chaos, the possibility of a new way of being.

We are far closer to the wilderness than we might think.  And it is far closer to us, though we might try to manage it and contain it and control it.  Here in the seeming solidity of our suburban lives, there’s a surprising amount of wildness.

Those wild, chaotic, shattering places can take many forms. It might be a place of loss that refuses to heal. It might be a season that should bring comfort and joy, but instead yields only isolation, stress, or anxiety.  It could be the churning, snarling chaos of our culture, red in tooth and claw, where truth seems forever out of our reach, and all of our energies seem turned towards attacking one another.  Our lives do not lack for wildernesses, and they test us as truly as the burning sun tested the prophets. How we respond to those times and places is the measure of our faith.

The key words there are “we” and “our.”  Because in a wilderness season, whatever it might be, finding the way out on our own is a recipe for endless struggle.  Here, together, in this place and in this little community, what we are doing is that Way.  Seeking that way, making it, building it?  That’s not something we have to do on our own.

But...that’s a Way for the Lord, you might say.  That’s a path for God to travel.  When I visualize what Isaiah proclaimed, and what John proclaimed again, I always think of a red carpet, rolled out across the desert.  It’s easy to see Jesus pulling up in his stretched Escalade, wandering down that carpet to the flashing bulbs of paparrazzi, while we struggle to catch a glimpse from behind the ropes.

This is not how the Way works.  Jesus invites us in, to walk that Way with him, all of us together.

In the wilderness, in all of our wildernesses, there is a way.  It is something we are called to make together, and to walk together with our God.

Let that be so for us, for you and for me, AMEN.

Twenty Four Seven

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

11.30.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 13

Twice in the last week, someone has said to me, in the thicket of some wildly busy thing: “You can sleep when you die.”  Which really, really bugs me.  I like my sleep, particularly when I’ve got a belly full of meatlike product and vegetarian gravy.   It seems a really telling saying for our time, just about perfect for this season.  Because now, more than at any other time of the year, we seem pressed for time.

We’re in the thickets of the holiday season now, and it feels like time is more and more at a premium.  Events and year-end deadlines, preparations for gift giving and family gatherings, travel and tests?  It’s so much, so much that sharing war stories of anxiety and overwhelmedness becomes a part of our assumption about the nature of this time.

The demands of our culture, of work and of school and the ten thousand other expectations layered upon us?  That’s what can easily become the essence of this season, as we frantically rush about trying to meet every need and seize every opportunity.  We must act now!  We’ve got to double down and lean forward, which we do until we find ourselves so doubled over and off balance that we’re toppling head over heels.

It’s a peculiar thing, this season, but it mirrors a deeper cultural reality, one that marks a change from even a generation ago.   We are never off.  Things never shut down, never, not ever.  They can’t.  Our culture is 24-7, always on, aways going.  And so we must always be going, always be ready to take that email or make that sale.  Carpe Diem, we cry, as if there is no difference between seizing the day and seizing a doorbuster flatscreen at one-thirty in the ay em on Thanksgiving Day.

Maybe it’s that I’m old, old enough to remember when 7-11 opened at seven and closed at eleven, and that was a revolutionary thing.  Old enough to remember when there was only one restaurant around that stayed open into the morning hours.

But now, now we’re always on.  It’s the joy of this era, and without question, there are some amazing advantages to our interconnectivity.  But it’s not always the most amazing thing.  Our co-workers get snitty if we don’t immediately respond to that email they sent at 9:47 at night.  OurAs if it is some improvement that there is no longer any space between the demands of our work and our home lives, as the blurring of demands on our existence gets more and more intense.  

We counterbalance that with all sorts of tricks and hacks, trying to find ways to cut corners and to tighten up, to make our lives even more productive.  But the faster we go, the further behind we fall, like the red queen in Alice in Wonderland.  

And here comes Jesus, in the middle of this season when, like, we’re already doing everything we can, and he says: Keep awake.  Awake?  We’re supposed to stay more awake?  We start every morning in a flurry, making the coffee first thing, sitting there with our giant bucket of stimulant beverage and toeing the line between drinking enough to be productive and drinking so much our heart explodes.  

