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The Danger of Playing It Safe
A sermon by Dr.
Jim Somerville
Pastor, Richmond’s First Baptist Church
Richmond, Virginia
November 16, 2008
Matthew 25:14-30
Last week I
attended the annual meeting of the Baptist General Association of Virginia in
Roanoke where I got a chance to hear Tony Campolo, one of my favorites. Tony is
a professor of sociology who also happens to be one of the most popular public
speakers of our time. One of the reasons he is so popular is that he is a
Christian who isn’t afraid to speak his mind. One of the other reasons he is so
popular is that he doesn’t seem to be afraid of anything. For example, I once
heard him tell a story about his childhood in West Philadelphia. He said, "When
I was a boy I loved to join my friends in playing a street game we called 'stick
ball.' In this game we used a broomstick as a bat with which we did our best to
hit half a tennis ball. The game could be played by anywhere from two to a
thousand players. Not surprisingly, whenever we played stick ball, we made a
lot of noise and we frequently blocked traffic. That meant that the police
would usually come and chase us away. Worst of all, the cops always took our
sticks.
"One day, we
wanted to play stick ball, but much to our dismay, we had no sticks. Every
broom within ten blocks of where I lived had been "raptured" by stick ball
players, and then the cops had confiscated every one of them. These sticks were
neatly stored in the back room of the police station, located at 55th and Pine
Streets. We all knew where they were, but we didn't know what to do about it.
"I remember
sitting on a curb with some of my buddies bemoaning our sad plight and saying
something I would have been better off not saying. I said, 'Somebody ought to
get into the back room of that police station where the cops store all those
sticks they take from us and steal some of them back.'
"My best
friend, ‘Mush,' said, 'I dare you!'
"When Mush
said that, I reacted like a Pavlovian dog. Like a lot of boys, I had been
conditioned to react to dares in ways that are hard to describe. My back would
tighten. My blood would run hot. My heart would beat faster. All of this
happened in response to the simple words, 'I dare you.'
"'All right,'
I snapped. 'You guys go into the police station before me, talk to those cops,
and keep them occupied. Pretend that you have to do a term paper for school
about police work. While you've got their attention, I'll get into that back
room and I'll come out with five sticks--or I won't come out at all!'
"I want you to
know," he says, "that the name Tony Campolo is still legend in West
Philadelphia. The kids on the street still talk about the guy who robbed the
police station at 55th and Pine.”[1]
Risk-taking is
exciting, Campolo says. It makes you feel heroic, it makes you feel alive. And
risk-taking, apparently, is precious in the sight of the Lord.
Look again at
the story Jesus tells here in Matthew 25. A man, going on a journey, called in
his servants and divided up his wealth with them, giving five talents to one,
two talents to another, and one talent to a third. And then he went away. And
that's when the risky business began. Do you know that a talent was worth more
than fifteen years' wages of a laborer in Jesus' time? Do you realize that in
our time, even by a very conservative estimate, a talent would be worth more
than two hundred thousand dollars? That's a lot of money! And it becomes a lot
more when you multiply by five. What you need to understand is that this
five-talent man took the equivalent of a million dollars from his master,
drove him to the airport, and on the way home invested every penny of it in the
stock market. When the broker asked him if he was sure he wanted to do that, to
invest all of it, the man shrugged his shoulders and said, “Why not? It’s not
my money.” And although the two-talent man didn't get as much, he was just as
gutsy, and did the same thing with his. Why not? It wasn’t his money.
I don't know
about you, but these two are hard for me to identify with. It's much easier for
me to understand the actions of the one-talent man. After the master had gone
he went back to his room and carefully arranged the money in neat little stacks
on his bed. Twenty stacks of ten thousand dollars each, two hundred thousand
dollars, and as he looked at it he smiled and rubbed his hands together . . .
and suddenly became almost stiff with fear.
It wasn’t his
money.
What if
someone should rush in right now, while it was lying on his bed, and steal it?
What if the other two servants had gone out to find someone who would take it
away from him and split it with them? What if even one bill was missing when
the master came back, and who even knew when that would be? It could be
tomorrow or next year. It could be ten years from now, but one thing was
certain: when he came he would want his money. All of it.
"The thing to
do," the servant thought, "is to play it safe. To put this money where I know
I'll be able to lay my hands on it and nobody else will find it." And thinking
that he was being both clever and wise he found a clean gallon jar, filled it
with the money, screwed the lid on tight, and that night, when no one was
looking, he buried it behind the tool shed.
This is a
basic human tendency: to hoard, to guard, to preserve, to protect. You can see
this tendency at work in most of us, most of the time. We save our money, we
lock our doors, we mind our own business, we play it safe. And while we might
secretly admire the courage of those who take more chances than we do, we also
believe that in the end a conservative policy will pay off, that we, and not
they, will have the last laugh.
