A Sermon Based Upon Matthew 25: 1-13
Dr. Charles J. Tomlin
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership
Last Epiphany/Transfiguration, March 6, 2011
I want to start with a familiar story most all of you know:
“One day as the Little Red Hen was scratching in a field, she found a grain of wheat.
"This wheat should be planted," she said. "Who will plant this grain of wheat?"
"Not I," said the Duck. "Not I," said the Cat. "Not I," said the Dog.
"Then I will," said the Little Red Hen. And she did.
Soon the wheat grew to be tall and yellow.
"The wheat is ripe," said the Little Red Hen. "Who will cut the wheat?"
"Not I," said the duck. "Not I," said the cat. "Not I," said the dog.
"Then I will," said the little red hen. And she did.
When the wheat was cut, the Little Red Hen said, "Who will thresh the wheat?"
"Not I," said the Duck. "Not I," said the Cat. "Not I," said the Dog.
"Then I will," said the Little Red Hen. And she did.
When the wheat was threshed, the Little Red Hen said, "Who will take this wheat to the mill?" "Not I," said the Duck. "Not I," said the Cat. "Not I," said the Dog. "Then I will," said the Little Red Hen. And she did.
She took the wheat to the mill and had it ground into flour. Then she said, "Who will make this flour into bread?"
"Not I," said the Duck. "Not I," said the Cat. "Not I," said the Dog.
"Then I will," said the Little Red Hen. And she did.
She made and baked the bread. Then she said, "Who will eat this bread?"
"Oh! I will," said the Duck. "And I will," said the Cat."And I will," said the Dog.
"No, No!" said the Little Red Hen. "I will do that." And she did.
AVERSION TO THE DIVINE GOOD
This is a simple story from the childhood of most of us. It teaches us one of the most basic lessons of responsibility and life, which goes all the back to the apostle Paul in the Bible: “If anyone is would not work, neither should he eat.” (2 Thess. 3.10). It’s a lesson familiar to most of us who grew up in the country and on the farm and stands as a valuable lesson against idleness and promotes responsible work ethic.
It’s the same kind of lesson we find in today’s Bible text from Matthew’s gospel and the parable of Jesus concerning the 10 Bridesmaids; 5 who were wise and 5 who were foolish. Most of you who grew up going to Sunday School are familiar with this story and it’s lesson, but just in case, let’s consider it once more.
"Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this. Ten bridesmaids took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom.
2 Five of them were foolish, and five were wise.
3 When the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them;
4 but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps.
5 As the bridegroom was delayed, all of them became drowsy and slept.
6 But at midnight there was a shout, 'Look! Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.'
7 Then all those bridesmaids got up and trimmed their lamps.
8 The foolish said to the wise, 'Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.'
9 But the wise replied, 'No! there will not be enough for you and for us; you had better go to the dealers and buy some for yourselves.'
10 And while they went to buy it, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went with him into the wedding banquet; and the door was shut.
11 Later the other bridesmaids came also, saying, 'Lord, lord, open to us.'
12 But he replied, 'Truly I tell you, I do not know you.'
13 Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.
(Mat 25:1-13 NRS)
The teaching moral of both of this story which is a parable from Jesus is basically the same as the children’s story of the Little Red Hen: If you are lazy, and do nothing, you’ll miss out. Interestingly, the same kind of lesson is taught in the next two stories in Matthew 25, the story about the talents, and the story about the sheep and goats. In the story of the talents, it’s the servant who does nothing with his talent that gets a harsh scolding by the master. He’s called “a wicked and lazy servant” and must give up the talent he did nothing with to the others who made an effort with theirs. Because this servant was lazy, the master calls him ‘worthless’ throws him into the “outer darkness”, where there is “weeping and gnashing (gritting) of teeth (25.30). In the story about the sheep and goats, who appear before the final judgment of God, it is the sheep on the right who fed the hungry, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked, and visited the imprisoned who inherit the kingdom. But the goats who did nothing---who did not feed the hungry, did not welcome the stranger, did not clothe the naked, nor did they visit those imprisoned; these lazy ones are those who are not only refused entrance into kingdom eternal life but are told to depart from the King’s presence and are thrown into the eternal fires of judgment.
The teaching contained in each of these stories has a common thread. In each story, it is the ones who did something, who worked, who made preparations, who are rewarded. But the ones who procrastinated, who were lazy and did nothing; they suffered great loss. They failed to obtain eternal life because they did not make the effort necessary to receive God’s blessing.