Our whole lives can feel like trying to keep ourselves focused and on and going strong, and what we feel more often than not is a desire to just slow things down, to take things at a saner pace.

And here, Jesus, Jesus of all people, tells us that we’ve got to be more awake?

Why?

This passage comes to us from a portion of Mark known as the “little apocalypse.”   The “little apocalypse” runs for most of chapter 13 of Mark’s Gospel, and contains much familiar imagery.

There are wars and rumors of wars.  There are earthquakes, trials and tribulations, cats and dogs, living together, the whole shebang.  At the conclusion of the sequence of events, we hear, in verse 26, that there will be the arrival of the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory.

There are a couple of elements, however, that make this a bit different from the typical end-times schpiel.  

Most apocalypses follow a particular format.  Anyone who had the pleasure of working their way through the Book of Revelation last year with me knows that apocalypses are a little bit bizarre.  There is usually 1) a bizarre vision being presented from God; 2) an angelic intermediary to interpret the strange visions, and 3) a clear judgment of bad folks.  Jesus doesn’t stick with this mold, and more importantly, he gets done with it quickly.  Eight verses.  Boom.   As in last week’s story from Matthew, when Jesus wants to tell how things end, he gets around to mercifully quickly.  

Because while that story is important to Jesus, it is less important than the impact he hopes his story will have.   It is the conclusion that matters.  You know things will happen.  You don’t know when.

“It is like a man going on a journey,” he says, spinning out a story to interpret the story.  That man leaves each worker in the household with the simple instruction to do what they’re supposed to be doing.

It is that tension between the fulfillment of the Reign of God and the anticipation of it’s arrival that is why this passage gets served up on the first Sunday of Advent. What Jesus is saying is not to be understood as being true only for the generation that heard him first. The reality he is describing isn’t something that occurs at one moment in time, or at one place.

The arrival of God’s Kingdom does not belong to one particular generation...it belongs to all of us.

And it’s not a reality that happens at one moment, and then passes on. As Christ says, though Heaven and Earth will pass away, my words will not pass away.   That call to stay awake, then, has direct implications for how we are to live our lives in the now.

But is that the form of wakeness that Jesus is asking for here?  Is this the shimmering juddering stress of the twenty four seven culture, exhausted and strung out on caffeine?  It is the wakefulness of anxiety insomnia, as you lie there with your eyes wide open, mind racing, unable to shut down in the terrified knowledge that IT COULD HAPPEN AT ANY TIME!  Are we to be Reign of God paranoid, rushing about in a state of hypervigilance like Mad Eye Moody?

Sure, we are meant to stay awake.  But what that looks like, I am convinced, is nothing at all like the wild churning stressfest that we have made of our culture.  There is no peace in that.  There is no grace in that.  The approach we take to our twenty four seven lives looks nothing at all like the Kingdom.

Our adult ed class has, over the last month, been poring over a book called The Slow Church.  It’s an interesting book, a countercultural book, one that’s both insistent and gentle.  It’s based on the premise that maybe, just maybe, being awake and ready for the Kingdom isn’t quite like being stressed out about an imminent deadline.  It looks like living that life, right now, that shows you understand what it is that Jesus asked us to live.

It means resistance.  Gentle, insistent, persistent, as we make a point of structuring our lives, our whole lives, in such a way that the Kingdom can be perceived in them.  We are awake, and active, and doing what we are meant to be doing.

Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

The End of All Things

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 11.23.14

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 25

This has been a mess of a week, craziness, the tumbling reality of being a Dad with two sons in multiple activities and a wife whose consulting business has her out there travelling.  There’ve been shows and swimming and gigs, mixed in with Session meetings and class preparations and the rest of life, and in the thick of it all.  So of course, this is the perfect month to try to be writing a novel.

It’s National Novel Writing Month again.  It rolls around every November, and for years I’d promised myself I’d finally get out some of those stories that were struggling to get out my head when the kids were young.  It’s a neat thing, run by a nonprofit organization that does everything in its power to help hopeful authors stop dreaming and actually make that dream a reality.

