.Accounting for our Talents.

Summer of Sin: Sloth

"Accounting for our Talents"

First Congregational Church, UCC

Battle Creek, MI

Koinonia

July 15, 2012

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The year before I went to seminary, I was working at a non-profit called “My Friend’s Place,” a drop-in center for homeless youth and young adults in Hollywood, California. My job, as the Special Projects Intern, was to invest my time and energy into building relationships with the young people, developing creative programming to help them discover their skills, and run educational workshops on any given topic. Because I was working through a volunteer program, I only got to work there for a year. That being said, I showed up to work ready to go, excited for a new and different experience. But as it usually goes with new experiences, for me, I got there and froze up. I was terrified. I was working with a population that was new to me and doing work for which I was entirely unqualified. So I followed my supervisor’s commands… did what I was told… and went home everyday knowing that I never rocked the boat. I worked really hard not to have conversations that I was afraid of having and put no effort into doing something new or implementing a new workshop for the youth. Seven months. For SEVEN MONTHS I did this… I was, what we call, a sloth. Sure, I did my work everyday; running around, accomplishing tasks set before me by my boss, but what I was missing was me… I wasn’t using the gifts, talents, or skills that I had in the environment in which I worked. After all, these gifts were probably the reason that I was hired in the first place…. As we explore the sin of sloth today, listen to this similar theme in your life. Let us pray.

(pray)

Our scripture for today sounds to me like one of those word problems that I can never figure out… If one train is traveling at 65 mph and another train on the same track is traveling at 50 mph, when will they hit? You know? It can come across a little confusing, so let’s figure it out together, shall we? Here we have a man, presumably a guy who has some men working for him, whom the passage calls “servants.” How many servants does he have? Three. Ok Good. So apparently this guy, before he goes off on vacation gives each of the men money ahead of time. The amount of money he gives to each person in this story is an unfathomable amount for their day. I mean, we’re talking a supervisor at a minimum wage paying job giving you a $300,000 dollar advance, right? So he has three servants and gives each of them a sum of money according to their abilities. The first two guys invested their money and doubled the amount. What did the third guy do? Anyone remember? ………….. Yup, he was so afraid of his master that dug a hole and buried his money in it to protect it. When the head honcho came back from vacay, each of the men were eager to show to him what they did with their portion of money. He was so impressed with the two who invested their money that he gave them a promotion. Then, the guy who was a) given the least amount of money and b) buried it in a hole, told his boss what he did and he threw a fit… “That’s a terrible way to live!” he says, “It’s criminal to live cautiously like that! If you knew I was after the best, why did you do less than the least?” He then commands that the “play-it-safe” guy be “thrown into utter darkness.”

Whew. Ok. So that’s a lot. Let’s clear up some stuff regarding this parable. The first thing we need to make clear is that there are lots of ways to read this parable. We talked Thursday at Koinonia fellowship about the numerous interpretations of this passage. Depending on the interpretation, some people liked what it had to say, but most struggled with it. And for good reason. Parables are typically challenging, as it is unlikely to ever walk away from a parable with a clear view of how one should act. The second thing about this parable is that I am personally not a fan of the master/servant language. However, to keep consistency and remain true to the original context, I will use it anyway. Thirdly, let us keep in mind that because this is a parable, this story is meant to exemplify a deeper meaning, just like an allegory or a fable. That means that this passage really isn’t about the money. It’s about a different kind of investment… But we’ll get to that later.

So to come back to our sin of the day, we need to understand what sloth is and what it isn’t. We must not think that sloth means laziness. You see, because sin is part of religious vernacular, sloth has some deeper, more spiritual quality to it. Laziness is not that quality. The other thing we must not do is confuse sloth with Sabbath. Sabbath is also a spiritual activity but one that seeks to provide rest and rejuvenation. If we are resting properly, we are most likely not sinning. So, sloth is neither laziness nor Sabbath. A definition I ran across the other day describes sloth as spiritual or emotional apathy. Another way we might describe this is fearful inactivity. Fearful inactivity. Now we have to be careful because inactivity can either mean the lack of action entirely or it can turn into doing a lot of things in order to avoid that one thing. For example, doing every chore but the dishes because you just don’t want to do the dishes. It’s a trivial example, but it gets the point across. Ok so fearful inactivity. But why fearful? Where does this fear come in?

Well, I didn’t grow up learning about the “Seven Deadly Sins” (thank you, mom and dad) and really all I gathered about them is that they were established in early Christian life to exemplify those sins that encapsulate all other. They’re sort of like the umbrella sins. Now I don’t think they’re called the “deadly” sins because we will be struck dead by God should we engage one of them, but rather we will face a spiritual death instead. You see, the way I understand sin is this: it is anything that we do that separates us from God. When we participate in sin, whether personally or corporately, we take a step farther away from God. We move father away from living a life full of goodness and truth.

