The Sky is Falling by Jill Carattini

Take approximately 5 minutes to read this shortened version of yesterday's 'A Slice of Infinity'. Post comments to the blog for spiritual collaboration. Please email your prayer requests too.

Parable of Talents

Slice of Infinity Snippets:
Chicken Little is afraid. The sky is falling and she needs to tell the king. She dashes off as fast as she can, running into friends along the way with whom she shares her fear. “The sky is falling!” she yells, and her worried friends join the race to find the king.

The well-known misadventures of Chicken Little and her friends tell a tale of fear and its infectious grasp. ...It seems like we have been hearing it a lot this year...

Focusing on our fears, ever-reacting to our worries, and accepting this culture of fear as a given, not only affects our subsequent reasoning, living, and faithfulness, our fears in fact become us. Our fears tell us how to spend our money, raise our children, vote in an election, and participate in (or isolate ourselves from) society. We become no different than Chicken Little or the slave in Jesus’s parable who withdrew in fear of his master and buried his talent in the sand...

Yet the harsh rebuke of this slave in the parable of the talents makes it clear that safe-living is not an option, nor an ultimate value, in the kingdom of God. So is there a distinctively Christian alternative to the atmosphere of fear that is so pervasive and contagious? The parable of the talent asks us to see the power and control we allow to masquerade as security and so convince ourselves that we are living wisely, even morally upright, when we are really living in fear. These fears move us to withdraw from the very kingdom Jesus calls us to join and join with him in announcing. Instead of moving further up and farther into the kingdom he proclaimed among us, we dig for our souls a place in the outer darkness.

There is indeed an alternative, but it is neither safe nor easy. It involves laying down our fears to follow Christ with faith’s daring; it involves opening our lives to a world that scares us, and rejecting the anxiety of a world convinced the sky is falling. The Christian alternative to a culture of fear is a kingdom of hospitality and abundance, vulnerability and generosity, love and self-sacrifice--the very kingdom Christ shaped with his living and dying, and invites us to do the same.

“Then Jesus told his disciples, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”