Sunday, November 15, 2020

Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost
Zephaniah 1:7-18
Psalm 90:1-12
1 Thessalonians 5:1-11
Matthew 25:14-30

Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a few things. I will set you over many things. Enter into the joy of your lord.

I don’t know about you, but I have that there has been more and more talk about the end of the world in the past few months. I have friends who are convinced that we are very close to the day when Christ will return to take His people home. Memes on Facebook show the reasons why we should take this seriously, how their thoughts line up to the scriptures. I must confess that there are days when I hope it is true that we are the generation to see the Day of the LORD.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I cry out daily “Come, Lord Jesus,” but I’m reminded by today’s Old Testament lesson that it isn’t necessarily a day we should hope to see. There is nothing but doom and gloom found in this text. There is no promise. There is no Gospel. There is only a word of warning describing this Day of the Lord. It will be horrifying. God will be searching for sinners, setting forth to punish those who are indifferent. God’s people thought that God would let them be because they were His people, but in this passage we see that God will not hold back from dealing with the sins of His people. This isn’t a pretty passage. It is not an image of God we want to see.

We find comfort in the images of Jesus’ second coming when He will take His people with Him; we look forward to the promises that will be fulfilled finally after so much time. The apocalypse is not about us, but about them, whoever they are. Yet, we cannot forget that the people of Israel were God’s people and that they had turned from the God who had blessed them above all other nations. They were set aside for a purpose and they had failed. They were unfaithful and God would not come simply to defeat His enemies, but to cause His people to repent. The letters to the churches in Revelation remind us to take these warnings seriously. We can fail to be the people God has called us to be.

The text from Zephaniah is not a pretty passage. This is not an image of God that we want to see, but are reminded that we are still waiting for the Day of the LORD. It is just so hard for us, who live in the New Covenant, to read these words. We are comforted by the images of Christ’s return, and yet the Day of the LORD is frightening, too. How do we find grace in a passage so filled with horror?

That’s the focus of those Facebook posts: to warn the readers to get their act together or like the enemies of God, they will be destroyed. It is all about fire and damnation, scaring people into faith. As people of faith, however, we understand the Day of the LORD a little differently. It is not a time for God to destroy His enemies, but rather it is a time to cause His people to turn to Him.

It does us well to listen to the warnings of the Old Testament promise. It is true that we live under a new covenant, but we are the same as those who throughout the ages have believed in God. We, too, can become complacent. We can forget God when our focus is on other things. We can turn our hope toward earthly things and lose sight of the One who is our true hope. Zephaniah talks about the people building houses and making wine, building up wealth that they would never use. Aren’t we doing the same? And when our lives are threatened by forces beyond our control, we mumble like the people in Zephaniah’s day that God won’t do anything, good or bad. We think we can “settle on our dregs.” But God is offended by our indifference.

He calls us to know Him fully, to know His power as well as His grace. He reminds us with passages such as this one that we can fall, turning away from all that He so freely gives. We can lose sight of Him by focusing on our own desires and resting in our own wealth. Zephaniah writes, “Neither their silver nor their gold will be able to deliver them in the day of Yahweh’s wrath.” We can’t buy our way out of learning that lesson all over again. We can only fall on our knees in repentance, crying out to the God who can ensure our deliverance or allow our destruction. Has He, even now, been consecrating our enemies for that great and terrible Day of the LORD? Will we see it? Are we ready?

This is certainly not a message we want to hear. But we do have something that eclipses this message: hope in God. He has promised and He is faithful. We may not see it clearly, but the Gospel underlies every text. We must read a message like this through the eyes of faith, resting in God’s love. We know that He has relented from destruction. He has changed His mind. We also know that He has given us His own Son to overcome our faithlessness and sin. The image in this passage may seem hopeless, but we are called to believe that there is always hope even when we can’t see it with our eyes. God does not forget His promises. Despite the warning there is always a promise. Zephaniah writes later in the book, “Yahweh, your God, is among you, a mighty one who will save. He will rejoice over you with joy. He will calm you in his love. He will rejoice over you with singing.”

That’s what’s missing in those fire and damnation posts. The images in today’s passage may seem hopeless, but in faith we know that God is faithful. He does not forget His promises even when we do. He has given us His Son to overcome our faithlessness. Though the world may end, we can still have hope because God has promised us eternal life.

As for those enemies, the ones we are sure will suffer that fire and damnation, we do not know their hearts, only God does. Condemnation is above our pay grade. While it is important for us to be warned, to consider our own lives and relationship with God, we are not meant to interpret these passages as judgment against “them” but as admonition for us. Jesus Christ is coming again. What will He find when He comes?