So, in our scripture for today, the Master went away without giving any instruction to the three servants. He didn’t tell them to invest their money, he simply gave it to them then peaced out. He went on vacation. In this particular interpretation of the scripture, our third servant, the one who buried his talents in the sand, ends up being an example of us. You see, he was legitimately afraid of his boss. He was afraid his boss would be disappointed in him or that he wouldn’t live up to such high standards. Another way we may understand this better is that perhaps that he was also afraid of himself… afraid of using his own resources.

 Either way we see it, he. was. afraid.

Here is where our sloth-like tendencies creep in. If slothfulness is fearful inactivity, then that’s precisely what servant #3 was participating in. This parable is about a different kind of investment. It’s about gifts. Talents. Skills. It’s about using what we have to further the reign of God on earth. We are each brought into the world with gifts bestowed upon us by God. These gifts span human capability. They are everything from managerial skills to parenting to data analysis to assembly line production, to conflict management to compassion and encouragement, patience and perseverance. The list could go on forever. We embody a diverse array of gifts, both personally and communally. While they span human capability, however, they cannot be laid down on a value scale. That’s what happened in our scripture, did you catch it? Each of the servants was given a sum of money according to their capabilities. You see, it is people in power that determine whose gifts are more valuable than others. We are embedded in a society dedicated to diminishing certain kinds of skills, but who is to say that compassion has less value than managerial aptitude.

Now there may be some of you feeling as though you can’t pinpoint any of your gifts. OR perhaps you know what they are but just have been too afraid call them out or to use them. But why is that? Well, as some of you know, I took a poll on Facebook this last week asking this same question. (And thank you to those of you who participated!) Why are you afraid to use the gifts that you have? There were varying responses but I found that most of the responses had to do with either personally feeling incapable or worrying about other people’s responses or reactions. Each of the answers I received on Facebook was fear-based. This fear, again, prevents us from living in truth…. Living the truth of who we are and what we bring to the table. Whether it’s our internal critic, potential ridicule, or a feeling of ineptitude, each time we choose not to use our gifts, we get further away from God. When we are fearfully inactive, we are not using our God-given talents. Fear paralyzes us and prevents us from using our gifts.

Our guy who buried his money in the sand was afraid of disappointing his boss, of not living up to his expectations… does this sound familiar? How often have we been afraid to use our skills simply because we were afraid of what someone would say or because we didn’t think we would be good enough?

For those of us who are having a hard time identifying gifts or feel a lack of support for the ones we do know we have, this might not seem like the best news you’ve heard all week.

BUT here is the good news! It is my understanding that all of this that we have explored today is about accountability. When we are in the trenches… in the deep depths of feeling useless… sometimes all it takes is someone to step in and encourage us. Someone to push us beyond what we thought we knew. Beyond what we thought could do.

In one of my monthly meetings in the spring with my supervisor, she asked me what kind of events I had planned for the youth. She asked what it was that might help advertise programs better. She pushed me to think more critically about the program… where it was and where it was going. For the first time I finally realized that I had the gifts to move the program in whichever direction seemed fitting. I had the ability to speak up and say what I thought should be happening in the agency. It took me seven months and a monthly meeting to realize my potential. I had the potential all along, I was just too afraid of using it. I spent seven months in the utter darkness because I was too afraid to speak up. But once I did… once I pushed for different means of communication and came up with programming all of my own, I recognized what my job was supposed to feel like. Not one relegated to the tasks given to me but one capable of opening doors and educating young people in ways they had never experienced. I spent the last five months of my internship doing everything I could possibly do to makeup for lost time. I had the hard conversations that had previously left me feeling incapable. I planned an event and took the criticism as it came. I tried and I failed, tweaked it and tried again.

You see, my supervisor, understood accountability. As a person of power in my organization, she didn’t believe in hierarchical value systems. Instead she believed that whatever I had to offer was good. She valued my compassion and my persistence, my organizational and critical thinking skills. One was never more important than the other but only added to the work I did with the young people. Once I let myself do what I knew I was supposed to be doing all along I grew in ways I could have never imagined. I took risks and stepped out on a limb over and over as a way of benefitting the organization. You see, my supervisor kept me accountable and moved me out of sloth, pushed me beyond what I knew, and simultaneously propelled me closer to God.

So let us not live in fear of the skills we bring or fear of what others might say. Let us not place value in some gifts more than others. Instead, let us be creative and let us be accountable to each other. Let us push each other beyond our limits and invest ourselves in calling out each others gifts and talents and skills for they are God- given, God-ordained. They are meant to be used in this life to better the lives of those around us and to give us a life full of goodness and truth.

Amen.