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