Sermon

The Twenty-Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
November 16, 2008

Chris Robinson

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Oh man. If I were going to pick the first text to preach on at a new place this would not make my top twenty list. When Paul first let me know which dates I would be preaching I hurried back to school and got out my Bible and read the text, and then stopped and wondered if Paul hated me. This passage just raises tons of questions for me. There is a certain picture of Jesus that we’re used to. He’s a man who works for justice and cares for the poor. Instead we get this other guy. “To he who has much more will be given and from he who has nothing, everything will be taken away.” Jesus comes across as a sort of reverse Robin Hood in this reading, stealing from the poor to give to the rich. Where is the emphasis on others, where is the outcry against injustice? To be honest, it is impossible for me to read this passage as a statement on economic policy. This may be part of my liberal upbringing, my stubborn refusal to believe that Jesus is not 100% dedicated to those most ostracized by our society, but I have to read this story as an allegory. With this reading I see the parable as less a story about economics and more about what Jesus wants us to do with the message he is leaving behind.

When I begin to look for another way to understand this passage I have to think through what Jesus is trying to communicate. It seems clear that the master in the passage is Jesus, the servants are his followers, and he is letting them know that he is leaving but he will return. An important question for interpretation is what do the talents represent? A talent was a vast amount of money, depending on where you look it ranges from fifteen to thirty years wages for the average laborer, a massive gift for a master to leave behind. Like the master Jesus is about to leave his disciples behind. And in his absence he will leave them a gift and that gift is the Gospel message. It it is through how the servants react to the master’s gift that Jesus speaks to different ways of dealing with His gift, His message. Like the two servants who trade with their talents we are expected to put the message of Christ into use in the world, to allow it to shine like a light on a hill. If we are willing to put the message out there, even without the physical presence of Christ, then our efforts will be rewarded. Remember, the two servants who traded with their talents were able to double their money. If this was all there was to the parable then we could be reassured that all of Christ’s follower’s would live out their lives according to the Gospel message, but it isn’t. There is still the troublesome matter of the third servant, who buries his master’s money rather than risk it, and who helpfully provides those of us listening to the parable with his reasons for doing so.

“I was afraid,” he says. And it is here that we discover the difference between the servants. The first two take the gift of their master and put it into action, returning it two fold, but the third servants is afraid and allows this fear to dictate his actions. It was fear that prevented him from putting his talent to good use. Perhaps a fear of his inability to trade properly, or a fear of failure that would result in him losing the money that his master entrusted to him. For whatever reason his fear constrained his ability and it is this fear, this decision not to act, that the parable is really about.

The followers of Jesus who heard this parable and understood that Jesus was talking about more than money probably had a list of fears on their minds. They may have feared that spreading the Gospel would have resulted in their being ostracized by their community or even killed. These were not empty fears, especially for those in the gospel writer Matthew’s community who were forced out of the temples and persecuted for their faith. But, perhaps most of all, they may have feared that the message wasn’t true; that they were staking their lives, and their hopes, on a promise that would never be fulfilled. After all, they were promised a world turned upside down, where the weak were made strong and the meek were going to inherit the Earth, and in the 2nd century Roman Empire this must have seemed very unlikely. And so, those listening could understand the desire to take the gift left behind by the master and bury it away so that upon his return they could dig it up and present it to him, safe and sound, lest he be angry that they had lost it or allowed it to be ruined. But the parable makes it clear that returning the gift, unchanged and unharmed, is not enough.

Instead, Jesus called his disciples to put the gospel message to use in the world. Jesus called them to refuse to let fear dominate their lives and to work against the natural inclination to protect the things they had. And some of them did. Without the bravery in the face of great danger of many early Christians the church would have died and the Gospel would have gone un-preached. These people were harassed for their beliefs, some were even killed, and yet time and time again they chose to put forth the Gospel message, trusting in the promise of Christ to transform the world. But, fear still persists. Now, as then, there are those of us who struggle to overcome our fears of things inside and out that can prevent us from living the lives that God is calling us to.