If it’s not already obvious, the deadly sin we are talking about today is called the sin called sloth. Sloth is an old English word out of the middle ages. The word is seldom used in popular culture today, except for referring to that very slow moving, long sleeping, low-energy, leaf eating mammal found in the rainforests of Central and South America. Users of English today prefer to use the word “lazy” or “lazybones” rather than “sloth” or “slothful”. But the meaning is the same and in the Bible it is treated as a sin against wisdom all the way back to the writing of the Proverbs, where it says:
6 Go to the ant, you lazybones; consider its ways, and be wise.
7 Without having any chief or officer or ruler,
8 it prepares its food in summer, and gathers its sustenance in harvest.
9 How long will you lie there, O lazybones? When will you rise from your sleep?
10 A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest,
11 and poverty will come upon you like a robber, and want, like an armed warrior. (Pro 6:6-11 NRS)
I think most of us are smart enough to realize how “unwise” it is to be slothful or lazy. We’ve all heard those well worn warnings from our elders like “An idle mind is the devil’s workshop”. If we have done anything with our lives by now, we know the value of hard work and the need to make some effort to provide for our families or accomplish dreams and goals. But the big question comes when we move from calling laziness a sin that is unwise and foolish to calling it one of the 7 most deadly sins----especially making it the kind of capital or “deadliest of sins” that puts us at risk, as Jesus parables suggest, at forfeiting or losing eternal life. How does laziness get to be one the most deadly sins of all?
To counter this line of reasoning, most of us love to quote that great text from the apostle Paul in Ephesians which says, “8 For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: 9 Not of works, lest any man should boast. (Eph 2:8-9 KJV). Since salvation is something we haven’t earn for ourselves, we think, how can it be something we can lose; as did the 5 foolish bridesmaids, the person with the single unvested talent, or the goat who did nothing “for the least of these”? Isn’t this some kind of contradiction--- to say that we can lose a salvation that’s a gift we haven’t earned?
I don’t want take this into a theological debate, but Paul’s very next words seem to clarify the issue. Right after Paul says we don’t earn our salvation, he also says: 10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them. (Eph 2:10 KJV) and in the next letter, an echo of this comes in Philippians, which says that we all must “work out our salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12). The point being, that though Salvation has been freely provided for us as a free gift if grace, if we reject, neglect or abandon the responsibilities that come with this “free” gift, then we also forfeit the gift and all the amazing grace that comes with it.
Now, we can see where “laziness” comes into the picture. Salvation that is not “worked out” and does not result in “good works” puts us, as the stories illustrate so vividly, in danger of being “unprepared” for the bridegroom when he comes, puts us in danger becoming a worthless servant who is of no use to the master, and worst of all, puts us in danger of losing eternal life and being thrown into the fire of judgment which was never prepared for us, but was prepared for the devil and his angels. In each story the central problem is sloth. This is what makes being “lazy” with our salvation not just physical laziness, but as Thomas Aquinas, the great mind of the middle ages called it, “it is an aversion (hate) to the divine good in us” ---What Aquinas means can be seen in a married couple who are having married problems, but after fighting, they keep on refusing to deal with the issues, they keep on going back into their corners and they keep coming back fighting without any progress. The good of their marriage is right there ready to happen, but they won’t do what it takes to resolve their differences. They are too busy fighting and too lazy to tackle the hard issues, and this laziness becomes the greatest and most dangerous threat of all.
RESISTING THE DEMANDS OF LOVE
Still some of you might be a little skeptical about all this. Should laziness, the sin of doing nothing really rank up there with all those other terrible aggressive sins like greed, lust, pride and envy? How does becoming a “couch potato” with our life and our faith become so evil and destructive? Several years ago Harper Magazine did an article which spoofed the 7-Deadly Sins, joking that if “sloth” had been the original sin, Adam and Eve would have been too lazy to have eaten the forbidden fruit in the first place, and we would all, fortunate for us, still be in paradise (As quoted from Glittering Vices, by Rebecca DeYoung, Brazos, 2009, p. 80). So, again, how does a seemingly “small” and “unnoticed” sin like laziness get into the top 7 sins?
Part of the answer comes in understanding that the original word for sloth or lazy in Latin is acedia, which is from the Greek, akadia. Here we find the same root word we use to form the English word: accident. And the sin of laziness or acedia carries this kind of sin: is the sin of deciding to live your life by accident---very close to the phrase many youth give when they face a difficult situation in life and use term: “Well, whatever!” A “whatever,” accidental life is a dangerous and deadly life that can lead to great hardship in living, says wisdom in the Bible, and so Jesus implies in his parable, a “whatever” life will eventually lead to a fate even worse than any accident you’ve ever faced, Hell.
But don’t think that the sin of “living your life by accident” is only understood a sin of being lazy in your work or in your daily life. The early Church Fathers remind us that the sin of sloth and acedia is not only exhibited in being lazy, but that we can be slothful when we are very, very busy. In other words, even a workaholic can be slothful and lazy about something they should be doing but keep putting off. People can busy themselves even very constructive work, and still be lazy about some of the things they should and ought to be doing, like taking time to rest, to worship, to exercise, or to care for their families and the needs of others. The term acedia, or sloth does not only mean a lack of effort, but the word actually means “a lack of care.” For the early Church Fathers, the lack of physical effort was always symptomatic of an even deeper problem: not caring in the right way.