Every generation of Christian and religious folk from many faiths since the beginning of time have wondered about the end of the world. The imagination can go wild with the possibilities. We see the end as some sort of catastrophic event. People have watched for signs on earth and in the heavens. Comets, eclipses, meteor showers foretold of doom. The people have always pointed to world events as proof that they are the generation that will see the end. War, rumors of war, natural disasters are all signs or omens and have been for every generation of humans. The same is true today.

It is interesting, then, that the passage from Matthew talks about the successes or failures of those waiting for the return of the landowner. The story foretells of Jesus’ own leaving and return. He is the landowner who gives gifts to the servants and goes away on a trip. When the landowner returns, he finds two of his servants have not only worked hard, but have profited from their work. They took what they had and made it into something bigger and better. In faith terms, they took their gifts and used them to grow the kingdom and glorify God.

So, even though the text does hint at an end time scenario, it is even more important to think about what we should be doing while we wait. We see in the story of God’s people throughout the Bible that many people do not have patience to wait, so they do what they think will hurry God along. Look at Abraham and Sarah. They could not wait for God to fulfill His promise that they would be the father and mother of nations, so they took matters into their own hands. They decided to use Sarah’s servant to get the long awaited heir. Their impatience still impacts our world today. Moses had little patience with God and the people as they journeyed through the wilderness. David had little patience with his situation and dealt with his sin against Uriah with more sin. The consequences of our decisions can be life altering, not just for ourselves, but for the world in which we live.

We know Christ is coming again, but we do not know when. How do we respond to the hope as we wait? The problem in Paul’s day is that the people were getting frantic because they were dying and Jesus had not yet returned. They were afraid and doubted the promise. They didn’t know what to do. Some were falling for false preaching. Others were oppressive with their own preaching, forcing others to believe in the hopes that they would create the necessary conditions for Jesus’ return. Yet others gave up. They stopped waiting and turned to the world for comfort and peace.

We look at the story of the talents and realize that we are called to be like the two servants who used their gifts for the glory of God. He has gone away but has left us each with sufficient gifts to make a difference in the world while we wait. It does us no good to sit around waiting for the Day of the LORD because there is so much to be accomplished. It does us no good to bury our gifts when there are so many people who still need to experience God’s kingdom in this world. So, instead of waiting and wondering when the Day of the LORD will happen, or even wonder what it will be like, we are called to get to work, doing God’s business today. Then we have no need to worry, or fear or doubt, because we’ll be doing exactly what God is expecting from us when Christ comes again. He’d find us actively living in faith and hope and love, ready to see what He has planned for us in eternity.

A light bulb glows brightly when it is new, but it slowly dims as time goes by. As it gets older, the light bulb eventually burns itself out until that day when the filament breaks and the light is gone forever. When we replace the bulb we are shocked by its brightness. We do not realize how dim the old one had become until is replaced with a new and brighter light. We do not know when a light bulb will burn out, but when it is replaced we realize that we had been seeing the signs all along, we just didn’t realize it.

Paul might have thought that Jesus would return during his lifetime, but his words are for us today. Despite two thousand years of waiting, we are called to stay awake. It is easy to become complacent, to settle into the world without concern for heavenly things. It is easy to let the light bulb slowly dim making it hard to see how our lives are falling apart around us. But we are called to be in the light, to shine the light of our Lord Jesus Christ. We are called to dwell in the promise of God, whose hope and salvation are true. We won’t be disappointed unless we allow ourselves to settle too deeply into the world and forget that the immediacy of Paul’s warning is as vital for us now as it was for them. Jesus will come; if we lose sight of His kingdom He will come like a thief in the night. But we are people of the light, called to be ready instead of “settling on our dregs.”

We often focus specifically on the spiritual gifts when talking about this passage, particularly since most translations call the coin called a “talent.” We think about our own talents and consider whether or not we are using them in a way that will grow the Kingdom of God. But this story isn’t necessary just about those spiritual gifts and talents; it is about our whole lives. After all, everything is God’s, isn’t it? We can probably list all the many ways we’ve served the Lord through our churches, the Sunday school classes we’ve taught or the songs we’ve sung in the choir. But do we take our faith out into the world in which we live, glorifying God with everything we do? Do we bury our gifts in the church and go about our daily lives without a thought about God’s Kingdom?