They provide online tools and advice, plus encouraging “you can do it” support from human beings who’ve actually published books.  That encouragement is important, because what they’re asking is that you write a fifty thousand word manuscript in thirty days.  It pans down to just under one thousand seven hundred words a day.  That’s the full written text of a sermon a day, every day, for thirty days.

One of the reasons, you can be sure, that this particular sermon references NaNoWriMo.  Nothing else quite felt right, including the entirely completed sermon I wrote that revolved around a completely insane video game called Goat Simulator.  Maybe next time I preach on this scripture.

Having done it last year and fallen just short of the fifty thousand word mark, I elected to take another swing at it this time around.  This time, there was something different.  I’d been writing bits and pieces of the story on and off over the last year.  I’d been figuring out characters, thinking about plot twists, trying to make the whole thing cohesive.  Bits and pieces of the it came out, and I’d dutifully write them down, like setting out the corner pieces of a jigsaw puzzle as you begin.

Back in August, I got a brainstorm.   There it was.  I could visualize it, see it, like it was playing out on the screen in front of me.  The end of my novel.  It had to end that way.

Only...it wasn’t written yet.  Here, I had the end, the final goal, those last few pages that bring the whole story to what felt like a soaring conclusion.  I knew where I was going, but I didn’t have a clue what the space between the end and the .  I didn’t know what it looked like, that journey.  I didn’t have any sense of most of it.

But there was the ending of my story, sitting there, like a beacon.  This is where you’re headed.  This is the point and goal, how the tale you’re telling comes to an end.

That’s one of the biggest challenges, I think, in trying to wrap our heads around the story that Jesus tells in Matthew’s Gospel today.   This particular story is unique to Matthew.  None of the other three Gospels contain it.  This is also the only place in the Bible where Jesus right up and says: this is what it’s going to be like at the end.

Here in the final vignette in a sequence of stories that have brought us to the end of Jesus’s teachings in Matthew, though, he steps away from the familiar path that we’ve gotten used to as we’ve listened to him teach.  

It appears, as we read it, to be something of a binary process.  The good go on the right hand, in the sheep line.  The not-good?  They go in the goat line.   The sheep are the righteous, the goats, the unrighteous.  

For all of the really amazing amount of energy Christians have spent arguing about theological and doctrinal issues over the last 2,000 years, there’s no doctrinal multiple choice test administered.

Instead, the measure is feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and visiting those who are sick or imprisoned.  Did you believe what I taught, Jesus asks, enough to have believed it with your whole life?  Was love of your neighbor something that lived for you, that breathed for you, that you didn’t just think with big thinky thoughts, but that was how you were towards even the most broken souls around you?

What isn’t this story?

This is not a parable, a story told to speak to a meaning beyond the story.  It is not an allegory, in which every thing in the story acts as a symbolic stand-in for some other thing.  It’s something else, something else entirely, a laying out of a guiding future, an intent.

There’s a formal term for this casting out of a future, among people who care about the art of telling a story.    And no, that term isn’t “spoiler,” like when someone tells you exactly how that film is going to turn out.  We haaate spoilers.  Did you realize he was Keyser Soze?    You know, she’s really a man.  Like my favorite part was when he realized he’s totally a ghost himself.   Oh, c’mon, Jesus.  You totally ruined the ending, dude.

This story isn’t one that can be ruined by knowing the ending.  This is a different sort of story, a story that imbues life with purpose and intention.  In a story that defines us, that casts out our identity for us, knowing the end is called prolepsis, a “before taking.”  

It’s a pretty simple measure, but one that we might, upon some reflection, struggle with a bit.  How does that work?

Have we done things that are good?   Have we cared for those in need, and given a kind word to those who were lost or hurting?  I’m pretty sure we’ve all done that here and there, more or less.

But how much, in those moments, do we really sense that they’re the end goal of our story?  How vividly do we see how vital that time is that we spend caring for others, bot individually and separately.   