We can see this “lack of care” and concern in all the parables of Jesus. The foolish bridesmaids did not care enough about the wedding to bring enough oil for their lamps. The man with the one talent did not care enough about his master’s fortune that rather than invest the talent, he buried it. He made the effort of digging a hole and burying it, but he did only cared to protect the talent for his own good, and cared nothing about his master’s fate. Finally, the most visible display of this “lack of care” called acedia, or living life by accident, comes in the final parable of the Sheep and Goats. Do you see it? It is not that Goat does not work, but that he did not care to look for Jesus in the plight of the hungry, the stranger, the naked, and the prisoner, that he lazy and uncaring. It is because he lives his spiritual life by accident and does not look for Jesus in these places of hurt and does not choose to show love that he proves the “goat” is so busy with others things, and is apathetic and uncaring, that he is separated from the “sheep” at the judgment and proves himself unfit for God’s coming kingdom or for the gift of eternal life.
When you consider the meaning of sloth, not just as being too lazy to work but as being apathetic and too lazy to love, then we get to the heart of the reason why this sin has made it to the list of the 7 most deadly sins.
Years ago, as a missionary in Germany, I used the film “Groundhog Day” with youth to draw their encourage them to go beyond life by “whatever” or “Es ist mir egal” in German. I wanted to challenge them to follow Paul’s admonition to “work out their own salvation in fear and trembling” and not to leave their life “to the snake” as one theologian suggests was the core sin of sloth by Adam and Eve in the primordial garden. Sloth as being “lazy about love” is dramatically illustrated in this creative story about weatherman Phil Conners. Conners doesn’t care about anything nor anyone, but himself.
The story starts with this Weatherman living a shallow life and not caring about the Groundhog festival or anyone else, but then waking up again the next day repeating the same scenario all over again, and again, and again. He is stuck living out Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. Realizing he can do nothing to overcome this “time freeze” and thinking there are no real consequences to his actions, he starts to make the most of it, amusing himself by living in pleasure not matter who it hurts, even himself. Once while eating doughnut after doughnut, someone remarks: “Aren’t you worried about your cholesterol?” “Oh, I’m not worried about that any more, ” Phil answers. Since he is stuck living on this day, and now that he believes there will always be tomorrow, he starts taking all kinds of careless risks with himself and with others.
Of course, as Hollywood has it, finally, he goes after the girl, his producer Rita, and attempts to win her over and to seduce her. He puts up a false front to win her love. Through trial and effort, he figures out what she likes. He takes great pains to play the game well---he learns what she likes to eat and cooks it for her, he learns to read French poetry, he pretends to share her interest in world peace and her taste in ice cream. All his manipulation goes well until Rita starts to see through scheme and rejects his advances. “I can’t believe I feel for this!” , she cries in anger. “You don’t love me! I could never love someone like you Phil, because you can never love anyone but yourself!” But when Rita accuses him of only loving himself, Phil replies honestly, “That’s not true: I don’t even like myself.”
You see Phil’s problem is the problem of being too lazy to love, even too lazy to love himself enough to do what love requires. But fortunately, at least in the move, after several suicide attempts Phil decides to start to do the work of real love. As he really learns to do constructive things with his life, study medicine, learn poetry, invest in helping some needy people, then Phil not only finds himself busy and satisfied with his life, he is transformed by the unselfish love he practices in the daily disciplines of life. It is moving away from his “apathy” of love into the “activity” of love that finally releases him from living Groundhog Day over and over again.
What Phil’s example shows us is that you can be either a “couch potato” or incredible busy and still, in both instances, be too lazy to love. The great and terrible sin of “sloth” or “laziness” is finally a sin against love, a refusal to do the work of love or it is a continual resistance to the duty and demands which love require.
REJECTING THE PERSON YOU CAN BECOME
Here, I would like to make my final point about sloth and being lazy in love, with some wise words from Novelist Anne Lamot, who recounts some words from a wise older woman in her church who once told her, “the secret of life is that God loves us exactly as we are….and he loves us too much to let us stay that way!”
Finally, sloth or acedia; that is deciding to live our life by accident or by “whatever happens” to us, is a sin that is a resistance to making an effort, but not only in the sense of being physically lazy. Rather, as Rebecca DeYoung rightly says, Sloth it is the resistance to work, to maintain the discipline and the effort of transformation which is demanded by our new identity is Christ.” Listen to these words of challenge from Second Peter 1: 3-10:
3 His divine power has given us everything needed for life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.
4 Thus he has given us, through these things, his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of lust, and may become participants of the divine nature.
