In the news this week, Barack Obama gave all his campaign workers a months pay, plus he let them keep the laptops and Blackberries that were assigned to them during the campaign.  It seems like a pretty nice perk as both of those electronic items can be high dollar.  I guess those items are essential on the modern campaign trail as communication is the key to success.  I am sure they were constantly sending emails so everyone would be up on the latest strategy and news.

            But I wonder if all those working hard on the campaign trail ever sent around goofy emails to each other like every other computer owner gets?  If the campaign workers get emails like most of us get, he might not have been so free to casually give them away as they might be fodder for slamming his presidency in some way.  While computers are essential in our modern world and maybe even in the election of the American President, you can kill a lot of time on a computer. They are time wasters. 

            I guess in the beginning of the information age playing Solitaire was the premiere computer time killer. Do you remember when everyone was playing solitaire on the computer?    Before computers solitaire was not so popular, but with the advent of computers it became the most popular game ever and a big time waster. They even sold software to help you hide the fact that you were playing.  There was a program that you could load and hit only one key that would take those cards off screen and paste a bogus spreadsheet on the monitor so you could fool the boss in a spit second. It would be my luck that my boss would wonder what the heck I was doing working with anything that remotely resembled a spreadsheet. Or maybe he would want to look at it as almost all executives get more excited about a spreadsheet than they do at a goat roping at the rodeo.  Solitaire was a lazy game, you didn’t have to shuffle or deal the cards, and you just had to trust the computer to do it and not cheat. 

            But the solitaire craze eventually gave way to a new computer time killer: internet surfing. Since everybody and their brother got internet access at work, surfing became the thing.  But more and more companies cracked down on unrestricted internet access and straightforwardly limited the websites one could visit to a bare minimum.  However, the professional time waster just learned to bring their own laptop which often through Wifi or cellular cards allowed them to bypass the system so they can read the CBF website at work.  At my shop, they even block news sites, but you can get the weather just in time to see what all those sirens are about.

            And then there are all those people who send all kinds of emails.  Some are funny, some are warnings that something bad can happen to you, and most of them are hoaxes or urban legends meant to create mass hysteria.  I personally have rebuffed several times the one that circulates about Mars being the brightest it has ever been and soon it will be a bright as the full moon.  There are those suggesting that Bill Gates is giving away free computers to anyone who responds to the email just so he can know how well email works at marketing. And at my workplace someone occasionally sends around an email to the effect that the government or someone is going to make it a crime to pray in public or something in that vein, and they hit the “Send to All” button which sends it to about 7,000 people where I work.  It is of course a hoax, and I have protested the use of our work email for religious extremism with our Chief Information Officer, and he sends out warnings, but it is difficult to control.

            The other thing about email is that once you sign up to be on someone’s list serve it can be impossible to stop it.  I get so much junk in my inbox everyday.  And many things that I have unsubscribed to don’t really unsubscribe.  But there is one new mailing that I get daily that I actually look forward to, and it is from a website/blog called “The Happiness Project.” 

            The Happiness Project was started by Gretchen Rubin, a Yale trained attorney who clerked for Sandra Day O’Conner in the Supreme Court.  But she gave it all up to write and is working on “the Happiness Project,” and as she puts it “grapples with the challenge to be happier.”  The blog which will be a book next year contains gems such as “Ten tips for being happier,” “What do you find fun?” “Counterintuitive tips for being happy,” and my favorite, “Seven tips to know if you’re boring someone.”

            Listen, if it takes you seven tips to figure it out, forget it oh clueless one you are as boring as watching paint dry.  You only need one tip: if you go tooling down the road and people you know cross to the other side you need a Dale Carnegie course.  I usually know if I am boring you because you might fall sleep, look disinterested, or play solitaire on your cell phone.  I have a couple of friends who tell me that during their church services they read my sermons on their Blackberries, so if you have a Blackberry here today I will trust that you are very interested and just following along with my written words so you can soak up every morsel of truth.   But I guess if I am really having an off day, you might take that Blackberry and just walk out the back door and act like you got paged or called.  So if you find it boring here, take a quantum of solace: at least I am short winded.

            Gretchen’s email I received this week was interesting to me, simply “10 tips for being happier,” and here they are: 1) Don’t start with profundities (lawyer talk for “keep it simple stupid”), 2) Don’t let the sun go down on anger (so that is my problem on rainy days) , 3) fake it till you feel it (come on now, we are talking happiness here!) 4) realize that anything worth doing is worth doing badly (guess she learned that at Yale), 5) don’t treat the blues with a treat, 6) buy some happiness (huh?), 7) don’t insist on the best (hopefully that is not why you are here this morning), 8) exercise to boost energy (OK, who really wants to hear about how you should exercise, where were those tips on boring people again?), 9) stop nagging (not the same as stop preaching), and 10) take action.

            Well, in the interest of not boring you as I am self-conscious of that possibility now thanks to Gretchen,  I will simply save the commentary on all of these, but I will say the one that made the most sense to me is number 10: “take action.”  How many of our problems could we solve, how many of our dissatisfiers could we confront, how possible would positive change be in our lives if we could just take action, sometimes any action.

