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By Pastor Glenn Pease
On April 18, 1906 San Francisco went through the worst catastrophe of California history.
An earthquake devastated the city, and a fire broke out that left that once thriving metropolis a heap of smoldering ruins.
The cost in lives and property was beyond calculation.
Yet, in the midst of all this destruction and death people were preoccupied with the trivia of life.
A mortician sat on the front steps of his office and polished coffin handles, like Nero fiddling while Rome burned.
You want to get angry at this man for giving himself to trifles in the midst of such a major disaster, but the question is, if the handles needed polishing, why not do it?
It is a trivial task, but coffins would be needed, and people would demand that they be clean and shiny.
The trivial cannot be evaded or avoided, for it is a perpetual part of life.
It is a crazy world where you cannot get life set up like a furniture store.
All of the chairs in one place, and all of the beds in another, and the lamps and dressers in still another.
And all the nuts and bolts and plastic and packing materials are isolated out of sight so as not to detract from the beauty.
In life all of this stuff is mixed together with the trivial and the tremendous in the same room.
No matter what tragedies people go through, they still have to pay the light bill, dust the end tables, put twisties back on the bread, and dozens of other trivial duties to maintain order.
The trivial is inseparable from the tremendous in every day life.
We sometimes feel guilty about it if we go on doing trivial things when there is a tremendous crisis going on.
You are not always involved in what is a major issue, but you are always involved in what is minor, and so the trivial is a perpetual part of all of our lives.
You get rest from the tremendous, but the trivial is ever with you.
Gamaliel Bradford wrote-
I think about God, yet I talk of small matters.
Now isn't it odd how my idle tongue chatters,
Of quarrelsome neighbors,
Fine weather and rain,
Indifferent labors,
Indifferent pain.
Some trivial style,
Fashion shifts with a nod
And yet all the while
I am thinking of God.
What Jesus is saying to us in this paragraph is that we must take the trivial seriously, for how we deal with a value, even the least of God's commands, will determine our status in the kingdom of heaven.
In other words, the trivial can be tremendous.
Jesus goes so far as to say, not a jot or tittle is insignificant.
Not the smallest letter, or the least stroke of the pen is really trivial.
In our system, not the dotting of an i, or the crossing of a t, is so trivial that God will neglect it, or ignore it in His plan.
Every detail of value, however trivial, will be fulfilled, therefore, nothing of God's law and revelation is so trivial that we can ignore it without loss.
The silly poet wrote-
One day I sat upon a chair,
Of course the bottom wasn't there;
Nor legs, nor back, but I just sat,
Ignoring little things like that.
But little though they be, you cannot ignore them and prevent a fall, and so it is with the least of God's laws.
Jesus says, if you want to be a nobody in the kingdom, just ignore the trivial, and violate its purpose, and teach others the same, and you've got it.
But if you want to be somebody in the kingdom, you have got to see the trivial can be tremendous.
One of the major problems of Christians all through history is the promoting of their own gifts and activities to the detriment of others.
The hand says to the foot, I have no need of you.
The Christian in evangelism says, the Christian in social service is wasting his time.
What good is a cup of cold water if a man is going to hell?
The social service Christian says, what good is the Gospel to a man who is starving and thirsty?
Christians fight each other saying, I am the greatest.
Jesus says, not so, for they are both least in the kingdom if they teach that the least commandment is unimportant.
The greatest are those who know obedience to all of God's will is important, and they teach and do it, for the trivial cup of cold water, and the tremendous message of the cross are both part of God's plan.
We get an insight here into the way God works.
God is into the big, for He created the whole vast universe, but the fact is, He built all the bigness of creation out of the small.
The whole of everything is built upon the trivial.
The trivial little atom which is so small and insignificant in itself, that I can rub millions of them off my hands and not see any difference, are the basis for all that is tremendous.
The poet wrote-
Little drops of water, little grains of sand,
Make the mighty ocean, and the pleasant land.
Time has many aspects to it, and goes from seconds to minutes; to hours; to days; to weeks; to months; to years; to decades; to generations; to centuries; to millenniums; to eons.
But if you really want to see when time is important, watch the Olympics where victory and defeat depend on 1,000's of a second.
All that makes it such tremendous competition is in those trivial moments of time.
In daily life we do not waste years, months and weeks, but we waste minutes and hours, and here is where the real battle with time is.
It is not on the upper level, but on the lower level of the trivial, and how we do on this level can make a tremendous difference in life.
The same is true with money.
We don't waste millions and thousands, but we do waste pennies to dollars, and what we do with the trivial always makes a tremendous difference.
God builds your life into what is tremendous by what, in itself, is trivial.
The seemingly insignificant events in life are the stepping stones to what is significant.
Some boys brought an injured shepherd dog to Florence Nightingale.
She agreed to help heal the dog, and as she ministered to it she became infatuated with the idea of ministering to suffering humanity.
Her compassion for a dog led her to become the Angel of the Crimean War, and mother of modern nursing.
The trivial led to the tremendous.
This is the way God has worked in millions of lives.
Most of us would agree, it is a rather trivial choice as to which pair of socks you wear.
President James Garfield had his whole life changed by his choice of socks.
The day he was to leave home for a long trip he injured his foot chopping wood.
The blue dye in the home-made sock he wore poisoned the wound, and he had to cancel his trip.
While he was home recovering, a revival broke out in his community, and he was converted.
He wrote, "New desires and new purposes then took possession of me, and I was determined to seek an education that I might live more usefully for Christ."
His choice of socks led to his choosing the Savior.
The trivial led to the tremendous.
One of the lessons Jesus most often sought to teach us is the lesson on the largeness of the little; the significance of the small; the mightiness of the minute, and the tremendousness of the trivial.
Michaelangelo labored on detail, and someone asked him why he would bother with details that no one would notice.
He replied, "Trifles make for perfection, and perfection is no trifle."
Jesus said that those who are faithful in a very little are faithful also in much.
If you give a money manager $500.00, and he loses some of it, you will not trust him with $5,000.00.
If he does well with a little, then you will trust him with a lot.
One sheep is a trivial percentage of a flock, but when that one is lost, it becomes a major issue, and the 99 are left in order to focus on finding the one.
The trivial becomes the priority.
The trivial mite of the widow was like the pennies of the little child in the Sunday School offering.
Truly trivial in the over all budget of the church, but Jesus exalted her gift to the level of the greatest gift of all, because it represented her all.
Others gave far more, but it was far from their all.
Because it was her all, her trivial became tremendous.
People often think if they are not gifted it is okay to do nothing, not realizing that if they give what little they have it can lead to tremendous reward.
The one talent man missed the whole point of Jesus, and he did not use his one trivial talent wisely.
He buried it, for it was nothing compared to the others.
He neglected his trivial, and lost the tremendous reward that could have been his by being faithful with his little.
Jesus said, "As ye did it unto the least of these my brethren you did it unto me."
The slightest expression of love can be a tremendous act of love.
Even a cup of cold water given in His name will not go unrewarded.
In this Sermon on the Mount Jesus is concerned with prevention, and the key to prevention is in awareness of the value of the trivial.
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