Year A
Matthew 25:14-30
The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn
Risking It All For God’s Kingdom
It’s interesting to see how people deal with great wealth. Take, for example, John D. Rockefeller. He became one of the richest men of his generation in the oil business but he did not sit on all that money. His astute business sense was matched by his reputation as a philanthropist. He gave great amounts of money to help further education, health care, and the arts. To this day, his name graces multiple colleges and hospital wings, as well as Rockefeller Plaza in New York City. Contrast that with Bernard Madoff, the financial advisor who cheated his clients out of millions only to see that greed rewarded with a life sentence in prison.
The more we try to hold onto things, whether it is money, talent, skill, time, or whatever, the less we gain from them. The more we give, the more we use what we have for the good of others, the more we gain, especially when we use those gifts for God’s glory. As we come to the end of the Pentecost season with Thanksgiving on the horizon, it is appropriate that this Sunday focuses on the theme of our response to God’s goodness which makes the texts today a bit unsettling, because they speak of the possibility of a failed response. God gives us talents with which to serve and we may squander the very gifts we’ve been entrusted with. The possibility of this failure hits close to home for all of us who claim to do God’s will, who claim to be disciples of Jesus Christ.
Yet, Jesus doesn’t want us to fail he wants us to take a risk. If we don’t take a risk, then we will lose for sure. The gospel text today from Matthew calls us to take a risk. It is a story of how the kingdom of God, in contrast to the kingdoms of this world, is to operate in the in-between time before Christ returns. We are not to try to calculate the exact moment but to live with trust in Jesus who is ever coming to us in surprising and unpredictable ways, and who calls us to a responsibility toward the world that he loves. The hearers of the parable that day would have recognized the situation. It was not unusual for a rich landowner to entrust his slaves with significant responsibility. A talent was a significant resource-worth more than fifteen years’ wages of a typical worker. Two of the servants were commended for their risk or investment and one was not.
Why do you think Matthew wanted us to know this story? At the time it was aimed at the scribes and Pharisees who were the super religious of the day. They thought themselves as protectors of the faith and saw any change as threatening their position and their God. So Jesus was saying that they were like the one-talented man who was not willing to risk. And when Jesus told this story during the last few days of his life, he was in the middle of his own personal high-risk venture. This is what eventually brought about his crucifixion. The pillars of the church just couldn’t stand being challenged-not in his claiming to forgive sins, not in his calling the dead out of their graves, and not in questioning the money exchange policies in the temple courtyard
There are times when all of us are tempted to act like the one-talent person. It is when we consider the little we have to offer, the minimal difference we could make, and the risk of venturing out to make a difference; that we may never get started at all. Yet, God depends on us and wants us to use the one, two, or five talents and offer them trusting that God will use them to great advantage. Just think about the many bible heroes we hold up as models of the godly life and how imperfect and sometimes one-talented they were: Moses with a stammer in his tongue and blood on his hands; James and John, loud-mouthed fishermen boasting about their place in the kingdom; Peter, a big burley man usually with his foot in his mouth; and Paul, a beady-eyed, man who chased and killed the early Christians until he met Jesus.
And, God was able to do through them amazing things because they trusted that God would use whatever they offered, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant to great advantage. God would like to work through us also. Therefore, God gives us talents with which to serve. We learn in our texts today that none of us is talentless or without significance. None of us without specific gifts; these gifts are themselves signs of God’s care and love for us. They are gifts that signify our having been recognized by God as God’s children. Our temptation is to think we ought to bury our talent in the ground and keep it safe. I wonder how it might have turned out if the third slave had put his one talent in a high-risk venture and possibly lost it all. I cannot imagine the master would have been harsh on him. He might even have applauded his efforts. The point of the parable is not about doubling our money and accumulating wealth; it is about investing and taking risks.
The greatest risk of all, it turns out, is not to risk anything, not to care deeply and profoundly enough about anything to invest deeply, to give your heart away and in the process risk everything. The greatest risk is to play it safe, to live cautiously and prudently. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that the sin of respectable people is running from responsibility. Bonhoeffer’s sense of responsibility cost him his life but his risk taking is held up as an example for all to follow. For those who have been blessed abundantly in sharing will find they are blessed with even more…”Take the talent from him and give it to the one who has the ten talents. For everyone who has will be given more, and they will have an abundance.” Ask anyone who gives abundantly…we call it tithing or stewardship of time, talent and money…and they will tell you they have never missed the money or time given to the glory of God.
Many years ago, before the Great Depression, a very wealthy man donated the money for a fine organ for his church in Toledo, Ohio. He then lost everything he had during the depression of 1929 and was forced to take a job as janitor in his church during the sad 1930’s. It was told that you could go in that church and hear him playing the organ he had given. He became well known for saying what he had kept he lost, but what he had given away he still had. It’s a point of this parable today as well. It is a story of faithful and unfaithful discipleship. Faithful discipleship is precisely what is seen in the story of Deborah, who becomes the OT model of the faithful Christian servant in this time between times. Full of gifts of leadership, Deborah is a witness of what it means to follow God.
She, in effect, announces in her life just what the psalmist utters: “I raise my eyes to you—you who rule heaven—our eyes attend to the Lord our God, until he has mercy on us.” In this Deborah is the model follower of God, the one who embodies and therefore performs what is called for in 1 Thessalonians. She wears the breastplate of faith and love, and puts on the helmet of salvation. She is not stopped by fear, but looks to the coming of the Lord and this allows her to act in obedience towards God and thus be true to who she is and the gifts she has. In these times between times, or in the time that remains for each of us, may we follow the witness of all who did or do not now squander the talents entrusted to them.
May we live in responsible generosity in the world as a sign of the awesome extravagant love of God toward the world. May we be the leaders to whom God entrusts the call. God doesn’t entrust us with any call for which God does not also equip and encourage us. We are not slaves looking to a master, but those who look earnestly toward God for instructions and for what we need to carry out those instructions. We live into our call in the midst of uncertain times, always. The “end times” are all these in-between times while we await the coming again of Jesus Christ-the greatest talent or gift we have been given and this talent is the one we hold onto and who holds on to us. God is with us, clothing us with armor; the armor of faith and love and the hope of salvation. And we are to live our lives as fully as possible behaving in risky and trusting ways, for in so doing we enter into joy upon the master’s return. The parable today is our invitation to the adventure of faith: the high-risk venture of being a disciple of Jesus Christ.