Sermon – November 13, 2011 – Risky Business

Risky Business

A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger Gaines-Cirelli at St. Matthew’s UMC November 13, 2011, the twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost.

Text: Matthew 25:14-30

For many people—and I would guess anyone even close to my age—the phrase “risky business” calls to mind an image of actor Tom Cruise dancing and lip synching to Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock & Roll” in nothing but a button down shirt, white socks, and “tightie whities.” This iconic scene is from the 1983 film entitled “Risky Business,” the movie that launched Tom Cruise to stardom. I caught the movie on TV a few months back and remember wondering whether the young Tom Cruise had any misgivings about doing that scene (not to mention some of the other scenes in that rather risqué film). I mean it’s kind of embarrassing. But just think about if he had decided that he wanted to play it safe and not do it—or if he hadn’t so completely thrown himself into the scene and made it so memorable. We might never have heard of Tom Cruise.

I’ve been thinking quite a lot about risk-taking lately. This past week, I spent some time googling “risk.” Wikipedia gives this definition: Risk is the potential that a chosen action or activity (including the choice of inaction) will lead to a loss (an undesirable outcome).

Undesirable outcomes are powerful motivators in human life. As children, once we learn that touching something hot is painful, we avoid touching things that are hot. I would venture to guess that pain and suffering, loss, and undesirable outcomes are things that we all wish to avoid. And this is where we get the overwhelming amount of energy devoted in our world to what is called “risk management.” I was fascinated by the definition I found—though it is too long and tortuous to quote in full this morning. However, I will share the list of risk’s potential sources. Here it goes: “Risks can come from uncertainty in financial markets, project failures (at any phase in design, development, production, or sustainment life-cycles), legal liabilities, credit risk, accidents, natural causes and disasters as well as deliberate attack from an adversary, or events of uncertain or unpredictable root-cause.” In other words, there’s a lot of risk out there, much of which is “uncertain and unpredictable.”

Regardless of our age or stage in life, no matter our vocation or status, we all have to deal with risk. Another way to think about this is that we are all vulnerable, finite, and subject to forces beyond our control. Life is risky. Love is risky. Caring about anything is risky. Being honest is risky. Making a choice is risky. Trying something new is risky. Let’s face it, getting into a car is risky. All of these things are risky because we aren’t in control of the response or outcome, we aren’t in control of the movements of the wind and sea or of other drivers on the road. The thing we can control is how we move through life in the face of its inherent risks. And this is determined in large part by how we perceive reality. Is the world out to get us or is it a gift? Are people mostly kind and loving or generally back-stabbing jerks? Is God a loving parent always waiting to welcome us home or a bully lurking around every corner waiting to whack us with a big stick for being bad?

If we look to our parable today for comfort, encouragement, or clarity about these issues or about taking risks, we might be slightly disappointed or disturbed—at least at first. This teaching of Jesus is found nestled between two other stories—both of which deal with what the faithful are to do as they wait for Christ’s return. The parable of the ten bridesmaids (Mt. 25:1-13) ends with the admonition to “keep awake” and the prophecy of the sheep and the goats (Mt. 25: 31-46) reminds the church that as we care for “the least” among the human family, we care for Jesus himself. Like the early church for which Matthew was writing, we too find ourselves in the in-between time. In a couple of weeks, we will enter into the season of Advent and will begin to focus even more pointedly on not only the first coming of the Christ into the world, but also on the return of Christ in glory. The church in Matthew’s day and in ours is left to sort out how to live, what to do, how to be, as we wait.

This involves making some choices, and choices involve risk. Upon our first reading of the parable, it may seem pretty clear that if we make the wrong choice, if we do the wrong thing, then sitting in the dark with weeping and gnashing of teeth is the undesirable outcome. This puts the pressure on you and me to figure out how to avoid this fate. And here’s the thing—I think every time we read this parable, we will find that there’s no way around the fact that, for the writer of Matthew anyway, the focus really is on whether we will choose, act, serve, respond faithfully. Matthew is about walking the talk, about putting our faith into practice. The thing that is less clear, however, is what motivates this action—or, another way to say it, what is the context for this action. Do we act out of fear—fear of punishment or fear of failure? Or might there be an alternative to these… might there be another way of seeing things? It is here that we would do well to go deeper into this parable.