There are times we give of ourselves, but not fully.  There are times we are good, but not wholly.  We might give, but feel a tinge of resentment.  We might pull away, failing to give as much as we could.   We might be meeting one need, but failing to meet another.  That’s the reality in which we live.   How does this vision of how things are measured connect with our purpose?

It’s what we have to hold in front of ourselves as we share together in the life and fellowship of this little community.  What’s the purpose of it?  What’s the reason we gather?

It’s to teach and to share with one another, as we strengthen each other in the journey together.  That’s the reason we give, it’s the reason we share, and it can be easy to miss in the humble nature of this time we spend together.

Here, an image of glory, of all of the nations, of Big Things Happening in Big Ways.  And here we are, teeny tiny, a little slip of a thing.  How do we place what we’re doing here together into the context of this moment, this end, this purpose?  How do we keep it from becoming little more than a distraction, as aimless and pointless as charging about a screen with a simulated goat?

Here, in front of us, we’re shown the value that defines everything we’re trying to do here together.  In this story, Jesus lays out the measure for our every action, for all that we do.  Does it show caring to the world?  Does it strengthen and encourage others and ourselves as we work together to show that caring, to strangers and to everyone we interact.

That purpose is the thing we’re asked to consider, here in the waning weeks of the year of our Lord Two Thousand and Fourteen.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN

Risk Aversion

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

11.16.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 25

I don’t like taking risks.

It is, perhaps, an old residual pattern of thought, dating from when I was in second grade.  Watching second grade boys tearing around like madmen, waving their pointed sticks at each other, their knees scabbed and scarred, their Emergency Room Rewards cards registering almost enough visits for a free full-body MRI, you’d think that wouldn’t mesh.  Risk?  What is this thing of which you speak?

I was not one of those boys.

In second grade, I was the one forever assigned to being a midfielder, the second-grade-soccer equivalent of living in flyover country.  Small boys go charging up and down the soccer field, kicking wildly at the ball in a dense little mud-encrusted cluster of shimmering energy.  Or most of them do.    Oh, look, there’s a passing cluster of kids crusted with mud and kicking at something.  How nice.  It was almost as pleasant as sitting on the sidelines where the coaches tended to keep me, daydreaming, my tube socks flopping, shinguards half out, an orange wedge stuffed into my mouth like an orangutan’s mouthguard.  I preferred it that way.

Being on the field meant pain, and I couldn’t stand the possibility of pain.  Those cleats are kind of pointy, and my twiglike shins anticipated every possible impact.  If I got too close, they might trample right over me, leaving me lying there like a broken pile of kindling in tube socks.  So I preferred doing nothing, just nosing around and watching the contrails in the clear fall sky.

I didn’t like risks.  When childhood fled like a dream, and suddenly the testosterone fires of adolescence stirred, what mattered was girls.  I may have gone to school, or at least, I’m reasonably sure I did, because I remember there being girls there.

As a fourteen year old boy, I had no trouble whatsoever talking with girls.  They were...people.  If we shared an interest, or had something in common, or were just hanging out in the same place, it was easy.  You just talked, you know, like with actual people.  It wasn’t hard.  It wasn’t like they were this strange and alluring being, unknowable and mystical and full of dangerous, intoxicating magic.

So I had no problems talking with girls, right up until that point when I looked at them and realized...Oh dear Lord that was exactly what they were. Then, I was paralyzed.  I overthought everything, a sure sign that I was predestined to be a Presbyterian.  If I said how I felt, it might make her uncomfortable.  Or it might make her think I was only talking to her because I wasn’t just being friendly but was interested in her, which, of course, I totally was.  What if I was just imagining the connection?  All manner of impossibly horrible and embarrassing scenarios played out in my mind, so I did nothing, and said nothing, wallowing in angst.

I was afraid.  I wouldn’t let myself take those risks.  Ultimately, I figured my way around that one, or else my current little family wouldn’t exist.

Fear and radical risk aversion leads to inaction, to an absence of change, and it was to that affliction of the souls of human beings that Jesus was speaking in the parable we heard from Matthew’s Gospel this morning.  

