Scriptures: Judges 4:1-10
Matthew 25:14-17, 19-23
Those of you who know your Bible, and especially this rather familiar Parable of the Talents, recognize that I’ve taken some liberties with it in terms of the verses I’ve chosen to read. In fact, you might almost say that I’ve bowdlerized it by cutting out the third slave who hid his talent in the ground and who was then condemned by his master. Well, I have my reasons. And maybe I’ll even let you in on them…..eventually.
But for now let’s just focus in on what’s happening here with the two slaves – or servants. This, of course, is the classic text for annual stewardship sermons, and I’m kinda surprised that it wasn’t offered up by the lectionary last week. But maybe the lectionary writers assume that churches automatically hold stewardship Sundays on the third Sunday of November, and so time the lectionary accordingly. I’ll bet you’ve heard many a stewardship sermon using the Parable of the Talents as the text, haven’t you?
But we’ve already had our stewardship Sunday last week (although there still are a number of pledges that need to come in – hint, hint; we are having a budget committee meeting next Sunday, and it would be very helpful to know where we are for 2009 by that time). So, let’s see what else there is in Jesus’ parable to help us on our spiritual journeys.
It’s all too easy and tempting to read this parable using contemporary eyes. Is it really all about investing and making a good return on some wise investments in order to win the praise of our master? As Pastor Andrew Warner says of the two: “The two trustworthy slaves doubled their money (no doubt a case of astute market timing.)….. (I)t was a particular audacity that allowed them to double their money, a willingness to risk what they were given. They risked buying high and selling low, as many in the U.S. have done this past year with houses and stocks. How would the master have responded to a slave who risked all in the Jericho olive oil futures market and lost every talent?”
So, this is not really a parable about wise investments (but we already knew that, didn’t we). Andrew Warner goes on: “It is easy to miss that what they truly doubled was the audacity of the first gift. They were given something amazing – a reckless, unearned, unheard-of trust. Recognizing the daring of their master, they responded with daring, courageously doubling both the principal of the bequest and the principle behind it.”
This parable, then, is a continuation of what we were talking about last week: the generosity of God, the free self-giving of God. The first thing to concentrate on, Christ is telling his listeners, is what a phenomenal largess this is that the master is offering. Again, think about the first century context. Is it even conceivable that a master would give gifts like these to what the translations clearly identify as “slaves”? And look at what the first sentence is saying: the master “summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them.” What an incredible account this is if you play it out as a parable is intended to be understood as a statement about the nature of the Kingdom of God. God trusts us. Us. Even us. In our free will God trusts us to do and be the kind of children of God that God wants us to be.
Now we come to the reason why I wanted to read just the verses that talk about the five-talent and the two-talent slaves and their master’s response to them. It is all too tempting to get caught up focusing on the one who hid his talent in the ground. Indeed, that wonderful preacher George Buttrick says, “It is hard to escape the conviction that the story was told mainly for this man. He stands center stage in the drama...(and) the real reason for his failure was his fear (“so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground.” [vs. 25]).” Well, I hate to disagree with my old homiletics professor, but this slave is not the most important character in the drama. Nor is he the one I think we should identify ourselves with. Buttrick gets it right, then, in commenting on verse 21 (“His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and trustworthy slave…..’”), when he says, “God is that kind of God, not a policeman who almost hopes to catch (us) in wrongdoing. The world is that kind of world: it finally rewards the venture of faith.” Note again the word the master uses about the slave: “trustworthy”; “you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.” A Lutheran meditation on this passage which I found on the Internet puts this quite nicely and succinctly: “I suppose this could be used to rail against the faithless who will ‘get what’s coming to them.’ But perhaps a better focus is to celebrate those ‘good and faithful servant[s]’ who do not fear being known as the Master’s servants and get what is not coming to them.”
They get “what is not coming to them” – that is, it was undeserved, a free gift from the master. And I like the word “celebrate” in that quote. What we are all about today in focusing on the parable of the talents is celebrating faithfulness – the kind of faithfulness that our generous God finds to be trustworthy. The master praises the servants for being faithful – not for being shrewd or effective or profitable. They are being praised for their faith, not for their results.
The word “talent” has entered into our language largely on the basis of the English translation of this parable. A talent is something that makes us special (even if in Jesus’ time it was referring to a specific amount of money). And we have been given many talents. Some of us start out with them – like the proverbial “born with a silver spoon in your mouth” – which might be comparable to the five-talent servant. Some start out life with very little. But “talent” in this context means much more than money, and the point of Jesus’ parable is what you do with what you have been freely given. If you have been given a fine speaking voice, for instance, but out of shyness or fear of getting up in front of an audience you refuse to develop it, that is letting a talent go to waste (OK, so now I guess I am referencing the servant who hid his one talent in the ground out of fear). Talents can be much more mundane than this, as well – you might discover that you have a particular talent for washing dishes, say. At the risk of embarrassing them, I am in awe at the talents that Nelson and Don bring to building and installing and repairing – along with the fact that they are willing to use their talents for the betterment of the church. And that’s the point, both of what I’m saying here and of the parable: each of our talents, whatever they may be, are there for us to use and share and offer up out of our faithfulness to God.
