24th Sunday after Pentecost – Year A November 19, 2017
Matthew 25:14-30 Panzer Liturgical Service, Stuttgart
Hundreds, maybe even thousands, of stewardship campaigns have been designed using this passage from Matthew. I’m betting you wouldn’t have been surprised if I had handed each of the kids at the children’s message a dollar, telling them to go and make some money to bring back to share at church. In fact, there’s a bestselling book, The Kingdom Assignment, which tells the story of Pastor Denny Bellesi and what happened with his church when he came in one Sunday to give out $10,000 in $100 bills to the people attending that morning. There were three requirements for getting one of the bills: 1. The $100 belongs to God. 2. You must invest it in God’s work. 3. Report your results in 90 days. Those reports were startling: people made money hand over fist to contribute to the Church, creative ministries were hatched, lives were transformed, people wept for joy – and all of it was reported by NBC’s Dateline. Great story, right? So why does it give me a little bit of the creeps? [i]
This feels like a truly American interpretation of the parable. In our culture, we can be wooed into the practice of investing for the future – even God’s future – and dealing out the results in tightly measured and regulated packets. The truth of the matter is that the majority of us don’t need to be given $100 to invest for God – we have plenty of our own to do that. And we often forget that, in fact, it all belongs to God.
So, let’s begin today with the premise that this parable doesn’t mean what we’ve always been taught it means. It may take us to an uncomfortable place, but hey, that’s what Jesus does.
Redirection #1: A talent in this story doesn’t mean our God given abilities. The CEB translates it as a valuable coin… definitely not a good translation.
In biblical times, a talent was gold equal to the amount of money that a man would earn over his whole adult lifetime – about 25 years. It would weigh over 50 pounds. It wouldn’t be a few coins that someone could slip in their pocket and forget about. Even the servant with one talent would have trouble carrying his treasure away.[ii]
Redirection #2: We should really pay more attention to the third servant than the other two. The first and second servants are busy while the master is gone, evidenced by the fact that the master had to seek them out when he returned. And it looks like they were ready, because they were able to give an immediate reckoning for their actions. Now this makes sense to those of you who regularly balance your financial accounts, but to those of us who check the ATM to see how much money we have, not so much.
But then again, the third servant was also ready to give an accounting. He, in fact, had chosen conventional wisdom for dealing with the master’s money. This is not the first time we have seen someone burying valuable things for safekeeping … remember the parable of the man who finds a treasure in a field and sells everything so that he can buy the field? The trick, of course, is to remember where you hide it.
So, I don’t think that this is a parable about keeping busy or being able to account for what we’re doing to build or support the Kingdom. Instead, I wonder what happens if we listen to what the third servant says about the master. It’s not very flattering or comforting… “I know you to be a hard man, so I played it very, very safe.” This is all we have. The other two servants don’t give us any clues to what kind of guy he is. And the landowner neither confirms or denies these claims. Instead, he replies with a simple question: “If you thought I was so harsh, why didn’t you choose another strategy?” It looks like the master’s response is a self-fulfilling prophecy… the third servant got exactly what he was afraid of.
All of this led me to wonder if that’s not true for us, too. When we see God as an enforcer of rules, we get sidetracked on legalism, and instead of worshiping God, we worship the rules. This version of God is stern and judgmental, and before long, we believe that everything bad in our lives is a kind of punishment from God. When we worship that God, we not only experience God’s anger for ourselves, but also expect that God is angry with everyone else, too. Lots of ink and tears have been spilled over this picture of a God who only wants to keep people in line.
But what if we seek God primarily in terms of grace and expectation? I am often surprised and uplifted by the gifts of time, friendship and possibility that are happening all around me. If we imagine God to be a God of love, then it is much easier to recognize and experience God’s love in our own lives and to share that vision of God and God’s love with others.[iii]
Too often we operate under the assumption that “what you see is what you get.” We lift a few verses out of the Bible and pontificate on them as equally applicable to all situations. But in my experience, context is always helpful. Jesus told this story just before he gathered his followers for a last meal, days before he was taken into custody and sentenced to death, and before he died a painful, shameful death. And while it’s classic theology to think of Jesus’ death as a substitution for our own sins, we should also know that its purpose doesn’t end there. The events of Jesus’ last days – the healings, the parables, the meal, the denials, the death, AND the resurrection are a testament as to how far a generous loving God will go to communicate his love for the world.
Jesus spent his life proclaiming and practicing the Kingdom of God. He fed the hungry, healed the sick, offered forgiveness and welcomed everyone who saw through him their need for the love of God. He defied conventional traditions and associated with people who were outcasts. And he called out those who lived only by the rules, those who could not recognize that Jesus was Emmanuel – God with us. And for all of that – he was killed. And just to make sure that we understood how far God can lift us up – from disappointment and tragedy and being stuck in our own expectations – he raised Jesus from the dead on the third day to remind us that life is more powerful than death and love will always win over hate.[iv]
So, yes, this is a parable about using all the resources we have to further the work of the Kingdom. Jesus intends for us to be about that work, always ready and expecting his immediate return. But it is also true that our resources will never be enough. God has this uncanny ability to multiply our efforts in ways that we could never imagine. Our perceived failures are often a witness to the fact that we don’t trust that God has our backs.[v] The good news is that we have unlimited opportunities to get it right... Jesus just wants us to try... to trust that God will bless the efforts we make in good faith that God's way is the best way to participate in the Kingdom of God.
As I was pondering all of this, I was left with two questions, which I ask you to think about this week. I don’t have the answers, only more questions, so maybe together we can come up with some ideas how they might help us grow in faith.
Is it fear that keeps us from taking risks? Are we afraid that our mistakes will be held against us so much that we make safe choices, hoping that maintaining the status quo will be good enough? This certainly seems to be the case for the third servant. He did the minimum required… he did not lose his master’s money. Is that we want for ourselves – just believing or doing enough to stay safe? Or do we want more?
Do we even believe that it’s possible to be adequate representatives of God and Jesus in the world? For all indications, it looks like the first and second servants were very successful surrogates for the master. They made a lot of money for the master, securing a good future for all of them. But mostly they just did what the master asked them to do. They were faithful in representing him in business and in the world. Even if the master hadn’t given them all the profits to keep, they would have been the success their master knew they could be. I’ll bet even if they hadn’t made all those profits, but gave it a good try, he would have been proud of them anyway. How about us?
What does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus? Is it what we believe about Jesus? Or is it about how we live our lives every day? In our children’s moment, we talked about thankfulness, and how it’s a byproduct of knowing that we are loved. Living out that love every day – that’s what Jesus is asking us to do. And in the process, talents are being multiplied. And we are thankful.
Yesterday I read this really amazing quote attributed to Henri Nouwen, a 20th century Catholic pastor, theologian, and mystic. It was not the quote I was looking for, but it stayed with me so much that I’ll use it to end today. It read: “For Jesus, there are no countries to be conquered, no ideologies to be imposed, no people to be dominated. There are only children, women and men to be loved.”
I want to be that kind of servant… that kind of Christian.
It sounds easy but it’s really hard. Good thing we’re not being asked to do it alone.
[i] James Howell, November 19, 2017, http://jameshowellsweeklypreachingnotions.blogspot.de/
[ii] Howell
[iii] David Lose, In the Meantime… How Do You Imagine God? http://www.davidlose.net/2014/11/pentecost-23-a/
[iv] Lose
[v] Carla Sunberg, A Plain Account… Proper 28A, http://www.aplainaccount.org/proper-28a-gospel
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