Matthew 25:14-30
For it will be as when
a man going on a journey called his servants and entrusted to them his property; to one he
gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then
he went away. He who had received the five talents went at once and traded with them; and
he made five talents more. So also, he who had the two talents made two talents more. But
he who had received the one talent went and dug in the ground and hid his master's money.
Now after a long time the master of those servants came and settled accounts with them And
he who had received the five talents came forward, bringing five talents more, saying,
`Master, you delivered to me five talents; here I have made five talents more.' His master
said to him, `Well done, good and faithful servant; you have been faithful over a little,
I will set you over much; enter into the joy of your master.' And he also who had the two
talents came forward, saying, `Master, you delivered to me two talents; here I have made
two talents more.' His master said to him, `Well done, good and faithful servant; you have
been faithful over a little, I will set you over much; enter into the joy of your master.'
He also who had received the one talent came forward, saying, `Master, I knew you to be a
hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not winnow; so I was
afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.' But
his master answered him, `You wicked and slothful servant! You knew that I reap where I
have not sowed, and gather where I have not winnowed? Then you ought to have invested my
money with the bankers, and at my coming I should have received what was my own with
interest. So take the talent from him, and give it to him who has the ten talents. For to
every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has
not, even what he has will be taken away. And cast the worthless servant into the outer
darkness; there men will weep and gnash their teeth.'
Sermon
WHY GOD WON'T LEAVE US ALONE
Take the
worthless servant and cast him into the outer darkness where men will weep and gnash their
teeth. That sounds awfully harsh, doesn’t
it? The lectionary doesn’t actually
include verse 30, as if we’re embarrassed that Jesus would say such a thing and we
need to cover it up, but we can’t; to be sure our sermon was sanitized. Some of Jesus’ teachings seem awfully strong,
awfully harsh. I went ahead and included it
because I trusted that you and I have the kind of relationship where I can say that
without destroying somebody’s faith. I
can let you know that Jesus actually did say verse 30; as well as the other verses which
contain some other harsh language about the worthless servant who took the one talent and
buried it in the ground instead of putting it out into the world to gain more talents;
more value. What that servant did doesn’t
seem so terribly worthless; to us at least, it might seem understandable to us. We have times when we have shrunk back from sharing
our talents. We identify with the idea that
maybe I don’t want to take that risk; or maybe I don’t want to be laughed at; or
maybe I don’t want to be somehow vulnerable because I’m putting a talent at
risk. Instead I want to be as protective of it
as I can.
The idea of
protecting your value, the idea of protecting what you have to invest is a sound idea; and
many of us prefer investing where we will get a shorter rate of interest as long as there’s
greater security. Rather than investing where
the return might be great, but the risk is also great.
So we can identify, I think, at least most of us can, with the servant who
did not want to take a risk; who knew that the master was a hard man, reaping where he did
not sow and gathering where he did not winnow and therefore he did not use the one talent
he’d been given. We can identify with
him; though I think what we’re identifying with is not the same thing that Jesus was
trying to make a picture of for us. We’re
identifying with our own feelings of anxiety and unease and our own vulnerabilities; and
Jesus is certainly aware of all those things in each of us and has been for all people
whom he’s known through the years. Jesus
knows that all of us have insecurities and are afraid to take risks.
But the
portrait he paints of the worthless servant is different from that, drastically different. If we understand this portrait rightly, what Jesus
is depicting here is a monstrosity. Someone
whose rejection of the goodness he’s been given is so great he becomes not fully
human anymore. That’s why I think such
drastic, harsh language is brought into play. To
help us see that in God’s eyes, that inability to make yourself use the talent is a
very, very serious thing indeed. I think I
ought to back up a little bit first, before I go on about that and talk more about the
story and the way he tells us the story.
First of all,
we have talents. The Greek word is talanton and the English word “talent”
comes from this parable; so when we’re talking about musical talent, or a talent for
public speaking, or a talent for science or math; when we’re talking about talents
for woodworking, or cooking, or sewing; when we’re talking about a talent for working
with engines, or whatever it is we’re using an application of a word from the New
Testament. What did that word originally mean? Well originally a talent was simply a measure of
weight; something would weigh so many talents. Later
on, in the time of Jesus, the word talent came to be applied to the value of a certain
weight in a precious metal, silver or gold. And
so it would be – how many talents is that camel worth?
Or something like that. And
roughly speaking in our own terminology today, a talent would be a sizable sum. My commentary, if it was written in 1940, would say
a talent would be a thousand dollars. You don’t
have to make guesses about how a thousand dollars in 1940 would be nowadays. So a talent is a large amount of money.
