New/old thoughts about talents and keeping it real...

NOTE: Here are my worship notes for Sunday, November 12, 2011. Please join us if you are in town at 10:30 am.  After worship, we will also hold a congregational meting to finalize our Open and Affirming statement. 

To be a person of faith in the spirit of Jesus means that you have learned to live your ordinary life extraordinarily well.  Like the ancient Church Fathers used to say:  the glory of God is a human being fully alive. Isn’t that beautiful?  The glory of God is a human being fully alive!

+As the story says we’ve ALL been given talents by the Lord – we’ve been given grace and blessings and joy, too – but do we use them and share them and multiply them or do we bury them?

+Do we live our ordinary lives so extraordinarily well that we imitate God’s gracious generosity and abundance – or are we cheap –   or fearful – or self-absorbed – and maybe just a little bit lazy?

That’s what I want to consider with you this morning as we try to keep it real –

 especially when it comes to this parable that has been over worked and misinterpreted for centuries – do we imitate God’s generosity or just play it safe?  Do we recognize – and fully embrace – the magnitude of God’s grace – regardless of the pain and darkness we also know in our lives – or do we waste it over and over again?  Do our ordinary lives give shape and form to the extraordinary generosity of God made real to us in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ?

So this morning let me share three insights with you and then I’ll take your questions:

+ First, let me clarify the meaning of talents because I think they have often been misrepresented in a ways that don’t bring us closer to God.

+ Second, let me share some thoughts about how this story invites us to respond to God’s generosity in our ordinary lives.

+ And third let me remind you that when it comes to God’s grace we are called NOT to play it be safe but to embrace this gift with creativity and a boldness that defies the imagination.

But first pray with me that we might be grounded in the Lord’s presence: O God of Grace and God of Glory: may the words of my mouth and the meditation of each of our hearts be acceptable in thy sight through Christ Jesus our Lord; who with you and the Holy Spirit reign now and forever. Amen.

Now right out of the gate let me say that this parable is NOT really about your abilities – or your creativity – or your wealth, beauty, talent or value:  it is about God’s grace.  I know it has been interpreted in other ways on and off throughout the years – and preachers LOVE to allegorize this text, too – talking about cultivating the God-given skills and abilities you have been born with and using and sharing them fully. Such talk builds up our institutions – keeps people volunteering – and makes others feel guilty.

Nevertheless, such an interpretation is fundamentally flawed because mostly it is about God’s grace.  When Jesus tells his story about a wealthy man who gives his slaves 5 and 2 and 1 talents, you have to know that a talent is serving as a symbolic representation of God’s grace, ok?

At first it doesn’t seem like it because in real life a talent was also a coin worth more than more than 20 years wages – between 75-96 pounds of silver in Christ’s time – so we’re talking about a massive act of generosity.     And I trust that Jesus used this symbol to get people’s attention: real people throughout the ages often need a hook to help them pay attention to the story, right?  We’re so very easily distracted…

+ Who watches television? Do you ever use your remote to flip through the hundreds of options available to you on cable until something grabs you attention?  Then you know what I’m talking about…

+ Who listens to the radio in the car?  A friend of mine once went to a workshop in Nashville for contemporary country song writers where they told him that their market audience is a 35 year old woman with a few kids in the back seat of a sport utility vehicle on the way to or from some child’s event – so you have less than 20 seconds to grab her attention before she punches another button and moves on.

Last month my brother-in-law auditioned in Manhattan for “America’s Got Talent” and he had to sell himself to the studio audience and judges in 90 seconds. Trust me, Jesus understood human nature, so he told a story that would grab people’s attention immediately, ok?  Trust me also that the pay off comes at the end of the story when the obvious is turned on its head – just like the kingdom of God – but at first he starts with something provocative to get us hooked.

It would be like me giving you a winning Powerball or Mega-Millions lottery ticket at the close of worship and then heading out of town.

+ Are you with me on this so far? That the talents in the story are a catchy and provocative way of luring people into a tale that is really about God’s grace?

+ This is not about practicing your piano lessons or becoming a doctor or a teacher or anything else vocational.  This is about recognizing that God has given us all – even those with only one talent – an enormous gift of grace.

And here’s something else you need to know about the talents: they were not on loan from the master, ok? These were flat out gifts – they became the property of the slaves – who

were not asked to return anything at the end of the story. Interesting, don’t you think?  If this were a story about being loaned some huge quantity of money, then it would become a stewardship message – and I’ve heard this text preached on stewardship Sundays all my life– but this isn’t about a loan.

+ It is about a gift – an incredibly generous gift – that everyone benefits from, right?

+ That’s the first insight: God’s upside-down kingdom is all about generosity and grace given to everyone.

The second idea from the story is this: just like each of the slaves was given

a gift and asked to use it to the best of their ability, so too are we.  And let me push

the envelope a bit with you here because this could be important. Did you notice that two

of the slaves were given a massive gift of grace?

+ What did they do with it?  They multiplied it – doubled it – so that there was a whole lot more to share and give away.

+ These servants treated their gift with the same audacious generosity as the one who it to them.  Verse 23 puts it like this:

Well done good and faithful servant; you have been trustworthy with a few things, now I will put you in charge of many things: come, enter into the joy of your master.

