There is one topic that is virtually forbidden to be
discussed in American Protestant churches these days. Despite that taboo, I’m
going to take my life into my hands and talk about it this morning, anyway. No,
I’m not going to talk about politics. I’m also not going to talk about… well…
you know… that three-letter word that begins with “s” and ends with “x.” Maybe
I’ll tackle it another time… but not today. No, today I’m venturing into an
area that even the bravest preacher hesitates to approach. Today I’m going to
be preaching about money.
Money is an intimidating topic. Many preachers steer clear
of it, except for the obligatory stewardship sermon that pops up in the fall
along with the annual giving campaign. Maybe that’s because what we do with our
money is an intensely private matter – at least, it is in our culture. While
this congregation has a tradition of giving generously, how much each person
gives from one year to the next is a carefully guarded secret. Only a few
people know who gives, and how much they give. I’m not one of those people; and
quite frankly, I like it that way. Knowing who gives a lot – and who doesn’t
give at all – has the potential to tempt me to give better pastoral care to big
givers. That won’t do at all. There are good reasons to keep our financial
habits private.
But money plays a big part in what Jesus had to say about
the Kingdom of God. Many of the parables that he told are about money and what
we should be doing with it. This morning’s parable is about money. Oh, we tend
to make it easier to swallow by making it spiritual. Since a “talent” no longer
refers to a unit of money, we interpret this parable to be about our natural
abilities and how we use them to serve God. And that’s OK. But we mustn’t
forget that this parable originally referred to what we do with cold, hard
cash. So that’s how I’m going to interpret it this morning.
Let me give you a little background just to get you on
board. A “talent” was an enormous amount of money in Jesus’ day. One talent was
the equivalent of 15 years’ worth of pay for an unskilled laborer. Today, to
someone who is paid at the poverty level of $25,000 a year for a family of four,
a talent would be worth $375,000. Three talents would be worth over a million
dollars; and five talents would be
worth almost 2 million dollars! The total amount that the master gave to all
three of his slaves to invest was nearly 3½ million dollars in today’s money. And
did you notice that he didn’t give those slaves any instructions? But the
slaves knew what was expected of them. In Jesus’ time, prosperous men
frequently entrusted their wealth to slaves when they had to travel on business.
When the master returned, the slaves were expected to have turned a profit with
his money. How they did it was up to them.
So, how did the slaves in today’s parable do with all their
cash? Two of them did very well, indeed. Both the slave with five talents and
the slave with three doubled their
master’s money! It takes quite a while to double any amount of money without
taking a risk. Safe investments – the kind that don’t require much of a risk –
also don’t offer much of a return. So we can assume that the two slaves who
doubled their money took quite a risk. They must have invested in something
that might have taken a nose dive and left them with nothing to show for their
efforts.
And that’s exactly what the third slave had when the master
finally returned. All he had was the original cash that his master had given
him, all $375,000 of it. In our day of roller-coaster stock markets and housing
bubbles, his strategy sounds very wise. He buried the money in the ground, a
common way to keep money safe in Jesus’ day. Today, we might put that cash in
gold, stuff it into a sock, and hide it under the mattress. You might think
that the master would have been happy with the prudence of his third slave.
After all, he had given that slave the least amount of money. He obviously
didn’t have much faith in that slave’s ability to turn a profit. He had all of his
original investment back! What was the problem?
The problem is that a no-risk strategy is also a no-gain
strategy. What’s that proverb? “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.” Money doesn’t
increase on its own. in Jesus’ day or in our own, you have to risk money to
make money. The master didn’t want his money to just sit there like a golden
paperweight. He wanted it to be used
for something. He wanted to see a return on his investments! So he sacked that
third slave, and he gave the money to the first slave who had proven himself a
whiz at investing! It appears that taking a risk was exactly what the master
had expected. Maybe in the Kingdom of God, the greatest risk is not to risk
anything at all.
Now, we have also been entrusted with wealth. In particular,
this congregation has been entrusted with wealth. We have recently received the
first installment of a very generous bequest; and we anticipate receiving more when the
estate clears probate. We have a very comfortable amount of money right now –
and we will soon have quite a bit more. We have to decide what to do with
it. Do we save it? Do we spend it? Do we do some of both? And how do we spend it? As we ponder these
questions, we need to remember that this money doesn’t belong to us – it belongs to God. The money that
the slaves invested wasn’t theirs. It belonged to the Master. Now God has
entrusted some of his money to his servants here in Nashville UCC to make
investments and to pay dividends in God’s Kingdom. How do we do that? Maybe the
parable that we just heard can give us some guidance.
First of all, I don’t think that the Master has any problem
at all with our saving some of this money for our future needs. Investing in
God’s Kingdom doesn’t mean spending every dime without any provision for what
might happen tomorrow. But I do think
that the Master would have a problem of we decided to save all of it. Jesus told us what happened to the slave who hid his portion
of the money in a hole in the ground! But even with some of the bequest safely
stored away for a rainy day, we still have a great deal of money to invest in –
what? What does God’s investment look like?
I can’t give you an iron-clad answer to that. No one can.
How God is calling us to handle this bequest is different than how God might
want another congregation to handle it. But I can tell you this much for sure. God is surely calling
us to take a risk with at least some of this money on behalf of God’s Kingdom. God
is calling us to try something new…to step away from just playing it safe… to risk a ministry
to people we don’t know and maybe haven’t even met yet! Maybe it is a ministry
to battered women. Maybe we could offer them a safe place in the middle of a
world that has only so far shown them only violence. Or maybe we could use our
Recreation Park as a playground for children who live in urban areas; and who
have never seen a trail through a
quiet forest, let alone walked on one. Or maybe we could start a ministry to
military veterans who don’t know how to fit back into society after returning
from overseas deployment. Whatever it is, it will probably turn out to be
something that we haven’t even dreamed
of yet! God will show us what we are being called to do – if we ask him; and if
we’re ready to respond to what he tells us.
This will be a long process, friends. It will take… months.
In the process, we will dream and talk and pray… and then we’ll dream and talk
and pray some more. We’ll come up with some wonderful ideas – and we’ll come up
with some stinkers! So, let’s work together, friends! Let’s brainstorm and talk
and pray and get creative! Let’s see where God is calling us, so that at the
end we will not hear, “You wicked, lazy slave!” No, indeed! At the end we want
to hear God say to this congregation, “Well done, good and trustworthy slaves!
Enter into the joy of your master!”
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