The first character we meet in this story is the man who goes on a journey, but only after entrusting his property to three of his servants. What we hear of the master in the first half of the parable is that he doles out his wealth—five talents to one, two talents to another, and one talent to the third—based on the abilities of the servants. According to scholars, a talent was a huge sum of money in Jesus’ day—equal to a lifetime’s worth of wages. When the master returns and is presented with the increase of what he has entrusted to the first two servants, his response is gratitude, praise, and the invitation for them to share in his joy. Doesn’t sound like such a bad guy so far… But then we get the third servant’s account—his excuse for why he still only has the one talent he was given. The third servant’s perception of his master is of someone who is skleros, a Greek word that means “hard” with no positive associations. This is “hard” in the sense of being ruthless, merciless, singularly unpleasant and mean. Notice that the third servant is the only one who acknowledges this perspective. In essence this servant blames the master for the servant’s own choice. Because he perceived the master as merciless and mean, the servant was afraid and buried what had been entrusted to him.

The master’s response can be read in several ways. In many interpretations, it is read as a confirmation of the third servant’s perception; like the master’s saying, “You got that right!” However, I tend to think that the placement of this parable invites a different reading. In both the parable of the bridesmaids and the prophecy of the sheep and goats, there is an emphasis on having your eyes open—being awake—seeing or recognizing Christ in others. I wonder whether the master’s response to the servant is simply repeating back what he has heard, as if to say, “YOU perceived this to be true of me, and, even if it were true, then you should have made a different choice.” In other words, what if that third servant had it all wrong? What if that third servant missed the point from the beginning? What if the third servant couldn’t see what was being offered? What if the third servant’s perceptions or fears or resentment at having received less than the others caused him to disregard what had been entrusted to him, caused him to paint this picture of his master as a tyrant when something else was really true?

What if the master in the story is NOT a merciless tyrant, but instead a wildly generous God who has enough faith in each one of us to entrust to us stewardship of God’s beloved and cherished creation and life itself—even our own lives? What if this generous God gives us exactly what and how much we need for the sole purpose of sharing all that is good and life-giving with us?

If we consider that this could be true, it doesn’t take away our responsibility, but it does place our lives, our choices, our risk-taking in a very different context. If we see that God’s grace is the starting point—that God has given us this life, all that we love, all that is beautiful and true, all that matters in life—then we receive what has been entrusted to us with energy and gratitude and joy. While we may still feel uncertain or even fearful of the risk, our awareness of God’s love and grace encourages us not to bury the life that we have been given (after all, what kind of bodies do we bury?) but to live it. As we live our lives, we share our lives with others—and life and love when shared, like the light of a candle, do not decrease, but increase exponentially.

The first two servants had their eyes open, they received what they had been given and began to enter into the master’s joy immediately. To enter the joy of God is to enter into the life of God; this is what God invites us to do—to participate in the divine life, the divine way that is a life of perfect love, trust, and self giving. So what if, in sharing/trading the gifts of God, the first two servants experienced loss or failure? It seems that in this context, we don’t need to fear failure or loss–though in human life it will surely still happen if we are truly living and choosing and loving and sharing. In this context, we are free to take risks because even “failures” are caught up in a web of grace that makes them opportunities for growth, for laughter, for learning, for becoming more compassionate, more fully ourselves.

Our perceptions of reality, our perceptions of potential risks, our perceptions of God as either a tyrant or a loving parent make a great deal of difference in the quality of our lives. In this parable, we see that the perception of God as nothing but a merciless, capricious bully leads to a life that is hoarded, fearful, and small. “Maybe at the end of the parable the reason why the third servant got cast out into the darkness is because that is where he had been sitting anyway. He was sitting in a darkness of his own devising, having taken a dark and dire view of his master and letting that fill his heart and his whole life with resentment, dread, fear, and loathing.”ⁱ Unfortunately, we all know folks who choose to look at life and see only thorns among the roses, who see the cup half empty instead of half full, who see enemies everywhere instead of friends, who are so distrustful and fearful that they close themselves off to the life that is theirs as a gift. My sense is that, from such a depressing point of view, it will be pretty difficult to see, much less enter into, the joy of the master. How many risks do you suppose those folks will take?

Today, if we have ears to hear and eyes to see, we are reminded of the amazing grace of our God, the overwhelming generosity that flows from God’s own heart, and the invitation to share in God’s own life of love, joy, and generosity. Perhaps in response to this great good news, you will be inspired to risk a little more of yourself, to share a little more of your life with others, to risk dancing this great dance of life with all you’ve got. After all, it’s more than a movie career that’s at stake.