We are often just as afraid of that third servant; we are afraid to use what God has given us where it is risky. It is risky to share our faith with our neighbors. It is risky to serve people. It is risky to give everything we have for an outcome we can’t guarantee. It is much safer to keep our faith among friends, to share our gifts with those we know, to do the things that we are sure will make a difference in the world. It isn’t enough to dedicate a few hours in one place each week to the glory of God. God calls us to use everything He has given us (life, breath, love, time, hope, peace, faith, along with our tangible possessions and our spiritual gifts) every day for the sake of His Kingdom and people.

But we get complacent. We become self-satisfied and conceited. Though we don’t necessarily say it, we begin to act as if God will not do anything, good or bad. We let the world convince us that if God exists, He isn’t much more than a far away creator-king who is no longer involved with His creation. We hide our faith because we are accused of believing in myths and fairytales; it is simply easier to have a private faith without the risk of being rejected or persecuted by the world. Unfortunately, that’s no better than the third servant who buried his talent in the ground, returning to the master only what he had given.

It takes time to get complacent. God’s people did not start out the way they were in Zephaniah’s time. They had passion and living, active faith. But time and the world mellowed their passion. They didn’t teach their children to have the same passion or faith. They conformed to the world. They allowed their leaders, their kings, to be allied with enemies and to concede to foreign friends. They made their faith fit their circumstances. Don’t we do the same?

We have talked about how the lectionary at this time of year focuses on the second coming of Christ, but how many of us are truly waiting for the Day of the LORD? How many of us really think we’ll see Him return in our lifetimes? There are those who think so, and they are counting down the days, studying the texts and certain they have figured it out. There are even those who are working to put the pieces in place to guarantee His coming soon. But most of us, most Christians, go about our daily lives worried about how we’ll pay the mortgage and what we will have for dinner rather than whether or not we are ready for Jesus’ return. After all, it has been two thousand years; perhaps we misunderstood. Some have suggested that He has already come or that the second coming is spiritual. That kind of thinking makes us stop preparing and waiting.

And so, as we draw closer to the Day of the Lord, we are reminded that God cannot be kept in a box, but we do have our limits. Time passes for us. We get older. Things change. The world becomes different. Our magnificent buildings get old and crumble, the things we deem important become obsolete. Even our words pass away; they are forgotten or they become irrelevant. But God and His Word are from everlasting to everlasting. He does not dwell in the world we have created for Him, we dwell in Him. He does not exist within time as we have ordered it; He has ordered the world in which we dwell. We need not put God in a box to understand Him because He has given us all we need. Whether our time is short or long, our home large or small, we dwell in the midst of the One who is outside time and space even while we are limited by our flesh in this world. And while we find comfort in our understanding of God, let us never forget that He is more than we can imagine.

In this day, we should be watchful and alert, doing as God has called us to do, living as God has created and redeemed us to live. We are in Christ, saved by His blood and Spirit, called out of darkness into the light. In that light, we are to love God with our whole being, doing His work every day. God is faithful and His Word is true. The Day will come, whether it is today or in a thousand years and God has provided us with everything we need as we wait. We need not be afraid to risk what He has given us for He will provide the growth.

The psalmist writes, “For a thousand years in your sight are just like yesterday when it is past, like a watch in the night.” We live in a world with instant gratification. We send a text and have a response in seconds. We type a few words into an Internet search engine and we have a million resources to help our research. We order a burger and fries, and it is delivered to our car window in seconds. We buy a book from a bookseller and it is downloaded to our e-reader instantly. We do not have to wait for anything anymore, and so we have lost the ability to wait.

Not that people were ever very good at being patient. Sarah wouldn’t wait for God, so she sent Abraham into the arms of a maidservant to create a child. And the early Christians wanted Jesus to return in their day. We still have that same longing, and it manifests occasionally when some charismatic cult leader decides to proclaim that the time is now. I have seen the would-be prophet proclaiming that everything that has happened in 2020 are signs that Jesus is coming, as if no other generation has had to face difficult times. There will be people who believe those proclamations, they may even quit their jobs and take up their signs that say, “The End of the World is Near!” They will try to scare people into salvation rather than shine the light of Jesus. And when the end of the world doesn’t happen, they will be left without a job, home or food. They will be disappointed and perhaps even lose heart. They may even lose faith.

Even worse, though, is when people are complacent. In Thessalonica, the people were self-satisfied, believing everything was fine. When we are complacent, we also become apathetic since there is no need for hope beyond today and no need to reach beyond oneself. Yet, our passages for today speak of a day when everything will fall apart, when the Master will bring an end to our complacency. They call us to live as if Jesus were coming today, doing His work in the world.

Let us pray that we will, one day, hear Him say, “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a few things. I will set you over many things. Enter into the joy of your lord.” In that Day, we will be invited to share in His joy, to bask in His glory, to dwell in His Kingdom forever.