“It May Not Be the Main
Point, but
Maybe It Should Be”
Matthew
25:14-30
First
Presbyterian
The Reverend
Thomas A. Sweet
November 16,
2008
Sacrament of
Holy Communion
I
am not sure that this parable of the talents that Jesus told is particularly
persuasive right now in these times of stormy financial weather.
In the story, the master applauds the first two servants who invested
their talents, a unit of money equal to fifteen years wages, and in an “up”
market realized a hundred percent rate of return on their investments.
Meanwhile, the servant who simply held on to the talents given to him by
the master, just stuffing the cash in his mattress, was excoriated for returning
no gain. In our present calamitous
days, that third servant is looking pretty smart.
There are a lot of us looking wistfully at our portfolios these days
wishing we had buried our money in a coffee can in the backyard.
But
the parable is not really about money matters even if it often is preached that
way. Many churches across the years
have used the parable to support a gimmicky kind of fundraiser in which members
are given a certain amount of money and asked to come back a month or so later
with a return on the money akin to one of the first two servants in the story.
But I doubt that Jesus intended the parable as an incubator for budding
capitalists.
Neither
is it really about using our gifts, the interpretation that is often, though
wrongly, applied to the word “talents” in the parable.
This slant on the story encourages us to discover whatever gifts and
“talents” we have and use them to the glory of God and in the service of
others. Everybody has a talent, so
the story goes, and some have many. Perhaps
our talent is playing the violin or helping people to navigate the welfare
system or maybe it is providing hospitality to those in need of it.
Regardless of our “talents” and whether we have one or many, God
wants us to use them wisely and well and not waste them.
That
seems a reasonable enough explanation of the passage and surely there is nothing
wrong with the idea of using our gifts to the glory of God, but that is too
benign, too tame, an understanding of the parable.
It is a “nice” and “polite” rendering of the story but Jesus
encountered and endured way too much in his life to go around offering
“nice” platitudes. Telling
people to use and develop their gifts would not have gotten him tethered to a
cross.
The
treasure to which Jesus was referring in the story is the gospel or, as he
understood it, God’s good news about a world that works for everyone.
Investment in the gospel is costly because a life committed to justice,
generosity, compassion, and mercy bangs up against a current in the world that
is too frequently flowing in the opposite direction.
But a life immersed in the gospel always pays dividends even when
appearances may seem otherwise. It
did not seem that Jesus had succeeded when he succumbed to the powers of the
Living
the gospel also pays dividends, not always immediately apparent, when a cadre of
church members, away from headlines or fame, cook Thursday night summer suppers
for the neighborhood. It pays
dividends when a man comes to his pastor, as one of our members came to me
earlier this year, presenting the entirety of his vacation savings to be given
to a young woman having trouble putting food on the table for her family.
Living the gospel pays dividends when young people commit themselves to
travel far from home and far beyond their comfort as our young people will do
during Holy Week next year in order to cross the borders and boundaries of their
present privilege to experience life as the poor and dispossessed of the
Investing
our lives in the gospel pays dividends because the future belongs to God and the
values of the gospel are the values of the future.
What is it that
The
third servant, the one who did not invest his talent, the one who did not invest
his life in gospel, offered the excuse that he knew that the master was “a
harsh man…and so I was afraid.”
But where did he get that idea? There
is nothing in the parable to indicate that.
Quite the opposite. The
master entrusts the talents to his servants for an extended time.
He trusts them. And then, in
a culture in which slaves and servants were expected to do their master’s duty
without praise or acclaim, the master when he returns gives the first two
servants extraordinary and extravagant honor, increased authority, makes them
members of his family (“enter into the
joy of your master”), and perhaps even lets them keep the talents they had
been given as well as the profits. The
first two servants invested in the gospel because they trusted the master for
and with their lives. But about the
third servant, preacher and theologian Tom Long says, and I love this by the way
for its truth, “He gets only the master
his tiny and warped vision can see. In
theological terms, he gets the peevish little tyrant god he believes in.”
In
regard to the third servant, the parable is not about a generous master suddenly
turning cruel and punitive; it is about living with the consequences of one’s
own faith. (1)
If we trust the goodness of God, as, by analogy, the first two servants
did, then we can venture out into the world with eyes wide open to the grace and
truth and wonder of life and feel confident of God’s providence and presence
everywhere. But to be a child of the
gracious, generous, and life-giving God and yet insist on seeing God as
fearsome, vengeful, and cruel is to live a sorry, sad, impoverished life.