            I think that taking action is simple genius, it is the old let’s do something about it, not just complain about it, or be victim to it.  Yet it can be amazingly hard to do for whatever reason.  It is easier to not take action, it is easier to let the ebb and flow of our lives roll on by until things change.  It is the old difference in country & folk music.  It has been said that country music wallows in how bad things are and we take comfort in the “misery loves company” thing, and folk music talks about how bad things are and want us to rally to instigate change, even radical change.  Take action.  Hard to do, but it may be the single most important happiness factor in our lives.

            In our lectionary passage this morning we have another difficult parable of the Kingdom, referred to as the parable of the talents, or of the Ten Talents.  Luke also has this parable in his gospel with some minor differences.  I read and studied this parable hard this week, and I am convinced that it is in its essence about faith and about fear.  There were three people mentioned, one given five talents, one two talents, and finally one person was given one talent.  Now a talent was a heck of a lot of money, some say as much as a three years wages.  This was a parable involving a master and his slaves.  The master would be away for a while, so he left a considerable amount of his assets to these trusted servants to manage.  And you know the story from here:  the one with the five talents made five more; the one with the two made two more.  The master was very pleased with their efforts and rewarded them accordingly.  The rub comes in with the final servant.  He was entrusted with one talent, and he went out and buried it in the backyard.  When the master heard his story, he said, what were you thinking?  The servant replied, I knew you were demanding and tough, and I was afraid I would lose it and earn your displeasure.  So I kept it safe for you, here it is, just as you left it with me.   To our surprise, the master called the slave names, like lazy and stupid and evil and cast him out to outer darkness where there was weeping and gnashing of teeth. 

            Well.  I have wondered all week exactly what the man did that was all that bad.  He was punished severely for not making his master a buck.  You would have to think to his credit he didn’t squander or waste the money either.  In understanding this parable we have to remember that its point is to shock the hearer, as Matthew’s Jesus is always upsetting the applecart.  And I am sorry, this parable is not about church growth, it is not in there, no way. Nor is the Master “God,” that would be to allegorize a parable and that is a hermeneutical disaster fraught with danger. 

            It seems to me that whatever else the message is in this parable at least this is true: This parable is about faith and fear.  Were not the first two servants afraid of their master as well?  I think they probably were.  The difference was they chose to take action, to risk faith, and the third man was paralyzed by fear, taking no action.  It was his fear that led him to inaction, and his fear led him to conserve and hold on, and in turn led him to be defeated.   This man was his own worse enemy.  It is as simple as that, and as profound as that.  He was afraid to the point that he hurt himself big-time. He buried himself and his future and lost the very thing which he was trying to preserve– his life.  His own fears sabotaged him.

            There is nothing more hurtful to ourselves than when we are subservient to our fears.  Fear keeps us from faith when faith is rightly seen as a verb and not a noun.  And if your fears consume you and paralyze you, then you have lost your ability to truly live. 

            Lance Armstrong in his book  Every Second Counts, talks about action in the midst of one’s fears.  Armstrong is arguably the world’s greatest athlete.  The book was written in the aftermath of his serious battle with cancer and the following comeback to a Tour de France victory.  Resplendently, he since has had five more such victories.  He was asked at what point did he make the switch from a fear of dying to deciding to really live.  “At what point do you let go of not dying,” he said.  As a result of his serious illness Armstrong constantly found himself about the business of proving to himself that he was alive, and thus the motivation for wining the Tour de France.  Armstrong tells the story of a piece of land that he bought in Texas, and on this 240 acre parcel is a deep hole full of water at the bottom of a high cliff called “Dead Man’s Hole.”  He rode his bike there for several days with his friends before announcing that he was going to jump in.  They all thought he was nuts.  It might kill him.  It might injure his very valuable athletic body beyond repair.  But he was compelled to jump as he states in the following account:

All I know is something makes me want to jump.  So this is about life.  Life after cancer. Life after kids.  Life after victories.  Life after personal loses. It’s about risk, it’s about agenda, and it’s about balance . . .  because the way you live your life, the perspective you select, is a choice that you make every single day when you wake up.  It’s yours to decide.

After the jump he wrote:

I was stupidly happy, as if I had new skin.  The scare of Dead Man’s Hole made me feel fresh.  It was a freshness put there by fear—cleansing, clarifying, sharpening fear. Fear that opened the senses, and brought everything into clearer view.  A little fear is good for you. That is, if you can swim.^[1]

It is obvious to me that Lance Armstrong was afraid of dying, and he needed to face his fears head on.  He needed to prove that he still felt, that he was alive.  Otherwise, he would as long as he lived be afraid of death.  The rest of the story is that he didn’t beat himself.

            I believe that the choice before us today boils down to either being a reluctant servant or a risky servant.  Have you ever felt like giving up? Have you ever wondered, even in what you try to do for God, whether it is doing any good?  Have you ever wanted to bury your head in the sand or your talent in the ground?  To submit to our fears in this way is to lose our very lives and to hurt ourselves in the ultimate self-defeating way.  In trying to hang onto what we’ve got, we end up losing.