5 For this very reason, you must make every effort to support your faith with goodness, and goodness with knowledge,
6 and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with endurance, and endurance with godliness,
7 and godliness with mutual affection, and mutual affection with love.
8 For if these things are yours and are increasing among you, they keep you from being ineffective and unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.
9 For anyone who lacks these things is nearsighted and blind, and is forgetful of the cleansing of past sins.
10 Therefore, brothers and sisters, be all the more eager to confirm your call and election, for if you do this, you will never stumble. (2Pe 1:3-10 NRS)
What Phil Connors learned in Groundhog Day is that “transformation” and “sanctification” takes time and it order to find the time you have to care about it and you have to be diligent in love. Interestingly, the word “diligent” comes from the word Latin, diligere, which means “to love”. To be diligent, disciplined, attentive and careful, you have to love. And love is, of all things, work. If you don’t work at love, then love you thought you had doesn’t work, then it gets worse, life doesn’t work either. The only way to make life work is to work at love.
Ancient people believed that “sloth” was a sin for which it is difficult to find a remedy. Being too lazy to care or to love is a self-perpetuating dynamic, like the downward spiral in Groundhog day it is a never ending Merry-Go-Round which is very difficult to escape with a simple one-time method. The answer of the ancient spiritual advisors is that the only way to overcome sloth and laziness in love is too infuse your life with a regular, daily, disciplined relationship with God, who is the source of love himself.
Recently I received an email from a pastor friend of mine updating me on a meeting I missed because I had to conduct a funeral. He shared a resource from a Buddy Shurden, a Baptist preacher I had once met in Georgia, who was now spending his retirement helping busy pastors preach better sermons. In this particular sample, Shurden was quoting the creative words of one several writers in regard to keeping busy with the right labor; the labor of love (Walter B. Shurden’s Preaching Journal, Vol, 3, Number 28, p 1). He told of how Henri Nouwen, a spiritual mentor to millions, once spent seven months in a Trappist monastery in upstate New York. In his book, The Genesee Diary, he said that he went to the monastery to explore his “compulsions and illusions.” To do this, he followed a rigorous daily discipline of prayers, manual labor, study, and rest. He followed this painstaking routine of prayers of manual labor, study, rest; prayers, manual labor, study, rest, and prayers day after day after day for seven months.
Also, Hal Stewart, a former student of Shurdens, once told him once how his daddy told him how to drive a car on a Georgia dirt road after a hard rain: “Put it in low gear and keep the wheels in the ruts. If you get out of the ruts, you’re going to get stuck.” How different from our thinking today, says Shurden. The in-words today are “innovative,” “creative,” “thinking outside the box,” and “pushing the envelope.” And, of course, something good can be said for all of that. But something huge must also be said for “staying in the ruts,” for “prayers, manual labor, study, and rest,” for reading one’s Bible, for saying one’s prayers, for meeting with God’s people for worship, for bringing tithes and offerings to God’s cause, for visiting the sick and lonely, for speaking a word for the poor in a rich society, for staying in the ruts!!! If we get out of the ruts, we get stuck! If you want to have Christianity, you have to PRACTICE Christianity!!
Fred Craddock spoke about the value work, effort and “habit” in the Christian life. He said that everywhere he turned, people told him to “keep it in the ruts” My doctor. "Exercise three or four times a week; watch your diet; stay away from the salt and junk food." "Please," he says, "stay in the ruts." Good health care requires discipline. My dentist. It is the same thing. "Brush and floss, brush and floss, brush and floss." Good dental care is a matter of discipline. "Please! Stay in the ruts!" My CPA. "Keep up with your expenses and save your receipts." My mechanic. "Grease it and change the oil." My wife. "Take out the garbage; take out the garbage." In all directions and from every corner of life comes the sage counsel: "Please! Stay in the ruts!"
Finally, Shurden refers to Miroslav Volf, a teacher at Yale Divinity School, who wrote about “staying in the ruts” when he said, “The Christian Bible makes clear, in manifold ways, that, whatever else the world is, it is a theater of divine love . . . Created as we are in the image of the God who is love, we can live genuinely flourishing lives only when we also make time and effort to love---to love God with all our being, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.”
Are you going to live your life intentionally or haphazardly? Are you going to live capriciously or habitually, purposely or accidentally, caringly or apathetically? Are you going to keep making the real effort, working in the labor of love each day or are you going to stand on the sidelines and watch the world go to hell and probably you with it? Learn once more from Peter who reminds us: “Make every effort to support your faith with goodness, knowledge, self-control and endurance, godliness, mutual affection and with love….and IF YOU DO THIS…YOU WILL NEVER STUMBLE! If you want your life back to keep love alive: Please, keep it In the ruts!.” Amen.
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