Those
who live with the conviction that God is trustworthy and good and generous will
find and see more and more of that generosity in the world and will be able to
live that way themselves. They can
invest themselves in gospel. But
those who believe that God is punitive, exacting, and judgmental will condemn
themselves to living a life laden with fear, rife with legalisms, and containing
precious little joy. It is in that
sense that Jesus says, “To those who
have, more will be given…but from those who have nothing, even what they have
will be taken away.”
So,
beloved congregation, trust God and live the gospel.
Trust God enough that you invest your life, your whole life, in living
the upside down adventure of the gospel that makes no sense unless you do trust
God. Amen.
Oh,
wait! I have one other thing I want
to say! I got stuck on these words
early in the week and they have not let me go, so I just want to say them aloud
to you. They, too, come from
today’s parable. They may not be
the main point, but maybe they should be. At
least they seem important to me. The
words are these, from the very first sentence of the story:
“a man went on a journey.”
In the interest of inclusivity, we also could say, “a
woman went on a journey.” The
journey is the thing. How many of us
get stuck in life? How many of us
stay where we are emotionally or intellectually or spiritually because we cannot
imagine the turmoil of uprooting ourselves and embarking on further discovery?
Or because we are afraid of the cost?
Or fearful of what we might find or of what our inner voice may ask of
us? Might some of us feel trapped by
our circumstances and so settle for a life pale and paltry by comparison to the
life that may be calling to us rather than risking a journey?
I
am so impressed with the man in our parable who went on a journey. We do
not know what kind of a journey. Did
he travel to the ends of the earth? Did
he go somewhere in order to change the focus of his life?
Did he find a monastery and seek the heart of God within himself?
All we know is that he left the management of his millions to others and
went. I am reminded of something the
great Catholic theologian Karl Rahner once wrote, saying,
In
the ultimate depths of our being, we know nothing more surely
than that our knowledge, that is, what is called knowledge in
everyday parlance, is only a small island in a vast sea that has not
been traveled. It is a
floating island, and it might be more familiar
to us than the sea, but ultimately it is borne by the sea…Hence
the deepest question for us humans is this:
Which do we love more,
the small island of our so-called knowledge or the sea of infinite
mystery?
“A man went on a journey…”
Those are words that lead to
life, my friends, and I commend them to you.
I
am much moved by a poem called The Layers
written by the late Stanley Kunitz, a former poet laureate of our country, in
the twilight of his life. It is his
clarion call to us to be on the move always, at least inwardly, journeying
toward our own fuller and more complete humanity.
The
Layers
I
have walked through many lives,
some
of them my own,
and
I am not who I was,
though
some principle of being
abides,
from which I struggle not to stray.
When
I look behind,
as
I am compelled to look
before
I can gather strength
to
proceed on my journey,
I
see the milestones dwindling
toward
the horizon
and
the slow fires trailing
from
the abandoned camp-sites,
over
which scavenger angels
wheel
on heavy wings.
Oh,
I have made myself a tribe
out
of my true affections,
and
my tribe is scattered!
How
shall the heart be reconciled
to
its feast of losses?
In
a rising wind
the
manic dust of my friends,
those
who fell along the way
bitterly
stings my face.
Yet
I turn, I turn,
exulting
somewhat,
with
my will intact to go
wherever
I need to go,
and
every stone on the road
precious
to me.
In
my darkest night,
when
the moon was covered
and
I roamed through wreckage,
a
nimbus-clouded voice
directed
me:
"Live
in the layers,
not
on the litter."
Though
I lack the art
to
decipher it,
no
doubt the next chapter
in
my book of transformations
is
already written.
I
am not done with my changes. (2)
It
is my hope, of course, that our journey would lead us more deeply into gospel,
more deeply into God, and thus more deeply into the world…a truly holy
communion.
Amen.
(Really!)
(1)
Long, Thomas G., Matthew.
(2)
Kunitz, Stanley, Passing Through: The Later Poems.
1995, p. 107.
©
Copyright 2008 First Presbyterian Church