            It seems to me that a real problem with Christianity today is that we play it safe, and our fears keep us from action.  Faith for us is defined by religion, and our religion is respite for us, our churches are safe havens, they are cities (in some cases fortresses) of refuge.  Church has become a place that we go to forget our worries, relieve our stresses, find new ways to cope, and simply to escape for a couple of hours on Sunday morning all the unhappiness that sabotages our lives.   It is a place that we look for answers, and many times in a way as to provide unrealistic solutions to our dilemmas.

            “Just trust in the Lord,” “God knows what is best,” “God is in control and on his throne,” and all the other “God has your back” type euphemisms are sometimes escape mechanisms meant to comfort us in the face of those things that we are powerless over.   And while we all need the hope that comes from something or someone bigger than us working on our behalf, it is easy to get lulled into inaction and to acquiesce to a place where our faith become nothing more than an orientation into a place called denial.  And in that place, we become spiritual monastics where our faith disconnects from the very pain it needs to impact.

            You see, churches everywhere this morning are full of Christians who are burying their talent in the ground, because it is the comfortable, easy, and safe thing to do.  And we seek out places that affirms us in our comfort zone, that offers us relief from taking action.

            But I am convinced that we are to be about something else this morning, that we are to be about action, and not just for happiness’ sake.  Our faith has to be about more than “come and hear” and get your booster shot for the week.  And if you are wondering why younger people are not attracted to the church like they used to be, that is it: they have many more choices for escape and more possibilities to get their feel good boost for the week.  In fact, many of them (and even an old guy like me too) find the reverse effect is true, that modern churches are often restrictive and have misplaced priorities to the extent that they really don’t even offer a very good escape anymore, they simply offer to exchange whatever shackles you are wearing for a different set.

            It is true that we have great worship at Providence in a very special chapel.  The messages are different and sometimes offbeat (OK, I am not looking for amens here), and our smallness is a sacred trust.  But we too have too be about something, we have to take those five talents and continually make five more, and we do so by being risky servants and by not sitting on our keisters– we have to be about the business of taking action.  We have been good here at Providence supporting many causes with our time and money: Safe Places, The Hope for the Future Daycare, The Rice Depot, Starlight Ministries, the CBF and the Alliance of Baptists.  We have tutored students in the past at a low-income daycare, we have provided Christmas for the needy, we have had a very active RAIN team where we ongoing and practical care for two men in need. 

            I would suggest to you today that we need to continue to seek out ways to make a big difference, to be a people even though small in number that are big in faith and big in action beginning right here on 32^nd street.  We have several important service opportunities coming up with CBF Arkansas, and I challenge you for you faith’s sake to give of your time to these worthy ministries, they will make a difference in our community, and our church, and yes, even in your own life.  Be a risky servant, don’t just come here Sunday after Sunday and bury your stuff under the ground.  Because when we take action, we risk faith.   And maybe Helen Keller said it best when she said that life is either a great adventure or a great nothing.  And to be a great adventure, we have to risk faith.

            So again are you going to be a risky servant or a reluctant servant?  You see there is really only one choice.  Those who would risk nothing are in fact risking everything, and that is the point of this parable.  Life by definition is risky.  We face formidable odds.  The one thing that has really impressed me in the 27 years I have been at the hospital is that there is no end to the number of ways that a person can get themselves dead.  But conversely there is only one way to truly live, and that is to let our fears give way to faith.  To take a leap in the dark and land in the light. 

            Because Fear paralyzes, faith empowers.    Fear discourages, faith encourages.  Fear sickens, faith heals.  Fear makes us useless, faith makes us serviceable.  Fear feels hopelessness, faith is full of hope.  

            Sure this thing called faith is risky.  To laugh is to risk appearing the fool. To weep is to risk appearing sentimental. To reach out for another is to risk involvement. To expose feelings is to risk exposing your true self. To place your ideas, your dreams, before a crowd is to risk their loss. To love is to risk not being loved in return. To live is to risk dying. To hope is to risk despair. To try is to risk failure. But risks must be taken, because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing. The person, who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, and is nothing.

            You see, what the disciples would learn was that Jesus never played it safe.  He risk it all, he laid love on the line every single day.  He who was God gave it all up and took on the form of a servant; yes a servant even to death on the cross.   

            So instead of conserving and holding on and living our lives in fear (often with a big assist from religion), we have to at least in the faith sense throw caution to the wind and jump to see if we are really alive.  Because any hurt that we incur in such a jump will pale in comparison to the hurt that we hurt ourselves with by living a fear plagued life.   Because when we risk faith we are liberated.  We “let go, and let God” as the old cliché says.  We let go of that which binds us, we let go of that which paralyzes us, we let go of that which hurts us, we let go of that which limits us, we let go of our failures, and our mistakes, and even our sins.  Because the truth is God has already let go of them on our behalf.  And this man Jesus would soon take the ultimate risk, and set us free.  And if Jesus sets us free, we are free indeed.  And there is no happiness that compares with the happiness that this freedom brings..  The cross saw to that.  And that is the Gospel, the Good News of Jesus Christ.  Thanks be to God!  Amen