If that's what
you believe then you might not want to hear the rest of this story, because when
the master finally comes back he calls his servants in for a day of reckoning,
beginning with the five-talent man. "How'd you do?" he asks, excitedly, and the
servant can hardly contain himself. "You gave me five talents," he says, "and
look! I made five talents more!" "Congratulations!" shouts the master.
"That's wonderful! Listen, they're throwing a welcome back party for me inside,
why don't you take your ten talents and go on in? You’ve earned it." And then
he turns to the second man: "How about you?" "Well," he says, with nothing to
be ashamed of, "you gave me two talents…here's two talents more!" "That's
terrific!" says the master. "Oh, I'm so proud of you. Why don’t you take your
four talents and go on in. You’ve earned it." And then the third man steps
forward, holding a dirty glass jar stuffed with bills. You know what he says.
"Master, I
knew you were a hard man, reaping where you did not sow and gathering where you
did not scatter. I was afraid of what might happen if I lost even one cent of
your money, so I packed it in this jar and buried it behind the tool shed. Here
it is. Every penny. You can count it if you want."
And in the
Kingdom, at least, it becomes quite clear that a conservative policy is not the
way to go. The master roars at the servant, "You wicked and lazy slave! If you
knew what a hard man I am why didn't you at least put my money in a passbook
savings account so I could earn a lousy two or three percent on it? You didn't
even do that! Here," he says, snatching the jar from the man and handing it to
another servant, "give this to the one with the ten talents. He's shown me that
he knows what to do with what he's given. But as for this worthless bum, throw
him out in the street." And so the story ends, with the no-talent man standing
on the master's front porch as the door is slammed forever in his face. Instead
of having the last laugh, he is left weeping and gnashing his teeth.
It's not an
easy parable to hear, but you who have ears, listen! This is not a story about
the joys of risk-taking, but about the joys of doing something with what
God has given you, about remembering that it’s not yours anyway. Too often
churches and the members who make them up play it safe even as God is
calling them to bigger and better things. And like the man in the story they do
it not because they don't care what the master wants; they do it because they
are afraid. How many times have you been moved by a worship service or a
sermon to come down the aisle and make a fresh or first-time commitment to
Christ but didn't because people would stare at you? How many times have you
heard missionaries speak, and seen their slides, and thought how wonderful it
was for them to be doing what they are doing but not you because you couldn't
live in place like that? How many times have you been encouraged to knock on
somebody's door and invite them to church, but you haven't, because they might
think you're a religious fanatic? It's not that we don't want to do these
things, but we're afraid. "What if people stare?" "What if I can't live
like that?" "What if somebody slams the door in my face?"
In a survey of
people who were ninety-five or older, one question was asked: "If you could
live your life over again, what would you do differently?" Again and again
these people answered, "I would risk more." Why? Because all their lives they
had played it safe. All their lives they had stopped just short of doing what
they really wanted to do. And now, in a nursing home, in the last years of
their lives, they wonder—"What if? What if I had gone for broke instead of
playing it safe? What if I had married my high school sweetheart? Taken that
job in Boston? Traveled in Spain? How would my life have been different if I
hadn't been so hobbled by fear?" And as they ponder that question some of them
weep and gnash their teeth, reaping what Fred Craddock calls “the inevitable
fruit of an unlived life.”
This morning I
want to challenge you to do something with what you've been given, to risk
something great for God. I don’t even know what it would be. It may mean
walking down a church aisle, or knocking on a neighbor's door, or volunteering
for the mission field, or going out into the neighborhood, or spending an hour a
day in prayer, or teaching a Sunday School class, or taking up your cross and
following Jesus. If it doesn't terrify you to even think about it, it's
probably not a big enough risk—think harder. But if it does terrify you, if it
makes your heart pound and your mouth dry, if it makes you suddenly weak in the
knees so that you can hardly stand for the final hymn, then do it. I dare you.
Remember that the only thing more fearful than risking everything you've got for
God is not risking anything for God. It is those people, in the end, who will
stand in the outer darkness.
Which brings
me to a strange conclusion. In the little bit of reading I have done on
near-death experiences I have learned that those who spend the longest time in a
state of clinical death report, like others, "traveling" through a tunnel toward
a distant light, emerging in a scene of great natural beauty, seeing friends and
loved ones who have died before them, but these also report standing eventually
in the presence of a shimmering pillar of light. They say that they feel no
fear—only a great sense of peace and joy—but in that shining presence they are
asked one terrifying question: "What have you done with the life I have given
you?"
What about
you? How would you answer? Could you say, with the five-talent man, with the
two-talent man, "I used what you gave me"? Or would you have to say along with
the one-talent man,
"I played it
safe"?
—Jim Somerville,
© 2008
[1]Tony
Campolo, Who Switched the Price Tags? (Dallas: Word Publishing,
1986), pp. 45-47.
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