Fear Not
Matthew 25:14-15, 19-29
The gospel we just heard is of a single piece with the parable from
last week of the wise and foolish virgins who fall asleep waiting on
the bridegroom to come. The failure of the ten to stay awake
foreshadows the disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane and with us at
the midnight hours of our lives. And as spiritual drowsiness
often causes us to miss the immanent revelation of God’s kingdom, so
fear can rob us of the power of life in that kingdom. Little
wonder that we are regularly admonished throughout the Bible to “Keep
awake!”; “Fear not!”
Listen carefully to the words of that third servant:
Master, I knew that you were a harsh man,
reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter
seed; so I was afraid…and I hid…
The words fear and afraid or their variations occur almost
800 times in the NRSV. From Genesis to Revelation, fear is a
characteristic of our separation from God and at the same time an
honest response to our nature as humans sojourning in a corrupt and
dying world – a world in need of redemption and transformation.
Now listen carefully to this exchange from the 3rd chapter of Genesis:
They heard the sound of the Lord God walking
in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his
wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees
of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, and said to
him, 'Where are you?’ He said, ‘I heard the sound of you in the
garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.’
This exchange reverberates and echoes in the words of the third servant.
Then at the end of the Revelation, in the 21st chapter, we read:
‘It is done! I am the Alpha and the
Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give
water as a gift from the spring of the water of life. Those who
conquer will inherit these things, and I will be their God and they
will be my children. But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the
polluted, the murderers, the fornicators, the sorcerers, the idolaters,
and all liars, their place will be in the lake that burns with fire and
sulphur, which is the second death.’
It is the cowardly, or as in other translations, the fearful,
who lead the list of those rejected. I will not pretend to grasp
the full meaning of the Revelation to John but I sense that from
beginning to end, the need to address our tendency to let fear control
our lives and our actions is at the heart of what keeps us from
becoming the creation God intended. Fear steals our power to live
transformed lives.
I know whereof I speak for fear has been a constant companion
throughout my own life. Trying to measure up to what I thought
were expectations of my parents, trying to match my brother in skills
and accomplishments, trying to prove my worth… The list goes on
and on. Suffice it to say, I am no stranger to fearful
living. Over a lifetime, I have worked and struggled to learn to
accept myself and to leverage my fear to energize rather than defeat.
I have also learned how we tend to project our fears onto others.
One of the real problems in reading scripture - or any written word –
is the absence of intonation. Consider the response of the master
in today’s reading:
You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter?
Here is a case of the servant finding that for which he was
looking. Expecting harshness, he finds it. That is not to
say that there are not times when we should be cautious or fearful of
the darkness that is found in each one of us. But far more often,
our reluctance to accept others, to hear them with openness, and to
receive them as children of God is due to our own failure to live fully
into our relationship with God to the effects of fear at work in our
lives. To paraphrase John’s epistle, if we cannot trust people
whom we see, how can we trust God whom we do not see?.
If we are to live as a transformed people, in the fullness of new life
given back to us through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we must find
our way into the Baptismal covenant:
• Will you continue in the
apostles' teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the
prayers?
• Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?
• Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?
• Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?
• Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?
The Rev. William Loader, an Australian theologian and Research Professor at Murdoch University, writes (read the original here) with what I feel is a particularly helpful insight about this parable:
There is a sting in the tail of the
parable. The person who refused to let the money work identifies
his fears. The owner reaps where he has not sown and gathers
harvest that was not originally his - a pretty good description of hard
business practice in any age. Fear of being abandoned seems to
motivate burying the talents. Matthew's community might think of
the controversy over the expansion of the gospel into the Gentile world
and the refusal of some Jews to accept that the doors should be flung
open so recklessly. God is misbehaving again and they cannot
believe it and refuse to support the adventure. In typically
Matthean style the text promises only damnation for such lack of trust.
The parable challenges us not to sit on the life of God in
us. That is a variant on the Matthean theme of keeping the oil in
supply, living from the life of God and not sitting back in complacency
on the basis of status or, here, not snuffing out the flame because our
narrow values will not allow us to keep up with God's generosity.
The talents of the parable are really about God's life and
power, not about our natural abilities, and our appropriate response is
to allow God's investing hand to employ our abilities. The
tragedy is that many people are afraid of losing or endangering God and
so seek to protect God from adventures, to resist attempts at radical
inclusion that they fear might compromise God's purity and
holiness. Protecting God is a variant of not trusting God.
Matthew wants his hearers to share God's adventure of
inclusiveness. God is bigger than our religious industry.
Sometimes we find God is pulling in great profits in areas which we had
deemed beyond God's interests. It is a fascinating thing to have
God compared to the entrepreneurial multimillionaire. "God's
mercy never ends" is a way of saying grace has capital, love is
rich. We need to … stop putting God under the mattress. As
we begin to trust, allowing God to move through us, our lives change as
individuals and our communities have a better chance of change.
There are rich pickings, so to speak, and the harvest is ripe.
Where are we as a church failing to let God’s riches grow in
our life, in what ways do we try to protect God from his own generosity
and profligacy? How do we fail to be open to the presence of
Christ in the people we meet, judging them unsuited for inclusion in
the kingdom and in the work of the church to live out that kingdom in
the midst of a hostile world?
Of what are we afraid? Of whom are we afraid? I could cite
Biblical texts from beginning to end which admonish us to fear not but
rather to trust in God’s goodness, to wait with him at the hour of
trail and be awake to meet him when he comes. Paul says it well:
… let us not fall asleep as others do, but let
us keep awake and be sober; for those who sleep, sleep at night, and
those who are drunk get drunk at night. But since we belong to
the day, let us be sober, and put on the breastplate of faith and love,
and for a helmet the hope of salvation. For God has destined us
not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus
Christ, who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep we may
live with him.
Amen.
The Rev. John Dryden Burton
Eureka Springs, Arkansas
November 16, 2008