Sermon Title: "This Is No Time For Talents"
Date: November 16, 2008
Minister: Rev. Charles E. Ensley, Jr.

Lesson:  Matthew 25:14-30

Whenever I select a scripture lesson for a sermon text, I like to reflect on my first reaction to it.  You might remember that for last week’s story of the five wise and five foolish bridesmaids, my initial reaction was “Wow!  Ten bridesmaids—too many.”

That parable is followed immediately by today’s familiar story of the talents.  You remember the gist:  a landowner entrusts one servant with five talents, who doubles them, and is praised by his master.  Another gets two talents, and doubles them, and again receives praise.  A third gets one talent, buries it in the yard, and at the accounting, returns to the landowner the one carefully saved and protected talent.  He is called wicked and lazy by his master.

If ever there were a time when one of Jesus’ parables was out of sync with the real workings of society nearly two thousand years after it was initially told, this is it.  Where are those two who can invest our money and guarantee that it will double? 

I did a little calculating after some third quarter financial reports arrived recently.  So far this year, our church’s endowment fund lost 13.5% in market value, with no withdrawals from it since 2002.  Closer to home, my 35 years of pension accumulations during the third quarter lost 5.6%.  And that’s before October!  And the monthly October report for our personal Smith Barney investments declined 14.7%.  My first question to Peggy was, “Did we write any checks on that account?”  Unfortunately, the answer was no.  So I’m thinking here, maybe the hero of the parable was the servant who buried the money, and upon the return of the landowner, returned to him 100% of his principal.  Maybe he was at last week’s wedding and heard the fate of the foolish bridesmaids without enough oil.  That wasn’t going to happen to him.  No sir; not a penny lost.  Would that our investment statements read the same.

To those of us have paid far more attention in the past six weeks to the daily ups and downs of the Dow Jones average than we ever have before, this week’s story about servants giving an accounting to their master could sound like a warning from Jesus to invest our money well, or at the very least to deposit it in the bank for interest—a stable bank that isn’t going to fail, that is!  However, as in most parables, the story isn’t about money, of course.  Money is the illustration Jesus uses, but as always, the meaning is surely much deeper than mere cash or bank balances.  The setting of the parable in Matthew’s Gospel helps:  as Jesus nears his death, would he really be exhorting his disciples to invest their money well?  We suspect he would not, so the story must be about something “more.”

As Jesus leaves his parting instructions, he uses the stories in this chapter to “direct the hearers’ attention to the issues at hand, to faithfulness, preparedness, and risk.” (Charles Cousar)  Oil is the image in last week’s passage, and money is used this week.  If hyperbole is exaggeration for effect, Jesus’ story certainly makes his point by using sums of money that would have been fantastic to his hearers.  One talent—which used to mean “money,” not “skills”—was equivalent to about 15 years’ wages for a common laborer, so the first servant was given what he would expect to earn in 75 years!  How much, we wonder, would it take to impress us today, when even “a trillion dollars” has lost its impact?  (I can never remember whether Henry Paulson’s bank bailout is 700 billion or 700 trillion.  I tend to work in the field of church budgets.  Half a million is my limit.)  Many years, many generations could have lived off the talents in this story.  And the master gives them not equally to the three servants but to each “according to his ability.”  The word translated as “ability” is dynamis, or “power.”  Again, we’re intrigued to think about the power within each servant, within each of us, and how we use it, or how we bury it.  Not just talent, but power.

What do we do with what God has entrusted to us?  Do we even understand what we have?  When I meet with couples I’m going to marry, I often ask what they studied in college.  In the majority of cases, the field in which they now work has very little to do with that college major.  Was it because they couldn’t find a job in that field, or is it that over time they discovered they had some other talent, ability, skill that better served them in another field?  Or I hear of people who started in one field, made a respectable career of it, but then turned to something completely different where they were even more successful—maybe not in money, but in making a difference in people’s lives.

What was going on inside the third servant, his commitment, courage and worldview?  Is he lazy, or stupid, or immobilized by fear?  (Some might say yes to all three.)  The lesson we can learn from the story about money and loans is to put our gifts into circulation.  This parable “compares the use of all God has given one – not just specific ‘talents,’ but all that one has and is – in God’s service, with the use of a financial loan in order to make a profit for the investor.”  If we hoard and hide money, it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do.  Just as “for a businessman, the whole point of money is to be used and spent and circulated in order to make more money.  What God has given us – our selves, our lives, our faith, our abilities, our gifts, our possessions – is given in order to be spent and put into circulation.  Our lives are to be expended in God’s service, becoming thereby the source of further blessings for others and for ourselves.” (Richard Bauckham)  A person with a beautiful voice can use it to glorify God and bring joy to listeners.  A retiree with a background in accounting can spend his days on the golf course, or he could donate some of this time to helping keep the books for a non-profit that can’t afford to hire a bookkeeper.  A volunteer can bring happiness to bedridden children in a hospital or companionship to a long-term resident of a nursing home.  And sharing these gifts has nothing at all to do with money, but with the investing of one’s self.

As valuable as all of these insights are, I think we could also read in this parable a very important lesson about how to live, again, “in the meantime,” before Jesus returns.  Yes, courage and generosity and good stewardship of our resources are all part of the picture, but the big picture is one of a transformed life, as individuals and as a church.  When Matthew wrote his Gospel, he wasn’t necessarily talking about the risk of losing money or being hurt in a relationship, but “the risk of the public expression of the gospel, whether [the first century Christians] would keep it safely tucked away in a secure context or let it loose in the broader world among the nations.  Anticipating Jesus’ return meant rejecting the lure of security, with its logic of fear and intimidation, and taking the risk of discipleship, with its dangers and perils.” (Cousar)  This is stewardship beyond money:  a stewardship of the gospel itself.

Could it be that we bury our faith, our relationship with God, the gospel itself, or at least tuck it away in some hidden place, and just take it out on Sundays and emergency situations?  Is our whole life affected, changed, transformed by living out our baptism, by responding every day to the call of the God who still speaks to us?