Sermons from the Pulpit

     So here we have the five-talent slave and the two-talent slave and the one-talent slave. Or servant, if you prefer. In the good old King James Bible it reads, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant!" Did you ever run across one of those collections of notable epitaphs on tombstones? Some of them are even better than church-bulletin bloopers. One of my favorites is in England, over the grave of a wealthy landed nobleman. It says: "Here lies Lord So-and-so, accidentally shot by his gamekeeper whilst out hunting." And then it gives his dates and, as gravestones often do, it quotes a line of Scripture: "Well done, thou good and faithful servant!"

     And it does seem that the first two servants, or slaves, the five-talent slave and the two-talent slave, are indeed being praised for making a killing in the market, as it were, whereas the third one, the one-talent slave, this poor sap, is condemned and cast into outer darkness, and for what? For being timid? For lack of ambition? For not having the temperament of a venture capitalist? Donald Trump gets into heaven. Too bad about the rest of you.

     In hundreds of churches this morning, the title of the sermon is "Use It or Lose It!" And maybe that's not a bad summary of this Gospel, but I'm nervous about it. Many interpreters, especially in America, have said that this reading is Jesus' own personal endorsement of free-market capitalism as God's chosen economic system, and I think that's nonsense and I don't want to contribute to it in any way.

     This isn't about economic systems. It's not even primarily about money. This is about faith. Faith and risk. And, dare I say it, the S-word: Stewardship. Ultimately, it's about how to live well.

     And here you thought Stewardship was just a code word for the church begging and guilt-tripping you for money. Wrong! No church ever thrives or does the will of God that way. Stewardship is nothing less than what you choose to do with everything that you are and everything that you have. Stewardship isn't something the church cajoles you into doing. It's something you do regardless of the church. You can do it well or you can do it badly. And the church can help you do it well, or it can fail to help you there. And that's exactly what this parable is about.

     I've heard it said that this is a harsh and cruel God in Matthew's Gospel. But to say that is to assume that the master or landowner in the story represents God, and you can't assume that. An allegory is a story where everything definitely represents something else, and it serves to teach some moral lesson, but a parable is a story where it's not clear what anything stands for, and its purpose is to undermine conventional thinking, to disturb our assumptions, and to raise more questions than it answers.

     So I don't like the master in this parable, you don't like him, and God doesn't like him either. But he serves to make us wonder about things, about God and about life, the good life, the art of living.

     For instance, these talents that he hands over to his slaves. A talent was a measure of weight in silver. At the low end, one commentator estimates it as the equivalent of five years' wages for a laborer. Or it might have been fifteen years. Or thirty-eight. It doesn't matter. A talent, to the hearers or this parable, was everything. The whole nine yards with the kitchen sink thrown in. Funny, isn't it, that when we say "talent" we think of a giftedness, an aptitude, an inclination, even a vocation. Intangible, immaterial things. But maybe the parable wants to make us think about both the material and the immaterial. The whole kit and caboodle. Life itself.

     I can't believe any of us waited until this parable came along before we started asking ourselves what we're doing with our lives, or what we've done or what we're going to do with them. I think we all know a life can be wasted, and we're all eager to avoid wasting ours, and none of us is so confident that we don't wonder about it.

     So let's let our wondering be guided by this parable. Remember, a parable raises more questions than it answers. One question it raises for me is: What would the master have said if the five-talent slave had come back not with a profit of five talents but with a loss of two and a half, and the two-talent slave had come back with none? Would that have made the third slave, who hid his talent in the ground, look good? Is this about success, or is it about risk-taking? If it's about success, the third slave might have been more successful than the other two if they had been unlucky in trade. If it's about risk-taking, then they are still praiseworthy, because they dared and he didn't. So who gets the Well done! and who gets to gnash their teeth in that case?

     Or try this question: The first and the second slaves get rewarded with praise: Well done, good and trustworthy slave! What else do they get rewarded with? Enter into the joy of your master, it says here. Well, that's nice, but it might not be worth much. What else does the master give them, do you remember? He gives them more work! You have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things. And I can hear all your tired, overworked souls crying out, If this is a reward, what's a punishment?

     Yes, this is a reward: there is no greater reward than to be considered trustworthy. You may think it would be nicer to have and possess many things without being held accountable for them at all - to own them outright, to do with them as you pleased. And maybe it would. But that's pure fantasy. Nothing that we have is ours, not even we belong to ourselves. It is all gift, it's all amazing grace, and who, receiving a gift, would have no interest in the giver?

     There's a word for this phenomenon of trusworthiness being rewarded with more trust, and good work being rewarded with more work, and risk-taking being rewarded with greater risks. That word is ministry. It's what churches do. It's what this church has done until now, and what we propose to do quite a bit more of in 2000 and beyond. It's what Christians do.

     And if that strikes you as a silly way to live, and not especially enjoyable, I can only encourage you to suspend judgment and stick around. We have some real live people in this place who, if you hang around them and observe them, could very well change your mind about that. Not by any argument, just by being themselves.

     Faith does not do the safe thing. Faith does not expect or fear a harsh master. Faith knows from actual experience that the greatest gift imaginable has already been given to us, so faith overflows with gratitude and generosity.

     The better minister you become, the more ministry there is for you to do. That's what happens to Christians and to churches. So don't let's get all hung up on outer darkness and the gnashing of teeth and the thief that comes in the night and that day of wrath and anguish. Fear's no way to live. Rather let's encourage one another and build one another up, as indeed I see we have been doing. And let the Holy Spirit be working in our ministry.

Amen.