We’re still in Matthew’s Gospel, on this long journey through his telling of the story of Jesus.  This part of his story comes to us from what scholars call the “Q” source.  Why “Q?”  Because it is the first letter of the word “quelle,” which means “source.”  This redundantly titled document doesn’t actually now exist, that contained all of the sayings that appear in Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark.  

In this story, a wealthy and powerful man goes on a journey.  He entrusts his property to three of his slaves.  Upon his return, he discovers that the one who’d received the most had invested it in business ventures.  He’d taken risks, and doubled what he’d received.   The one who’d received less than half of that amount had also doubled it.

The last one?  Well, he knew that   He took what he’d been given, and he dug a nice little hole in the ground, and buried what he’d been given.  It’s the careful thing to do.  It’s the prudent thing to do, particularly given that his boss was demanding.

And hearing this, the rich man takes back the money, gives it to the first slave, and fires the guy with a flourish worthy of Donald Trump, casting him into the outer darkness of weeping and gnashing of teeth.

We don’t like hearing this story, which strikes us as a tiny bit unfair.  It’s not like the slave squandered the money.  He didn’t go to Atlantic City with it, after all.  Heck, if you bury it in the ground, you’re getting nearly the same interest you’d be getting if you put it in 6 month Bank of America Certificate of Deposit these days.   Doesn’t that count for something?

But that’s not the point Jesus was trying to make.  This is not that simple.  

This isn’t a parable about investment strategies.  It’s a parable about what it means to use your gifts in the active and purposeful work of God’s Kingdom.  As we engage in that work, both individually and corporately, there are some core learnings we should take away from this passage.

This is, first and foremost, a reminder of the need for balance.  It follows on last week’s parable of the Bridesmaids, which appears to have said the exact opposite thing.  You remember the story, about those unwise bridesmaids, who had to run home to get their iPhone chargers and managed to get locked out of the best party ever, standing around disconsolately Oh Em Geeing and saying how they just can’t even?  We don’t want to be them.  

“Be wise,” said Jesus.  “Be prepared!”  And so Jesus sends us off scurrying to make ready for anything and everything, as we buy more food for the generator and fill our unfinished basement with canned food and ammunition.

But that favorite parable of preppers and survivalists was not the end of what Jesus has to say.  Because there is wisdom that prepares, that makes itself ready to deal with likely eventualities.  But there’s also a form of “wisdom” that’s a mask for cowardice, the lipstick we put on the pig of our fears.  

We are terrified of failure, and so we do everything we can to insure that nothing could ever possibly ever happen to us.  

We are terrified of rejection, so we allow ourselves to follow along with a crowd, even when that crowd is only driven by terror, like a flock of maddened starlings, or a herd being rounded up for slaughter.

We are terrified for our children, listening to the endless fearmongering of profit-driven media, and so we seal them away in boxes, managing every aspect of their lives, hovering over them as their budding personhood is blown away in the rotorwash of anxiety helicopter parenting.

Jesus reminds us to steer away from that false wisdom that counsels us to ignore or gloss over wrongs, that warped prudence that seeks to protect what is by not doing what needs to be done.   Play it safe.  Keep it quiet.  Bury it away.   That sort of caution, caution that covers its own behind instead of taking the risk that comes with seeking justice, almost invariably leads to ruin.  

True wisdom examines itself, tests itself, measures itself against both reality and its God-given purpose.

There’s another, deeper danger that fear of risk.

When we realize the Holy Spirit is trying to work something new in us, that newness involves change and transformation.  We do not know, cannot know, what that change will look like.  The heart of the Gospel is transformation, a deepening of our gifts and graces, a growing into awareness of that potential self that we are not yet.

There is risk in that.  That’s true for every venture in life.  It’s true in relationships.  It’s true in our work-life, and in our schooling.  And it is particularly true in the lives of congregations.  If we are called...as we are called...to be servants of the transforming love and grace of Jesus of Nazareth, then we need to let our wisdom examine itself, see those places where God’s good promise can live in us, and then be bold about it.

Let that be so, for you and for me,  AMEN