Here is the face of our economy in our own parish:
- A desperate man coming to the window in the office for help with a prescription. He spends his days, sick or well, in the parking lot of Home Depot, hoping to pick up jobs as a day laborer.
- A couple at coffee hour talking about their fear and insecurity as they live from paycheck to paycheck, knowing that they have nothing to fall back on in an emergency.
- A retired couple confiding that their decrease in income with this economic downturn has meant that some months they have to make decisions between food and medicine.
We wonder if the recipient of one talent weren’t just being prudent – one talent would buy a lot of food or medicine in an emergency! So it is shocking to hear Jesus castigating the man who “played it safe,” saving his talent, and apparently lauding the risk-takers, the investors. It all sounds a bit like the “Prosperity Gospel”: Jesus wants you to be rich! Send money, and wealth will come to you!”
It doesn’t seem like the Jesus we have come to know: the one who up-ends the traditional values, drawing the marginalized to the center, exalting the lowly, saying the first shall be last and the last shall be first. THAT Jesus is more reflective of the parable by Kafka in which a thief breaks into a department store in the middle of the night, and, instead of stealing anything, simply re-arranges the price tags, so that the next morning shoppers are surprised and delighted to find that diamonds now cost a dollar, and ceramic mugs and key chains demand thousands.
As followers of Jesus, we’ve gotten used to those re-arranged price-tags, so now we’re confused! What is Jesus doing, rewarding the investors? Validating once again the truism that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer?
Ah, but the translation of money as “talent” gives us an out! Of course – this isn’t about economics! We needn’t read this literally, as money. (Or, perhaps, we should read this literally, as talents!) God has given us each gifts, aptitudes and abilities, to use, to share: playing the piano, singing, drawing, cooking, writing poetry, fixing things… Suddenly we are more comfortable. Of course: we are to use our God-given abilities – and many of us do: the choir we so enjoy, for example, or the many other individuals whose time and talent maintain the infrastructure of this old building and its ministries…
But since when do Jesus’ teachings make us comfortable?!! I think focusing on money – or on talents as gifts and abilities – is to take the easy way out of this difficult passage. What we lose sight of in the focus on economics or the focus on aptitude and ability is the fact that a “talent” – just one talent, let alone two or five! – was a veritable treasure – an amazing amount of money, an amount of money unimaginable to Jesus’ hearers then – or to us today. Think Bill Gates. Think Fort Knox. Think our national debt. Think “treasure.”
Treasure. There’s the focus. Not on money. Not on aptitudes and abilities. Treasure. That which is of immeasurable value. Jesus has spoken of treasure before: the pearl without price; the treasure buried in the field. This isn’t a matter of simple – or complicated! – economics, nor of the development of our assorted gifts and abilities. This is about how we use that which is of immeasurable value, a treasure given to us, entrusted to us.
We all have treasure in our lives, of course. Family. Health. Home, job, lifestyle… Ask the victims of any natural disaster or health crisis about the treasure in their lives… What is the treasure in our life? What do we save, value, take with us, guard and keep? Is it the fine china we only occasionally use for fear it will break? Often it is the crisis which helps us know what it is we value, which helps us shed the detritus of our lives and realize what is truly meaningful.
Think for a moment of the treasure in your life. In your mind’s eye, peel away the layers of what you are and what you have. Consider: what is “unpeelable”? What can’t be taken away from you? What is left underneath everything else?
Your relationship with God. God’s gift to us in the incarnation, in Jesus. We were each given the gift of Jesus, that treasure of immeasurable value, in our baptism. There is our windfall! We are washed in water in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and voila! We are in possession of this amazing gift!
And, because many of us were too young to remember our own baptisms, every time as a community we baptize someone, we all renew our own baptismal vows. We revisit that time of gift-giving in our own lives.
Consider for a moment your own baptism. Hold it in your mind’s eye. As the waters of baptism washed over you then, let the magnum of the event wash over you now. You have been sealed as Christ’s own forever! Allow yourself to experience it as the treasure it is.
What are the feelings evoked? Do we receive it with excitement, this treasure of our baptism? Are we filled with plans, eager with anticipation? Confident that we can accomplish with God that which we could never do alone? Are we breathless? In awe, anxious – or perhaps even frightened of the responsibility? Or have we sunk into complacency, not even realizing the treasure we possess? How do we feel?
Today’s Gospel lesson challenges us to recognize the gift for the treasure it indeed is, and to consider how we use that gift.
Not “use” as in outcome – at the end of your life no one is going to tally the Sundays you’ve been to church, or the amount of money you’ve donated, or the number of converts you have made! Notice that the servant who received two talents and the servant who received five talents are rewarded identically. To each the response of the master is, “Well done, good and faithful servant… enter into the joy of your master.”
The servants have been praised for their faithfulness, not for having doubled the talents their master gave them. Even so, we servants, baptized into life in Jesus, are responsible for being faithful to the gift of that baptism, honoring it, living it, bringing forth the life of Jesus Christ through us: not losing it in the busy-ness and distractions of our day-to-day living, or burying it in some forgotten recess of our lives.
How do we keep that gift real? Alive? How do we live the import of that gift in a culture which seduces us with so many false gods and insubstantial “treasures”? How can we be faithful to the gift?
Jesus tells us that faithfulness involves risk; not simply hanging onto what we have, but investing it, putting it out there, allowing it to grow. Jesus tells us there is more to honoring the gift than coming to church on Sunday mornings because it “makes us feel good.”
He challenges us, like the servants with the talents, to invest our treasure! And we do that. Messiah has community outreach and social justice “down pat”, and most of us are comfortable with what we do! But with words? Now, there we’re a bit more uncomfortable…
Tell someone about my treasure?
Share the Good News of Jesus?
Pray with someone?
Invite someone to church?
There’s our challenge!
I read recently that Vincent Van Gogh, more re-known for his art than his pithy remarks, once commented: “One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.” I wonder if that describes us as Christians? We have in our soul the blazing hearth of our baptism. Do people see only the wisp of smoke when we could be inviting them in to sit by the fire?
Walter Bruggemann writes:
We will not keep silent.
We are the people who must sing you,
For the sake of our very lives.
You are a God who must be sung by us,
For the sake of your majesty and honor…
We are witnesses to your mercy and splendor;
We will not keep silent…ever again.
Jesus, our master, has given us each a great treasure. May we be faithful servants.
Amen.
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