A Homily for the Thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Proverbs 31:10-13, 19-20, 30-3  1 Thessalonians 5:1-6  Matthew 25:14-30

Why wait? If that simple yet stark question does not summarize the Gospels in their totality, it certainly captures the challenge posed by the Parable of the Talents. 

Why wait? Or, what are you waiting for?

Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected four times to the U.S. presidency, though he would serve less than four months of his fourth term. Yet even before the establishment of term limits, Roosevelt only planned to serve two terms. 

In his compelling new history, A Shadow Over the World: Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Rise of Fascism, and the Making of America’s World War II, William Hitchcock insists: 

[N]o one knows exactly when Roosevelt made up his mind to run for a third term. Sam Rosenman (Roosevelt’s speechwriter) thought he decided sometime between the invasion of Norway on April 9 and the evacuation of Dunkirk on June 4. Henry Morgenthau (the Secretary of the Treasury) thought he made up his mind sometime during the month of June.

We treat Democratic and Republican national conventions as coronations, but that is a relatively recent phenomenon. Delegates used to deliberate their choices at conventions. Even so, 

as the Democratic National Convention opened in the enormous indoor Chicago Stadium on July 15th, Roosevelt had still not stated his decision to run, feeling that he could not be seen to want the nomination but would accept it only by acclamation and because of the world emergency.

What emergency? Pearl Harbor would not be attacked for another year and a half. But since Roosevelt had first entered the presidency, fascists had won the Spanish Civil War; Italy had conquered Ethiopia and invaded Albania; Japan had ousted the legitimate Chinese government; Hitler and Stalin had divided Poland; and without firing a shot, Nazi Germany had swallowed up the Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia. 

Often these events occurred when Roosevelt was out of Washington, pouring martinis in Warm Springs, Ga., or deep-sea fishing. Roosevelt was not a laggard, but he was nearing 60 and an ill man. He had lost the use of his legs to polio and was already battling congestive heart failure. 

There is every reason to believe that when Roosevelt addressed the Chicago convention delegates by radio to accept their nomination, he was not dissembling when he told them:

Like most men of my age, I had plans for myself, plans for a private life of my own choice and for my own satisfaction, a life of that kind to begin in January 1941. These plans, like so many other plans, had been made in a world which now seems as distant as another planet. Today all private plans, all private lives, have been in a sense repealed by an overriding public danger. In the face of that public danger all those who can be of service to the Republic have no choice but to offer themselves for service in those capacities for which they may be fitted.

Why wait? What are you waiting for? Many people asked that question of F.D.R. during his two previous administrations as dark clouds gathered overseas. But in the throes of the Great Depression, the home front desperately needed attention, and many Americans who felt they had been duped into the First World War were determined never to enter another foreign war. 

You and I do not bear the weight of the free world, but all of us have found ourselves in life-changing situations, when everything we thought we knew about our own worlds suddenly changed because of a job loss, a divorce, a diagnosis or a disease. Then, like Roosevelt, we suddenly found that we could wait no longer. We had to act, had to change in response to a crisis.

Return to the simple question the Gospel poses. Why wait? What are you waiting for? If you have buried the talents the Master left you, when do you plan to dig them up? 

Put another way, what changes would you make if you knew a life-altering crisis was coming? Why are you waiting to be that person? What are you waiting for?

The Gospel proclaims that the world changed utterly and forever when Christ died and rose again from the dead. We say we believe that. We tell ourselves we believe that. But what do our lives, the way we spend our hours, say about what we really believe?

Concerning a crisis that comes sooner or later for all of us, St. Paul told his flock:

But you, brothers and sisters, are not in darkness,
for that day to overtake you like a thief. 
For all of you are children of the light
and children of the day.
We are not of the night or of darkness. 
Therefore, let us not sleep as the rest do,
but let us stay alert and sober (1 Thess 5:4-6).

If you are a child of the light and of the day, and yet shadows still suffuse your life, why wait? What are you waiting for?

The Rev. Terrance W. Klein is a priest of the Diocese of Dodge City and author of Vanity Faith.