Zephaniah 1:7,12-18
Matthew 25:14-15, 19-29

Perceptions are interesting. Our perceptions are anchored in our own histories. We see, experience, understand, and interpret within our own interactions, out of our own experience. Our perceptions might hold much in common, depending how much we share with each other a cultural or geographical closeness. Then again, sometimes closeness shows the depths of differences that we experience. It is interesting to look at this morning’s readings in this light. Our texts all speak of God’s judgment.

To speak of God’s judgment makes us uncomfortable. Some of us maybe come from revivalist backgrounds or maybe real authoritarian relationships where judgment loomed over us like a lightening bolt ready to strike us for giggling in the back of the car as children. God’s judgment was used to control, to force a denial of our own perspectives through guilt to submit to some false authority. Perhaps, though, more of us really are convinced that God is Love, and that as Love, God cannot judge. God exists to affirm. God’s perspective is really our perspective writ large – God understands and cares. Truth, Beauty, Goodness do not really find themselves as One in God; God shares in our own perspectives – our own histories, our own personal truth, beauty, and goodness, shares in a give and take relationship with us so that God has no Life outside our lives, our histories, from which to judge. Judgment is really passé, a relic of a psychological uninformed world.

Interestingly, both such interpretations share a common presupposition: God’s judgment is about us. I’m not so sure. As I read our OT passage and the Gospel reading, it seems to me that God’s judgment is ultimately about God, and only then about us. Let’s look at the Zechariah and Gospel passages together.

The passage from Zechariah is a stark reminder that God will not be dismissed.

Have you ever been in a room, having a good time, and someone comes in and yells, “Shut up!” It’s shocking, scary. Or perhaps you’ve heard of a story, never been there of course, about a party when suddenly someone yells, “It’s the police.” Everyone starts to scatter. Judgment is at hand. I remember the dumbest thing I ever did. I stepped over a beaten down fence and, with a friend, ran down a live runway of an airport to get home. Suddenly we looked up and an airport security van was speeding directly at us and there was no place to hide.

How do such times occur? Such times happen when our own perspectives, be it inexperience, denial, or just plain stupidity, run straight into reality. Maybe it is kids just getting caught up in the moment – they don’t have the experience to think of the baby asleep in the next room. Maybe it is denial – hey, this party is cool; it’s fun. Maybe it’s just plain stupidity – it’s a beautiful Saturday morning. No one will care. Think how cool it will be to run down a runway. Judgment comes. Reality runs smack into our limited perspective. Truth crashes into our life. What we ignore, what we deny, what just doesn’t occur to us, suddenly smashes into our own reality. Our reality is brought into line with what is. Judgment.

Be silent before the Lord! God is at hand. Reality is breaking through. Wealth plundered; forced into exile; the sound of the Lord is bitter; that day will be a day of wrath. No denial now; no time to consider our own limits. It’s too late to run. Why? Why will this happen? They said in their hearts, “The Lord will not do good nor will God do harm.” The elect have dismissed God. Their history, their perspectives, their lives, whether from inexperience, denial, or just plain stupidity, had unfolded without consideration of God. Big mistake. Truth will impinge; Reality will break through. Suffering will shatter their perspective. Their mistake, miscalculation, repression or deceit, comes home to roost. Reality smashes into their own little reality. Judgment. The Truthfulness, the Goodness, the Beauty that are One in God comes into the lives of the people, as a group, and therefore, as individuals. And the falsity, the sinfulness, and the ugliness of their denial, their dismissal becomes evident for all to see.

The day of the Lord is at hand. God will not be dismissed.

The Gospel reading speaks to a similar situation: we will not project our own perspectives upon God; God’s Truth will come to us to shatter our projections about God.

This parable of Jesus, well, it seems to be everything that we are afraid of in judgment. Here’s the last gifted person, doing the best from within his own life history. Give the guy a break. We love a good underdog story. Here’s a chance for a remake of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Instead, “take the talent away, and give to those who have.” From those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” Ouch. Mean ol’ god.

