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Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's November 13, 2005 Sunday worship service. Talanta Psalm 123; Matthew 25:14-30 Bethel 11/13/05 Rev. Marc Sherrod, ThD I was reminded that November is the traditional month for church stewardship emphases when, at our Fun Lunch this past Tuesday, Dick Hettrick handed me a copy of the text Garrison Keillor sang to the tune of “Stand Up, Stand Up, for Jesus” on a recent edition of his radio show, the Prairie Home Companion. (Feel free, if you wish, to hum along as I read)
And so it is, that each November, whether on public radio or old pulpits, we get reminders of what we should be doing year round when it comes to the management of all which God has entrusted to each of us. Surveys to enlist volunteers, pronouncements on teachings from scripture and church tradition, pledge forms – all with a little friendly guilt thrown in -- have become standard features of this season. And so, not perhaps surprisingly, the Parable of the Talents comes our way today. Today’s sermon title, the Greek New Testament word Talanta, Talents, which rhymes with Mylanta or switch two letters and you get Atlanta, is the key word of this passage, a word often used by preachers and laity alike to try and capture the essence of stewardship and this stewardship season. How many times have we heard, in relation to this text, some variation of the phrase, “don’t waste your talents?” Meaning, don’t be like the third servant who didn’t even bother to take his master’s money to the bank to draw interest. It seems obvious enough to the one who reads or hears the parable that Jesus doesn’t want us to hoard our gifts or to be conservative when it comes to investing whatever money or resources we have, which the parable seems to say, are always gifts directly from the hand of the master. Clarence Jordan, who in 1942 founded the Koinonia community in Americus, Georgia, an interracial community in which members pooled their material resources and shared all property -- used to like to say that a parable from Jesus was like a Trojan horse: you let it in, and Bam! – its got you. I wonder how many times this parable about the Talanta has been used as a kind of Trojan horse by churches during their Fall stewardship campaigns? I bet you’ve heard it before: “God has blessed you with so much, don’t be foolish like this wicked servant who went out and buried his cash instead of getting a good return on his money. Pledge to us. It’s an investment in the kingdom. There are plenty of church schemes and stewardship gimmicks that exploit this parable in just such a fashion. Take, for instance, the little book entitled The Kingdom Assignment , based on this parable from Matthew 25. It’s the story of a pastor who several years ago gave away $100 bills to 100 church members one Sunday morning. (Now, I hasten to add, don’t get your hopes up!) He had three requirements for those who received the money. 1. The $100 belongs to God. 2. You must invest it in God’s work 3. Report your results in 90 days. The results, once reported, were staggering: people invested, made a profit and gave to the church; new ministries were launched; people gave wonderful testimonies about lives touched and changed – and it was all covered by NBC’s Dateline. And now, churches across the country are taking up The Kingdom Assignment. So, why not try it at Bethel? Well, I could say, with a twinkle in my eye, give me a $10,000 Christmas bonus, and I’ll see what I can do! But more seriously, I would have to say, honestly, that I shudder a bit at this gimmicky form of stewardship, this nod to the power and appeal of American capitalism, the idea that more always equals better. And why should I give somebody $100 and say, “This belongs to God,” thereby implying that the other half million in their investment or retirement portfolio is not God’s? The Kingdom Assignment. It sounds good, but it’s like the African-American minister who, several years ago, offered $5.00 to any white person who would visit his church on a particular Sunday morning. Shoot, I’d offer $5.00 to any member on Bethel’s Inactive Roll who’d come next Sunday, but that kind of defeats the theological purpose of being the church, doesn’t it? I mean, aren’t we here because of what we can do for others, because we want to be here, instead of what we desire to earn for ourselves. The problem with many interpretations of the Parable of the Talanta is that it so often comes down to a form of works-righteousness, that ever–present Trojan horse in the life of faith that can deceive us into thinking we have a right to or have earned any of this in the first place – this, meaning this church or this amazing grace, our this home or bank accounts. We think we’ve arrived when we double our net worth or when we increase the amount of our check in the offering plate, and we imagine