The Gifts of God for the People of God
Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost, 2020
Matthew 25:14-30
As we near the end of the Ordinary Time, these seemingly endless Sundays after Pentecost (which was back at the end of May, if you can believe it), our scriptures get darker and darker. We start tipping towards the end times: of darkness and destruction, and of course, the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth: the ancient formulation of the more contemporary ‘going to hell in a handbasket’.
I’m not going to go all Pollyanna on you and dismiss such sentiments. This year continues to be challenging. The rates of Covid-19 infections around the country, the economic uncertainty, and the political unrest leave us exhausted and anxious.
Our gospel passage for today has a, yet again, challenging parable. Really? We’re being asked to admire the investment skills of the first two servants, and join in ridiculing the hapless third man who buries his single talent? And invited to nod our heads wisely at the statement:
‘For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.’
It’s hard not to see this passage through the unchristian so-called prosperity gospel lens, even if that was not what Jesus was teaching.
A single talent was an enormous amount of money in the first century. Quite apart from anything else, it weighed just under 130lbs. A talent was worth six thousand denarii, with a denarius being the usual payment for a day’s work. Six thousand denarii therefore represented 16 years of labor.
If Jesus is asking us to identify the man going on a journey with God, which I believe he is, we are being reminded of the extraordinary generosity of God. Our God who shares such abundance with each one of us, even if we can’t always see or know it.
And while I am happy for the first two servants, handling such large amounts of money with such success and ease, my attention is caught by the third who goes off to dig a hole in which to keep his master’s money safe.
The first two servants clearly had no such inclination, so what was going on for the third?
So many of us have been spending our days in zoom meetings, and I’m sure I can’t be the only one who has found some pleasure enjoying my colleagues’ zoom spaces. I like reading the book titles on their shelves, admiring their virtual backgrounds, and generally learning a little more about each of them from their setting. Last week a poster on a wall caught my eye. Maybe you’ve seen it? It reads:
You are not an imposter
You are for real.
It’s not luck, timing or a lie.
You deserve it.
And haven’t we all been there at one point or another? Suddenly paralyzed by the seeming audacity of our showing up to do whatever it is we have committed to. Who do I think I am to be standing here in front of you, taking ten minutes of your precious time and attention to say, what?
Fear is usually not helpful. It undoubtedly is when it will stop us doing something dangerous, and with this pandemic stalking our social gatherings, we have many good reasons to be cautious.
Our talent-burying servant chooses the extremely cautious route out of fear. He is open about it. In defense of his action, he says: ‘Master, I knew that you were a harsh man....; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground’.
How often do we choose to hide ourselves, our talents, everything that we have to offer the world out of fear? And what a loss to the world that is.
I’m sure we each have our own tapes that play through our heads about why we should, or more specifically, why we shouldn’t do something. Maybe the tapes are of our own voices. More commonly they seem to be the voices of others that we have internalized and made our own.
Growing up, I always seemed to be either too much or too little. Getting it just right was always beyond my reach, and so I have spent much of my life lurching between embarrassing myself or hiding. Therapy has helped!
We are all beautiful, beloved children of God. We live in a world of great abundance. Yes, we are challenged: after all, no-one said it was going to be easy. Each of us is invited to live fully into our God- given vocations in this world: vocations of varying sizes and shapes, but all of equal importance. A view that our society seems not to believe worth considering.
Our willingness to recognize that everything we have in our lives comes from and is of God is a powerful tool in our work for the Kingdom of Heaven. We can recognize when our fears get in our way. We can see when others are being limited by their own demons. We can, as Paul tells us in his letter to the Thessalonians, “encourage one another and build up each other as indeed you are doing.”
None of us needs to fall prey to any imposter syndrome or other fear. Let us venture boldly into these uncertain times, bringing all of our God-given gifts with us. Let us help each other put on our breastplates of faith and love, and hand each other our salvation of hope helmets’.
As the last verse of our opening hymn told us:
So let the love of Jesus come and set thy soul ablaze
to give, and give, and give again what God hath given thee;
to spend thyself not count the cost: to serve right gloriously
the God who gave all worlds that are, and all that are to be.