But let’s look at the story. The person is going on a journey. He gives his property away to three slaves. He comes home and immediately brings the first two into the joy of the master. They participate as slaves in the very wealth, the household, the very life of the master. The third one comes: “Master, I knew that you were a harsh man.” What? A harsh man? A harsh man entrusting his property to slaves? A harsh man making the first slave wealthy? A harsh man who treats the second slave the same way? Does reaping where he doesn’t sow and gathering voluntary crops mean that this is a harsh man? The third slave projects his understanding falsely on the master. Then he has to come to terms with the consequences of his perception. He projects what he wants onto the master, rather than seeing truly the gifts that the master gives. Catch the irony. What does the man lose? Nothing of his. Whose talent was it? Wasn’t it already given back to the man? More, did you catch the final saying? From those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. What is taken from them? What do they have? Nothing! Okay, everyone, please I want nothing from you. Please, give me nothing. A harsh man? Come on, get over it. See what’s going on.

Why did the servant see the master as a harsh man? More – why do we believe that he accurately described the man? So often we’re shaped by perceptions of God by the world around us, subtly shaped. You are a harsh man. You are nice. We miss that we can’t know God if God had not revealed God’s Self to us. And that in Jesus, the Mystery that is God has shown God’s Self to us. And this is no harsh man. This is no milk toast god. This is God who is Terrifying Love, a Love seen in the Son by the Spirit’s working in our lives who will take the nothing from the lives of those who live from their projections rather than by God’s own revelation of God’s own character – and leave them with what they are. Judgment comes – Reality breaks in. Our lives have to deal with the fact that we can lose nothing, the very nothing that our lives become when lived outside the Reality, the Mystery, the Love that is God. When we let our perspectives, our histories so determine our lives that we can’t see what is, the God Who Truly Is, and the Beauty, and Goodness of the Spirit working in and around us in the smallest, but most significant areas of our life, the Spirit who calls us to participate in this goodness to have God’s love shed abroad in our hearts, judgment comes. The nothing of our lives take over, and God leaves us with what we are – nothing.

Judgment comes when we insist on placing our perceptions before God’s revelation in living our lives.

God’s judgment is not bad news. Judgment is the Truth, Goodness and Beauty of the Spirit coming into our lives to heal the deceit, sin, and nothingness. Now or in the future, judgment will take place, for our lives, whether we admit it or not, only exist in relationship to God.

God is not like us. God does not have a history; God does not have a perspective. Is God a big, unresponsive blob? Oh no. All history is in God; all perspectives are found in God. God is the One in Whom we live and move and have our Being, the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End. God is the Eternal Movement of Love that is the Father and Son and the Holy Spirit. We can deny, we can repress, we can be inexperienced, or just plain stupid. But Reality, the Transcendent, the Mystery that is God will ultimately be made known to us in judgment through Jesus Christ by the Spirit.

God is not an Object for us to grasp, not a Subject into whom we must penetrate. We can find objects fully only in relation to God; we find subjectivity, our own selves, only in relationship to God. God is Creator, the One who brought all things into existence out of nothing. Of yes, we can dismiss God for a little while. But ultimately, the Truth of God, and therefore of our lives, we be known. We can project from the experiences of our lives onto God, but God will reveal Godself, and therefore, each one of us in stark truthfulness. The Truth of our life will come, for the fullness of God’s revelation will come to all creation in Christ.

God’s judgment is nothing more than an encounter with God in God’s own revelation of the Truthfulness of the world, the Truthfulness of our life, the Truthfulness that is God. God’s judgment is that the truth of creation, the truth of our lives will be made known, has been made known in Christ. We will be either the truthfulness that participates in God, in the joys of God’s wealth, or we will be nothing – and this nothing will be taken from us.

Judgment is the encounter with God through God coming to us in Christ, by the work of the Holy Spirit, in which we might see the difference between who we really are in God and the lack, the nothingness, the limited histories and perspectives that govern our lives.

This is why judgment takes place at this Table. Here is an encounter with God the Father in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit. The Lord’s Supper is a token of Christ’s coming again, for here, again and again, by the Spirit, Christ’s presence comes to us by faith so that we might partake of the life of Jesus Christ. In Christ, judgment comes, for Christ comes, and in Christ, God comes. We are forced to encounter the Truth that our lives only find themselves fully in God, or continue in nothingness, denial, repression, inexperience, stupidity. Here we confront the lack of our lives with the fullness of Life that is God. Come, friends, to be judged, to encounter the Truthfulness of all life that is the Word made flesh, now present in the bread and the wine. Come in repentance; come in faith. Come . . . and be thankful.