November 16--The Only Thing We Have to Fear

"Master, I knew that you were a hard man. You harvest things you did not plant. You gather crops where you did not sow any seed. So I was afraid and went and hid your money in the ground." --Matthew 25: 24-25a.

(Lectionary focus: Matthew 25:14-30)

I've been reading the prophets lately, as they cycle their way through the daily lectionary. The harsh words of the LORD through the prophet Zephaniah have hounded me this week: "I will punish those who are satisfied with themselves," our God says to ancient Israel. "Their wealth will be stolen and their houses destroyed. They may build houses, but they will not live in them. They may plant vineyards, but they will not drink any wine from them. The LORD's day of judging is coming soon; it is near and coming fast" (Zephaniah 1:12-13).

No wonder the servant is scared! If the prophets are right, there’s not much that angers God more than the people of God mishandling our wealth.

The self-satisfied spending of elite biblical Israel, after all, led to a radical day of reckoning at the hands of a foreign empire, centuries before the time of Christ and his presentation of this parable. Investment in exotic luxury items at the expense of the most vulnerable rendered the whole people of God susceptible to foreign assault . . . and ultimately the victims of outright exile. It makes sense that the servant several hundred years later would see wealth as so dangerous. Better, indeed, to avoid it altogether. Better, indeed, to make sure it stayed safe.

And it’s not just an Old Testament sentiment, either. The entire Book of Revelation anticipates a cataclysmic economic collapse of the great Roman Empire as God’s righteous response to their incessant greed. The letter of James, too, warns the rich that their gold and silver “will eat your bellies like fire” (5:3). The First Epistle to Timothy reminds us that “the love of money is the root of all evil” (6:10).

So why would Jesus choose to describe the kingdom of heaven in terms of so much wealth? A talent, after all, could fund one worker for fifteen years. Two talents for thirty. Five talents for 75!

It’s not God’s abundance that’s the problem, Jesus suggests in this parable. It’s our gratitude for it . . . our acknowledgement of it . . . and our stewardship with it.

Because we still do have talent, both the monetary kind and the human ability kind. We have quite a lot of it, actually. Some of us have enough to fund thirty or even 75 years. Others of us have just a single dose, just enough for fifteen. But even one talent is a whole lot of money for a first-century worker dependent on his boss for his daily bread. And even one talent is a whole lot ability for the twenty-first century worker desperate for a job. And every talent, invested well, will double in return. This is the one certainty of God’s market economy.

It is natural to fear for our basic economic survival. It is natural to fear our mishandling of wealth. Even the euphoria of a dramatic presidential election emphasizes in its wake our deepest anxieties about money. Has our wealth been stolen--or will it be soon? Have our houses been destroyed--or will they be soon? Have our jobs been lost--or will they be soon? The economic agenda is the nation's agenda, the world's agenda. The parable of the talents could not be more relevant.

We can bury God’s gifts of talent and treasure and face a wrath even worse than that of the prophets. Or we can take what we have, invest it in the common good, and double our wealth in service to God. The choice is ours in the weeks and months ahead. May we make the choice of faith, acknowledging our fears before God, and trusting God’s everlasting abundance.
Amen.

Gusti Linnea Newquist

(additional lectionary texts for this week: Judges 4:1-7; Psalm 123; 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11)

September 28--Hitting a Rock with a Stick

Text focus for this week:

Exodus 17:1-7 and Psalm 78:1-4, 12-16

(Additional lectionary texts for this week:

Philippians 2:1-13 and Matthew 21:23-32)

My mother has a black and white photograph hanging in the hallway of a three year old girl holding a two foot long stick. The girl’s eyes are wide with anticipation as she prepares to whack the brightly decorated papier mache llama hanging just to her side. She has been told there is a special treasure inside that piñata and that if she just hits it hard enough with her stick, then streams of candy—butterscotch and peppermints and Hershey kisses—will flow down like river. She really wants that candy.

The three year old girl hits the piñata really hard, harder than she has ever hit anything in her life. She swings that long stick so hard, in fact, that she loses her balance and skids onto the concrete floor, scraping her hands and her knees.

No candy flows down from that pretty piñata. The only things she has to show for her valiant efforts are bruised up limbs and a deflated dream.

“There was never any candy in that stupid llama!” she screams at her parents in her distress. “You tricked me and now everyone is laughing at me. I wish I could just go home. I wish I had never come here at all!”

She stomps over to the corner and refuses to speak to anyone. Not to her mother, who tries to convince her there really is candy in that llama. Not to her father, who chastises her for acting like a baby. Not to her best friend, Susan, who brings her the stick and begs her to try again. This candy-loving, stick-whacking three year old has given up hope and refuses to pretend otherwise.


The ancient Israelite community we encounter in our text from Exodus this week has also given up hope, but on a much more spectacular scale than our piñata-challenged three year old. The ancient Israelites are literally wandering from one place to another in the wilderness between Egypt and the land of Canaan, never quite sure where they will end up next. They live “paycheck to paycheck,” which for them means gathering up frost-like flakes that fall on the ground each morning and a handful of quail each night. It is not much—not butterscotch or chocolate or even milk and honey—but it is enough to sustain them from one day to the next.

The industrious ones among them fear their luck may run out and want to save for the future. Maybe the manna won’t come the next morning! Maybe the quail won’t come the next night! But when they try to save the manna and the quail, it just turns to worms overnight. Day-to-day living is the only option in this barren desert.

The social climbers among them crave the stability of food and drink from their former lives in Egypt. Slavery is better, they say, than this uncertain existence. But the decision to leave has already been made, and they have no choice but to press ahead.

