Matthew 25: 14-18; I Thessalonians 5: 4,5

Let your light shine

I have talked about ways people can let their light shine in their world and the world.   We have seen how there are people who do not hide the talent they were given.  Let us recap what we learned from the text.  In Matthew three people are given currency called talents.   One gets 2 and makes another 2, one gets 5 and makes another five and one gets one and buries it.   To us living in the more affluent part of the world, we can definitely relate to the person who made his or her money go along way, but for the poor the action of the one talent-person is that surprising.  In developing countries it’s easier to get more money when you have some and incredibly hard to get some more if you have almost nothing.  To hide the talent is not so dumb.  Your child’s school or the doctor in the hospital might demand it some time and they will want it right there and then.  Of course the parable isn’t really about money, it is how we prepare for the Kingdom of God.   Now most Bible stories can be understood and appreciated on different levels. Perhaps we are not ready to hear and appreciate on one level, but we are on another.  So I am proposing today we take the word “talent” literal in a different way, a talent we possess, something we can do for the world.  In I Thessalonians Paul speaks about Christians as “children of the light” who do not live in darkness. He is talking about the hope and liberation faith provides.  Again it has to do with the kingdom of God.  Remember that the people in Jesus’ and Paul’s time lived much more with a sense of the end of the world than we do.  We know that at one point human destruction will be inevitable due to temperature change or heavenly bodies crashing in or super volcanoes erupting. Eventually we’ll go the way of the dinosaurs. But not anytime soon.  We can understand Paul’s words on different levels too.  So I am proposing that the light we carry as children of God includes the light that each of us individually have to shine here on earth.  This is where our two texts come together. Our God given light and our God-given talent are perhaps close to being one and the same thing.  

Kim Addinizio, a poet with depression, wrote in the New York Times last week( November 14, 2014: “Why I don’t kill myself?”):  “I am never going to be free of anxiety. I will always observe that every silver lining has its cloud. In the song Gillian Welch wrote’ ,some girls are bright as morning and some girls are blessed with a dark turn of mind. ‘” Addinizio continues:”I like the word ‘blessed.’ I like to think that demons can sometimes be angels, that probing through the mire, we can recognize the glint of small things that sustain us.”  Friends, there is the light.  Addinizio can still continue with her talent to the world and perhaps others can shine a glint of light into her world of depression.

A Scandinavian scientist found a way to freeze and to move light (NPR, November 14, 2014.  Since light is the fastest thing known in the universe, this is a major accomplishment.  She did it by superheating sodium atoms and then making them cold again, then hitting them with light which then gets encoded in the atoms so that it remains there. Stumped, are you? Well, so am I.  But wouldn’t it be wonderful, friends, if we could take light and move it from one place to another? Isn’t that what faith is about: Moving light from God to the world?  The light of God’s love hits us and we sit frozen and something happens, the light becomes part of us.

In the movie the Year of Living Dangerously, an Australian journalist meets a photographer called Billy Kwan who guides him through the mystery of a South-East Asian country on the verge of a coup.  Billy’s philosophy is summed in a single statement:” Don’t think about the major issues. You do what you can about the misery in front of you. You add your light to the sum of all light?”  Friends, we must add our light, our talent, to the sum of all light and the sum of all talent.

Friends, I ask this question or similar ones regularly about our congregation here: “how can we shed more light on the world around us, how can we bring more light to bear, are we as congregation still burying some of our talents and still hiding some of our light?” Friends, let us not bury our talents our gifts.  Let us not hide our light.  Let us always be focused on bringing the light we have to bring to the world that is frozen in fear and depression and poverty and desperation.  This is what medical worker in Africa are doings. This is what helping professionals and teachers and church people are doing here. May God help us answer that question over and over again. Thanks be to God.