Hmmmmm…?  The joy of your master – what do you think that’s about?  A brief survey of Matthew’s gospel is insightful:  The first time the word joy (chara) is used is when the Magi see the star leading them to Bethlehem and stop to rejoice at the Lord’s birth.

+ In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells his disciples that that will rejoice and be glad whenever they are persecuted for following him for their reward will be in heaven.

+ The man who finds a treasure hidden in a vacant field is filled with joy when he sells all he owns to buy it.  A shepherd who finds a lost sheep rejoices over it, more than the ninety-nine who never went astray.

+ And the women who come to the empty tomb after the Lord’s crucifixion experience joy and awe when they are told that Christ lives again and will meet them back in Galilee.

Preacher and bible scholar, Brian Stoffregen, says that in the gospel of St. Matthew, joy is caused at “finding the infant Jesus, trusting that your reward will come in heaven, hearing God’s word, experiencing the kingdom of God in all its surprising forms, being rescued like a lost sheep and discovering that Christ has been raised from the dead.”  Joy it would seem – the joy of the Master – has something to do with being open to grace and sharing it with as much reckless abandon and generosity as God.

+ And I say this because look at what happens to the other slave who simply buried his blessing. He didn’t waste – or squander it or do anything wrong with it – he just didn’t do anything with it.

+ He stuck it in a hole in the ground in fear:  I was afraid so I went and hid your gift in the ground.

And what does the master say to this news:  You wicked and lazy fool – you neither reaped nor sowed, gathered nor scattered my gift – so get away from me… and live into the outer darkness where there will be weeping and the gnashing of teeth.

That’s a hard word: an important word, too but still a hard one because there’s nothing about Jesus meek and mild here.  And I think the reason it is included in Matthew’s gospel is contextual. Jesus first shared this with his friends and apprentices to help them prepare for times of darkness and waiting. “You will be tested by real life,” he was telling them, “by darkness and fear, by your wounds and the wounds others inflict upon you. And the only way through the darkness is by sharing the light I have already given to you with reckless generosity.”

+ Forty years later, St. Matthew was telling the community much the same thing: unless we’re willing to be as generous as God to us with grace… we’re going to blow it. Our own fears – or laziness – or judgment will lock us up into a hole in the ground where we’ll miss the chance to share love and forgiveness and compassion.

+ You see God’s grace is not diminished by sharing it; someone likened it to a Christmas Eve candlelight celebration: “When one person shares the light of a candle with another, the first person’s light isn’t diminished in any way – and now there is twice as much light as before.” (Stoffregen)

Not so, however for the third slave who is judged – and cast away for a time – because he was too afraid to share. He hoarded the light – he wasted the gift – and he lived more into his wound than God’s gift of grace. So that’s the second insight: if we live into the master’s joy and generosity – if we share it with abandon – then we will experience blessing God’s presence within and among us ways that defy our imagination. If we don’t, we will know only darkness and the gnashing of teeth.

So don’t play it safe, beloved, that’s the third insight:  DON’T play it safe and bury grace in a hole in the ground.  Or in a hole in your heart - or in a wound in your life.  God really is greater than our wounds and fears and hurts and that’s why we’re asked to consider St. Paul’s wisdom today, too. He is living proof that God’s grace is bigger than all our wounds.  You recall the arch of his story, right?

He began as an opponent of the Lord Jesus Christ – he hated the new way – and created a life dedicated to destroying Christianity. But on his way to bring some Christians to death, what happened?  He was struck blind by the resurrected Jesus – he was challenged and judged by God and heard Christ call him out on his hatred – only to be taken into the care of his former enemies and nursed him back into health.

And then for 14 years – this is the part I often forget – for 14 years he went off into Syria and Arabia for prayer to sort out the meaning of this judgment by grace.  We know that his conversion happened in about 32 of the Common Era and he arrived in Thessalonica about 51 CE:  that’s 14 years of being judged by God’s grace.  No wonder he told his first congregation in I Thessalonians 5:

God didn't set us up for an angry rejection but for salvation by our Master, Jesus Christ. He died for us, a death that triggered life. Whether we're awake with the living or asleep with the dead, we're alive with him! So speak encouraging words to one another. Build up hope so you'll all be together in this, no one left out, no one left behind. I know you're already doing this; just keep on doing it.

And this wasn’t some cheap misappropriation of God’s amazing grace – a campaign stunt by one of the cartoon characters who currently pollute the political world – now this was the real deal: I once was lost but now am found – was blind but now I see. 

Grace generously offered – and shared with abandon – is the way an ordinary life is lived extraordinarily well.  And here’s the last thing:  even judgment born of Christ’s grace holds the possibility of redemption. The great Reformed theologian, Karl Barth, put it like this:

The person who says that the Bible leads us to where finally we hear only a great No or see a great void, proves only that he or she has not yet been led thither. This No is really Yes. This judgment is grace. This condemnation is forgiveness. This death is life. This hell is heaven. This fearful God is a loving father who takes the prodigal into his arms. This crucified is the one raised from the dead. And this explanation of the cross as such is eternal life. No other additional thing needs to be joined to the question…

For even just asking the question opens us to the answer: God didn't set us up for an angry rejection but for salvation by our Master, Jesus Christ who died for us a death that triggered life.

+ God shares with us all an amazing grace

+ God calls us to find the heart of living well by sharing that grace

+ And God’s grace never quits for even judgment there is light

Well, that’s the good news for today:  any questions?