And so the ancient Israelites arrive at a new camp on a new day—sustained but worried, pushing forward but second-guessing—and realize there is no water for them to drink. And it starts all over again. “There never was any land of milk and honey calling us out of Egypt!” they lash out at Moses. “You tricked us and now we will die and our children and our farm animals with us. We wish we could just go back to Egypt. We wish we’d never come here at all!”


What do you do if you’re Moses, the reluctant leader of this rag-tag alliance? What do you do if you’re the parent of a three-year old who has never seen candy spill from a piñata? What do you do if you’re stuck in a day-to-day existence and don’t know how you’re going to pay next month’s rent?

“I will stand in front of you on a rock at Mount Sinai,” the Holy One offers to Moses. “I will stand with you in front of that papier mache llama,” says the parent to the small child. “I will stand with you as you go to that temp agency,” says our God to the laid-off social worker. “Hit that rock with the stick, and water will come out of it so that the people can drink.” Hit that rock with the stick and streams out of the rock will cause water to flow down like rivers.

Hit that rock with a stick, says our God to everyone who wonders how we’re going to survive in these uncertain times. Keep on hitting it, even though you’re blindfolded, even though others second-guess you, even though you second-guess yourself. I have led you out of your slavery, and I have given you manna and quail, and I will give you more than enough water, as if from the deep ocean. I have done it before, and I will do it again. And I will stand with you, even until the end of the age.

We don’t know when that papier mache piñata will finally break, we don’t know when that rent check will finally come, we don’t know when that stream will finally flow, but God is still with us, and we are still with God. May we trust it in plenty and in want, in certainty and in doubt. Amen.

P.S. Kelsey Rice Bogdan has graciously exited her role as MBS Blogger and passed on the duties to me! I'm Gusti Newquist, a June 2008 graduate of Harvard Divinity School and Presbyterian minister-to-be. I served as the MBS seminary intern from October 2005-May 2006 and am delighted to be back with MBS in this capacity.

July 27-- God For Us

Passages: Genesis 29:15-28, Psalm 105:1-11, 45b, Romans 8:26-39, Matthew 13:31-33, 42-52

Hello, those of you eagerly awaiting another segment of the Massachusetts Bible Society lectionary blog! As a newcomer to this blog, but not to MBS, I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself before getting to the actual text for this week’s lectionary. I’m Kelsey Rice Bogdan, third year student at Harvard Divinity School and 2006-2007 MBS seminarian. I had the pleasure of working with MBS the year before Joe came on board, in the Society’s pre-blogging days. I was an avid blogger before the student life ate up all my time, though, so I’m excited to be back in the blogosphere. I also look forward to setting aside some time each week with you all to pause and reflect on a little snapshot of Scripture from the Revised Common Lectionary. I hope it will be a time for all of us to consider, be challenged, and grow together.

What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? ... Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” --Romans 8:31, 35-39

Have you ever wondered why John Calvin, the great Protestant Reformer of the 16^th century, ever made such a big deal about the idea that God chose some people for salvation and others for destruction? After all, it isn’t such a warm, fuzzy doctrine, and a good chunk of Christians (even Presbyterians like me, who claim their religious heritage from Calvin’s teachings) don’t really buy into it today. But Calvin was very emphatic on the point, and today’s lectionary passage is a perfect example of why.

In Romans 8:26-39, being God’s “predestined” (v. 29) suggests that God is with you, God will take care of you, nothing can come between you and God. In Calvin’s day, it was a comforting thought to reflect that, though the French authorities might threaten to kill you for your faith, God would vindicate you in the end because you were a beloved, chosen child. In Paul’s own first century context, it must have been likewise reassuring to think that despite all the vulnerabilities that come from being poor (as the majority of those living under the Roman Empire were at the time) and a follower of a strange new Jewish sect, God was on your side. It is no coincidence that, whether they agree with Calvin’s take on who or what is “predestined” in this passage, Christians through time and space have clung to it to claim God’s stake in their cause.

And therein lies the danger, the key element that can make Paul’s words both a clarion call for justice and the all-too-easy weapon of the oppressor: God is for us. Too many times we gloss over this phrase in verse 31 and just assume that if God is “for us,” that means someone—the devil, that particularly nasty co-worker, corporate America, Iran—is against us. We then go on to scan the rest of the passage with a smile on our face, knowing that we can be assured that God will make us “more than conquerors” over all those people we’ve brought into our reading of the text.

When I look again at Romans 8:31 and 35-39, though, an important character is missing from our little scenario: all the people who are against us, all the people we are supposedly going to conquer. The Holy One who created all of us, who embraces all of us as a mother embraces the sometimes squirmy child, is ultimately for all of us. Jesus, who reached out to Mary Magdalene and Nicodemus, Matthew the tax collector and Martha the busy housewife, doesn’t have to pick and choose who to love. When we think of God as a God of abundance, rather than through our own frame of scarce, coveted resources, who indeed is excluded from God’s overflowing love to stand against us?

Perhaps this is why, through Christ, we can be more than conquerors. Through Christ, the text suggests, we can transcend the lens of limit and lack through which we see others. We can go beyond winners and losers, beyond the notion that my gain is your loss. That’s not to deny the brokenness that exists in the world—in verses 35 and 36, Paul acknowledges the realities of persecution, hunger, and war, some of which humans and human systems cause. But none of those things can alter the fact that the God who appeared among us did so because that God is for each and every one of us.

In the gospel Paul presents here, no one—no individual, group, or society—can lay claim to God’s special favor over another. For just as Jesus embraces all of creation in this troubled world, we are called to embrace all those who we might view as standing against us. What would it mean to look at the enemy, even one that perpetuates injustices we rightfully oppose, as someone whom God is ultimately for? Maybe that means revising our belief that an enemy is someone to be vanquished, conquered, bent to our will. Maybe that means seeing our opponents as God sees them—broken, flawed creatures like us, desperately in need of transformative love.