I want to come back to Pastor Andrew Warner who tells this story
about a member of his congregation, which is Plymouth Church (UCC) in
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as a way of illustrating what it means to share our
talents:
“Jean Hutchinson gave our congregation a remarkable gift. When we
needed a piano, she gave us one; when we had a deficit, she covered it. It was
not a surprise that when she died she gave us a sizable bequest. But her gift
was more than a bequest of money. Once, when many of our members were
disparaging a new hymnal, Jean said simply, ‘I like the new songs.’ Her life
was marked by a deep generosity and a love for the church that could not be
preserved simply by keeping to a 5 percent draw (from the investments).”
There’s one other point to this parable which is often passed over. Although Jesus doesn’t explicitly say it, it seems obvious that the five-talent and two-talent servants don’t get to keep the money. The master has asked them to do this on the master’s behalf. The two successful servants aren’t even working for their own increase. It’s not their money. They’re working for the increase of their master. Their true reward is to share in their master’s happiness. So happiness is the reward, and happiness comes from serving others. By focusing on creating increase for others (such as by helping people grow), there is great joy to be found in doing that, and it ultimately creates increase for us as well – not necessarily financially or materially but where it really counts, which is as an increase in the joy that our generous God has already given us.
Along about now those of you who paid particular attention to the bulletin and thus to the title of this sermon may be wondering what that title has to do with what I’ve been saying about the parable of the talents. (Yes, it’s all right; go ahead; you can look at the bulletin and refresh your memory.) It has to do with yet another facet of this multi-layered parable (this certainly is a parable on which a whole series of sermons could be based) – one that, I think, is the reason the lectionary writers paired it with the story of Deborah in the book of Judges. Note at the very beginning the set-up for the story has the master “going on a journey”. The master is going to be absent for awhile, and the implication is that the slaves weren’t really quite prepared for this turn of events. The gifts that were entrusted to them came as something of a surprise (perhaps this is one reason the one-talent servant reacted out of a sense of fear). The master is gone. The servants are left to act on their own. (Don Schmiedel and I were reflecting earlier this week about the “death of God” fad in the 1960s. What was being said at that time was that human beings had been left on their own; how they would react – whether out of faithfulness or not – took on quite a different meaning when there was no God to lean on as a crutch or a problem-solver.)
But the master does return (even as a belief in the living God came back powerfully after the “death of God” theology ran its course). And the servants needed to be alert to that return, just as they needed to be alert to the gifts that had been suddenly thrust upon them when he left.
Be alert to what it is that God is offering to us. It’s a bit like that old story which I’m sure many of you have heard about the pious man who is suddenly caught in a flood. He makes his way up to the roof of the house and begins to pray, “God, I have been faithful to you and a trustworthy servant. Please let me live and survive this flood so I may continue to do your will.” Pretty soon a teenager swims by on a plank of wood and shouts, “C’mon, there’s room for both of us.” But the man responds, “I am praying to my God, and I know my God will save me.” The water continues to grow higher. Then, a couple come by in a rowboat and call to him: “Jump down and swim over to us; we’ll pull you in.” But again the man says, “I am praying to my God, and I know my God will save me.” Now the water is almost to the crest of the roof. Just as he’s about to go under the man sees a helicopter overhead with a rope ladder being lowered down to him. But once more he thinks to himself, “I am praying to my God, and I know my God will save me.” The water pours over the rooftop and the man drowns. When he comes before God he is quite angry: “God, I have believed in you all my life and I was sure you would save me. Why did you let me drown?” And God responds, “Whatdya want from me? I sent you a plank and a rowboat and a helicopter, didn’t I?”
The passage that we read from Judges reflects a violent time in the history of the Israelites, but more importantly it was a time when the Israelites were going against the word of God. As Frank Ramirez notes, “the people of God were stuck in a toxic cycle. Again and again in the book of Judges we watch as the people forget their God, fall into oppression, remember God in their misery and cry aloud, after which God sends a deliverer, the people are freed, and then they forget their God again.” And so judges were called out from the people – wise ones who were to assume temporary leadership. Deborah was one of the greatest of these, and it was quite amazing in that time of dominant male authority that she would be listened to as a woman. But Barak from the tribe of Naphtali gives no evidence that he will give in to the prejudice of male chauvinism (as an aside, I find it fascinatingly coincidental that our lectionary passage should have a character named Barak just a week-and-a-half after our US election – even if it is spelled without the “c”). He says quite clearly to Deborah, “’If you will go with me, I will go.” Barak is alert to the leadership that God has sent, and he will not let irrelevant distractions – like the fact that Deborah is a woman – get in the way of accepting that leadership. As was the case with the slaves who invested on behalf of the master and not for themselves, Deborah says to Barak, “the road on which you are going will not lead to your glory.” Nevertheless, he is ready to follow her in order to benefit the whole community – the people of Israel.
Stay alert – for all the gifts, all the talents, all the leadership God has been sending your way – that you might enjoy today, tomorrow and always the beneficence of our generous God. Amen
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church,
UCC
Las Vegas, NV
November 16 , 2008