hearing God say, “Well done, good and trustworthy servant.” But, in truth, I don’t think the parable is finally, really, about money. Well, on the surface, it is about money. It is about Talanta, a word in the world of the parable that doesn’t really mean talents or abilities but refers to an astronomical amount of money, something like a bucketful of solid gold, with each talent weighing, perhaps, 50 or 75 pounds! Jesus, I think, wants us to try and imagine the rather ridiculous picture of all these hundreds of pounds of money being dragged around. The first servant, for instance, who doubled his five talanta, ends up with over 700 pounds of money that he, presumably, has turned over to the master upon his return from his journey. But the value of five talanta would so stagger any individual Mediterranean common laborer so as to be utterly impossible for him to know what to do with it. It would be like expecting the kid who works down at the gas station, and who just won the 234 million Powerball Jackpot, could wisely manage or invest such a windfall. Jesus, who of course, had never personally seen that kind of money, nor, as far as we know, ever owned anything, uses an outlandish hyperbole to symbolize the gospel. Jesus, tongue-in-cheek, is letting his audience know that the message of the kingdom is not about earning money or even capitalizing on one’s investments. The real message of the kingdom is this: when the master gives you an opportunity, be ready and be willing to risk it all. The parable is finally not about doubling the gift you’ve been given but being willing to wager everything on an unpredictable and unknown future. When I enter the world of the parable, I have to face the truth that it’s not that I am now doing much better with my giving to the church than I did when I was a boy when I put $1 in the offering plate each week. The amounts aren’t the issue. But rather, the issue is this: have I risked everything for the sake of the kingdom? Read in this way, the third servant is the one who haunts me, not because he didn’t double his gift, but because he couldn’t get beyond his own conservative nature to see the possibility of doing something, way out of his comfort zone, something that he had never thought of before. The third servant did what, in Jesus’s day, was the cautious, prudent thing to do: he went and buried the one talanton the master had given him. He expected to be commended for not messing up, but instead, he got a tongue lashing. In the world of the early church that wrote down the stories of Jesus and preserved his teachings, I take these servants to be metaphors for the church. The first two must have taken a certain pride and joy in the master’s commendation of their great accomplishment. It’s not that they are a bad example, it’s just that the third servant’s experience lies much closer to the truth of what the church is really like. The third servant should haunt us because we, too, just don’t get it . . . we don’t get what an astonishingly rich and lavish gift has been unloaded on our unsuspecting church and congregation. We have not the foggiest notion about what to do with the gospel. We’d much rather play it safe and not even begin to think, for instance, about what it would be like if we listed the total net worth of each of us on a sheet of paper, added up the total, and realized what a paltry sum is our annual budget. We’d much rather play it safe and pay for our own staff and buildings and programs first, before we risk giving too high a percentage of our money to the mission of the church around the world. We’d much rather play it safe and give money to provide a Christmas basket than take the risk of actually finding a poor family and inviting them to our home for Thanksgiving dinner. I like this quotation from William Sloan Coffin’s book, Credo: “Most achurch boats don’t like to get rocked; they prefer to lie at anchor rather than go places in stormy seas. But that’s because we Christians view the Church as the object of our love (repeat) instead of the subject and instrument of God’s. Faith cannot be passive; it has to go forth – to assault the conscience, excite the imagination. Faith fans the flames of creativity althogether as it banks the fires of sin” (140.) Maybe what God really needs is people who will huddle up, shake their heads and confess, “We just have no idea; the treasure is too big, the responsibility too heavy to bear.” Maybe then, and only then, can we dare something big for God. The gospel isn’t being unleashed if some percentage of church members start to think of an extra $100 as belonging to God, or even if the most clever stewardship campaign in history magically seduced a majority of Presbyterians into tithing. The gospel is too big for such trifles. And that’s the word of the Lord to you and to me on this Lord’s Day. Amen.
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