This fear can be both internal and external. We can be plagued by doubt in our own abilities, by the belief that we can never be good enough for the world around us, that others will never respect the person who we choose to be. It is into this world that we are charged to take the Gospel, but often our fear of other’s reactions drown out our willingness to speak the truth. I am reminded of a story about Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier. After Stalin’s death when Khrushchev took power he often spoke out against the heinous actions of Stalin’s administration. At one public meeting where he denounced Stalin a heckler from the back yelled out, “You were one of Stalin’s advisors. Why did you never speak out while these atrocities were being committed?” Khrushchev looked towards the voice and roared, “Who said that?” For a few moments there was silence. And then Khrushchev said, “Now you know why I did not speak.”

The world can be a scary place, and sometimes those in authority, and even society at large, are not happy with the message of radical social change found in the gospel. For many of us there may not be the life and death threats that existed in Stalinist Russia, but we still experience fear that silences our proclamation of the message. Sometimes it only takes a small challenge to force us into silence, unwilling to defend our positions because they are so very hard to defend, based as they are on faith. But, I don‘t think it is the possibility of being ostracized that scares us most, any more than it scared the early church the most. I believe that as Christians we are still most afraid of our message being unable to create the sort of change that we believe it should create. It terrifies us, or at least me, that the Gospel may not be able to change the world in the way I think it should.

But it is this fear that this passage is meant to speak directly to. As readers of the gospel we are used to Jesus talking about fairness and justice and so this passage always appears strange. There doesn’t seem to be any fairness in it, and that’s because Jesus wasn’t talking about those things in this passage. This parable is delivered near the end of Matthew’s gospel. Over the next few chapters Jesus will be arrested and crucified for preaching his word. He knows he is about to die and so he begins to talk to his disciples about his return. He talks about being ready, about being dedicated, and, in this passage, he talks about being afraid. Here, Christ is telling his disciples that they must refuse to live in fear and instead must choose to live in hope. That if they live in hope, if they believe, if they are willing to put Christ’s gift, Christ’s message into the world, then it will be multiplied. And it is this hope, this call to proclaim the gospel, trusting in its power to transform that speaks to me from this passage even today. But we still aren’t there yet.

The Gospel message we receive from Jesus Christ contains a promise of a world very different from the one in which we live. From Jesus, we hear about a world in which the last are made first, a world in which the weak are raised up, and a world in which the greatest among us will serve the least. And yet we don’t see this world exist. When Matthew was writing his gospel he believed that the return of Christ was eminent. But two thousand years later we have not only not seen the return of Christ, but it doesn’t seem like we are any closer to creating the world described in the gospels. As Episcopalians we sometimes describe this as our living in the time of already and not yet. Already has Jesus died and won victory, but not yet has the kingdom been established. Already we know the outcome at the end, but not yet does everyone believe. And so we have to make the choice to believe in the promise that is presented in the image of Christ crucified without any proof to justify our choice. Of course we are afraid of this choice. There is nothing wrong with being afraid, but it is our reaction to that fear that is so crucial. It is important to remember that even Jesus was afraid of the cross. It was in Gethsemane that he asked God if there was any other way for this to happen then to allow the cup to pass over him. And yet, he went on, trusting in God and trusting in the promise for a new kind of world.

We too have a choice. We can choose fear. We can choose the world in which we live, a world of greed, and injustice, a world in which the words, “and to those who have, more will be given and from those who have little all will be taken away,” don’t sound so strange. Or we can choose hope, and faith and love. We can choose to proclaim a new kind of world. A world so radical and transformative that 2000 years after it was first proposed by a man in a small village in Palestine there are still men and women all over the globe meeting and talking about it. We can choose to be afraid or we can choose to put our lives into God’s hand, preaching God message, and trusting in God.