So the master
gives talents to his servants; and asks them, or expects them to do something with those
talents. Well, I think all three meanings of
talent: the talent designated as a weight; the talent with the designation of money; and
the talent with designation of a skill or gift; all three of those have in common the idea
of value; the idea that this is something valuable that we have in our possession. God has given us talents, something of value. It might be a personality trait, it might be a
particular skill, it might be something stable and rock solid in our character that was
given to us through our upbringing rather than in our biology. It might be something of that nature. I think everybody here is abundantly blessed with
talent; and the number of talents and the kinds of talents you have in this room are
extremely varied and extremely great. Talents
are anything of value that God gives us.
And yet those
talents come with expectations. God isn’t
going to leave us alone. Why? Well, the worthless servant actually perceived
something true about the master. What the
worthless servant told the master was – I knew you were a hard man, reaping where you
did not sow, winnowing where you did not gather, and so I hid the talent. And the master did not say – you’re wrong
about me, you misunderstood me. The master
said – oh, you knew that; then here’s what you ought to have done. If we translate that into God’s terms, we
could say that God is a challenging God. God
expects us to provide something that he himself does not provide; God gives us things of
value, so that we can make something of value from our own initiative, from our own
energy, from our own volition, with the things of value that God gave us.
The gifts, the
talents that God gives us are meant to be used by us to return something greater to the
whole human race and ultimately to God. There’s
a reciprocal action, a co-creation, if you will; God, the one who made us, wants us to be
creators too. When you think of all the
creatures in the world, God wants us, unique
among all the creatures in the world, to have this kind of mental and emotional and
spiritual independence; that’s what it means to be human. To be able to use the gifts God has given you, to
do something that God himself isn’t making you do like you’re a puppet on a
string; instead, God wants you to be doing it from your own inner sources that are part of
the gift he has given you.
So, God wants
us to take our blessings, our talents, our gifts and do something on our own. That’s the message we see – the
worthless servant was correct, that God wants us to provide things that he can reap, that
he himself did not sow. Why won’t God
leave us alone with our talents? Because God
wants us to make something new with our talents. That’s
his whole purpose in creating us. It’s
what it means to be human, to take these talents and develop them into something new,
something that can add to this world; that adds to the beauty of the world; that makes the
world a better place. Some private way, but
still God provides a way to do this.
Now, the next
point that I want to move into is the point about who it is that has talents. Are talents just something that belong to talented
people? Aren’t talents the things that are obvious?
Am I not suggesting that God is going to discount a large amount of the
human race? The untalented people out there;
the people who, like the worthless servant, feel that they have nothing to give and so
they hide things and go off thinking about the day that the master returns and we’ll
have a day of reckoning with him. Isn’t
God treating those people as second class people, the ones who are untalented people? What
I would suggest to you is that I have never met a person who is like the worthless
servant, not really. I acknowledge that there
may be such people out there, but I shudder for them if there are. What I have met, time and time again, are people
who are so different from myself that I have managed to expand my understanding of what it
means to be fully human by understanding what their talents were. And yet I think that’s exactly why God put
them in my life, why God placed them in my path.
I remember one
young man who was a member of my very first church. It
was a Texas country church, and in that rural community there was a
tradition that the people that actually do the work in the church are the women and the
men just kind of show up whenever they really, really have to. And this person took that “really, really have
to” idea very seriously and showed up maybe Christmas Eve and that was all. He was not a participant in the church in any way. He did not have a friendly expression or a smile,
he did not get to know me by name; he did not indicate in any sort of way that he wanted
to connect with me, the preacher, and then become a part of the life of the church. This was David, a member of this country church.
His wife,
Glenda, however, was very active. She was the
mother of several of the little kids in the church and she was a Sunday School teacher. And so it happened one weekday afternoon that I was
stopping by the house to drop off some Sunday School material for Glenda. And David was there.
And so I went into my usual kind of attempt to connect with him in some way;
usually I would get one syllable replies from him. But
this time, I was at his home; and so it was different.
I can’t remember exactly what I said; it was some sort of off-hand
comment about what he spent his time doing when he wasn’t working. And all of a sudden, he was offering to show me
what he had in his shed out behind the house. And
so we went out there to the corrugated steel shed, and went in the shed and I saw what he
had a talent for. Something I have absolutely
no comprehension of – internal combustion engines.
He had engines
here, there, and everywhere - he had an engine ready to be dropped into a chassis and
other engines that were just going to be lifelong projects, staying forever in his garage. But as he talked about his engines, a gleam came
into his eye; a light came into his eye; a rapidity came to his speech. Suddenly he’s full of words, words I didn’t
get, but full of words. He had all kinds of
things to say; and he kept stopping and asking –now, are you still following me? And
I hope this wasn’t a lie, I finally said “yeah”, because I wanted to keep
him going. I was so delighted to see him share
his talent. And we spent two hours together
looking at all this stuff that I didn’t comprehend and he was telling me what all the
differences were among all the different methods of making the internal combustion process
work.
And the main
thing that I experienced was that this person, who seemed so unpromising whenever he
entered the door of the church, could in his own comfortable sphere, in his own area of
life, he could actually produce something that not only showed that he had a brain, but
also showed that he had a human sense of connecting and of people. He had some means by which he could enter into a
relationship with the rest of creation – the human community, the world around him,
the world of physics basically, and chemistry. And
on top of that, this is a way in which he could move outside his own ego and connect with
God. And perhaps he was less ego-centered than
I was, there are millions of people who are; so perhaps he was one of them; and I didn’t
ever know it until he had the moment to share his talent with me. The setting was right, the time was right, and he
did.
Now I want to
suggest to you that that is situation we find in almost all cases of people we know who
seem to be like the third servant – not only talent-less in the conventional sense,
nothing special about them; but also talent-less in the sense that they don’t want to
share themselves with other people. People who
are closed off, people who seem unfriendly, people who seem to be not wanting to be a part
of the human race. Maybe you just haven’t
seen them in their moment, in their proper sphere where that talent that God has given
them enables them to make those connections.
So, I think
the talents that we see in unpromising people, are actually quite complex, quite varied,
quite great in their significance. And so we
shouldn’t think that there are a lot of people out there like the worthless servant. We should recognize that having talents which we
relate to others is what it means to be wholly human; it’s what God created us for. It’s a sign that God is not leaving them
alone. God is not leaving them alone. And that brings me to another point about talent
and being a Christian.
So far, I have
been talking about talents and being human. And
I think that’s a large part of what I want to say about this parable; it’s a
parable that tells about God’s plan for humanity; the way that God created us and
what God expected of us. Coming into the world
as Jesus Christ was God’s intervention to allow us to start doing this kind of thing
over again because we had so turned away from God that we needed this kind of intervention
to bring us back into the pasture, to make connections, to create new things, to the
valuable things that God gives us in our lives.
And I think
when we look at other people in the world; we should look at them not as either Christian
or non-Christian; but as persons who are eager, explicitly within the Christian church, or
people who might someday enter into God’s plans for salvation according to God’s
timetable and God’s intentions. And their
talent is the way they might do it.
I’m
thinking of a colleague of mine, who teaches at LeMoyne College, another history professor, like me, although I think he
dwarfs me in his skill at teaching and in his ability to master the facts of the past. Anybody talking to me, hearing me be a know-it-all,
playing Trivial Pursuit or something like that, would probably say “Oh, nobody knows
more trivia than you do.” But this guy
actually does. What really impresses me about
him is, he had a Christian upbringing, Moravian actually, I hear him say critical things,
very critical things about Christianity especially, when he’s talking to students. But also, when he’s talking to students, if
students come in to work on their papers, and they may be students who don’t even
seem to care about the course, he finds it within them; he forces them to come up with
paper ideas. They come in to him – “Here’s
my idea for my term paper” and he jumps on the idea and immediately, through his own
enthusiasm, he is forcing them to get into the conversation with him and together, (he may
providing more input than the ideal teacher’s manuals say he should), but what he’s
doing is sparking an interest in them because he finds their topic interesting. He finds something to enthuse about in every
unpromising idea that a student brings in. And
if I’m doing work over in my cubicle and he’s working in his cubicle and I hear
one of these conversations, I keep finding myself listening more and more closely. Because, the way he relates to students is so good. He makes me feel humble, at times; when I think
about the ways I try to help my students. He’s
so effective at it; clearly this person has a talent for reaching out into the lives of
others. And although he seems to be a part of
a world in which many are not focused on anything religious; I would like to think of him
as somebody who’s in training for whatever God’s future plans for him might be. I think God is working to bring him to the point
where he can use that talent to the fullest. And
use it as something that will help to bring about the day when God gathers all of our
talents and all of us together. And I hope and
pray God sees favor and will say to each of us well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful in little; I will make you
faithful in much. That is why God won’t leave us alone.
Amen.
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